October 13, 1887 - Jozef Tiso
A Catholic priest who rose to lead a fascist client state, Tiso presided over a government that collaborated actively in the deportation of Slovak Jews to Nazi extermination camps — a process his administration helped organize and, at times, finance. His case remains historically striking for the convergence of religious authority and political complicity, and for the degree to which the Slovak state under his leadership acted not merely under compulsion but with initiative. He was tried and executed after the war's end, though debates over his legacy persisted for decades in Slovakia.
From Wikipedia
Jozef Gašpar Tiso (Slovak pronunciation: [ˈjɔzef ˈtisɔ], Hungarian pronunciation: [ˈjoʒɛf ˈtiso]; 13 October 1887 – 18 April 1947) was a Slovak politician, dictator, and Catholic priest who served as president of the First Slovak Republic, a client state of Nazi Germany during World War II, from 1939 to 1945. After the war, in 1947, he was convicted of treason and executed in Bratislava.
Born in 1887 to Slovak parents in Nagybiccse (today Bytča), 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 (Slovenská ľudová strana) 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 (that was until then part of Czechoslovakia) 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 (under Czechoslovak laws), became the Slovak Republic's prime minister, and, in October 1939, he was elected its president.
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