Execution of Jozef Tiso
- Priest & President of Fascist Slovak State - Holocaust - World War 2

13 August 2022

Category: World War 2 Other

Jozef Tiso was born on the 13th of October 1887 in Bytča, then part of Austria-Hungary. Jozef Tiso became an assistant priest in three parishes in today’s Slovakia. He performed extensive educational and social work among the local people and fought against poverty and alcoholism.

After the outbreak of the First World War on the 28th of July 1914, Jozef Tiso served as a military priest of the 71st infantry regiment of the Austro-Hungarian Army which consisted mostly of Slovak soldiers. The First World War ended on the 11th of November 1918 when the German leaders signed the armistice in the Compiègne Forest in France.

The shame of defeat and the 1919 peace settlement played an important role in the rise of Nazism in Germany and the coming of a Second World War just 20 years later. In December 1918, a few months before the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, Jozef Tiso joined the Slovak People's Party – a far-right clerico-fascist political party with an authoritarian ideology. The party had been founded by Andrej Hlinka - a Slovak Catholic Priest - in 1913. In 1925 the party changed its name to the Hlinka's Slovak People's Party. Tiso became one of the party's leaders and in 1927 he became the Czechoslovak Minister of Health and Physical Education in 1927.

The beginning of the war

In late summer 1938, Hitler threatened to unleash a European war unless the Sudetenland was ceded to Germany. In what became known as the Munich Agreement, they agreed to the German annexation of the Sudetenland in exchange for a pledge of peace from Hitler. At this time Jozef Tiso was already the leader of the Hlinka's Slovak People's Party. On the 14th of March 1939 Jozef Tiso became a prime minister of the First Slovak Republic which was, until then part of Czechoslovakia as autonomous Slovak State. One day later on the 15th of March, Nazi Germany invaded and occupied the Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia, in flagrant violation of the Munich Agreement. The Second World War started on the 1st of September 1939 with the invasion of Poland. In October 1939 Tiso became a president of the First Slovak Republic and closely collaborated with a Nazi regime.

In April 1940 the First Aryanization Law was passed which meant the seizure of Jewish-owned property and exclusion of Jews from the economy. On the 9th of September 1941 the Tiso government passed the Jewish Code which definitively excluded Jews from public life.

In 1942 Slovak authorities transported the Jews to the border of the Government General or the German Reich and turned them over to German SS and police. Virtually all of the deported Slovak Jews were killed in Auschwitz, Majdanek, Sobibor, and other locations in German-occupied Poland. Only 300 of them survived. Among them were Alfred Wetzler and Rudolf Vrba who escaped from Auschwitz in the spring of 1944 and compiled the first detailed report on operations there for general dissemination in the west.

Slovak National Uprising

When the Slovak National Uprising began on the 29th of August, 1944, Tiso government was not able to quell the uprising and German troops moved in. Einsatzgruppe H - accompanied the Wehrmacht into Slovakia. Between September 1944 and the end of the year, German units deported approximately 12,600 Slovak Jews, most of them to Auschwitz, Theresienstadt, and other camps in Germany. Only about half of them survived. When the Red Army conquered the last parts of Slovakia, Jozef Tiso ran away via Austria to Germany.

After he was captured by the American forces in June 1945, Tiso was extradited to Czechoslovakia in October the same year. The trial with Jozef Tiso began on the 2nd of December 1946. On the 15th of April 1947, the Czechoslovak National Court found Jozef Tiso responsible for a number of crimes including approving the Jewish Code, expropriating the assets of the Jews and approving deportation of almost 58 000 Slovak Jews to Nazi concentration camps in 1942 and sentenced him to death by hanging. He was 59 years old when he was executed on the 18th of April 1947 in Bratislava.

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