Publication details
Brněnské Gestapo 1939-1945 a poválečné soudní procesy s jeho příslušníky
| Title in English | The Brno Gestapo 1939-1945 and the Post-war Trials with its Members |
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| Year of publication | 2020 |
| Type | Monograph |
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| Description | The revised and expanded edition of the book, published for the first time in 2018. The book deals with the activities of Brno headquarters of the Nazi Secret State Police known under the abbreviation of Gestapo. This most feared section of Nazi security forces was active in Brno in the period from the occupation in 1939 to the liberation of the city by the Red Army. The Nazis first established a station here, which was renamed to headquarters in August 1939. It was the most important institution of Nazi security forces in Moravia, to which outstations located in smaller Moravian towns were subordinate. The seat of the headquarters was the confiscated building of Provincial School Council in 3, Mozartova Street; from December 1940 to the end of the war its seat was in the building of the Faculty of Law of Masaryk University in 70, Veveří Street. From here operations against Czech resistance organizations and also parachute units sent to the protectorate from the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union were directed. Altogether 800 employees worked in Brno headquarters in the course of the period of Nazi occupation. Five officers gradually held the office of the director; out of these Wilhelm Nölle was in charge the longest: between 1941 and 1944. Brno Gestapo ran operations against a great number of domestic resistance organizations of varying sizes and political beliefs in the period between 1939 and 1945. The growing number of arrested people called for the construction of new prison facilities in the territory of the city of Brno. In the end, Kounic Hall of Residence became the biggest police prison, having been seized by the Gestapo during the intervention against Czech students on November 17th, 1939 and turned into a prison facility. In the course of the occupation, over 30,000 prisoners from many Moravian towns and villages were incarcerated here. A smaller number of foreigners were also imprisoned here. In the area of the yard of the hall of residence, the Nazis carried out executions, which took place in three waves in 1941, 1942, and 1945. In total, nearly 700 men, women, and in several cases adolescents and children were executed here. The author pays attention to the origin and genesis of the Gestapo itself and its position among Nazi security forces. He also deals with the personnel structure of Brno headquarters, its inner structure, and methods of combating resistance organizations and parachute units. The final part of the work deals with the post-war trials of Brno Gestapo officers. They took place as a part of the so-called retribution legal system before the Special People’s Court in Brno, where, among others, the former important representatives of Nazi security police were sentenced: Max Rausch, Otto Koslowski, Kurt Leischke, Anton Mondorf, or Franz Schauschütz. An appendix containing the names of all the 83 people sentenced to death by the Special People’s Court in Brno and executed between 1945 and 1949 complements the book. |