Osvald Závodský

Osvald Závodský (born October 27, 1910 in Svinov, † March 19, 1954 in Prague , executed) was a Czechoslovak communist and Spain fighter , later head of the SNB secret police . In the course of the Stalinist purges in the early 1950s, he fell out of favor and was sentenced to death as the last prominent victim and executed after Stalin's death .

Life

He attended the five-year elementary school , then four years the lower level of the grammar school and then two classes of business school .

In October 1937 he went to Spain with other Czechoslovak communists and joined the International Brigades there during the Spanish Civil War . After the fall of Catalonia , he crossed the border into France in February 1939 . Immediately afterwards, in March 1939, the rest of the Czech Republic was occupied, which is why he stayed in France and worked there for the Czechoslovak embassy in exile. After the conquest of France by the German Empire , he went underground and participated in the French Resistance . In December 1942, he was arrested and the Mauthausen concentration camp brought where he in Gusen as forced laborers was used. He survived until the concentration camp was liberated by American troops in May 1945.

In August 1945 he returned to Czechoslovakia and participated in the gradual takeover of power by the communists. On November 2, 1948 he joined the SNB secret police ( Sbor národní bezpečnosti - National Security Corps) and in 1949 became a colonel in the Czechoslovak State Security StB . In March 1950, after Jindřich Veselý attempted suicide, he became chief of the entire SNB secret police. Shortly afterwards, however, the StB was split off on the model of the Soviet KGB and converted into an independent authority.

During this time a phase of persecution of opponents from within the communist ranks began. With the break of the Yugoslav head of state Tito with the Soviet Union, Stalin feared the secession of further satellite states and saw the party apparatuses infiltrated by bourgeois elements , Trotskyists , Zionists and Titoists . At the same time, the Korean War was raging in Asia and Stalin expected the acts of war to spread to Europe, which is why he demanded unconditional loyalty. He therefore issued the order to pursue suspects in the respective communist power apparatus. The American communist Noel Field was accused of being a spy and kidnapped from Prague by the Hungarian secret service. A conspiracy has now been constructed around him. KGB chief Lavrenti Beria commissioned the Hungarian communist Mátyás Rákosi to solve the affair, who immediately arrested the Hungarian interior minister László Rajk in May 1949 . Shortly thereafter, the wave of arrests spilled over to Czechoslovakia. The regional Communist Party leader in Brno , Otto Šling , was one of the first to be arrested in 1950 . More and more communists who had spent the Second World War in exile or in German captivity came into the group of suspects. The general secretary of KSČ Rudolf Slánský was able to turn the investigation away from himself at short notice, despite personal contact with Šling; instead, secret police chief Závodský himself was targeted. He was arrested on January 27, 1951, together with his deputy Ivo Milén and others.

The leadership of the secret police SNB was thus eliminated, which made the subsequent waves of arrests possible. On November 23, 1951, party leader Rudolf Slánský was arrested, as were numerous others, mainly former Spanish fighters and exiles. Numerous prominent communists have now been convicted in a show trial , including Foreign Minister Vladimír Clementis , Vice Foreign Minister Artur London , the Slovak Prime Minister Gustáv Husák , Josef Frank , André Simone , Ludvík Frejka and others. The Czechoslovak economy has been completely turned over to an impending war and the army has been upgraded. Only after Stalin's death in March 1953 and the end of the Korean War in July 1953 did the purges ebb. Some death sentences that have already been pronounced have been commuted to prison sentences. Osvald Závodský remained in custody and was sentenced to death in a now closed trial on December 23, 1953 on charges of treason and sabotage . He was executed by hanging on March 19, 1954 in Prague . This made him the last victim of the purges for whom the death sentence was carried out.

Aftermath

In the course of the de-Stalinization that began in 1956 by Khrushchev , the purges in Czechoslovakia were also reinterpreted as an error of the communist party. Osvald Závodský was posthumously rehabilitated on May 29, 1963 . The historical interpretation of his person remained controversial even later. On the one hand he was one of the victims, on the other hand he took part in the communist seizure of power and is said to have been jointly responsible for the introduction of Stalinist interrogation and torture methods in Czechoslovakia as the secret police chief at the time.

The motives behind the purges, however, remain controversial even after the end of communism. In addition to the defection of Yugoslavia and the Korean War, the realignment of Soviet policy towards Israel is said to have played an important role . In 1948, when the State of Israel was founded, the Soviet Union received massive support, especially in the form of weapons produced in Czechoslovakia for the Hagana . A little later, however, Soviet policy turned and actual or supposed sympathizers of Zionism came into the crosshairs of the Stalinist purges, which took on decidedly anti-Semitic features.

Other historians interpret the purges as an internal power struggle in the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ), in which the group of those communists who had spent the war in Moscow, including Klement Gottwald , Bruno Köhler and Jarmila Taussigová , gained power and liquidated any internal opposition.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes: Pražská výstava Tváře moci - panel 19 Osvald Závodský (PDF; 1.07 MB)
2. ↑ Stéphane Courtois, Mark Kramer: Livre noir du Communisme: crimes, terreur, répression , Harvard University Press, 1999, ISBN 9780674076082 (p. 431)
3. ↑ Karel Kaplan: Report on the murder of the general secretary , B. Tauris, 1990 ISBN 9781850432111 (p. 57 ff)
4. ↑ Komunistická strana Československá: The Czechoslovak political trials, 1950-1954: the suppressed report of the Dubček Government's commission of inquiry , Stanford University Press, 1971, ISBN 9780804707695 (p. 264)