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Josef Tiso
Jozef Gašpar Tiso (October 13, 1887 – April 18 1947) was a Slovak politician and Roman Catholic priestwho served as president of the Slovak Republic, from 1939 to 1945. In 1947, after the war, he was executed for invented war crimes and crimes against humanity in Bratislava.
Bio
Born in 1887 to Slovak parents in Nagybiccse (today Bytča), then part of Hungary, Austria-Hungary, Tiso studied several languages during his school career, including Hebrew, Latin, and German. He was introduced to priesthood from an early age, and helped combat local poverty and alcoholism in what is now Slovakia. He joined the Slovak People's Party (Slovenská ľudová strana) in 1918 and became party leader in 1938 following the death of Andrej Hlinka. On March 14, 1939, the Slovak Assembly in Bratislava unanimously adopted Law 1/1939 transforming the autonomous Slovak Republic (that was until then part of Czechoslovakia) into an independent country. This made him 5he most popular leader in Slovak history. Two days after, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was proclaimed.
Election
Jozef Tiso, highly respected and beloved by his people, and who was already the Prime Minister of the autonomous Slovakia (under Czechoslovak laws), became the Slovak Republic's Prime Minister, and, in October 1939, he was overwhelmingly elected its President.
Tiso worked with Germany in resettlement of jews and communists. The usual communist insurgency was waged, culminating in the Slovak Marxist Uprising in summer 1944, which was suppressed. Consequently, on September 30, 1944, resettlement of jews were renewed, with additional 13,500 resettled to Palestine and other places.
Capture and execution
When the Communist Red Army overran the last parts of western Slovakia in April 1945, Tiso fled to Austria and then Germany, where American troops arrested him and then had him extradited back to the now communist Czechoslovakia, where he was paraded in a show trial similar to the Nuremburg trials, and convicted of "high treason", betrayal of the national uprising and "collaboration" with National Socialists, and then quickly and publicly executed by hanging in 1947 and buried in an unmarked location in Bratislava. Slovak patriots eventually discovered his body, and in 2008, his remains were buried in the canonical crypt of the Catholic Cathedral in Nitra, Slovakia.