Zdeněk Fierlinger

Zdeněk Fierlinger (1932)

Zdeněk Fierlinger (born July 11, 1891 in Olomouc , † May 2, 1976 in Prague ) was a Czechoslovak social democratic and later communist politician, member of the government in exile in London during World War II and twice Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia (ČSSR).

Life path and political work

Zdeněk Fierlinger was the son of an academic teacher and a graduate of the secondary school and the German commercial academy there, from 1910 to 1913 he was a commercial agent in Rostov-on-Don and in 1914 took over the foreign agency of the American McCormick Harvesting Machine Company in Russia. In the First World War (1914-1918) Zdeněk Fierlinger took part as a volunteer in the Czech units in the tsarist army, which fought on the side of the Russian Empire on its western front against the Central Powers and in 1917 was commander of the 1st regiment of the Czechoslovak legions .

After the fall of the Russian Tsarist Empire, the Russian October Revolution and the collapse of the Austria-Hungary monarchy , he became head of the Czechoslovak military mission in France from 1918 to 1919 , where he met Edvard Beneš and, from 1924, worked together as a member of the Czechoslovak Social Democratic Labor Party. He was then envoy of Czechoslovakia in The Hague , from 1921 to 1924 in Washington , 1928 to 1932 in Bern , at the same time a delegate to the League of Nations in Geneva, from 1932 to 1936 envoy in Vienna , from 1936 to 1937 head of the political section of the Foreign Ministry of Czechoslovakia in Prague and from 1937 to 1939 envoy in Moscow . In 1939, at the beginning of the Second World War , Fierlinger emigrated to France, went to London in June 1940 and was the representative of the Czechoslovak government- in- exile in London from 1941 to 1945 during the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia .

Impressed by the Soviet-Russian central administrative economy after the expropriation of the large estates there with the end of hereditary servitude , Zdeněk Fierlinger traveled to Moscow for a few weeks in 1931 and published his impressions in 1932 in The Soviet Union in a new way , and subsequently published numerous articles on Czechoslovak newspapers the new communist system. The foreign policy orientation of the Czechoslovakia towards the USSR was justified by its theory of the convergence between socialism and capitalism . Fierlinger assumed that Eastern Europe and Western Europe would move closer together as unifying socialism was on the rise everywhere.

When Zdeněk Fierlinger was head of the political department of the Czechoslovak Foreign Ministry in Prague in 1936, his political career was about to end because of an unauthorized stop of arms deliveries to Portugal and the termination of foreign relations and the trade treaty by Portugal. After Fierlinger survived this defeat, he came to Moscow in 1937 as ambassador. There he experienced the last Stalin purges ; but he was convinced that those affected had been supported by outside opponents and praised Joseph Stalin's tough approach to maintaining his power. Fierlinger joined the Social Democrats, presumably on the advice of then Foreign Minister Beneš, but was never particularly active in the party; in the last years of the war he became increasingly involved in the pro-Soviet wing of the party.

After the Munich Agreement and the annexation of the Sudetenland by the National Socialist German Reich , the political situation became difficult again for Fierlinger in 1939. As a result of the destruction of the rest of Czech Republic by Germany in March 1939, German and Czech government members in Prague asked him to resign as ambassador to Moscow, as Czechoslovakia ceased to exist after the formation of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia . After the signing of the German-Soviet non-aggression pact , which is said to have come as a complete surprise for Fierlinger, he was officially requested on December 14, 1939, to leave the Soviet Union. He went into exile, first to France, then to London.

After the German attack on the Soviet Union , Fierlinger, who had stayed in Paris and London in the meantime, returned to Moscow as ambassador in 1941. There he was instrumental in the Czechoslovak-Soviet friendship treaty of December 1943 and, after the end of World War II, in the Czechoslovak-Soviet uranium treaty of November 23, 1945, which determined the uranium yield and other details of the uranium mine in Jáchymov in the Ore Mountains , which was occupied by Soviet-Russian troops had to the content. In the summer of 1944, Fierlinger was to be recalled from Moscow, but Edvard Beneš prevented this.

Immediately after the Second World War, on April 5, 1945, Fierlinger became Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia ( Government of Zdeněk Fierlinger I and Government of Zdeněk Fierlinger II ) and from July 2, 1946, Deputy Prime Minister in Cabinet I of the Klement Gottwald I government . 1945–1948 he was (with a short interruption) chairman of the Czech Social Democratic Party (ČSSD) and was jointly responsible for the communist revolution in February 1948. During the reign of Fierlinger in 1945 and 1946 the Germans were expropriated and expelled from Czechoslovakia , legalized by the Beneš decrees . After the merger of his party with the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KPČ), he was a member of the Central Committee (ZK), the Politburo (1954) and the party presidium of the KPČ (1962) in 1948. 1946/47, 1948 and 1949–1953 he was Deputy Prime Minister, 1950–1953 Minister for Church Affairs and 1953–1964 President of the National Assembly.

He was buried in the central cemetery in Olomouc.

Family members

His nephew, Oscar-nominated animator and film director Paul Fierlinger , was placed with foster families for a long time as a child. He turned away from his uncle and father, the diplomat Jan Fierlinger, and their political ideals. He processed this in the short film Sketches of Memory , USA 1998 ACME Inc.

Fonts (selection)

• Sovětské rusko na nové dráze. Ústřední dělnické knihkupectví a nakladatelství, Prague 1932, ( Soviet Russia on a New Path ).

literature

• Heribert Sturm (Ed.): Biographical lexicon of the history of the Bohemian countries. Volume 1: A-H. Published on behalf of the Collegium Carolinum . R. Oldenbourg, Munich et al. 1979, ISBN 3-486-49491-0 , p. 346 .

Web links

• Literature and other media by and about Zdeněk Fierlinger in the catalog of the National Library of the Czech Republic

See also

• Government of Zdeněk Fierlinger I
• Government of Zdeněk Fierlinger II

Individual evidence

1. ^ Rainer Karlsch , Zbynek Zeman: Urangeheimnisse. The Ore Mountains in the focus of world politics 1933–1960. Links, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-86153-276-X , p. 74.
2. ↑ Karel Kaplan : The fateful alliance. Infiltration, conformity and annihilation of the Czechoslovak Social Democracy 1944–1954. Pol-Verlag, Wuppertal 1984, ISBN 3-9800905-0-7 , p. 25, note.
3. ^ Zdeněk Fierlinger . Short biography at the Government of the Czech Republic, vlada.cz (Czech)
4. ↑ Doba poválečná 1945–1948, historical overview by the government of the Czech Republic, vlada.cz/assets (PDF; 85 kB; Czech)