Bedřich Pokorný

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Bedřich Pokorný (born March 6, 1904 in Brno ; † March 31, 1968 ibid) was a Czechoslovak secret service officer and temporarily head of the Czechoslovak domestic secret service Obranné zpravodajství (OBZ). After the end of the Second World War he organized attacks on the Sudeten German population in the Brno death march and in the Aussig massacre .

Life

Pokorný attended secondary school and a vocational college before starting a military career in the Czechoslovak Army in October 1924 and joining the 31st Infantry Regiment in Jihlava as a soldier . Two years later he attended an officers' academy in Milovice and in 1927 a poison gas course in Olomouc .

In 1934 he completed a secret service training course in the provincial military headquarters in Košice and was assigned to a border unit as a liaison officer. After reorganization, he was employed as an agent at the PAÚ ( Predsuvná agenturní ústredna ) and in 1938 as Rudolf in Slovakia against Hungary . After the occupation and formation of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia , he was dismissed from military service. From 1939 to March 1945 he worked for the Ministry of Finance of the Czech Protectorate in a revision commission in Brno and at the same time as an agent of the Reichsführer SS security service , where he was a member of a communist cell that turned against the German occupation with leaflets and brochures. It is unclear whether he was working as a double agent . On April 29, 1945 he joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KPTsch) and was accepted into the Czech secret service at the same time .

post war period

With the conquest of Brno by the Red Army on April 26, 1945, the winners formed the SNB service, for which Pokorný was the regional representative in Moravia from May to early July 1946 , and then worked for the Prague Interior Ministry under General Josef Bartík . Here he was responsible for reports from the MV (national defense) and Z (political situation) departments. From May 18, 1945 he was in command of the National Security Guard of Moravia and as such was directly responsible for the Brno death march . Furthermore, he was significantly involved in the planning and execution of the events of the Aussig massacre , as a result of which he officially led the investigative commission in a perfidious manner. On July 2, 1945, he was appointed Deputy Head of Department Z on the personal instructions of the then Interior Minister Václav Nosek . After an internal power struggle with his superior Josef Bartík, he became his successor for a short time on January 15, 1946 as head of the OBZ domestic intelligence service.

On November 3, 1946, he was released from this post and demoted to head of department of the OBZ for Slovakia. During this time he was significantly involved in the creation of Slovak diversion acts , which had the goal of ensuring the complete seizure of power by the CPC in all of Czechoslovakia. At the same time he was one of the deputies of Jindřich Veselýs , the head of Department Z (Security; the later Czechoslovak State Security Service (Státní bezpečnost, StB)). From February to April 1948 he was deployed as a disguised counselor at the embassy in Vienna . After his return to Prague he was again deputy head of the OBZ.

After the restructuring and reorganization of the secret service, he was appointed Head of Defense of the StB on January 1, 1949. He held this position until October 1949, when he was recalled from a post at this management level. From October 10, 1949 he was head of the prisons department in the Ministry of the Interior. He held this position until the beginning of 1951. As part of the purges in the ranks of the CPC, he was demoted to deputy, dismissed from service in January 1951 and arrested on January 28 at the instigation of State Security Minister L. Kopřiva on suspicion of treason . In a secret trial, a nine-member court sentenced him, together with Karl Cerný, as an alleged saboteur under Section 85, to 16 years in prison on December 23, 1953. From the end of the war he is said to have hired traitors and informants of the Gestapo , introduced their methods and thus seriously damaged operations of the security apparatus.

Pokorný was one of the party functionaries of the second line who were subjected to Stalinist trials at this time . Prior to that, at the beginning of December 1952, Rudolf Slansky and other leading party members were executed in the " Slansky trial ".

After 5½ years in prison, Pokorný was released, re-admitted to the KSC (Communist Party) and received a severely disabled pension and, in later years, compensation of Kcs 90,000 . After his return to the secret service in the early 1960s, as a lieutenant colonel, he became the chief of the secret service brigade of a border brigade on the border with the Federal Republic of Germany .

Between November 8 and 10, 1965, another trial was held against him, in which he was accused of torturing prisoners. On March 31, 1968, during the Prague Spring , he was found hanged in a forest near Brno. Because of the political unrest of that time it cannot be clarified until today whether it was murder or suicide, because of his knowledge of the actions of the state security.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Karel Kaplan , František Svátek: The political cleansing in the KPČ. In: Hermann Weber , Ulrich Mählert (Ed.): Terror. Stalinist party purges 1936–1953. Schöningh, Paderborn u. a. 1998, ISBN 3-506-75335-5 , pp. 563-599.
  2. ^ Jiřina Dvořáková: Bedřich Pokorný - vzestup a pád. Internetová verze Sborníku AMV 2/2004 (Bedřich Pokorný: Rise and Fall. Czech, PDF, 35 pages, 319 kB).
personal data
SURNAME Pokorný, Bedřich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rudolf (agent name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Czechoslovak intelligence officer
DATE OF BIRTH March 6, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH Brno
DATE OF DEATH March 31, 1968
Place of death Brno