From WW1 Hero to Nazi Collaborator: The Fall of Moravec (1945) JJ

15 March 1939, Prague. In a cold spring snow, German motorised columns   roll into the Czechoslovak capital. There has  been no battle and no defence of the city. Barely   six months after the Munich Agreement stripped  Czechoslovakia of its border fortifications and   handed the Sudetenland to the Third Reich, Adolf  Hitler has ordered the Wehrmacht, the German army,   to occupy what remains of the Czech lands.

By  nightfall Hitler himself sleeps in Prague Castle,   above the city of the Bohemian kings, and the  following day he proclaims from its halls the   creation of the Protectorate of Bohemia and  Moravia. The independent Czechoslovak state,   born two decades earlier, ceases to exist.  Among those who watch the German columns pass   in silence, is also a decorated army colonel and  celebrated military writer, a man who only months   before had begged his president, face to face,  to fight the Germans rather than surrender to   them. Within three years he will wear a uniform  of his own design, broadcast in support of the

Nazi occupier every week, and become the most  hated Czech of the war, the living symbol of   collaboration whom his own nation will remember as  the Czech Quisling. His name is Emanuel Moravec. Emanuel Moravec was born on 17 April 1893  in Prague, then part of Austria-Hungary,   into a modest merchant family.

He graduated from  an industrial school and took work as a clerk   in a Prague company, an unremarkable start for a  man who would spend his life in uniform and as a   writer. When the First World War broke out in the  summer of 1914, Moravec was conscripted into the   Austro-Hungarian army and sent to the front. In  1915 he was captured by the Russians and held in   a prisoner-of-war camp in the city of Samarkand,  today’s Uzbekistan.

He volunteered there to fight   against the Austro-Hungarian Empire and took  command of a machine-gun platoon in the First   Serbian Volunteer Division, a unit raised from  Slav prisoners of war to fight on the Russian   side. In September 1916, Moravec saw fierce action  against Bulgarian forces on the Dobrudja front,   where he was injured and later was hospitalised.

After his recovery he joined the Czechoslovak   Legion, the volunteer force of the Czechs and  Slovaks fighting for the Allies for the idea of an   independent homeland and for the formation of the  new state – Czechoslovakia. In this time Moravec   was desperate to secure an officer’s commission so  he falsely claimed to hold an engineering degree.

Emanuel Moravec together with other Czechoslovak  legionnaires in Russia were influenced by the   evolving Russian Civil War and their return to  the newly founded Czechoslovakia took years.   During this time, in January 1920, Moravec married  Helena Grigorievna Bekova, a Russian woman who was   17 years old and expecting his child.

Similar  relationships with much younger women would   become a recurring pattern throughout his life. Upon his return to the newly formed Czechoslovak   state, Moravec remained a professional  soldier in the Czechoslovak Army. He served   as an intelligence officer on the staff of the  Land Military Command in Uzhhorod, today a city   in Western Ukraine, then part of Czechoslovakia.

Later he enrolled as a cadet at the War College in   Prague and, even before graduating, was promoted  to the rank of major in 1923. From 1923 to 1927,   Emanuel Moravec served on the staff of the  Land Military Command in Prague. In 1926,   an in-depth audit of Moravec’s department  uncovered financial irregularities,   and in 1927, Moravec was transferred and became  commander of the 1st Field Battalion of the 24th   Infantry Regiment in the city of Znojmo. It was  there that his marriage began to fall apart.

Moravec was transferred to the town of  Michalovce in Slovakia, where he met Ilona   Emma Pavla Szondyová, who was 21 years younger  than him. In 1932, he divorced his first wife and,   that same year, the 39-year-old Moravec married  the eighteen-year-old Ilona Szondyová. At that   time Emanuel Moravec taught at the War College in  Prague as he built, alongside his military career,   his second reputation as a writer.

Under the pen  name Stanislav Yester, he contributed articles   on political and military affairs to newspapers  and magazines. By the early 1930s he was one of   the country’s most prominent military thinkers  and he became colonel on the General Staff.  Moravec’s central theme in his writing was the  German danger for the Czechoslovak republic. He   warned repeatedly of the expansionist ambitions  of Nazi Germany, argued that Czechoslovakia must   arm itself and seek alliances with Poland and  Italy, and described the Bohemian lands as a   natural fortress guarding the head of the Danube  basin, a barrier whose fall would open central

Europe to whoever seized it. His arguments and his  patriotism caught the attention of President Tomáš   Garrigue Masaryk, the founder of the Czechoslovak  state and Moravec repeatedly showed loyalty to the   president and to the democracy.

When Masaryk died  in 1937, Moravec led a military procession through   Prague and stood guard of honour at his coffin. The decisive test for him came in September 1938.   As Hitler pressed his demands for the Sudetenland,  the borderland of Czechoslovakia, and the threat   of war hung over Europe, Moravec sought an  audience with Masaryk’s successor, President   Edvard Beneš.

In a confrontation that lasted some  two hours, on the eve of the Munich Agreement, he   pleaded with the president to reject the ultimatum  and lead the country into war rather than   capitulate. The Czechoslovak army had mobilised  and stood ready behind its border fortifications,   but Edvard Beneš chose to accept the Munich terms.  Moravec’s pleas went unheeded and the capitulation   broke something in him.

He raged that men  without courage had led the nation to surrender,   and declared: “A state unwilling to defend its  ideals should not boast of them in the same way a   prostitute has no right to boast of her honour”. In a gesture of contempt for the government, he   asked to be released from the army so that he may  enlist in the forces of El Salvador, the Central   American country.

Under the short-lived Second  Czechoslovak Republic, as Prague sought to appease   Berlin, Moravec was removed from his teaching  post at the military academy and forbidden to   write for the newspapers, on the grounds that  his anti-German polemics were too provocative.  Then came 15 March 1939 and the German occupation  of the remnants of the Czechoslovak Republic.   Moravec had every reason to fear the new Nazi  rulers, for his name was known across the Reich   as that of an enemy of Germany.

He was surprised,  therefore, when the new German authorities   informed him, he could resume writing books and  newspaper columns. Moravec returned to writing   adopting an editorial line blaming Beneš and  the intelligentsia for Czechoslovakia’s defeat.   He declared it was the unwillingness of the elite  to confront Germany militarily that demonstrated   democracy’s moral decay.

One of the most vocal  supporters of the idea of defending Czechoslovakia   became a collaborator with the Nazis. Moravec  was on the radio every week, lending his   gifts as a writer and speaker to the occupier’s  propaganda. His moment came with the arrival of   Reinhard Heydrich as acting Reich Protector of the  Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia in the autumn   of 1941.

Heydrich wanted harsher control and  more visible Czech commitment to the war effort,   and Moravec fitted his plans perfectly. In  January 1942, over the objections of Emil Hácha,   the German-dominated president of the Protectorate  of Bohemia and Moravia, Heydrich compelled   Moravec’s appointment as Minister of Education  and National Enlightenment, granting him a pardon   for his pre-Munich attacks on Germany and setting  his zeal to work.

In May 1942 he helped establish   Curatorium for the Education of Youth, a fascist  organisation intended to draw young Czechs into   the orbit of the Reich, and became its chairman. As minister, Moravec presided over an education   system already gutted by the occupation  as the Czech universities had been closed   already in 1939.

He declared that the  Czech universities had no need to reopen,   made German a compulsory subject in schools, and  preached that Czech culture was properly a branch   of the Germanic world. Moravec had a personal  ministerial uniform made, a hybrid of Czech army   and SS design, which he wore with evident pride. Few figures in the Protectorate were hated by   their own people as deeply as Moravec.

As early  as the winter of 1939 to 1940, the resistance   was thinking about killing Moravec and even the  Czechoslovak government-in-exile in London planned   his assassination. When Reinhard Heydrich was  mortally wounded by Czechoslovak agents in May   1942, and the Nazi regime answered with terror  against civilian population killing thousands   of people, it was Moravec who stood at the great  staged rallies, denouncing the assassins and the   exiled Beneš and calling on Czechs to prove their  loyalty to the Reich.

In 1943 he even proposed   sending the Czech Government Army to the Eastern  Front to fight for Germany, a scheme that Hácha   and even Minister of State for Bohemia and Moravia  Karl Hermann Frank declined to put before Hitler.   Moravec also embraced an antisemitism that echoed  the Nazi party line, blaming Jewish interests for   the pre-war hostility between Czechs and Germans.

Moravec’s private life was as turbulent as his   politics. He married three times. With his first  wife, he had two sons, Igor and Jurij. A second   marriage produced a third son, Pavel, and in 1942  the 49-year-old Emanuel Moravec married a former   housemaid, Jolana Emmerová, who had been sixteen  years old when their relationship began.

His sons   were drawn into the wreckage of his choices. Igor  volunteered for the Waffen-SS, the military branch   of the Nazi paramilitary organisation, and fought  on the Eastern Front with the Totenkopf division,   and in 1947 was hanged in Prague after the war for  treason.

Jurij served in the German army but was   privately critical of his father. The youngest,  Pavel, was killed in an air raid in 1944. By the spring of 1945 the war was visibly lost.  As the Red Army approached, Moravec turned his   propaganda to warnings of the Bolshevik danger,  hoping to rally Czechs against the coming Soviet   forces. However, his appeals fell flat.

When  the Prague Uprising broke out on 5 May 1945,   the 52-year-old Moravec got into a police  truck in front of the Kolovrat Palace,   where his ministry was based, and drove off  to a meeting with Karl Hermann Frank. However,   on its way the German vehicles came under fire  from the insurgents, so the convoy set off for   Prague Castle via different route.

The car in  which Moravec was sitting ran out of gas while   traveling along, so the driver got out – at  that moment, Moravec made a final decision.   Rather than be captured by the countrymen he  had betrayed, he drew a pistol and shot himself. Emanuel Moravec was not the only man broken  by the Munich Agreement. Thousands of others   who felt the same humiliation chose a different  path: they joined the resistance, went into exile,   fought the Nazis, or died for the country  that had been abandoned in 1938.

Moravec   made another choice. The officer who had  once demanded that Czechoslovakia fight,   became a servant of the occupier, a  minister supporting Nazi propaganda,   and a voice urging his own people to accept  submission. His story is therefore not simply   one of disappointment or bitterness.

It is  the story of a betrayal, a story of a man who,   when others turned their anger into  resistance, turned his into collaboration. Thanks for watching the World History  Channel. Be sure to like and subscribe   and click the bell notification  icon so you don’t miss our next   episodes. We thank you and we’ll  see you next time on the channel.