Czesław Oberdak

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Memorial plaque in Woeste Hoeve with the name of Czesław Oberdak
General view of the memorial with a poem by Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the foreground

Czesław Oberdak (born July 20, 1921 in Krakow , † March 8, 1945 in Woeste Hoeve near Apeldoorn ) was a Polish pilot .

biography

Czesław Oberdak was born in Kraków as the second child of Porfiriusz (born March 24, 1878) and Stefania Oberdak (born December 26, 1888), nee Klinger. The father fought in the First World War as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army in Galicia . During the war he married Stefania Klinger, the family initially lived in a village in the north of Krakow and moved to the city after the war. The daughter Ludmiła was born in 1917 and the son Roman in 1923.

As a boy, Czesław Oberdak developed a noticeable interest in airplanes. In addition to his enthusiasm for aviation and technology, he was musical and a good draftsman. After graduating from school in May 1939, he acquired a glider license in the summer months . The petite, only 1.63 meter tall man then signed up for training as a military pilot with the Polish Air Force , which began on August 15, 1939; Since he was still a minor and his mother was against it, there were heated discussions in the family beforehand. After the attack by the German Wehrmacht on Poland just two weeks later, he made a detour via Romania , Yugoslavia , Italy and France to Great Britain , where he registered for service with the Royal Air Force in June 1940 and then received training as a pilot. In December 1943 he was assigned to the Polish Dywizjon 306 "Toruński" flight squadron.

By May 30, 1944, Second Lieutenant Oberdak had flown 26 missions. On his last assignment, he accompanied US aircraft that bombed a branch of the Junkers factories in Halberstadt . His plane, a single-engine North American P-51 Mustang (FX979), was damaged and he had to make an emergency landing in Dalmsholte near Ommen in the Netherlands on the way back . He set the plane and all the documents on fire. An observer of the crash brought him to resister Jan Seigers , where he stayed until Seigers was arrested on June 29, 1944. Subsequently, members of the resistance hid Oberdak at eight different addresses. The change of location was sometimes done by bike, for which Oberdak first had to learn to ride a bike. He was known to the other people in hiding and resisters only as pooltje ( little Pole) .

Officially, Oberdak was "missing". In December 1944 he was in Amsterdam , where around 15 people in hiding , including the American soldier Franklin D. Coslett, happily celebrated Sinterklaas together, which is documented by photos. The next day, Oberdak and Coslett had to leave the hiding place with bicycles that the Gestapo resistance claimed to have stolen in the direction of Apeldoorn in order to go into hiding in a new location. It was planned that the two men should try to reach the already liberated south of the Netherlands or the Rhine by bike.

Part of the building by De Kruisberg (2015)

On December 24, 1944 Oberdak was near Hoenderloo discovered together with four other men by the Germans in a cave: A car was near a plate realized and the German occupants in the forest smoke. The five men hidden there are said to have just shaved and sang loudly. Oberdak and Coslett were sentenced to death by the SD in Velp for "terrorism" and "sabotage" because there were weapons and ammunition in the cave. She was then taken to De Kruisberg prison in Doetinchem , a former child welfare institution, as a death row inmate . From there, Oberdak was taken away on March 8, 1945. Together with 116 other men, he was executed as "number 75" in the hamlet of Woeste Hoeve as part of a reprisal after an assassination attempt on the German general commissioner for security and high-ranking SS man Hanns Albin Rauter . He wasn't dead on the spot, so he was fired at one more time. A total of 263 inmates from prisons and concentration camps were executed as part of this action.

A man from the firing squad of the police is said to have refused to shoot because he has never shot at people. According to witness statements, he was supposed to have been taken away and executed the next day on the instructions of the commander of the security police and SD Karl Eberhard Schöngarth himself.

His fate remained unknown to Oberdak's relatives. Coslett survived captivity and was released from Westerbork on April 12, 1945 . He became a radio and television presenter after the war and died in 1992 at the age of 76.

Search for the dead

After the execution, the dead were buried on their side in a mass grave in Ugchelen to save space. After the liberation of the Netherlands in May 1945, they were excavated for identification. Two victims remained unknown, a man 1.73 meters and one 1.63 meters tall.

In 1990, after the opening of the Iron Curtain , Oberdak's older sister Ludmiła Kaczmarska wrote to the Oorlogsgravenstichting , the Dutch war graves service, and to the Zwolse Courant for help, after she found her in the 1989 book Księga lotników polskich poległych 1939, zmarłych i39 1946 had read from Olgierd Cumft and Hubert Kazimierz Kujawa that their brother had made an emergency landing near Zwolle . Richard Schuurman, a journalist with the Courant , then began looking for the remains of Czesław Oberdak. He found out that they had been buried on the Nationaal Ereveld Loenen in grave E1253 as an "unknown Dutchman" since 1982 .

In November 2008, the smaller corpse was finally identified with the help of the Bergingsen Identificatiedienst der Koninklijke Landmacht and the Korps Landelijke Politiediensten after a DNA comparison with samples from the sister. On December 10, 2008, Czesław Oberdak was buried with military honors in the family grave in the presence of his 92-year-old sister Ludmiła in Kraków's Rakowicki Cemetery . As early as 1996, his name was added to the glass plate with the names of the execution victims, after the size of the dead man and a gold wristwatch had indicated the identity of Oberdak at that time, although final doubts remained. His name is also on the Polish War Memorial in South Ruislip near London . In September 2009 Oberdak was posthumously honored with the order Polonia Restituta (Commander).

The identity of the second corpse is still unknown (as of 2012).

At the beginning of 2012, during renovation work on a house in Ommen, a leather boot was found which, according to research, can be attributed to Czesław Oberdak. In return, information from the Royal Air Force spoke about the type of boot, its small size and the fact that in 1944 the resistance fighter Jan Seigers was registered at this address, who had created an underground hiding place there mainly for Allied soldiers. The boot was temporarily exhibited in the Ommen Regional Museum.

In the same year journalist Richard Schuurman was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland by the Polish Ambassador to the Netherlands, Janusz Stańczyk .

literature

  • Richard Schuurman: Spoor naar Woeste Hoeve. De zoektocht naar de geëxecuteerde piloot Czesław Oberdak . Lost, Hilversum 2012, ISBN 978-90-8704-250-9 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Cmentarz Rakowicki w Krakowie (małopolskie). In: polishairforce.pl. Retrieved June 6, 2018 .
  2. ↑ Schuurman, Spoor naar Woeste Hoeve , p. 17.
  3. ↑ Schuurman, Spoor naar Woeste Hoeve , pp. 18/306.
  4. ^ The Search for P / O for Czesław Oberdak. In: polishwargraves.nl. July 20, 1921, Retrieved June 7, 2018 .
  5. ↑ Schuurman, Spoor naar Woeste Hoeve , p. 19
  6. ↑ Schuurman, Spoor naar Woeste Hoeve , p. 20.
  7. ↑ Schuurman, Spoor naar Woeste Hoeve , p. 306 f.
  8. ↑ 306 Dywitsjon Mysliwski. In: dws-xip.pl. Retrieved June 7, 2018 .
  9. ↑ Lancaster DV267. In: 626-squadron.co.uk. December 10, 1945, accessed June 7, 2018 .
  10. ↑ a b Harro Ranter: Accident North American P-51 Mustang Mk III FX979, May 30, 1944. In: aviation-safety.net. May 30, 1944, accessed June 6, 2018 .
  11. ↑ a b c d e f g h Een eresaluut voor een gefusilleerde. In: historiek.net. December 27, 2017, accessed June 6, 2018 (Dutch).
  12. ↑ Schuurman, Spoor naar Woeste Hoeve , p. 307.
  13. ↑ a b c Czeslaw Oberdak. In: oorlogsgravenstichting.nl. Retrieved June 5, 2018 (Dutch).
  14. ↑ Schuurman, Spoor naar Woeste Hoeve , p. 99.
  15. ↑ Schuurman, Spoor naar Woeste Hoeve , p. 140.
  16. ↑ Schuurman, Spoor naar Woeste Hoeve , p. 195
  17. ↑ Erepeloton Waalsdorp. In: erepeloton.nl. April 25, 1945, Retrieved June 10, 2018 .
  18. ↑ Schuurman, Spoor naar Woeste Hoeve , p. 194.
  19. ↑ Franklin D. Coslett. In: Bevrijdingsportretten. April 29, 1944, Retrieved June 6, 2018 (Dutch).
  20. ↑ Schuurman, Spoor naar Woeste Hoeve , p. 217.
  21. ^ The Polish War Memorial at Northolt . Retrieved June 6, 2018.
  22. ↑ Postanowienie Prezydenta Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej (pdf)
  23. ↑ Schuurman, Spoor naar Woeste Hoeve , p. 303.
  24. ↑ Laarsje van piloot Oberdak gevonden. In: tracesofwar.nl. Retrieved June 6, 2018 .
  25. ↑ Odznaczenie Richarda Schuurmana. February 23, 2012, accessed June 6, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Oberdak, Czeslaw
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish pilot
DATE OF BIRTH July 20, 1921
PLACE OF BIRTH Krakow
DATE OF DEATH March 8, 1945
Place of death Woeste Hoeve, Apeldoorn