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"Ward, James Mace"
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Priest, Politician, Collaborator
InPriest, Politician, Collaborator, James Mace Ward offers the first comprehensive and scholarly English-language biography of the Catholic priest and Slovak nationalist Jozef Tiso (1887-1947). The first president of an independent Slovakia, established as a satellite of Nazi Germany, Tiso was ultimately hanged for treason and (in effect) crimes against humanity by a postwar reunified Czechoslovakia. Drawing on extensive archival research, Ward portrays Tiso as a devoutly religious man who came to privilege the maintenance of a Slovak state over all other concerns, helping thus to condemn Slovak Jewry to destruction. Ward, however, refuses to reduce Tiso to a mere opportunist, portraying him also as a man of principle and a victim of international circumstances. This potent mix, combined with an almost epic ability to deny the consequences of his own actions, ultimately led to Tiso's undoing.
Tiso began his career as a fervent priest seeking to defend the church and pursue social justice within the Kingdom of Hungary. With the breakup of Austria-Hungary in 1918 and the creation of a Czechoslovak Republic, these missions then fused with a parochial Slovak nationalist agenda, a complex process that is the core narrative of the book. Ward presents the strongest case yet for Tiso's heavy responsibility in the Holocaust, crimes that he investigates as an outcome of the interplay between Tiso's lifelong pattern of collaboration and the murderous international politics of Hitler's Europe. To this day memories of Tiso divide opinion within Slovakia, burdening the country's efforts to come to terms with its own history. As portrayed in this masterful biography, Tiso's life not only illuminates the history of a small state but also supplies a missing piece of the larger puzzle that was interwar and wartime Europe.
eBook
Collaboration and Legitimacy: A Reply to Irene Hecht
James Mace Ward responds to Dr. Irene Hecht's criticism of his 2008Pacific Historical Reviewarticle “Legitimate Collaboration: The Administration of Santo Tomás Interment Camp and Its Histories, 1942–2003.” Although Ward rejects Hecht's claim that “collaboration” is an inappropriate way to understand the Santo Tomás internment, he praises her reply as a valuable memoir by a former child internee. Ward also elucidates the evolution and purpose of his category of “legitimate collaboration.”
Journal Article
Legitimate Collaboration: The Administration of Santo Tomás Internment Camp and Its Histories, 1942–2003
During World War II the Japanese Imperial Army concentrated several thousand Allied civilians at the Santo Tomás Internment Camp in Manila, the Philippines. Internee and Japanese administrators subsequently collaborated extensively to run the camp. Since its liberation in 1945, however, the camp's English-language historians have tended to tell the camp experience as a resistance story. This article explores both the history of the camp and its historiography through archival and published sources. It argues that the tendency to recast collaboration into resistance stems from an understanding of collaboration as inherently illegitimate. By conceiving of collaboration as a behavioral category within which lies a spectrum of moral and political legitimacy, the historian can work against this inclination to misunderstand the past.
Journal Article
“People Who Deserve It”: Jozef Tiso and the Presidential Exemption
Between March and October of 1942, Slovakia deported the majority of its Jews to extermination camps in German-occupied Poland. Since then, critics and apologists of the nominally independent Nazi satellite state have argued bitterly over who was to blame. Did the Slovaks act voluntarily or under German pressure? If the latter, were they in any position to do otherwise? With equal vigor, the two sides have clashed over whether the Slovaks realized they were participating in genocide, whether they acted to limit or stop the deportations once the truth came out, and whether, compared with other German-occupied or German-allied countries, Slovakia succeeded in saving a relatively high percentage of its Jewry.
Journal Article
Standing Up for the Truth, 1938–39
After the Munich Agreement, Slovakia fell prey to rapacious neighbors. In fall 1938, Hungary annexed much of the south of the province. Poland and Germany took smaller bites from other borders. Four months later, Hitler dismantled the rump republic, setting Slovakia up as a client state and occupying the historic lands. Hungary, eager to regain regions lost as a result of the First World War, conquered Subcarpathian Rus’ and briefly attacked Slovakia. The next fall, Hitler invaded Poland through Slovak territory. Working with Josef Stalin, a bitter foe changed into partner, Hitler then destroyed and partitioned Poland.
No Czechoslovak politician
Book Chapter
The Lure of the World, 1933–38
Adolf Hitler loathed Czechs, and probably had since school age. Yet, before 1938, he seems to have rarely thought about Slovaks. In this regard, he was like most Europeans. When he suddenly championed the Slovaks against the Czechs in a 1938 speech at the Berlin Sportpalast, it was a rare moment when Tiso’s nation stepped out of the Czech shadow.¹
Hitler’s interest in Slovaks had little to do with sympathy for them. The dictator was on the verge of dismantling Versailles Europe. The guarantors of continental security—Britain, France, and the League of Nations—had failed to contain fascism, letting
Book Chapter
The Failure of “Activism,” 1925–33
Between 1927 and 1929, when the Czechoslovak minister of public health and physical education spent the night in Prague, he slept in a monk’s cell. The minister, Tiso, had declined the benefit of a state flat, preferring to board in a monastery. As more evidence of his distaste for metropolitan life, he traveled weekly to his Slovak parish, over 300 kilometers away. He lived modestly in the Bánovce parsonage with his assistant priests and a younger sister, all of whom he supported.¹ His devotion to the town was legendary. One assistant priest remembered him as a self-sacrificing taskmaster, always the
Book Chapter
“For God and Our Homeland,” 1887–1918
For the first half of his life, Jozef Tiso lived in the Kingdom of Hungary and the bosom of the Roman Catholic Church. The state was consolidated around 1000 by István, a Magyar warrior. Before 1918, it held extensive lands later belonging to Czechoslovakia, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Austria. After 1526, the kingdom was half of a Habsburg empire that, by 1914, stretched from Bohemia to Transylvania and from Galicia to Bosnia. The empire of Tiso’s church, meanwhile, claimed millions of adherents worldwide, remaining the dominant European religion despite the vicissitudes of schism, reformation, and secularization.
The histories of Tiso’s state
Book Chapter