Jan Habrda

Jan Habrda (born December 6, 1912 in Třebíč , Moravia , Austria-Hungary ; † August 16, 1943 in Berlin-Plötzensee ) was a Czechoslovak radio amateur and resistance fighter against National Socialism .

Life

Habrda was born in the South Moravian town of Třebíč. From 1931 to 1933 he attended the electrical engineering school in Brno , where he was trained as an electrical engineer. He then performed his military service from 1934 to 1936 with an artillery unit in Jihlava and with the 6th Artillery Brigade in Brno. He then worked for a radio technology company in Brno and for the Czechoslovak Post Office. In his free time, Jan Habrda occupied himself with amateur radio , where he held the callsign OK2AH.

On March 16, 1939, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was proclaimed and incorporated into the German Reich as immediate territory . Habrda belonged to a group of radio amateurs who came into contact with Vladislav Bobák in 1940 . He was a member and main actor of a group of Czechoslovak pilots who were deposed by the Soviet secret service as agents behind enemy lines in order to, among other things, spy out German troop movements and armament projects in the area of ​​the Protectorate. The network of informants they created soon covered the entire area of ​​the Protectorate. Their information was transmitted by means of encrypted messages, among other things, for which two members were specially trained as radio operators who both mastered Morse code and were able to build appropriate radio equipment. Material samples, drawings, documents and the like were carried out of the country via the network.

Due to the expanding network, additional transmitters were necessary. That is why the radio amateur Gustav Košulič had already been recruited as a radio operator by Bobák. Always under the risk of being targeted and discovered by the Germans , he constantly changed the location of his radio station after a brief instruction in the system by Radoslav Selucký , another key player. Jan Habrda supported him and helped build the radio station.

At the beginning of 1941 the network was betrayed by Jaroslav Bednář, who worked for the Gestapo , and was finally discovered by the Germans. Like numerous other members of the network, Habrda was arrested by the Gestapo on March 14, 1941 in his apartment in Prague and finally sentenced to death in November 1942. While most of the death sentences from the group around Bobák were carried out on July 12, 1943, Jan Habrda was executed on August 16, 1943 in the central execution site in Berlin-Plötzensee .

The radio amateurs Vladimir Kott (OK1FF) and Alois Horký (OK1HY), who were also connected, survived the Second World War .

Honors

In his hometown Třebíč a street was named after Jan Habrda.

literature

In 1979 the GDR military publishing house published the paperback book The Command of the Brave by František Kavan, which tells of the struggle and work of the espionage network. In the original language it appeared under the title Komando statečných . And also the Czech non-fiction author , radio presenter and radio amateur Dr. Josef Daneš († 1999) reported in his 1985 book Za tajemstvím éteru on the work of the network with the participation of radio amateurs around Habrda and Košulič and its later break-up by the Gestapo.

Individual evidence

• Entry on Jan Habrda in the online encyclopedia Brno
• Vítězslav Hanák, OK1HR: “ČEŠTÍ A MORAVŠTÍ RADIOAMATÉŘI - VYSÍLAČI PROTI NACISMU 1939–1945” in AMA, the journal of the Czech radio club, December 1995, pp. 3 to 10

1. ↑ František Kavan: The command of the brave . Military publishing house of the GDR, 1979 (Czech: Komando statečných . Prague. Translated by Ruth Kassube).
2. ^ Josef Daneš: Za tajemstvím éteru. (Nakladatelství dopravy a spojů - Praha, 1985) pp. 146–157 ( Memento of the original of June 8, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
3. ↑ Dr. Josef Danes dies - Radio Prag in Funkamateur , 1/00, p. 32