Ctirad Mašín, Czech resistance fighter died he was , 81.
(August 11, 1930 - August 13, 2011)
Citrad Mašín and Josef Mašín (b. March 8, 1932) are two brothersknown for their armed resistance against the
communist regime in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s. What made them really famous was their incredible escape through the
Iron Curtain, in the words of the Czech-American writer
Jan Novak the
Greatest story of the Cold War: fleeing, mostly on foot, through all the
GDR to
West Berlin, thousands of East German policeman and
Soviet
troops were not able to catch them. Outside of the Czech and Slovak
communities at home and abroad, this story is almost forgotten.
They were born to Zdena Mašínová and Josef Mašín who
was an army offficer of Czechoslovakia and member of the underground resistance against the Nazis.Josef Mašín was born at
Lošany near
Kolín. He was a member of the
Czechoslovak Legions fighting in Russia (1916–1921) and later an officer in the Czechoslovak Army (commander of an artillery regiment). After the
occupation of Czechoslovakia by Nazi Germany he, together with
Josef Balabán and
Václav Morávek,
formed a resistance group concentrated on intelligence gathering and
sabotage. While more resistance groups existed, this one, aptly named
Tři Králové (
Three Kings), is the most known among the Czech
public. Mašín was captured by the
Gestapo
on May 13, 1941. After being tortured, he twice attempted suicide. As
part of the German retaliatory measures for the assassination of
Reinhard Heydrich he was executed in
Prague. His wife was imprisoned for several months. After the war, Josef Mašín received a posthumous promotion to
Brigadier General. His sons - then 13 and 15 years old - got Medals for
"personal bravery during the war" from president
Edvard Beneš.
The resistance group and its actions
Following World War II, Mašín's sons, who were both born in Prague, attended a high school in
Poděbrady.
After the Communists seized power, they witnessed how some of their
family's friends - opponents of the regime - were silenced, vanished
without a trace or were sentenced to death in public show trials. For
instance
Milada Horáková,
a famous early judicial murder victim, had been a friend of their
mother. The Mašíns shared the idea that the Americans, who had helped to
establish the Czechoslovakian state, would soon come and "wipe out
Communism". The radio stations "
Radio Free Europe" (RFE) and "
Voice Of America"
(VOA) seemed to promise an imminent invasion. Therefore they formed a
military resistance group with a few friends. The Mašín brothers' uncle
Ctibor Novák,
a former Secret Service Officer, became an adviser of the group. One
source says that Novak had actually put up with the fact of Communist
rule and was satisfied if the Communists didn't bother him. He engaged
in the group mainly because he hoped he could control his hot-tempered
nephews and prevent them from doing the most dangerous actions. But that
was just his defense strategy when he was on trial in 1954. Indeed he
was very supportive and encouraged the brothers' actions. The brothers
and Novak were the only ones in the whole "no-name group" who knew all
other members by name.
The following actions of the group are documented:
In 1951 the group raided two police stations in order to get weapons
and ammunition. In both cases one policeman was killed (one of them
previously chloroformed and handcuffed).
Since it was becoming increasingly difficult to conduct actions, the
brothers decided to go West. Their goal was to get some real training in
partisan warfare techniques from the Americans. They believed a
shooting war was imminent, and they wanted to return to Czechoslovakia
in the vanguard of the liberating western armies. A first escape attempt
failed when a
CIC agent who was supposed to accompany them was arrested by the Czechoslovak Secret Service
StB.
During interrogation, he named Ctirad Mašín. Shortly thereafter, both
brothers and Novák were arrested by the StB and were tortured. The StB
never found out that they had seized the men responsible for the police
station raids. Josef Mašín and his uncle were released after a few
months.
Ctirad Mašín was sentenced to two years slave labor for the crime of
knowing about someone else's planned escape but not reporting it. He was
sent to work in a
uranium mine near
Jáchymov. Mašín states that his time in the Czechoslovak equivalent of the
Gulag made him even more determined to fight the regime.
During Ctirad Mašín's imprisonment the others attacked a payroll transport and obtained 846,000
Czechoslovak crowns. One of the car's occupants raised his pistol against Josef Mašín and was shot by him.
After Ctirad Mašín's release, the group stole four chests totaling
100 kg of donarit explosives from a quarry. They planned to blow up a
uranium train with these explosives, or possibly President Gottwald's
personal train.
The last action before their escape was the "Night of Great Fires". In several
Moravian villages Václav Švéda and Ctirad Mašín placed
incendiary composition with
time fuses
into straw stacks. They all lit up in the middle of the night. The
action was a protest against the Socialist collectivization of
agriculture. At that time, even straw was in short supply, so the
Mašíns' intention was not only spreading "shock and awe" but really
harming the economy of the agricultural collectives. A firefighter was
gunned down. While one source states he died with one bullet in his eye
and one in his lungs, most others mention only three casualties in
Czechoslovakia which means he must have survived.
Through the curtain
In October, 1953 the group made a second attempt to escape to the
West. Radio Free Europe broadcasts made it sound like World War III was
imminent, and the Mašíns and their friends wanted to take part in the
invasion. They claimed that the police still had no leads on their
actions, therefore the danger of being arrested was not a reason for
their escape. In the night from the 3rd to the 4th of October
Zbyněk Janata,
Václav Švéda,
Milan Paumer and the Mašín brothers crossed the border to
East Germany near
Hora Svaté Kateřiny (
Deutschkatharinenberg) in order to get to the western part of
Berlin.
West Berlin was the last gap in the Iron Curtain. The
Berlin Wall had not yet been erected, and numerous streets and footpathes,
trams and
suburban trains
connected the parts of the divided city. The border guards could not
manage to check the identity of every passenger. So there was a chance
for the five to reach their destination without being discovered -
especially because their names and their activities were not yet known
to the East German police. After three days of walking through the cold
they tried to hijack a car. The attempt failed, but now the police
started searching for "five armed foreigners". The fugitives made
another mistake taking a train which they thought would bring them
closer to Berlin. But on the train they misunderstood an announcement
that the train would go back to were they had started from.
The next time they took a train ended in a disaster: the women who
sold the tickets informed the police about some "suspicious foreigners".
At Uckro station (today: Luckau-Uckro) the police waited for the train
and checked the passengers. When challenged the group started shooting,
killing one policeman and injuring two others. The policeman in charge,
hit by 6 bullets, quit his job when the head of the East German police
(Volkspolizei) held him responsible for the Mašín brothers finally
escaping to the West.
Shortly after that incident Zbyněk Janata, separated from the others,
was caught. Only after interrogating him and consulting the
Czechoslovak authorities did the East German police know who they were
dealing with. Now the biggest manhunt of the
Volkspolizei (literally: People's Police)
started. After finding and losing the track of the refugees several
times, more and more troops were ordered to support the manhunt. East
Germany did not have an army at that time - there was only a predecessor
of the East German Army, the so called "
Kasernierte Volkspolizei" (
Baracked People's Police). Those troops and eventually even Soviet
Red Army troops based in the GDR were asked for assistance.
Eventually thousands of people hunted the four anti-Communists. Right
after their arrival in West Berlin, western newspapers wrote of "20,000
Vopos" (
Vopo stands for "Volkspolizei officer").
Wolfgang Mittmann
(1939–2006), a true crime author and former member of the Volkspolizei
states that according to the final report there were only 5,000
policemen involved in the manhunt - plus troops of the Secret Service
plus troops of the
Red Army.
Their number does not appear in the police files. Barbara Mašín assumes
that the number of 5,000 was a first attempt by East German officialdom
to minimize the manhunt and the scope of the humiliation.
Altogether three pursuers were shot by the group. At least three more bystanders died in
friendly fire.
At
Waldow, about 100 km from Berlin, the group was encircled.
They waited for the night and then managed to run through the
encirclement. The next day Václav Švéda, hurt by a stray bullet,
surrendered and was eventually found by the police.He was executed in
Czechoslovakia in 1955.
Several times the police were called because of rumours that someone
had seen the Czechs. Many of the troops were inexperienced young men who
had joined the armed forces only weeks or months before. They did not
get any official information from their officers, and therefore rumours
spread in which the Czechs were depicted as savages who had killed
countless pursuers. Therefore the troops, whenever assuming the
fugitives around, shot at "anything and everything that moved" and
afterwards wrote into their reports that they had fired at the Czechs
but missed. As a result, one can find gun battles at places that the
fugitives never passed near in the police files. Moreover the Mašíns,
after arriving in the West, consciously changed some details of their
story in order to protect people who had helped them. For instance they
claimed they had crossed the
autobahn between
Berlin and
Dresden
after the Waldow battle and found refuge with a family in "Schönwalde".
Though later there were people in Schönwalde who "remembered" the
Mašíns' visit, several researchers found out that they never made it
there: the highway was under permanent surveillance, passing it was
simply impossible.
On 2 November 1953 the Mašíns and Paumer reached their destination:
Ctirad Mašín under the floor of a suburban train, Milan Paumer and Josef
Mašín somehow managed to cross the border on foot.
The follow-up
Back in Czechoslovakia people who had any association with the Mašíns
received harsh treatment. Václav Švéda, Zbyněk Janata and Ctibor Novak
were sentenced to death and executed. Their bodies were not delivered to
their families but buried in anonymous common graves. Farewell letters
to their families were found 45 years later, only after the
Velvet Revolution. Other friends and relatives were sentenced to many years of imprisonment. The Mašíns' mother,
Zdena Mašínová,
who was not involved at all in the military resistance of her sons,
died in prison on June 12, 1956. According to the family, their mother
did neither get any medical aid nor were the scandalous conditions of
detention improved when she was terminally ill. Even the Mašíns little
sister - her name also
Zdena Mašínová (*1933) was jailed. Today she is an
icon for the Czech anti-Communist movement.
In East Germany, whose armed forces had been humiliated, the manhunt
was brushed under the carpet. In Czechoslovakia communist propaganda
made full use of the Mašín's actions, describing them as looters and
brutal murderers of innocent passers-by. Their actions were used to
justify tight control over the society and brutal treatment of any
opponents.
The fugitives moved to the United States and served in the U.S. Army Special Forces at
Fort Bragg,
North Carolina, for five years. Milan Paumer fought in
Korea. In the '60s, Josef Mašín Jr. settled down in
Cologne,
West Germany. The Czechoslovak Security Service
StB
several times planned to kidnap or kill him. Later he moved to the U.S.
again. Both the brothers continued to live there and refused to enter
Czech soil again unless they were fully rehabilitated. In 2001, Milan
Paumer sold his home in Florida and moved back to
Poděbrady where he died in 2010. Ctirad Masin died in Cleveland, Ohio, in 2011.
Books and documentaries
Various fictional and documentary versions of the Mašín-Brothers'
story exist. The authors of most cannot be considered neutral. Therefore
an overview of the existing literature shall be given. According to
Barbara Mašín, three propaganda books on the Mašíns were published in
Czechoslovakia. The last one, "Mrtví nemluví"
(Dead do not talk)
was translated into German and published in the GDR in 1989, a few
months before the end of Socialism. It was the only book in the GDR
mentioning the story at all. Surprisingly the book does not claim the
Mašíns were American spies. Their activities are described as a kind of
personal retaliation upon the Communist government by frustrated
high-society kids. The book of course doesn't mention the penalties
against the Mašíns' family and friends.
Besides the Mašíns had to serve as culprits in one episode of the infamous detective series "
Major Zeman".
In contrast to reality, "Major Zeman" caught them. The Mašíns
themselves, after losing the illusion that the West would wage a war to
end Communism in Eastern Europe, were reluctant to talk about their
past. Eventually another expatriate made them tell their story again:
Ota Rambousek
(1923–2010) had been a political prisoner in Czechoslovakia. While many
people sat in East European jails accused of being American spies,
Rambousek was one of the few who were not innocent: He had indeed been
an agent of the US
Counter Intelligence Corps.
First he was sentenced to death, later his death sentence was commuted
to life imprisonment. In jail he heard about the Mašíns In 1968 he was
released and moved to the USA. Only in 1984 did Rambousek manage to meet
the brothers in New York and wrote his novel "Jenom ne strach"
(Just No Fear). The Czech expatriate publishing house
68 Publishers in Toronto refused to publish the book. Eventually it was published in Prague after the
Velvet Revolution. 1987
Radio Free Europe
broadcast a series of interviews with Ctirad Mašín by Ota Rambousek. As
Eastern archives were not yet open, the book and the interviews were
based only on the Mašíns' memories and on what they read about the
manhunt in the newspapers after arriving in West Berlin. They contain
the "Schönwalde Fake" (see above) and wrongly claim the group shot four
instead of three Volkspolizei officers: Western press had copied the
East German propaganda account which had added one of the friendly fire
casualties to the Mašín's victims.
In East Germany, Wolfgang Mittmann (1939–2006), policeman and true
crime writer, rediscovered the manhunt in the 90s. He states that he
found the names of four killed policemen, killed near the town where he
lived, which were not mentioned in the official chronicle of the
Volkspolizei. He started interviewing local people and found them
reluctant to talk about the "Czechs' War". As long as the GDR existed,
files on the manhunt were top secret. Mittmann went to Prague where he
got a pirate copy of the
RFE
interviews, made by employees of Prague Broadcasting Service, studied
exhibits of the Prague Police Museum, which included the Czechoslovak
police records on the Mašín's police station raids and also viewed the
papers of the late author of "Mrtví nemluví"
(Dead do not talk). Only after the
Reunification of Germany—Mittmann
had retired and writing had become his full-time occupation —could he
read the German files as well as Rambousek's book. For Mittmann the
Mašíns were killers. He accused Rambousek and the Mašíns to consciously
play down the actions in the Czechoslovak Republic. Mittmann's critics
say, he never questioned the account he found in police files. Also he
failed to see the political reasons for the vast number of troops
involved in the manhunt. For him this overreaction was due to the
ambitions of a single person, Chefinspekteur
(Lieutenant General) Willi Seifert, proxy of the head of the Volkspolizei, who wanted to catch the "fascist bandits", no matter what the cost.
After reading Mittmann's report, two German journalists decided to
find and interview the Mašíns . Their documentary "Der Luckauer Krieg"
(The Luckau War) met with severe criticism because they "displayed murderers as heroes".
In 2004 the Czech-American writer
Jan Novak (not related to
Ctibor Novak) wrote a biographical novel on the father's and the sons' stories. Its title: "So far so good"
(Zatim Dobry). It won the coveted
Magnesia Litera Prize in the Czech Republic. Although Novak wrote in English, only the Czech Edition is available so far. The Czech film maker
Ivan Passer (a former classmate of Josef Mašín and of film director
Miloš Forman) announced he is going to make a movie based on the book.
Eventually, Barbara Mašín, Josef Mašín's daughter spent several years
researching to reconstruct the story of her father and uncle. She had
spent most of her childhood in Germany before her family moved to the
USA. Later she studied Czech and was thus able to read all the relevant
documents in Germany, the Czech Republic and the USA. "Gauntlet", the
result of her research was published in September 2006 and has become
the most important source for non-Czech speakers.
Controversy
After the
fall of communism
in Czechoslovakia (1989), the oppression and crimes of communist party
were officially condemned and those sentenced during the communist era
for political 'crimes' were generally recognised in law as innocent
victims. The Mašíns became the most disputed exceptions.
Armed resistance after 1948 was very small (compared to that of neighbouring countries in the
Eastern Bloc)
and killings were uncommon. Ota Rambousek's book "Jenom ne strach" (see
below) was published in Czechoslovakia in 1990 and realistic
descriptions of how the brothers killed a cashier or how they cut the
throat of an unarmed policeman rendered incapable by
chloroform did not fit well into "velvet" mood of Czechs.
Even fifty-five years later the case of Mašíns is able to deeply
divide the Czech public into two groups: one seeing them as heroes, the
other abhorring their sometime brutal killings. Politicians in the Czech
Republic face uneasy problem when trying to take a clear stand on the
Mašíns.
In 2005, the
Czech and Slovak Association of Canada gave the Thomas-Masaryk-Award to the Mašín-Brothers and Milan Paumer.
On 28 February 2008 the Czech Prime Minister
Mirek Topolánek
awarded the Mašíns with the new "Prime Minister's Medal" at a ceremony
at the Czech Embassy in Washington. At a later ceremony in the Czech
Republic on 4 March 2008, he also decorated Milan Paumer. As its name
suggests, the award is a personal decoration, not one given in the name
of the Czech state. Topolánek wishes to start a new discussion on the
"third resistance", as the anti-Communist struggle is sometimes, but
controversially termed (the first and second resistance being the fight
against the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1914-1918 and Nazi occupation in
1939-1945). He hopes that as a result of such discussion the Mašíns will
eventually receive official state recognition.
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