Ludvík Svoboda was a Czechoslovak general and the seventh president of Czechoslovakia.
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Ludvík Svoboda was a Czechoslovak general, a commander of units on the Eastern Front in the Second World War, and the seventh Czechoslovak president.[1] He was born in 1895 in Hroznatín in the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands.[1]
Early life and the First World War
He came from a farming family, studied at the Provincial Agricultural School and also worked in viticulture. In 1915 he was conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army, on the Eastern Front the same year he crossed over into Russian captivity, and in 1916 he joined the Czechoslovak Legions. According to Czech Radio he fought at Zborov and Bakhmach and travelled back home via Siberia and the United States, returning with the rank of captain.[1]
Interwar years
After the war he briefly returned to the family farm, but was soon called up because of events in Hungary and remained in the army. In the 1920s he served in Subcarpathian Rus, then at the Military Academy in Hranice. In 1938 he commanded a mobilised battalion in Kounice near Brno.[1] His publications from this period include Praktická učebnice maďarského jazyka (a practical Hungarian textbook), published in Hranice in 1932 together with František Krakovský.[2]
The Second World War
After 15 March 1939 he was retired and took part in organising the domestic resistance in Kroměříž. In June 1939 he crossed illegally into Poland, where he commanded a military camp in Kraków through which many Czechoslovak soldiers passed on their way abroad. After the defeat of Poland he withdrew with a group of more than 700 soldiers and officers to the Soviet Union, where they were interned.[1]
He negotiated the dispatch of twelve transports of soldiers in total to countries fighting Nazi Germany. After the attack on the Soviet Union he took part in the agreement with the USSR and organised a separate Czechoslovak military unit. As a colonel he commanded a battalion in the Battle of Sokolov, and after the liberation of Kyiv he was promoted to brigadier general. After the unsuccessful start of the Carpathian-Dukla Operation he took over command of the 1st Czechoslovak Army Corps on the order of Marshal Konev.[1]
His wife Irena helped soldiers cross the border during the Protectorate and hid parachutists. After being exposed by the Gestapo in November 1941, she and their daughter managed to remain in hiding until the end of the war. Their son Miroslav died in the Mauthausen concentration camp.[1]
After 1945
In April 1945 President Edvard Beneš offered Svoboda, as a non-party man, the post of Minister of Defence in the new government, the so-called Košice Government. In February 1948 the army remained neutral according to the decision of Svoboda and Beneš.[1] According to Czech Radio he is also associated with the period after 1968, when as president he did not prevent normalisation.[1]
Works
The Encyclopedia of the History of Brno lists among his books Budujeme novou armádu (1946), Z Buzuluku do Prahy, Cestami života I and II, and Deník z doby válečné (2008).[2]