Tuka, sometimes referred to by the Magyar name Béla, was born in Hegybánya, in the Hont County of the Kingdom of Hungary (today: Štiavnické Bane, Slovakia).

This annex, according to Tuka, stated that the declaration was, by agreement, to be valid for only ten years; after 30 October 1928, he claimed, Prague's writ would no longer run in Slovakia.

[1][2] On 9 March 1939 Czech troops moved into Slovakia in reaction to radical calls for independence from Slovak agitators (including Tuka, who had recently been released from prison).

The agreement called for dual command by the Slovak People's Party and the Hlinka Guard (HSĽS), and also an acceleration in Slovakia's anti-Jewish policies.

[6] On 24 November that year Tuka and von Ribbentrop signed a protocol entering Slovakia into alliance with Germany, Japan, and Italy.

[8] With Wisliceny, Tuka composed the Ordinance Judenkodex (Codex Judaicus, or Jewish Code) of the 9th of September 1941, which comprised 270 articles comprehensively denying rights to Slovak Jews.

Twenty thousand Jews were to be deported under the German resettlement scheme, for which the Slovak government was to pay five hundred Reichsmark per deportee.

[10][13] A report by the Bratislava Sicherheitsdienst, the intelligence agency of the SS, stated that the reason for the sudden halt was a meeting called by Tuka on 11 August 1942.

At that meeting, Tuka and the secretary-general of the Industrial Union told the ministers that Slovakia's economy could not withstand continued deportation of the Jews, causing the council to order the halt.

At the end of the war, having already suffered a stroke which confined him to a wheelchair, he emigrated together with his wife, nursing attendants, and personal doctor to Austria, where he was arrested by Allied troops following the capitulation of Germany and handed over to the officials of the renewed Czechoslovakia.

[15] František Alexander, executive chairman of Slovakia's Central Association of Jewish Religious Communities, told The Slovak Spectator that the funds from the account should be allocated by an international council of justice.

Instead, Weiss suggested, the money should be used to pay for the upkeep of the graves of Slovak soldiers who died in vain fighting alongside the Nazis against the Soviet forces on the Eastern Front.