Jozef Tiso

The Reverend Jozef Tiso
Tiso, c. 1936
President of the Slovak Republic
In office 26 October 1939 – 4 April 1945
Prime Minister	Vojtech Tuka (1939–1944) Štefan Tiso (1944–1945)
Preceded by	Office created
Succeeded by	Office abolished
Prime Minister of the Autonomous Slovak Region
In office 7 October 1938 – 9 March 1939
Preceded by	Position established
Succeeded by	Vojtech Tuka
Minister of Interior, Social Care and Health
In office 1 December 1938 – 20 January 1939
Preceded by	Himself
Succeeded by	Himself
Minister of the Interior
In office 7 October 1938 – 1 December 1938
Preceded by	Office created
Succeeded by	Himself
Minister of Health and Physical Education of Czechoslovakia
In office 27 January 1927 – 8 October 1929
Preceded by	Jan Šrámek
Succeeded by	Jan Šrámek
Personal details
Born	(1887-10-13)13 October 1887 Nagybiccse, Hungary, Austria-Hungary
Died	18 April 1947(1947-04-18) (aged 59) Bratislava, Czechoslovakia
Cause of death	Execution by hanging
Political party	Slovak People's
Profession	Politician cleric Catholic priest
Signature

Jozef Gašpar Tiso (Slovak pronunciation: [ˈjɔzef ˈtisɔ], Hungarian pronunciation: [ˈjoʒɛf ˈtiso]; 13 October 1887 – 18 April 1947) was a Slovak politician and Catholic priest who served as president of the First Slovak Republic, a client state of Nazi Germany during World War II, from 1939 to 1945. In 1947, after the war, he was executed for treason in Bratislava.^[1]

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 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 14 March 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. Two days after Nazi Germany seized the remainder of the Czech Lands, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was proclaimed.

Jozef Tiso, 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 elected its president.

Tiso collaborated with Germany in deportations of Jews, deporting many Slovak Jews to extermination and concentration camps in Germany and German-occupied Poland, while some Jews in Slovakia were murdered outright. Deportations were executed from 25 March 1942 until 20 October 1942. An anti-fascist partisan insurgency was waged, culminating in the Slovak National Uprising in summer 1944, which was suppressed by German military authorities, with many of its leaders executed. Consequently, on 30 September 1944, deportations of Jews were renewed, with additional 13,500 deported.

When the Soviet 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 restored Czechoslovakia, where he was convicted of high treason, betrayal of the national uprising and collaboration with the Nazis, and then executed by hanging in 1947 and buried in Bratislava. In 2008, his remains were buried in the canonical crypt of the Cathedral in Nitra, Slovakia.