Václav Hrneček

Vaclav Hrneček was the deputy commandant of an internment camp in Budweis between May 1945 and November 1946 and a later convicted Czech war criminal.

Václav Hrneček's childhood and adolescence are unclear. In 1928 he joined the Czechoslovak police service in Budweis . After the smashing of Czechoslovakia as a result of the Nazi regime's policy of aggression, he was taken into “protective custody” in 1940, which he initially spent in the Theresienstadt concentration camp and later in the Sachsenhausen , Groß-Rosen and Dachau concentration camps , among others . In April 1945 he was liberated by the US Army. After the end of World War II and the restoration of Czechoslovakia, Hrneček became deputy commandant of the internment camp in the Linz suburb of Budweis in the spring of 1945, where members of the country's German minority were imprisoned. In the following years he effectively headed the camp, in which around 2,000 prisoners were locked. It also had a few sub-camps. In the meantime, Hrneček, who had meanwhile risen to the rank of first lieutenant in the gendarmerie, showed extremely brutal behavior towards the prisoners, who were beaten by himself and his subordinates with clubs, whips and steel rods, among other things. Some of the victims were fatally injured. He is also said to have raped female underage inmates. The German press later gave Václav Hrneček the nickname “The Executioner of Budweis”.

After the communist seizure of power in Czechoslovakia in early 1948, Hrneček fell out of favor with the new rulers and settled in the Federal Republic of Germany . There he worked for the American armed forces. In March 1952, Hrneček was recognized by former inmates in front of Munich Central Station and arrested by the German police. Since Hrneček worked for the occupying power, the Americans took the case. An initial charge of murder was soon dropped. In May 1954, Hrneček was sentenced in Munich by an American military court to eight years in prison for bodily harm, dangerous bodily harm, grievous bodily harm and bodily harm resulting in death. His two-year pre-trial detention was counted towards his prison sentence. With good conduct, he should be given three years imprisonment. Only seven months later, one day before Christmas Eve 1954, Hrneček was pardoned by the pardons committee of the Allied Higher Commission. He was made to leave the Federal Republic of Germany immediately, for which he received a visa for the United States.

Individual evidence

1. ^ So: Die Zeit, June 3, 1954.
2. ^ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, July 25, 1952.
3. ^ Archiv des Völkerrechts 5 (1955/56), pp. 222–231 (judgment).
4. ^ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 16, 1955.

literature

• RM Douglas: “Ordnungsmektiven Überführung” - The expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War , Munich 2012, pp. 168–171 and pp. 196f.