Druhá retribuce. Činnost mimořádných lidových soudů v roce 1948
The Second Retribution: The Work of the Extraordinary People’s Courts in 1948

Summary/Abstract: This article is concerned with the work of the Extraordinary People’s Courts in Czechoslovakia in what is known as the ‘second period of retribution,’ from the beginning of April 1948 to the end of the year. This period, she argues, has so far received scant attention from researchers. Immediately after taking power in February 1948, the Communist leadership decided to pass a law on the restoration of the Extraordinary People’s Courts. The author reports on the debates of this question in the Government and Parliament, clearly demonstrating the political aims behind the law. ‘Class justice,’ run by Minster Alexej Čepička, was intended to deal with the legacy of ‘bourgeois justice,’ which was represented by Prokop Drtina, Čepička’s predecessor in office. Drtina had allegedly prevented the prosecution of Nazi criminals and collaborators in order to use them in the struggle against the Communists. According to the author the régime originally hoped that a new wave of retribution would reconsider tens of thousands of cases. In the next part of the article she dis¬cusses some important cases that the courts tried in the ‘second period of retribution.’ She points to attempts at abusing the courts of retribution in order to get rid of troublesome people like the Náchod police commissioner Jan Chudoba and especially the General Secretary of the National Social Party, an important member of resistance to German occupation, Vladimír Krajina, who was sentenced in absentia to 25 years in jail in August 1948. The Nazi functionary Hermann Neuburg, who during the Occupation had been Konrad Henlein’s Deputy Gauleiter in the Sudetenland, received a similar sentence; in the mid-1950s he was sent to West German y. The author discusses the trials of Anton Burger, Karl Bergel, and Rudolf Haindl, top-ranking commandants of the Theresienstadt ghetto, as examples of true Nazi war criminals’ being given sentences in the second wave of retribution. In the last part of the article, the author attempts to pass judgment on the work of the restored Extraordinary People’s Courts in 1948 as a whole. She argues that the original plan of the initiators of the law, to sentence tens of thousands of alleged culprits, was a failure because only about 3,000 people in total were sentenced in Czechoslovakia (of whom 52 received life sentences and 31 were sentenced to death). She argues that society at that time was not yet prepared for such a mass abuse of justice and that the courts were not yet entirely in the hands of the Communists. Moreover, the régime, buttressing its power, later had other aims, so that the second wave of retribution remained unfinished. At the end of the article the author provides a statistical assessment of the work of the Extraordinary People’s Courts in 1948 together with tables.

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