The surrender of the Tiso government

On 8 May 1945, the day on which the final act of surrender of the Third Reich was being signed in Berlin-Karlshorst, the life of another state created by Hitler came to an end in the small town of Kremsmünster in Upper Austria. In the buildings of the local Benedictine abbey, the Prime Minister of the Slovak Republic, Štefan Tiso, and four members of his entourage signed a document in which they placed themselves, their families and “the whole policy” of the government at the disposal of the commander of the US XX Corps, Lieutenant General Walton Walker. Slovak historiography often calls this text the act of surrender of the Slovak government and regards it as the formal end of a state that had in reality ceased to exist several weeks earlier.

The statement that the “remaining members” of President Jozef Tiso’s government surrendered to XX Corps is broadly accurate, but it needs two qualifications. First, the President himself was no longer at Kremsmünster – he had left for Bavaria a week earlier. Second, Walker did not receive the Slovaks in person: the document was signed on his behalf by the corps chief of staff, Brigadier General William A. Collier, in the presence of two other officers.

A government in exile in an abbey

The Slovak Republic was proclaimed on 14 March 1939, on the eve of the German occupation of the Czech lands, by the parliament in Bratislava under pressure from Berlin. In October 1939 Father Jozef Tiso, leader of the Slovak People’s Party, became its President. To the very end the state remained an ally of the Third Reich: its soldiers fought in Poland and on the Eastern Front, in 1942 the authorities themselves organised the deportation of almost 58,000 Jews to occupied Poland, and the Slovak National Uprising of autumn 1944 was crushed by German troops with the President’s approval. On 5 September 1944, after the uprising broke out, Tiso appointed a new government headed by a distant relative of his, the judge Štefan Tiso, who also took over the foreign affairs and justice portfolios. This cabinet was already operating in a country occupied by the Wehrmacht and had no real independence.

At the turn of March and April 1945 the Red Army and the Romanian troops fighting alongside it were approaching western Slovakia. According to Štefan Tiso’s diary, published in 2006 by the Slovak Nation’s Memory Institute, at noon on 31 March the German envoy Hanns Ludin advised the Slovak politicians to leave Bratislava immediately. After a meeting at the President’s and a lunch together, the government left the capital at 4 p.m. and reached Skalica in the evening. From there a column with the President and almost all the ministers set off on the afternoon of 4 April and arrived at Kremsmünster before noon on 5 April. On the same day, while the Slovaks were on the road, the Russians took Bratislava.

Kremsmünster Abbey, founded in the eighth century, had been confiscated by the Nazi authorities in 1940, and its buildings had served various Reich institutions. Now a Slovak “colony” moved in – ministers, deputies, officials, families and a guard several dozen strong. From Kremsmünster the government tried to keep up the fiction that the state still existed. On 27 April President Tiso spoke on the German radio station Donausender, claiming that the departure abroad had been forced by “enemy pressure” and that the Slovak state existed because its president, government and administrative bodies were functioning. In reality, in the Slovak lands occupied by the Red Army the authority of a revived Czechoslovakia, represented in Slovakia by the Slovak National Council, was immediately restored. By 30 April the front had passed across the whole country.

At dawn on 1 May Jozef Tiso left Kremsmünster with a small escort. He went to the Capuchin monastery of St Anne in Altötting in Bavaria, a famous Marian shrine. According to accounts, the Archbishop of Munich, Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, knew of his stay there. Prime Minister Štefan Tiso, as he himself recorded, did not even know where the President was going.

The Americans at Kremsmünster

At the beginning of May units of General George Patton’s US Third Army entered Upper Austria. Walker’s XX Corps, which in April had crossed Bavaria and forced the Danube, reached the Linz area early in May. On the morning of 5 May Štefan Tiso saw the first American soldiers beyond the monastery walls. The next day an American captain ordered the Slovaks to hand over all their weapons. In the town, as in many places in Austria in those days, there was looting; the Prime Minister noted in his diary that the Americans had threatened to shoot anyone caught stealing, and wrote that their conduct struck him as “humane”.

On 7 May Tiso was received by General Collier. The Slovak Prime Minister told him about the history and “statehood” of the Slovaks and asked for protection for the government and the refugees; the American reportedly assured him that they were in no danger and that he would pass their request on to his superiors. In the evening Collier informed Tiso that Walker had approved his handling of the matter and was expecting a written request for American protection. The general drafted the text himself. During the night the Slovaks translated it and prepared Slovak and English versions.

The document of 8 May

The document, dated “Kremsmuenster, May 8th, 1945” and bearing the seal of the Prime Minister’s office, was addressed to the commander of XX Corps, US Third Army. In it Štefan Tiso wrote on behalf of “the Slovak government in exile at Kremsmünster” that he submitted himself, the members of the government, their families and the whole policy of the government to the corps commander, “for such disposition as the Allied high command may deem wise and order”. He asked for the full protection of the army of the United States – where, as he stressed, about a quarter of the Slovak nation lived – and declared that the government accepted the democratic principles of government “of the people, by the people and for the people”. Separately, he asked for protection for the whole Slovak colony at Kremsmünster and for his compatriots in the territories occupied by the Allies.

On the American side the document was signed by Brigadier General William A. Collier, Colonel Curtis of the corps staff and Captain of Infantry David W. Allard. On the Slovak side it was signed by Prime Minister Štefan Tiso, the Minister of Finance Mikuláš Pružinský, the Minister of the Economy Gejza Medrický, the Minister of Education Aladár Kočiš, and the Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary Tido J. Gašpar, for many years head of the propaganda office. According to the Prime Minister’s diary, when asked whether the text could be regarded as an agreement, the Americans replied that it could. After the signing the officers stayed in the Slovaks’ quarters until late at night over slivovitz, cognac and coffee.

The significance of the document is judged in different ways. Some Slovak authors call it an act of surrender which, from the point of view of international law, brought the existence of the Slovak Republic to an end. Others point out that it was not a military surrender – Slovak units had long since stopped fighting or had surrendered at the front – but an act of submission by a group of politicians who no longer exercised power over any territory. For the Czechoslovak government of Edvard Beneš the text had no legal significance: under its doctrine of the continuity of the republic, the Slovak state was an illegal creation and its leaders were to be tried as traitors. The words about “democratic principles”, coming from politicians of a party that had ruled in authoritarian fashion since 1938, were an attempt to win the goodwill of the victors.

Arrest, extradition and trial

American protection did not mean impunity. The members of the government were interned, and over the following months the Allies, in line with the accepted principle of handing over people suspected of war crimes and collaboration to the states to which they were subject, transferred them to Czechoslovakia. Jozef Tiso, who had been hiding at Altötting for several weeks, was arrested by the American military police in June 1945. At the end of October 1945 he was taken to Prague’s Pankrác prison, and then to Bratislava.

The former President’s trial before the National Court in Bratislava opened on 2 December 1946. On 15 April 1947 Tiso was found guilty of treason against the state, of betraying the uprising and of collaboration – including breaking up the republic, sharing responsibility for the deportation of the Jews and helping the occupiers in the repression that followed the crushing of the uprising – and sentenced to death by hanging. His plea for clemency went to the government of Klement Gottwald, which on 16 April recommended by 17 votes to 6 that it be rejected; President Beneš did not exercise his right of pardon. Tiso was executed in Bratislava on 18 April 1947. Štefan Tiso was sentenced to 30 years’ imprisonment and died in 1959 in the prison at Leopoldov. Some prominent figures of the regime, among them the former Foreign Minister Ferdinand Ďurčanský, managed to escape abroad; in exile they put forward the thesis of the legal continuity of the Slovak Republic.

Significance

The Kremsmünster document was the last act in the history of a state that had existed for six years thanks to Hitler and fell together with him. On the day when Europe was celebrating the end of the war, and at Karlshorst the Wehrmacht was surrendering to all the Allies, a handful of Slovak politicians in an Austrian abbey were placing themselves at the mercy of the Americans, hoping for gentler treatment than they could expect from the Red Army and a revived Czechoslovakia. That hope proved illusory. Slovakia returned to a common state with the Czechs, and the reckoning with the People’s Party regime – the trial and execution of the priest-president – became one of the most contentious subjects in Slovak historical memory, judged differently to this day by historians and political circles.