Jozef Tiso, Slovakia's Roman Catholic Fascist Dictator
November 2, 2025
by William P. Meyers

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Banality of Evil, Roman Catholic Style

Joseph Tiso was the President of Slovakia, or at least the First Slovak Republic, from 1939 until 1945. Here I will use his story to illuminate a variety of issues. I have long intended to add an essay on Tiso to my series on Fascism, particularly with respect to the roll of the Roman Catholic Church in creating and maintaining authoritarian, Catholic governments. The catalyst for this essay is my reading of Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, A Report on the Banality of Evil. Given that the fossil fuel industry, industrialism in general, and human overpopulation are sinking the earth in a Slow Motion Apocalypse, studying the dynamics of the banality of evil is crucial to good decision making.

Note that fascism is a word that does not have a consistent definition. In the modern U.S.A., leftists hurl it at right-wingers, and sometimes right wingers hurl it right back. It does not mean simply authoritarian, though that is a consistent component. The classic form of fascism is due to the Italian dictator of Italy from 1922 to 1943 Benito Mussolini. More often people associate it with Adolf Hitler and his Nazi, or National Socialist, party. Nationalism is a fascist constant. Socialism meant something different from the left-wing socialist or communist movements, though there were many similarities that leftists consistently deny. Notably, Mussolini was raised Catholic, became an atheist and lefty type socialist, then created or at least led the Fascist Party in Italy, becoming a nationalist, militarist, and Catholic along the way. I would direct you to look up the two other big time fascists, Petain of France and Franco of Spain.

Here I will examine the fascist leader of a small nation that was part of the Austrian Empire, then part of Czechoslovakia, then briefly independent starting in 1939. [Slovakia again became independent again in 1993]

The Catholic Church currently denies that the four big fascist dictators of the 1930s and 1940s, Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, and Petain. Even though each was a well known Catholic during his life time. It also denies being anti-Semitic (anti-Jewish), despite a near 1700 year history of reminding Catholics, at least one Sunday per year, and then for good measure on Good Friday, that the Jews demanded the death of Jesus and said "Then answered all the people, and said, His Blood be on us, and on our children." [Bible, Matthew chapter 27, verse 25]

So consider Joseph Tiso. He was a fascist, a close ally and friend of Hitler, he helped murder the Jews of Slovakia. Not Roman Catholic? He was not just Roman Catholic. He was a priest. And the Church never took away his priesthood. [The Church did not excommunicate Hitler, Mussolini, Franco or Petain. It even gave a gold medal to Franco.]

In Arendt's book on the Eichmann trial the section on Croatia and Father Josef Tiso covers pages 202 to 205 [Penguin paperback edition of 1994]. We learn Father Tiso and the Catholics in Slovakia were anti-semitic even before the nation went fascist. It was a small country, with about 2.5 million people, including about 90 thousand Jews. It was economically backward. Father Tiso achieved power at the same time Slovakia achieved independence in 1939, as World War II began. Tiso and the government took a Catholic approach, rather than the Nazi racist approach, to Jews. A Jew baptized into the Church was no longer a Jew. Even the obstinate Jews did not need to be exterminated; expelling them was good enough. The sin of the Jews was their wealth, so confiscating that wealth appealed to Tiso and the Slovakian fascists. They put Jews in ghettos or in forced labor camps.

The German put in charge of helping Tiso with his Jewish problem was Dieter Wisliceny, who in turn was subordinate to Adolf Eichmann. In 1942 his superior, Heydrich, visited and asked that all Jews be resettled in the East, which meant in German run concentration camps. Tiso went along partly because the Germans did not demand the Jews' money; Slovaks could keep that. The language the Germans used seemed to say the deported Jews would not be killed. But by June 1942 52,000 Jews were deported to killing centers in Poland.

Forgive me if I now quote Ms. Arendt at length, so you know this is not my interpretation. "There were still some thirty-five thousand Jews left in the country, and they all belonged to the originally exempted categories — converted Jews and their parents, members of certain professions, young men in forced labor battalions, a few businessmen. . . The Bratislava Jewish Relief and Rescue Committee, a sister body of the Hungarian Zionist group, succeeded in bribing Wisliceny, who promised to slow down the pace of deportations." To no avail. The Vatican now revealed to its clergy (including Father Tiso) that resettlement meant murder. But the resettled Slovakian Jews were already dead. Under pressure from Hitler, the good Father put the remaining Jews in Slovakian concentration camps. "In August, 1944, as the Red Army drew near, a full-fledged revolt broke out in Slovakia, and the Germans occupied the country . . . [they] sent Alois Brunner to Bratislava to arrest and deport the remaining Jews. Brunner first arrested and deported the officials of the Relief and Rescue Committee . . . On April 4, 1945, when the Russians arrived in Bratislava, there were perhaps twenty thousand Jews left who had survived the catastrophe."

In April 1945 Father Tiso fled to Germany. He was arrested by American troops. In the restored nation of Czechoslovakia he was tried not for helping with exterminating Jews, but for setting up Slovakia independent of Czechoslovakia. He was executed on April 18, 1947.

Note too that Father Tiso attended the Salzburg Conference in 1940, long with Hitler himself, and agreed the Slovakia regime would be National Socialist. Tiso may not have been as anti-semitic as the Final Solution wing of the German National Socialist Party, but it is impossible to deny that he was a fascist and a Roman Catholic.

The point here is not to make people feel sorry for the Jews and so excuse the bad behavior of the Zionist regime in Israel/Palestine. Or to remind people of the long, evil history of the Roman Catholic Church. Or to get people to use the word fascist more carefully.

The point is what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil. In the case of Adolf Eichmann, he did not see making the trains run on time, to carry Jews to their deaths, as evil. When he did good work he got promotions. He liked promotions. If he had been promoted for working on cancer cures, he would have done that instead.

The banality of evil rolls on today, meeting little resistance. The yes men and yes women of the Trump regime are happy to have their meager talents rewarded. So they prosecute the innocent, pardon the guilty, and otherwise do the bidding of Trump and his billionaire buddies.

The human race is putting itself in its own ovens of extinction. The banality is everywhere, from the executive ranks of ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Aramco to the airlines and world travelers to the people who buy a gas powered car bigger than they need.

Hitler likely would have gone on until he died of natural causes if he had not made the mistake of attacking the Soviet Union. Winston Churchill's reign of oppression over the British colonies hardly made him more moral than Hitler. Even Franklin Roosevelt messed with democracy by running for four terms as President, not ending racial segregation, and putting Japanese Americans in prison camps.

Humans must often pay a price to resist evil. I understand trying to minimize the price, to at least resist in a clever manner. But going along with the destruction of the planet.

In the end Father Jozef Tiso was hung until dead. I believe that people who do his level of evil have graduated beyond the banal. My only problem with his fate was that it did not come earlier.