Vojenský historický ústav Praha is a Prague institution of military history whose roots reach back to the Památník odboje of 1919 and the Památník osvobození at Vítkov.
Vojenský historický ústav Praha is a Prague museum and research institution devoted to military history. Its website traces a development that begins with interwar institutions, which were founded after 1918 and based in a complex at the foot of Vítkov.[1]
Predecessors after 1918
After the creation of Czechoslovakia, its leaders, headed by President T. G. Masaryk, recognised the need to develop political and military traditions and to treat them both scholarly and in a museum display. As early as 1919 the Památník odboje was set up at the Ministry of National Defence as an advisory body for collecting memorabilia of the resistance during the First World War. As the collections grew, particularly after the legionaries returned from Russia, it was turned into a department of the ministry and then into an independent Archiv legií.[1]
The archive found temporary shelter in the National Museum building. The collections were provisionally placed in Troja Palace, in Hvězda summer palace and in Trojická street. In 1919 the Archiv národního osvobození was also founded, a year later the Vojenský archiv and the Vojenské muzeum, which gathered memorabilia from the period before 1914.[1]
Památník osvobození
On 28 October 1929 these institutions were merged into a research institute, the Památník osvobození. It was housed in a newly built complex of buildings at the foot of Vítkov, while only part of the military-historical collections remained in the Invalidovna in Karlín. In the interwar period it was headed by General Rudolf Medek.[1] The complex was built between 1927 and 1929 to a design by the architect Jan Zázvorka, a former legionary.[1]
At the same time the Pantheon národního osvobození was rising on the top of Vítkov, in front of which an equestrian statue of Jan Žižka of Trocnov by Bohumil Kafka was to stand. The opening planned for 28 October 1938 did not take place because of the political situation, and the building was completed and opened only in 1950 with a different purpose.[1]
According to the institute's website, the Památník osvobození existed for only about ten years. It focused on the public, on museum and publishing work, and on modern trends in military museology and historical research. At the end of the 1930s it strengthened patriotic feeling by recalling the national resistance of 1914 to 1918.[1]
During the occupation
After the occupation of the Czech lands in 1939, the Památník osvobození was labelled a bearer of the so-called legionary ideology. As part of the ministry being abolished, the whole complex was declared the property of the German Wehrmacht. In August 1939 the Gestapo took over the complex and placed in it an office called the Kriegswissenschaftliche Verbindungstelle, which included a department for establishing a German military museum (Heeresmuseum Prag).[1]