The President of Czechoslovakia, Dr. Gustav Husak, and persons holding high posts in the communications media in that country, have been identified as active Nazi collaborators during World War II. Husak, who is First Secretary of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party, was named by the Czech-language monthly “Czeske Slovo” published in Munich, as a collector of funds for the Nazi Hlinka Guard and Hlinka Youth Organization in Slovakia which was governed by a Nazi puppet regime during the war.
The other alleged Nazi collaborators were identified in a survey released by the International Council of Jews from Czechoslovakia (ICJC). One of the most prominent is Jan Kiment, head of the editorial office of the Czech Communist Party daily. “Rude Pravo.” Kiment was private secretary to the Nazi director of Kuratorium, a collaborationist organization in Bohemia during the German occupation, according to the ICJC. Prior to taking his post at “Rude Pravo” he edited the Prague periodical “World of the Soviets.”
The ICJC reported further that Svatopluk Dolejs, 53, presently on the Czech Embassy staff in Cairo and Cairo correspondent of Radio Prague. was editor of the anti-Semitic Prague weekly. “Arijsky Boj” (The Aryan Fight) between 1941-44. During the latter phases of the Nazi occupation that publication issued an “Anti-Jewish Reader” subtitled “Handbook on the Jewish Question in the Czech Lands.”
After the war, Dolejs was cleared by the Czech State Security Service and joined the secret police. In 1960 he was put in charge of Arab language broadcasts from Prague and visited Arab countries. When the Dubcek regime was suppressed by the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Dolejs was given an executive post with Radio Prague. He also contributed to the anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist booklet of Yuri Ivanon under the pen name of Yevgeni Yevseyev.
The booklet, entitled “Beware Zionism,” was first published in Moscow and later translated into Czech and Slovakian and was introduced last year as compulsory reading matter in primary schools in Bohemia and Moravia.
ANOTHER TOP MAN IDENTIFIED
Another top man at Radio Prague is Bohumil Rohacek, 56, who the ICJC identified as the former editor of the Czech Nazi journal “Vlaja” (The Flag). He was a frequent contributor of anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist articles in leading Communist publications. The ICJC identified him as co-author, with Jew-baiter Jiri Bohatka, of an article alleging that Zionists connived with the Nazi commanders of Resienstadt and other concentration camps to release Zionist Jews and in exchange “handed over non-Zionist Czech Jews for deportation.”
The ICJC also named Jan Rybak, literary editor of “Rude Pravo” until his retirement in 1967, as an employe of the “League for Collaboration with the Germans” during the Nazi occupation.
The report from “Czeske Slovo” quoted by the ICJC, said that Husak was involved with the Nazi Hlinka Guard in his capacity as secretary of the Central Federation of Forwarding and Shipping Agents in Slovakia during the war. The funds he collected were applied to pre-military training and reception organizations for Nazi youth and were tax deductible. The ICJC reprinted a letter dated Oct. 20, 1942 to this effect signed by Husak and Dr. F.Weiss, vice-chairman of the Central Federation.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
