Josef Slanina

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Josef Slanina was born on October 6, 1921 in Žiželice near Chlumec nad Cidlinou, where the Slaninas owned a small farm. After finishing elementary school, he trained as a locksmith, then attended the Higher School of Mechanical Industry in Pardubice, which he completed in 1943. In the following years he worked as a technical assistant in several Prague enterprises and factories. In March 1947, he joined the Elementary Vocational School in Semily as a teacher. After 1945, he became a member of the Czechoslovak National Social Party, but he did not develop any deeper political activity at that time. He was also a long-time member of Sokol. After February 1948, his father was dismissed from the position of cultural officer of the Local National Committee of Žiželice and Josef Slanina himself was expelled from the hunting association in May 1948 because he refused to sign a declaration in support of Prime Minister Klement Gottwald. At the beginning of October 1948, during a business visit to Prague, Slanina accidentally met his friend Miroslav Tichý, who introduced him to Colonel Josef Hruška (at that time already a collaborator of the 5th Gottlieb Gestapo). Department of the Main Staff - formerly the Military Defence Intelligence). At the meeting, he convinced Josef Slanina to join the activities of the alleged illegal resistance group Pravda zvítězí. The group was in fact a decoy network of the Military Defence Intelligence and its main goal was to carry out an armed coup. Slanina participated in the fake resistance activity by printing anti-regime magazines. In October and November 1948, he printed two issues of the illegal magazine “V nový život” and other printed materials, which he handed over to Josef Hruška and Karel Bacílek. Although he was supposed to print mainly Hruška’s texts, he disagreed with many of them because they were too radical. Therefore, he often edited them, which Hruška reproached him for during their next meeting in Prague at the end of November 1948, and they ended their cooperation. In the meantime, Slanina managed to connect with some members of Sokol from Semily and Ostrava who wanted to distribute the anti-regime leaflets he had printed. Although he had not worked for Hruška’s illegal organisation since November 1948, Slanina was arrested on December 22, 1948 after being “exposed” by the security authorities. He was interrogated first in Bartolomějská Street in Prague and then in the Pankrác detention centre until May 1949. In the May show trial of the alleged thirteen-member command staff of the underground organization Pravda zvítězí (Truth Will Prevail), headed by General Karel Kutlvašr, the Senate of the State Court in Prague handed down very harsh sentences, including three death sentences (also for the provocateur Josef Hruška). Josef Slanina was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment for treason. He served his sentence only in fixed prisons: at Pankrác, Bory, Ilava, Leopoldov and finally again at Pankrác. Josef Slanina was released on parole in 1957. At first he worked as a heating engineer, then as a central heating designer. At the beginning of the 1990s he worked in the Office for Documentation and Investigation of State Security Crimes (later the Office for Documentation and Investigation of Crimes of Communism - ÚDV). In 1993, together with historian Zdeněk Vališ, he published a book about General Karel Kutlvašr. He received the award of a participant of the anti-communist resistance. Josef Slanina died on March 8, 2017.