Hubert Ripka

Hubert Ripka (born July 26, 1895 in Kobeřice u Brna , Austria-Hungary , † January 7, 1958 in London ) was a Czechoslovak author and politician.

Life and activity

Ripka was the son of a forester. He studied at the Charles University in Prague . After the First World War he worked from 1925 to 1930 as editor of the newspaper Narodni osvobozeni (National Liberation), an organ of the Czechoslovak Legion. From 1930 to 1938 he was editor of the newspaper Lidové noviny ( People's Newspaper ) for which he wrote as a “diplomatic correspondent”, primarily on questions of foreign policy and relations between European powers.

In addition to his journalistic activities, Ripka was a close advisor to the Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš in the 1930s . Ripka attracted public attention in 1938 through his opposition to the settlement of the German territorial claims against Czechoslovakia negotiated in September 1938 between the German Reich and the Western powers Great Britain and France. This means that, in order to satisfy its claims, the Reich should be allowed to separate the so-called Sudeten areas from the Czechoslovak state and to incorporate them into its own state, which ultimately - against the opposing view of Ripka and the Beneš advised by him, as well as against their corresponding prevention efforts - in the Munich Agreement was officially stipulated by the great powers.

In 1939 Ripka moved to France, where he published the book Munich: Before and After , which sharply criticized the appeasement policy of the incumbent British and French governments. Also in 1939 he became a member of the Czechoslovak National Committee in Paris.

In 1940 Ripka emigrated to Great Britain , where he became a member of the Czechoslovak National Committee in London. He also held the post of State Secretary in the Foreign Ministry of the Czechoslovak government in exile from 1940 to 1945 . He was also responsible for overseeing the BBC programs broadcast to the population of Czechoslovakia during the war . In his position as State Secretary of the Czechoslovak Foreign Ministry in Exile a. a. the restoration of an independent Austrian state , the independence of which was to be guaranteed by international guarantees and international measures aimed at eliminating Pan-Germanic tendencies.

At the end of the 1930s, the National Socialist police authorities classified Ripka as an important target: In the spring of 1940, the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin put him on the special wanted list GB , a directory of 2,820 people who, in the event of a successful invasion of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht, were assigned to special forces SS should be systematically tracked down and arrested.

In 1945 Ripka returned to Prague, where from April 1945 to February 1948 he took over the office of Minister for Foreign Trade in the new government under Beneš. From 1946 to 1948 he was also a parallel member of the constituent assembly of Czechoslovakia. As Foreign Trade Minister, Ripka u. a. signed a contract with the Soviet Union on Czechoslovak uranium supplies to it, which later led to the success of the Soviet nuclear weapons program.

After the communist seizure of power in Czechoslovakia in February 1948 (February coup), Ripka left Czechoslovakia again and went into exile in Great Britain again. There he took on the role of "Foreign Policy Officer" for the Czechoslovak exile after 1948. He also lived in New York for a time, where he taught at the New School of Social Research and took part in meetings of the Council of Free Czechoslovakia.

Fonts

• Munich: Before and After: A Fully Documented Czechoslovak Account of the Crises of September 1938 , London 1939.
• Russia and the West , 1942.
• The Soviet-Czechoslovak treaty. London: Czechoslovak Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Information Service, 1943 - speech delivered before the State council on the 15th december , 1943.
• The Repudiation of Munich , London 1943.
• Czechoslovakia in the World Alliance , 1943.
• German Massacres in Occupied Czechoslovakia , 1943.
• East and West , London 1944.
• The Future of the Czechoslovak Germans , London 1944. (also in German as The Future of the Czechoslovak Germans , 1944)
• Austria and Czechoslovakia 1944. (together with Maria Koestler and Emil Winter)
• Czechoslovakia Enslaved: The Story of the Communist Coup d'État , Victor Gollancz, London 1950.
• A Federation of Central Europe , 1953,
• Eastern Europe in the Post-War World , Methuen, 1961.

literature

• Z Brezina: The Czechoslovak Democrat. The Life, Writing, and Politics of Hubert Ripka from 1918 to 1934 , Boston 2008.
• Vladimír Gonec: Hubert Ripka and European thinking in exile in the 1950s , In: José M. Faraldo / Paulina Gulinska-Jurgiel / Christian Domnitz: Europe in the Eastern Bloc. Ideas and Discourses 1945-1991 , pp. 371–387.

Individual evidence

1. ^ David Hertl: Hubert Ripka - muž, který věřil. In: rozhlas.cz. Retrieved May 14, 2016 (Czech). 
2. ^ Entry on Ripka on the special wanted list GB .