Arnošt Heidrich

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Arnošt Heidrich (born September 21, 1889 in Josefov , † February 12, 1968 in Washington, DC ) was a Czechoslovak diplomat and foreign policy maker .

Life

Arnošt Heidrich grew up in the family of Colonel Arnošt Heidrich in Josefov. After attending high school in Hradec Králové , he passed his Abitur in Sarajevo and devoted himself to studying law in Vienna. He also took courses in diplomacy and consular work and in 1921 became consular attaché at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Prague and later Secretary of the Embassy in Bern.

In the 1930s Arnošt Heidrich headed the fourth department in the field of politics of the Czechoslovak Foreign Ministry. In the spring of 1938, the Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš appointed his confidante Heidrich as permanent envoy to the League of Nations . Before Heidrich took up his post in Geneva , he attended the annual conference of the Little Entente , the alliance of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Romania . Beneš had asked Heidrich to ask the Romanian government there to allow two things: (1) the overflight of military aircraft from the Soviet Union , which Czechoslovakia had bought there, and (2) the march through of Red Army troops for "extreme emergencies." ", D. H. the invasion of the Wehrmacht when the Sudeten crisis worsened. The Romanian King Carol II , in the presence of his Foreign Minister and Chief of Staff, agreed to the first request, but categorically refused to allow Soviet ground troops to march through.

After the so-called occupation of the rest of Czech Republic , Heidrich founded the resistance group Parsifal and worked in the umbrella organization ÚVOD . Heidrich was arrested by the Gestapo in June 1944 and imprisoned in the Small Fortress Theresienstadt . At the end of April 1945, Karl Hermann Frank , German Minister of State in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia , had a group of political prisoners brought together in the Jenerálka Castle near Prague . Heidrich also belonged to this group. Also among the "celebrity prisoners " were the ex-ministers Kamil Krofta and Ivan Dérer , the diplomats Jindřich Andrial and Zdeněk Němeček , and Vladimir Krajina , former professor at Charles University and last chairman of the resistance organization ÚVOD. The goal of amalgamating the prisoners - negotiating pledges vis-à-vis the Western powers, forming a Czech government or preparing for deportation to Germany - has not been finally clarified. The prisoners were released on May 7, 1945.

After 1945 Heidrich was State Secretary in the Czechoslovak Foreign Ministry. In July 1947 he took part in the negotiations in Moscow as a member of the delegation under Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk , during which Czechoslovakia was banned from accepting the Marshall Plan . On November 20, 1948 - after the communist coup d'état - Heidrich fled to the USA with his family, where he lived in exile from then on. There he was active in organizations in exile such as the Rada svobodného Československa (RSČ) (on February 25, 1949 he became Secretary General of the Council). He also worked for the station Voice of America and in the Czechoslovak delegation of the Assembly of Captive European Nations in New York, a kind of umbrella organization for various groups in exile from Eastern Europe.

Publications

  • Arnost Heidrich: Political Causes of the Czechoslovak Tragedies of 1938 and 1948 . Czechoslovak Society for Arts and Sciences in America, Washington DC 1962.

literature

  • Arnost Heidrich, ex-Czech Aide . In: " New York Times ", February 13, 1968, p. 43. (Obituary, an abstract is available online.)
  • Stanislav Kokoška: Prague in May 1945 - the story of an uprising , translated from the Czech by Dagmar Liebova. V & R Unipress, Göttingen 2009, ISBN 978-3-89971-540-8 .
  • Igor Lukes: Czechoslovakia between Stalin and Hitler: The Diplomacy of Edvard Beneš in the 1930s . Oxford University Press, 1996, ISBN 0195102673 .
  • Radomír Luža : The Hitler kiss - a memoir of the Czech resistance . Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge 2002, ISBN 0-8071-2781-7 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Short biography on the pages of the Czechoslovak Legionnaires Community, Czech, accessed on January 19, 2010
  2. ^ Igor Lukes: Czechoslovakia between Stalin and Hitler . Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 48.
  3. ^ Fritz Taubert: Myth Munich . Oldenbourg, Munich 2002, ISBN 3486566733 , p. 48.
  4. ^ Radomír Luža: The Hitler kiss - a memoir of the Czech resistance . Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge 2002, p. 138.
  5. ↑ Stanislav Kokoška: Prague in May 1945 . Göttingen 2009, pp. 107-109.
personal data
SURNAME Heidrich, Arnošt
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Heidrich, Arnost
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Czechoslovak diplomat and foreign politician
DATE OF BIRTH September 21, 1889
PLACE OF BIRTH Josefov
DATE OF DEATH February 12, 1968
Place of death Washington, DC