Monsignor Jozef Gašpar Tiso, ThD was a Slovak politician and Roman Catholic priest who was president of the Slovak Republic, a client state of Nazi Germany during World War II, from 1939 to 1945. In 1947, after the war, he was executed for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Bratislava.
Born in 1887 to Slovak parents in Nagybiccse, 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 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 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, became the Slovak Republic's Prime Minister, and, in October 1939, he was elected its President.