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| Europe |
| Obituary, Ctirad Masin - Freedom Fighter?, Terrorist?, Criminal? |
| 2011-08-17 |
| The ruthlessness and daring of the “Masin Gang”, as they were known, continues to divide opinion in the Czech Republic, with some regarding them as resistance heroes, and others (including around half the Czech population, according to a recent poll) regarding them as murderers. Masin, his brother Josef, and their friend Milan Paumer became part of a resistance cell after the communists took power in Czechoslovakia in 1948. In 1951, determined to get weapons for their struggle, they robbed two police stations, killing two policemen. In one case Ctirad subdued the man with chloroform, before slitting his throat. “We wanted to show the communists what could be done, that we could kill, that we could fight back too,” Paumer recalled. In 1953 the Masins donned military uniform and flagged down a van carrying a large sum – wages for local factory workers. When the clerk in the van pulled out a gun, Josef Masin grabbed the man’s hand, pushed the weapon into his chest and forced him to pull the trigger. Paumer was subsequently called up into the military, but in early October he received a telex from the Masin brothers — “The wedding is next Saturday” — a coded message that the time had come to escape. To begin with the Masins, Paumer and two other gang members, Zbynek Janata and Vaclav Sveda, made good progress, but a few days after crossing the border into East Germany a railway ticket inspector reported the presence of five suspicious-looking foreigners to the police. As their train rolled into the next station, the Czechs found a posse of East German policemen waiting for them. When ordered to put their hands up, the gang opened fire, killing one policeman and wounding another. Zbynek Janata was captured, and the remaining four fled into the night. There followed a dramatic chase across East Germany. Pursued by perhaps as many as 25,000 policemen, secret agents and Soviet troops, the Czechs made their way through snow-covered forest towards Berlin, hiding at night in branch-covered holes and stealing whatever food they could. The journey of 200 miles took them 28 days. More than once they had to fight their way out of trouble, leaving three policeman dead. On one occasion, near the town of Waldow, the group found itself surrounded by hundreds of security personnel; but, after waiting until nightfall, they managed to sneak through the police lines. The next day Vaclav Sveda was forced to surrender after being wounded in a gun battle and later, as the group neared Berlin, Paumer was shot in the hip during a struggle with a policeman. “I nearly gave up the last few miles of the journey, I was so tired and weak,” he recalled. “But Joe [Josef Masin] aimed a gun at me and said: 'Either I will kill you or they will kill you — you choose.’” Eventually the three men managed to struggle to a railway siding where they stole away in the undercarriage of a train that took them the last few miles to Berlin. Once in the German city, they crawled along a ditch into the American sector on the night of November 2. Ctirad Masin was born in Prague on August 11 1930, the eldest son of Josef Masin, a Czechoslovak army officer who would be tortured and executed by the Nazis in 1942 for his activities in the Czech resistance and as part of retaliatory measures for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. His wife Zdena was imprisoned for several months. After the war Josef Masin received a posthumous promotion to brigadier-general and his sons Ctirad and Josef, then 15 and 13 years old, were awarded medals for “personal bravery during the war” by President Edvard Benes. The boys attended school in Podebrady, but as the communists tightened their grip on power, some of their family friends vanished without a trace or were sentenced to death in public show trials. Believing that the Americans would soon come and “wipe out Communism” they formed a resistance group with a few friends. The Masins’ uncle, Ctibor Novak, a former Secret Service officer, became their adviser; when the Americans did not arrive the group decided to break out to the Free World, learn how to stage an insurgency, and return to carry it out. After arriving in the American zone of West Berlin, the Masins and Paumer turned themselves over to the police. Paumer was put in a military hospital. All three subsequently joined the US Army. Paumer served in the Korean War and then settled in Miami. Josef Masin moved to Germany and then to Santa Barbara, California, where he started an aviation business and became a millionaire. Ctirad Masin moved to Cleveland and set up in business selling heaters. Back in Czechoslovakia, while the prosecution of the Masins on charges of sabotage, murder, attempted murder, embezzlement, defection, espionage and treason was suspended in 1954, people who had any association with them were rounded up. Vaclav Sveda, Zbynek Janata and Ctibor Novak were executed, their bodies thrown into common graves. Farewell letters to their families were found 45 years later, after the Velvet Revolution. The Masins’ mother, Zdena, died in prison in 1956. Even their little sister was thrown into jail. While Milan Paumer returned home after the fall of communism and died last year in Prague, the Masin brothers refused to return because, they said, the Communist Party had not been banned. A proposal in the Czech Senate that the three men be awarded a state medal for their fight against communism came to nothing. Meanwhile the Czech Communist Party continued to demand that they be tried for their “crimes”. |
| Posted by:phil_b |
| #1 Stories like this all over eastern Europe. Especially Yugoslavia and the Balkans. WWII was just the culmination of the bitter fight between everybody else and the communists. In 1919, for example, Béla Kun foreshadowed Pol Pot, with his "Caravan of Death", slaughtering any number of his innocent Hungarian countrymen for five months until Hungary was invaded by Romania, in response to Kun's invasion of Czechoslovakia, and threat to invade Romania, to set up Soviet Republics there as well. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2011-08-17 08:53 |