Ladislav Karel after work

Ladislav Karel after work

Ladislav Karel Feierabend (born June 14, 1891 in Adlerkosteletz , Reichenau an der Knieschna district ; † August 15, 1969 in Pörtschach , Carinthia ) was a Czechoslovak politician and Minister of Justice, Agriculture and Finance of Czechoslovakia , the Czech government in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and ministers in the Czechoslovak government-in-exile in London.

Life

The father Karel Feierabend was a university professor. After graduating from high school in Königgrätz , Ladislav Feierabend studied law at Charles University in Prague as well as in Neuchâtel and Oxford and received his doctorate in 1915. Law at the Czech University in Prague.

From 1917 he was an employee of the Czech agricultural cooperative system and from 1930 General Director of the “Unified Headquarters of Economic Cooperatives” and chairman of the “Prague Product Exchange”. In 1934 Feierabend was appointed President of the Agricultural Association.

As the representative of the Agrarian Party, Feierabend was Minister of Justice and Minister for the Unification of Legislation and Organization of Administration in the Government of Rudolf Beran I from October 5, 1938 to March 15, 1939 .

After German troops marched into Prague on March 15, 1939 and the " Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia " was founded with its own government, foreign policy and defense were in German hands. From March 16, 1939 to February 26, 1940 in the Protectorate Government, Minister of Agriculture under the Prime Minister Government Rudolf Beran II and Government Alois Eliáš closed the workday . In 1939 Feierabend bought the Miröschau Palace near Pilsen in western Bohemia .

When the German State Secretary in the Protectorate, SS-Gruppenführer Karl Hermann Frank , put pressure on the Protectorate government in May 1939 to enact anti-Jewish laws based on the Nuremberg Laws , the government withstood this pressure and decided to resign if anti-Jewish laws were to be adopted would be introduced. Ladislav Feierabend wrote in his memoirs that “the protectorate was the only country under Nazi influence that did not pass anti-Jewish laws”.

When he was threatened with arrest by the Gestapo after his role in the political wing of the resistance movement was discovered , Feierabend fled via Hungary and Yugoslavia to France and, after its occupation, to England. Because of his role in the resistance and his subsequent activity in the London government in exile , his family members who remained in the Protectorate were arrested on July 1, 1942 after the assassination attempt on Reinhard Heydrich on May 24, 1942, and deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp . From there, the male family members were sent to the Dachau concentration camp on September 11, 1942 . The minister's father, Karel Feierabend, was the oldest inmate of the Dachau concentration camp at the age of 83 and died a few days after his liberation. With him the brother of the minister, Karel Feierabend (1892-1976) and his sons Karel (1922-1992) and Vladimir (* 1924, since 1990 member of the executive committee of the Comité International de Dachau ) were imprisoned in Dachau. The minister's wife, Hana (1903–1989), and his sister-in-law Marie (1898–1991) were deported to the Ravensbrück women's concentration camp .

In the Czechoslovak government-in-exile in London, Beneš was Minister of State without portfolio from July 22, 1940 to October 26, 1941, and Minister of Finance from October 27, 1941 to April 4, 1945. As such, he led negotiations in Washington in April 1943 with the American Treasury Secretary Morgenthau and was from July 2 to July 22, 1944 head of the Czechoslovak delegation at the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference in Bretton Woods (New Hampshire) .

In January 1941, Feierabend recommended to Beneš that the Czechoslovak state border be brought forward beyond the historical state borders in the event of Germany's defeat, in order to have “strategic borders for the living space of the Czech people”. He also suggested that the country should be “ethnically segregated”, for this purpose over a million Germans should be resettled, and the rest should be resettled in front of an “ethnographic security line” that was to be set up and denied them minority rights. In April 1944, he also suggested that one million members of the German minority be transferred to the Soviet Union as forced laborers after the end of the war. After the formation of the new Fierlinger government in Košice in the liberated part of Czechoslovakia on April 4, 1945, the government in exile in London resigned.

After his Agrarian Party was not involved in the new government, Feierabend returned to Prague as a private citizen in June 1945 in order to manage the family property again. After his arrival in the evening employees discovered a makeshift mass grave in the garden of the property. After work had to find out that a few weeks earlier, after the armistice, around 200 prisoner-of-war German soldiers of the Waffen SS and members of the Vlasov army had been murdered by partisans in the basement of his castle . (see also local history)

After the communist coup in February 1948, the Feierabend family's property was confiscated and banished from Prague. After work went into exile again - this time with the whole family. After he narrowly escaped arrest by the communist secret police, he reached Hamburg, hidden in a boat, across the Elbe. In 1948 Feierabend emigrated again to England and lived in the USA from 1950.

There after work worked as an author, consultant, and from 1965 to 1969 as an expert on the Voice of America . He was also chairman of the Czechoslovak Science and Art Association in Washington, DC

His son Ivo Karel Feierabend (* 1927) was a professor of political science at San Diego State University , while his daughter Hana manages the castle, which was returned to the family as part of the restitution in 1991 after the end of communist rule.

Autobiography

• Prague - London vice versa. Memories. 8 volumes, 1961–68

literature

• Detlef Brandes : The way to expulsion 1938-1945. Plans and decisions to “transfer” Germans from Czechoslovakia and Poland (= publications of the Collegium Carolinum. Vol. 94). 2nd, revised and expanded edition. Oldenbourg, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-486-56731-4 .
• Ferdinand Seibt , Heribert Sturm (Hrsg.): Biographical lexicon for the history of the Bohemian countries. Volume 1: A - H. Oldenbourg, Munich et al. 1979, ISBN 3-486-49491-0 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Ladislav Karel Feierabend in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

From 09:55 on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4HXgxqKwxM