Germans, Czechs and One Brave Man

...He carried off the role of the dashing, young, aristocratic Aryan playboy so well that the Germans generally assumed he wasaNazi...

...In 1939, the year the Nazis made "protectorates" of Moravia and Bohemia, the then 28-year-old von Zedtwitz contacted the Czech Resistance Movement in Prague and volunteered to assist persons GEORGE GIBIAN a longtime'NL contributor, is the Goldwin Smith Professor of Russian Literature at Cornell University...

...But his idealism and courage might have been forgotten had one of his collaborators in the Resistance not been the journalist Milena Jesenska, whom Franz Kafka fell in love with some 20 years earlier while she was translating his stories into Czech...

...One package from him did reach her on May 15, 1944, as she lay half comatose and dying from a kidney infection...

...Perhaps the most essential fact about the Count, scion of a German noble family that settled in Bohemia in the 14th century, is that he saw himself as having a dual identity—"nationality: German, citizenship and residence: Czech...

...TRANSCENDING NATIONALISM Germans, Czechs and One Brave Man BY GEORGE GIBIAN FOR MANY months now Germany and the Czech Republic have been attempting to draft a joint declaration on grievances dating back to World War II...

...He appealed to the Czech courts and to the Ministry of the Interior, insisting as before that his nationality was German and his civic allegiance Czech...

...Now fresh details about him have come to light from wartime files that were kept on 30,000 Prague residents the German police suspected of anti-Nazi activities...

...In the days preceding the balloting German Finance Minister Theo Waigel, speaking at an annual conference sponsored by Sudeten Germans, actually heightened tensions with his strongly pro-Sudeten comments...

...Von Zedtwitz made contact with British residents of the city, who worked as teachers of English (but may actually have been British intelligence agents) and through them with Milena Jesenska, who was active in Czech underground organizations...

...After being held for 15 months in the Moabit prison and in Danzig, he was released June 21, 1941...

...In short, he unhesitatingly placed a concern for universal humanity above ethnic and national identity...

...Bonn's representatives cite the forcible repatriation and seizure of the property of millions of Sudeten Germans caught at War's end in the once more Czech territory...

...Ironically, when the Communists took over shortly afterward, in 1948, von Zedtwitz had to flee the country...

...Finally the Czech courts were convinced, and he was granted the right to residence and citizenship as well...

...Indeed, the wartime activities of one Count Joachim von Zedtwitz are exemplary...

...Czech negotiators emphasize the pro-Nazi activities of many Germans who lived in the Sudeten region before Prague finally had to cede it to Hitler in 1938...

...Numerous individuals whose lives he had saved spoke up in his behalf, however, and not only in Prague...

...The Kafka connection made Jesenska famous...

...Their personal contact was minimal, but Kafka wrote to her practically every day for almost two months, as we know from the book Letters to Milena...

...The Germans, furthermore, have raised the matter of restoring the deportees' property—something that is anathema to Czechs...

...His own natural camouflage in this dangerous operation was supplied by his German roots...

...who she feared had been executed, was alive...

...This brought a sharp response from Czech Prime Minister Vaclav Klaus, and demands from German opposition parties that he be reprimanded...

...Until the Germans occupied Poland, the British had a station in Katowice from which they would dispatch fugitives to safety in the West...

...In the courtroom Von Zedtwitz pretended to be insane...

...She was able to tell Margarete Buber-Neumann how overjoyed she was to learn that von Zedtwitz...

...Arrangements thus began to be made for him to meet people who were in grave danger...

...He spent many years practicing medicine, first in Germany and then in Switzerland, where he continues to live and serve as a reminder that dwelling on past conflicts and crimes, massive though these were, often only exacerbates national resentments and hatreds, and that nations are best served by those with supranational ideals...

...Each side wants an apology or a statement acknowledging guilt as a precondition of a final compromise...

...whose lives were particularly at risk because of the German occupation...

...But his efforts to save her proved futile...

...The "Sudeten question" did not become a pressing election issue mainly because of the discretion and circumspection of Czech politicians, together with the Republic's enforcement of a news blackout on the negotiations...

...When he was abused, it was by Czechs who jumped to the same conclusion...

...After the War the files came into the hands of the Czech Communist Party, and over the last two years they have been opened up to researchers...

...He believed in supraethnic, supranational loyalties, and he pursued the principle that being born into the nobility gave not privileges alone but also obligations...

...A Prague scholar, Marie Jiraskova...

...He spent the rest of the War working as an intern in hospitals in Berlin and Vienna...

...Unfortunately, the process has revived old recriminations...

...They point out, too, the lynchings that sometimes accompanied those expulsions...

...has already used them for an article published in the newspaper Literdrni Noviny that adds to our knowledge of von Zedtwitz...

...He made it a meeting place for young Germans, particularly students, who were pro-democratic, pro-Czech and anti-Nazi...

...In March 1939, Germany occupied Prague...

...And the whole enterprise is complicated by the fact that the Republic wants German support for its efforts to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union...

...At issue are questions of mutual responsibility and compensation for crimes committed between 1938 and 1945...

...Small wonder that the negotiations between the two governments still have not reached a conclusion, although it had been expected that a reconciliation accord would be issued before the May 31 -June 1 Czech elections...

...THE GESTAPO first began questioning the Count after searching Milena Jesenska's apartment on November 12, 1939, and finding letters he had sent there for forwarding to Switzerland and to London...

...Von Zedtwitz now faced a new battle: He was one of those marked for forcible removal...

...He claimed he did not know what was in the letters, had never met Milena, and had never even heard her name before one of the police officers mentioned it...

...According to a German Socialist Deputy in the Bundestag, if Milos Zeman, the leader of the Czech Social Democratic Party, had "played the German card [during the election campaign], he would now be Prime Minister of the Czech Republic...

...Von Zedtwitz, who had completed medical school, successfully simulated schizophrenia...

...He would pick them up in his little two-cylinder, two-seat, Czech Aero sports car and drive them into Poland, or close to the Polish border, where local "smugglers of people" guided them on foot to safety...

...Whatever wording the two nations do finally agree on, the lingering enmity revealed in their attempts to reach an understanding suggests that both might better be able to overcome their acrimonious history if they adopted the heroic posture of a little-known man each can lay claim to...

...He told his interrogators that he had a history of mental illness and was so out of touch with reality that he did not know what he had been involved with...

...When the War ended, the Eduard Benes government in liberated Czechoslovakia issued a decree expelling all Germans, except those who had suffered under the Nazi occupation or could prove that they had actively opposed the Nazis and aided victims of Nazism...

...He cited his wartime actions as evidence of his good faith, but his pleas were repeatedly denied...

...Testimonials came from London and Switzerland too...

...But he was arrested March 27, 1940, and sent to Berlin to be tried...

...Von Zedtwitz' link to the journalist, in turn, kept his name alive in works devoted to her...

...They also stress, of course, the horrors of Germany's subsequent occupation of the rest of their country...

...His is the kind of complex allegiance that is badly needed in Central and Eastern Europe...

...Von Zedtwitz' passengers, who included the publishers of several German-language anti-Nazi newspapers—Prager Tagblatt, Prager Mittag and Prager Montag— were often known to him only by their cover names...

...His prominent uncle, Count Albrecht zu Eulenburg, corroborated his story by testifying that he had suffered from psychiatric problems since childhood...

...One was required, if necessary, to sacrifice everything in the struggle to help innocents being victimized...

...Until he was himself arrested the Count, an ethnic German raised in Czechoslovakia, put his own life on the line numerous times to help in the escape of Jewish refugees, known Socialists, Communists, Czech Air Force pilots, prominent journalists, and other anti-Nazis...

...In addition, he tried to help Milena Jesenska, who was being held at the Ravens-bruck concentration camp...

...Thus in 1938 von Zedtwitz founded an organization in Prague that he called Tat (Deed...

...After the Munich Agreement turned over Czechoslovakia's borderlands to Hitler, refugees poured into the rest of the country...