Josef Bartík

Josef Bartík (born June 30, 1897 ; † May 23, 1968 ) was a Czech general and secret service officer, and until January 1946 head of the Obranné zpravodajství (OBZ).

Life

During the First World War , he first served in the Czechoslovak legions as a soldier on the Italian front . After he became a prisoner of war there , he volunteered for the Italian army . As the commander of a reconnaissance unit, he was seriously wounded shortly before the end of the war in 1918 and returned to his homeland in 1919. After his convalescence , he joined the Czechoslovak Army, which was newly founded after 1918, as regimental commander . After a short time he was seconded to the Ministry of Defense, where he was employed as an officer in the Second Office of the Military Secret Service of the General Staff .

During this time, Josef Bartík was disguised as a correspondent in Poland and ultimately in France in 1940 . From there, after the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the German Wehrmacht, he emigrated to London , where he initially worked for the government-in-exile as head of foreign espionage and later as head of the secret service. Here he was also promoted to Brigadier General.

After the war and the liberation of Czechoslovakia by the local partisans and the Red Army , Josef Bartík played a key role in building the Obranné zpravodajství (OBZ) and was in charge of it from June 1945 to January 1946. During this time, he also organized and directed the decisive processes about the Aussig massacre , whose spiritual father he is considered to be. Strengthened by this "success" in the fight against the Sudeten Germans , however, the chief of staff, Bedřich Pokorný, who was also heavily involved, pushed his superior out of his position as chief of the secret service.

After the communist revolution in February , he was arrested on March 9, 1948 and sentenced to five years in prison for allegedly disseminating military secrets.

Honors

• In 1968 Josef Bartík was posthumously awarded the Czech Order of the White Lion III. Class awarded

literature

• Helmut Roewer , Stefan Schäfer, Matthias Uhl : Lexicon of the secret services in the 20th century . Herbig, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-7766-2317-9 .