Jozef Gašpar Tiso (Slovak pronunciation: [ˈjɔzef ˈtisɔ], Hungarian pronunciation: [ˈjoʒɛf ˈtiso]; 13 October 1887 – 18 April 1947) was a Slovak politician, dictator, 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. After the war, in 1947, he was convicted of treason and executed in Bratislava.
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.
Jozef Tiso was born in Bytča (then Hungarian: Nagybiccse) to Slovak Latin Catholic parents, in Trencsén County, of the Kingdom of Hungary, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Tiso's father, also named Jozef, was a butcher, while his mother, Terézia, came from a poor family involved in pottery. The second of seven children who survived infancy, Tiso was raised in a religious family and studied at the local elementary school. Then, as a good student with a flair for languages, he studied at a lower grammar school in Zsolna (today Žilina, Slovakia). The school had clearly Hungarian spirit, since all Slovak grammar schools were closed at the time of his study. Here, he began to use the Hungarian form of his name Tiszó József.
In 1902, he began to study at the higher Piarist grammar school in Nyitra (today Nitra, Slovakia). The Bishop of Nyitra, Imre Bende, offered him a chance to study for the priesthood at the prestigious Pázmáneum in Vienna. Tiso, taught by several elite professors, became familiar with various philosophies and the newest papal encyclicals. During these studies, Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises became a crucial influence for Tiso, with its emphasis on self-discipline, obedience to authority, and militant attitude against spiritual and worldly enemies. Tiso also extended his language skills; along with already knowing Hungarian, German, and Latin, he studied Hebrew, Aramaic dialects, and Arabic. The school reports describe him mostly as an "excellent", "exemplary", and "pious" student. Enrolling in the Pázmáneum in 1906, he was ordained a priest in 1910 and graduated as a Doctor of Theology in 1911. Influenced by his professors Ignaz Seipel and Franz Martin Schindler, in addition to city mayor Karl Lueger, Tiso began to gravitate toward the ideas of integralism and Christian socialism during his time in Vienna.
His early ministry was spent as an assistant priest in three parishes in today's Slovakia: Ócsad, Bán, and Rajec. Tiso was interested in public affairs and performed extensive educational and social work. During his fight against poverty and alcoholism, he may also have adopted some stereotypical and simplified views on Slovak-Jewish relations. Such views were not unusual in the contemporary society, including among priests or other people with higher education. He blamed the Jewish tavern owners for the rising alcoholism and he was also a member of a self-help association selling food and clothing cheaper than the local Jewish store. Tiso became a member of Néppárt (Catholic People's Party) and contributed to its Slovak journal Kresťan (Christian). Nevertheless, Tiso carefully distanced himself from the Pan-Slavism and Slovak nationalism of some of his peers.
During World War I, he served as a chaplain of the 71st infantry regiment of the Austro-Hungarian Army, recruited mostly from Slovak soldiers. The regiment suffered heavy losses in Galicia. Tiso got first-hand experience with horrors of war, but also with Germanisation and Russification of the local population. Tiso's military career was ended by a serious kidney illness and he was ultimately released from the military service after a month-long appointment in Slovenia. Tiso was inspired by the effective organization of the Slovenian national movement, and soon began to see himself as a Slovak. He did not return to his parish in Bánovce, but he was appointed as the Spiritual Director of the Nitra seminary by Bende's successor, Vilmos Batthyány, a "Magyar chauvinist." Tiso was also active at this time as a school teacher and journalist, publishing his war diary in The Nyitra County Review, where the he "[appeared] as a nationally reliable, fervently Catholic, and personable idealist." In his diary entries, Tiso would refer to his nationality as magyarországi (from Hungary) rather than magyar or tót (Slovak). Tiso admired the unity of the Germans and the piety of the Poles, yet he also associated Galician Jews with "filth, disorder, and fraud." Tiso's rhetoric somewhat resembled protofascism, as he perceived war as a "morally purifying" force that would awaken idealism, remove class conflict, and strengthen nationalism through a "harmonious working together of strengths." He also covered religious and educational topics, emphasizing a need for religious literature in Slovak.
Tiso did not belong to politicians active in the pre-war national movement and his pre-war national orientation has been frequently questioned. His political opponents tried to draw him as a Magyarone (Magyarized Slovak) while some Slovak nationalists sought for proofs of his early national orientation. Tiso carefully avoided national self-categorization language, and his behaviour might be framed in a "national indifference" approach – a practice largely spread in Central Europe before 1918. In some of his pre-1918 writings, Tiso complained about the state hierarchy or the ruling Liberal party, but he never denounced the Magyarisation or the Magyar nationalism. At the same time, he was more focused on social and religious activities among the Slovaks without revealing his ethnic or national self-identification. Most importantly, Tiso publicly acted as a loyal subject of the Habsburg dynasty. More specifically, his identity was stronger linked to the entire monarchy of Austria-Hungary, than to the Kingdom of Hungary, whose citizen he formally was.
Characterized by biographer James Mace Ward,
Rather than an enthusiastic Magyar, Tiso was more likely a patriotic Hungarian. Rather than a secret pan-Slav, he was someone who was attracted to Slovak social causes yet unwilling to jeopardize his career over them. Virtually all of Tiso's actions before 1917 can be understood as defending Catholicism and the Hungarian state. It is also clear that he was drawn to agendas of progress for the country and for the weaker social classes. In the western Felvidék, these social groups tended to speak Slovak.