[Kyt]

http://www.praguemonitor.com/en/183/...al_news/12882/

MfD: Experts find wartime paratroopers' grave

By ČTK / Published 4 October 2007

Prague, Oct 3 (CTK) - Jan Kubis and Jozef Gabcik, the wartime Czechoslovak heroes who murdered Nazi Reichsprotector Reinhard Heydrich, are buried in anonymous pits at Prague's Dablice cemetery, a year-long research has confirmed, the daily Mlada fronta Dnes (MfD) writes Wednesday.

Paradoxically, the two paratroopers, along with their colleagues within the anti-Nazi resistance, who all finally committed suicide in a cache before the Gestapo could catch them alive, are buried in Dablice along with Karel Curda, a traitor who reported their cache to the Nazis, the daily writes.

High-ranking German and Czech pro-Nazi officials who were executed as war criminals after the war are also buried in Dablice, as well as victims of the Czechoslovak communist coup of 1948, the paper says.

"We checked the testimonies of witnesses and past recordings of the Prague Cemeteries' Management, including the Institute of Forensic Medicine," says Ales Knizek, head of the Czech Military Historical Institute that organised the research.

The researchers also gained valuable help from a private explorer who in the 1980s recorded the testimonies of former doctors and police officers well acquainted with the Nazi "technology" of freedom fighter burying, who, however, have died in the meantime.

Emanuel Vlcek, leading Czech anthropologist, who worked in the Forensic Medicine Institute during the war and who died one year ago, confirmed to MfD shortly before his death that the remains of victims from among Czechoslovak freedom fighters had been buried in Dablice.

"If this [the paratroopers' undignified burying] is true, it is a huge shame and something must be done about it," Czech Senate deputy chairman Jiri Liska (Civic Democrats, ODS) told MfD previously still before the research confirmed the suspicion.

Liska says that in negotiations with the Dablice district hall he pushed through the plan to erect a monument to the late paratroopers and other freedom fighters. It is to be unveiled on October 28, the anniversary day of the establishment of Czechoslovakia in 1918, whcih is a public holiday, MfD writes.

Apart from Kubis and Gabcik, a duo known under the codename Anthropoid, Dablice is also a burial place of Alfred Bartos, Josef Valcik and Jiri Potucek (paratroopers from the Silver A operation), Adolf Opalka (commander of the Out Distance paratrooper group), freedom fighter Vaclav Moravek and Marie Moravcova, who hid the paratroopers from the raging Gestapo, MfD writes.

Those buried along with them include Karl Hermann Frank, a Nazi leader who decided that the central Bohemian village of Lidice be razed to the ground in June 1942 in retaliation for the death of Heydrich, the Reichsprotector who planned the Czech nation's liquidation.