This year marks the 85th anniversary of the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia and establishment of an autonomous Slovak state, just as Europe braced for a second world war. Among the key figures in these developments was Fr. Jozef Tiso, a Roman Catholic priest and eventual president of the wartime Slovak Republic. Outside Central Europe, he is little-known; his close nominal resemblance to Croat-Yugoslav partisan and communist leader Josip Broz Tito doesn’t help in that regard. Those familiar with him are likely to describe him as a mere puppet. Yet, Fr. Tiso’s complicated legacy and the transient national environments that characterized it deserve more analysis than they currently enjoy.
Fortunately for English-speakers, University of Rhode Island historian James Mace Ward published a thorough biography in 2013, Priest, Politician, Collaborator: Jozef Tiso and the Making of Fascist Slovakia, which offers a valuable contribution to Slovak historiography.
Mercifully, Ward does not engage in the sort of self-righteous moralizing that is endemic to modern historical studies of sensitive topics like this one. A rare exception occurs in the preface, where, as if to apologize to his colleagues for his chosen topic, Ward belittles modern-day Slovak nationalists. Having paid that academic cost of entry, the author engages in a mostly measured analysis throughout his study. As a resource for anglophone readers, Ward’s work pairs well with broader studies of Slovak history for insights into the complexities of the wartime Slovak leader and his times.
Son of Trianon
Born to Slovak-speaking parents in the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy, Jozef Tiso studied in Hungarian schools and wrote his name in its Magyarone form, Tiszó József, in the early decades of his life. Even while switching between German, Hungarian, Latin, and Slovak, he nearly always maintained the Hungarian form of his surname, Tiszó, during this period. As a promising seminarian, he attended Vienna’s Pázmáneum, the elite formative institution of the Hungarian Catholic clergy. Despite his later Slovak nationalism and hostility to the Hungarian state, he never completely escaped accusations of Hungarian sympathies from his rivals and critics.
Tiso distinguished himself as a seminarian and a young priest. He enthusiastically advocated for Christian social ideas, which remained at the center of his political identity throughout his life.
Having established a Slovak identity after the Treaty of Trianon, Fr. Tiso devoted himself to policies that would advance the Catholic faith and the Slovak people. His preferred policies toward Jews and Czechs depended heavily on the prevailing political environment; among Slovak nationalists, he counted as a moderate throughout his career.
Fr. Tiso remained deeply connected to minutiae such as parish finances and local cooperatives. While he seemingly couldn’t escape his desire for political power, he shunned other vices that politicians often enjoy. He spent nights sleeping on the floors of Prague convents, and for many decades he frequently returned to his parish in Bánovce nad Bebravou, in central Slovakia, on the weekends.
Fr. Tiso became minister of health and physical education in the Prague-governed Czechoslovak state from 1927-1929. This was, of course, not a position of great influence in the grand scheme of things, but it was an achievement for him personally and for his Slovak People’s Party. While he had achieved his most influential position to date and resided in faraway Prague, his weekend trips to Bánovce nad Bebravou continued. He was unwilling to relinquish his role of parish priest.
Father of a stillborn Slovak state
As with so many historical figures, Fr. Tiso ascended to power, and into our modern historical consciousness, through the vicissitudes of history. For years, both Fr. Tiso and his Slovak People’s Party—the only significant Czechoslovak party that consistently called for Slovak autonomy—were confined below a humble ceiling. Under such conditions, the occasional minor cabinet post represented a sort of pinnacle. Both priest and party endured, and international events proved fortuitous. By late 1938, Fr. Tiso had become prime minister of the Autonomous Slovak Region; one year later, he ascended to the role of president of the Slovak State, a reality that had long seemed fanciful.
Meanwhile, Nazi Germany picked Czechoslovakia apart and frightened Fr. Tiso and other Slovak nationalists with Hungarian irredentism. The Slovaks ultimately lost territory to their neighbors, primarily Hungary, but nationhood was secure while Germany controlled Central European power dynamics. By 1942, having rebuffed a leadership challenge from the militantly pro-Berlin radicals led by Prime Minister Vojtech Tuka, Fr. Tiso assumed the style of Vodca in a local form of Führerprinzip. “This clever political move,” notes Stanislav J. Kirschbaum, “enhanced Fr. Tiso’s freedom to pursue his policy of restraint but also tainted him with the fascist ideology that he was trying to keep out of Slovakia.”
Fr. Tiso’s Slovakia (excepting, of course, its Jewish community) mostly escaped the ravages of war, no small feat for a European country in the 1940s. Economic and social achievements defied the constraints of a continent at war. A British Foreign Office file from 1943 notes,
A traveller who has recently returned from Slovakia was amazed to find how normal things were, not only in Bratislava, but also in other towns. There was no blackout and practically no restrictions. Food and clothing were plentiful and prices reasonable. There was little war talk.
One year later, communist activist and later Czechoslovak leader Gustáv Husák wrote, “If this state had another content and were led by another regime, not to say anything about a change of ally, there would be nothing to say against it from a Slovak point of view.” Slovak soldiers fought alongside the Germans on the Eastern Front, but Slovakia mostly avoided Allied aerial bombing.
Fr. Tiso’s most serious failings as Vodca, listed in order, are these: complicity in anti-Jewish laws and the Holocaust; complicity in the invasion and destruction of Catholic Poland; and complicity in suppression of the Slovak national uprising. (The term “complicity” is truly applicable, since the Slovak Republic existed mostly on the whim of its benefactor, Nazi Germany.) One can be ambivalent about the last failing, though it was arguably the most significant factor to the communist-dominated court that prosecuted Fr. Tiso. After all, the uprising was disorganized, incompetently orchestrated, communist-dominated, and unlikely to avoid German retribution, irrespective of Fr. Tiso’s actions.
The nascent Slovak state’s complicity in the 1939 invasion of Catholic Poland, on the other hand, is impossible to dismiss. Fr. Tiso allowed German forces to attack Poland from Slovak territory. At no point did he condemn the invasion of one of Europe’s most Catholic states. Franco’s Spain, at the beginning of 1943, entertained the idea of becoming “the number one Catholic country,” at the head of an entente including Croatia, Hungary, Ireland, Portugal, and Slovakia. Catholic Poland was conspicuously excluded from this coalition.
Unsurprisingly, Fr. Tiso’s reputation will always hinge significantly on his role in embracing anti-Semitic laws and submitting Slovak Jews to the Holocaust. Under Fr. Tiso’s watch, whether the Vodca directly condoned it or not (he had a habit of absenting himself at key decision-making moments), over three-quarters of Slovak Jewry perished in the Holocaust. Surely one’s legacy cannot escape a moral failing of this magnitude.
Historical analysis is more complicated than this. Upon learning definitively that Jews were being murdered in German death camps in Poland, Fr. Tiso liberally granted so-called “presidential exceptions” to spare Slovak Jews from deportation; at various times, he shielded an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 Jews in this way. Furthermore, he served as a foil to Tuka, who not only negotiated with Germany to take Slovak Jews but agreed to pay for each deported person. Until Germany assumed complete control of the country after the 1944 uprising, Fr. Tiso employed at least some degree of diplomatic interference on behalf of Jews.
Could he have done more? Should he have embraced this poisoned chalice of the presidential role in the first place? Historians of Slovakia will never concur.
Fr. Tiso’s career, for all its failings, was a catalyst in the formation of the modern Slovak state. The Slovak people had often enough been dismissed as peasants incapable of national realization. In the historical analysis of this eventual realization, Fr. Tiso is now remembered among nationalists such as Ľudovít Štúr and Jozef Miloslav Hurban as a pioneer of the state that modern Slovaks now inhabit. Kirschbaum concludes, “Whatever view one may have of him, the fact is that it was under Fr. Tiso’s leadership that the Slovak nation, at a time when most of Europe was at war, saw the process of national development reach its final and natural outcome, the establishment of its own state.”
Churchman or collaborator?
The question must be asked: What shall we call Fr. Tiso? Robert O. Paxton, scholar of fascism and author of The Anatomy of Fascism, dismisses him as “more clerical authoritarian than fascist.” Ward insists on the term “Christian-National Socialist,” which invites comparisons to Germany’s National Socialism. Whatever one calls him, Fr. Tiso exhibited less radical leadership than would have others, like Tuka. The politician-priest was a failed leader in many (perhaps most) respects, but his legacy should defy 21st-century simplism.
Fr. Tiso lived in a time and region in which an unusually large number of historical figures might be fairly characterized as evil; the two regimes duking it out on the Eastern Front were rife with such individuals. Fr. Tiso was not one of these. Yet we may expect more from priests, particularly those who insert themselves into the public sphere. Fr. Tiso did so with generally poor results on the national and international level, though he was a prolific and respectable contributor on the local level, as a parish priest and community spokesman.
Fr. Tiso has not been the only Catholic priest to stray disturbingly far into politics and doctrinally troubling public policy in the last century. Colombian priest Camilo Torres Restrepo was a Marxist guerilla who died in combat in 1966. The Nicaraguan Marxist Sandinista government known as the Junta of National Reconstruction included five priests in cabinet-level posts in the 1970s and ’80s. Jesuit Robert Drinan was a U.S. Congressman and vocal abortion advocate. In our own times, Jesuit James Martin often appears to be a gay-lobby propagandist masquerading as a priest. Yet, Fr. Tiso is the only priest to have been the head of state of a modern European country (outside of the Vatican); and he is the only one who can be accused of complicity in the Holocaust on a large scale. Irrespective of any personal comparisons to the aforementioned figures, those distinctions secure for Fr. Tiso a particularly dubious place in the pantheon of political priests.
Thirty-five years after the fall of Fr. Tiso’s regime, facing challenges from political priests in his own time, Pope John Paul II implored the clergy, “Leave political responsibility to those who are entrusted with it. The role that is expected of you [priests] is another, a magnificent one. You are leaders in another jurisdiction as priests of Christ.” Though it is doubtful Fr. Tiso would have obeyed such an entreaty, he might have benefited personally and spiritually from ordering his priestly ministry in such a way.
Ernest Žabkay, Fr. Tiso’s defense lawyer, reported being impressed with the priest’s composure after learning of his impending execution. “Good,” replied Fr. Tiso to the news. He certainly would have been familiar with the Catholic doctrine of mercy. God willing, the politician-priest availed himself of this mercy before he passed into the eternal.
