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3. Dealing with the Past: The Trial of Jozef Tiso
- University of Pittsburgh Press
- Chapter
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The trial, conviction, and execution of Jozef Tiso was a central event in postwar Slovakia, and one which had the effect of mobilizing and energizing forces across the Slovak political and social spectrum. The KSS had a strong interest in condemning Tiso, and with him the wartime regime, as a means of forcing the DS into a no-win situation. The Democrats could either defend Tiso, and risk being labeled as enemies of the Republic, or abandon him, and risk alienating the Catholic support they had won with the April Agreement. That is, the DS could become crippled either by police investigations and subsequent government enforced purges of its ranks or by the defection of the very voters that gave it a landslide parliamentary victory in May 1946. Partisan organizations and trade unions, in line with Communist wishes and seeking Tiso’s demise, mobilized their forces in calls for his conviction and execution, while village and townswomen from some of Slovakia’s most heavily Catholic areas, encouraged by clergy sympathetic to Tiso, engaged in antigovernment demonstrations. Slovak Catholic bishops urged calm while requesting clemency for Tiso from various government bodies. President Beneš and other non-Communist Czech political leaders had to decide whether to support clemency or ratify his execution, while the Slovak nationalist underground sought to stir up public unrest against Czechs, Jews, Communists, and Lutherans in connection with Tiso’s destiny. From December 1946 to May 1947, Slovaks were caught up in the Tiso trial and its aftermath. 86 3 d ea l ing w ith the past The Trial of Jozef Tiso 87 The issue of what to do with Tiso was present already during the war. In December 1943, during talks with the Soviet leadership in Moscow, Czechoslovak President-in-exile Edvard Beneš asked the Soviets to insist on the punishment of those Slovak leaders responsible for Slovakia’s participation in the war against the Soviet Union.1 In making this request, which Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov declined, Beneš could put the onus on the Soviets , not the Czechs, for any prosecution of Slovakia’s wartime leaders that would occur after an Allied victory in the war. Tiso, who in April 1945 fled to Austria, and then Bavaria, was arrested by the American army in early June, detained in the American POW camp at Garmisch-Partenkirchen for several months, and extradited to Bratislava in late October. Now in the custody of the Czechoslovak Republic, Tiso could expect to face trial for a series of alleged war crimes. Because Tiso was a Catholic priest and former head of state of a regime that had close relations with the Catholic Church, his fate was a prime issue of concern for Slovakia’s Catholic bishops. As discussed above, these bishops sent a letter on January 8, 1946, to the Slovak National Council, calling for a more complex, tolerant, and balanced understanding of Tiso’s actions and the dilemmas and pressures he faced during the war. Slovakia’s bishops stood almost alone in Slovak public life in saying some positive things about Slovakia’s former leader. The Vatican, not happy with Tiso’s initial decision to assume leadership of wartime Slovakia, and upset with some of his wartime policies, such as the deportation of Jews from Slovakia to a grim fate in Nazi Germany, was cool to Tiso during the period leading up to his trial. A measure of the Vatican’s reluctance to get involved in the Tiso affair is evidenced by the visit of Monsignor Amleto Cicognani, the Vatican’s representative in Washington, D.C., to the Czechoslovak ambassador to the United States, Vladimír Hurban, on December 18, 1945.2 Making his visit on papal orders, Cicognani reported that the Vatican had received much embittered correspondence from Slovakia’s bishops and priests, alleging that there was the danger of nationalist disturbances in Slovakia on account of the Tiso trial. For that reason, His Holiness made two requests, neither of which, the monsignor stressed, were to be construed as an attempt to influence the course of the trial. These requests were, first, that Tiso not be interned in a prison, but in a monastery; and, second, that Tiso be given “due regards.” Hurban promised to pass on the first request to Prague but asked for clarification about the second request, given its vague dealing with t h e past 88 nature. Cicognani agreed that, indeed, his request was vague and promised to get clarification from the Vatican...