In Priest, flesh presser, Collaborator, James Mace Ward bargains the 1st complete and scholarly English-language biography of the Catholic priest and Slovak nationalist Jozef Tiso (1887-1947). the 1st president of an autonomous Slovakia, validated as a satellite tv for pc of Nazi Germany, Tiso used to be finally hanged for treason and (in influence) crimes opposed to humanity by means of a postwar reunified Czechoslovakia. Drawing on wide archival learn, Ward portrays Tiso as a devoutly spiritual guy who got here to privilege the upkeep of a Slovak kingdom over all different matters, supporting therefore to sentence Slovak Jewry to destruction. Ward, in spite of the fact that, refuses to minimize Tiso to an insignificant opportunist, portraying him additionally as a guy of precept and a sufferer of overseas conditions. This effective combine, mixed with a nearly epic skill to disclaim the results of his personal activities, eventually resulted in Tiso's undoing.

Tiso started his profession as a fervent priest trying to shield the church and pursue social justice in the state of Hungary. With the breakup of Austria-Hungary in 1918 and the production of a Czechoslovak Republic, those missions then fused with a parochial Slovak nationalist time table, a posh technique that's the center narrative of the ebook. Ward offers the most powerful case but for Tiso's heavy accountability within the Holocaust, crimes that he investigates as an final result of the interaction among Tiso's lifelong development of collaboration and the murderous foreign politics of Hitler's Europe. To today stories of Tiso divide opinion inside Slovakia, burdening the country's efforts to return to phrases with its personal historical past. As portrayed during this masterful biography, Tiso's lifestyles not just illuminates the background of a small kingdom but additionally provides a lacking piece of the bigger puzzle that used to be interwar and wartime Europe.