Tiso becomes President of Slovakia

On 26 October 1939 the parliament of the Slovak Republic met in the Aula Maxima of the Faculty of Law building in Bratislava and unanimously elected as head of state, for a term of seven years, the outgoing Prime Minister, the Catholic priest Jozef Tiso. The next day, 27 October, the new President appointed as Prime Minister his former deputy and rival within the party, Vojtech Tuka. Slovakia, which since March had been a state under the Reich’s protection and in September had taken part in the attack on Poland, thereby acquired the system of government laid down in the July constitution: a president, a government and a one-party parliament. On the same day that the President was being elected in Bratislava, Hitler’s decrees came into force in the neighbouring Polish lands annexing western Poland to the Reich and creating the General Government, with which Slovakia now shared a border.

Chronologies give the two decisions under two consecutive days, though they formed a single political act. Some sources also date Tuka’s appointment to 26 October, since with Tiso’s election as President executive power passed to the Deputy Prime Minister. According to Czech and Slovak listings, Tuka’s government formally existed from 27 October.

A state without a president

The Slovak State came into being on 14 March 1939, the day Hitler brought about the break-up of Czecho-Slovakia. A few days later Bratislava signed a treaty of protection with Berlin, which handed Germany control of the new state’s foreign policy and army and allowed the Wehrmacht to garrison a strip of western Slovakia. For its first months the state had no head. The law of 14 March transferred the head of state’s powers to the government, which was headed by Tiso.

On 21 July 1939 parliament passed a constitution that gave the state the name Slovak Republic. It had thirteen chapters and more than a hundred sections. It enshrined the leadership principle and the leading role of Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party, alongside which only the parties of the German and Hungarian minorities were permitted. Citizens’ rights were subordinated to their duties towards the nation and the state. Some provisions drew on Catholic social teaching and the idea of a corporate state, close to Tiso’s heart, others on Fascist models. The President was to be elected by parliament for seven years. He was commander-in-chief of the armed forces and appointed and dismissed the government, and his power was limited above all by the party and, above it, by Berlin.

The presidential election was postponed until the autumn. In September Slovakia was busy with war: three of its divisions, under the Minister of Defence Ferdinand Čatloš, advanced together with the Wehrmacht into Podhale, the Nowy Sącz region and the Bieszczady, and the government justified this as the recovery of lands that Slovakia had lost to Poland in 1920–1938. After the fighting ended, Tiso strengthened his position in the party. On 1 October he formally became its chairman; before that he had been vice-chairman and, since the death of Andrej Hlinka in August 1938, its de facto leader.

The election and the new government

Parliament, chosen in December 1938 in elections with a single list, had no other candidate. Tiso was elected without a dissenting vote. According to German and Slovak accounts, his election was well received in the country: for many Slovaks the priest from Bánovce nad Bebravou, who remained parish priest while President and returned to his parish for Sunday services, was a symbol of the new statehood, and propagandists compared him with the rulers of Great Moravia. As President he became, ex officio, commander-in-chief of an army that had already fought once at Germany’s side.

Tiso’s election also meant that the government passed into the hands of the radicals. Vojtech Tuka, a lawyer born in 1880, before 1918 a lecturer in law at Hungarian universities and later the ideologue of the most radical wing of the People’s Party, had been sentenced in Czechoslovakia in 1929 to fifteen years’ imprisonment for high treason and espionage on behalf of Hungary. Released in 1937, he went straight back into politics. At the beginning of 1939 he sought support in Berlin for independence, and in February, without any authority to do so, he declared to Hitler that he was placing the fate of the Slovak nation in his hands. From March he was Deputy Prime Minister, and the Germans saw in him a more reliable partner than the cautious Tiso.

Tuka’s government retained the Minister of Foreign Affairs and of the Interior, Ferdinand Ďurčanský, who tried to preserve for Slovakia at least some freedom of manoeuvre in foreign policy, the Minister of Defence, Čatloš, and the Minister of Education, Jozef Sivák, Tiso’s man. An important role outside the government was played by Alexander Mach, commander of the Hlinka Guard and head of the propaganda office. Tuka and Mach wanted to remodel the state on National Socialist lines; Tiso aimed at an authoritarian Catholic corporate state. This dispute lasted throughout the war, but neither side questioned the alliance with Germany.

Its place in the war

Tiso’s election closed the period in which Slovakia’s institutions were built up as an ally of the Reich. In November 1939 Germany handed Slovakia some 770 square kilometres of Polish Spisz and Orawa, which its troops had occupied in September, as a reward for its part in the war. Britain and France had already in September ceased to recognise the Slovak state and treated it as part of occupied Czechoslovakia.

Tiso soon learned where decisions were made. When in the spring of 1940 he tried to curb the influence of the radicals and accepted Mach’s resignation as commander of the Hlinka Guard, Hitler summoned the Slovak leaders to Salzburg. There, on 28 July 1940, he forced Ďurčanský’s dismissal. Tuka took over foreign affairs, and Mach the interior and, once again, the Guard. In November 1940 Slovakia joined the Tripartite Pact, in June 1941 it sent troops against the USSR, and in September 1941 Tuka’s government issued the so-called Jewish Code, modelled on the Nuremberg Laws. Between March and October 1942 the Slovak authorities handed over to Germany some 58,000 Jews, who were deported to Auschwitz and the Lublin region, where almost all of them perished. President Tiso publicly defended these deportations.

In October 1942 parliament gave Tiso the title of Leader and extended his powers, while Tuka, ailing and ever weaker, lost his standing in the party. In 1944, when the Slovak National Uprising broke out, Tiso called in German troops to help. Both leaders elected and appointed in the autumn of 1939 died by sentence of the Czechoslovak National Court: Tuka was hanged in August 1946, Tiso in April 1947.