Slovak Republic President, World War II War Criminal. He was an ordained Roman Catholic priest who was installed as President of Slovakia as a puppet leader for Nazi Germany from 1939 to 1945. By the time of the Nazi invasion, he had already been installed as the prime minister of the autonomous Slovakia under Czechoslovak laws, became the Slovak Republic's prime minister, and, in October of 1939, he was elected its president. He collaborated with the Nazis in the deportation and extermination program against thousands of Slovak Jews, while numerous others were murdered in their homeland. As World War II wound down, he was arrested and later tried for crimes against humanity. Found guilty, he was executed in April of 1947. Born one of seven children into a Hungarian working-class family, he was intelligent and well-educated. He excelled in the languages of Hungarian, German, Latin, Hebrew, Aramaic dialects, and Arabic. He graduated with a Ph.D. in Theology in 1911 from the University of Vienna. He was described as being pious. Although he was well-educated and like many of his countrymen, he developed antisemitic ideology. During World War I, he served as a field curate of the 71st infantry regiment, saw the horrors of war firsthand before being discharged with renal disease. In January of 1927, his right-wing political career began as the Minister of Health and Physical Education of Czechoslovakia as he had been actively working with the problem of alcoholism and poverty. Many of the bars were owned by Jews, thus leading to blaming the Jewish population for the high rate of alcoholism. His image appeared on a coin issued during 1944 and the same year, approximately 12,600 Slovak Jews were deported to Nazi concentration camps. In all, Nazi forces, working with Slovak authorities, deported more than 70,000 Jews from Slovakia and later murdered more than 60,000 of them in concentration camps. Even during the horrors against the Jewish population of World War II, he served several parishes legalizing his legitimacy and power in an overwhelmingly Catholic country. In 1942, the Vatican ordered him to halt the deportation of Jews for a short time.