Prague, Oct 1 (CTK) – The newspaper article headlined “Hitler Gentleman,” which a Czech historian has uncovered in archives, according to daily Pravo’s information, is not the one President Milos Zeman mentioned as an article by journalist Ferdinand Peroutka last year, Zeman’s spokesman Jiri Ovcacek has told CTK.
Peroutka (1895-1978) was a prominent democratic journalist during the interwar period. He was imprisoned by the Nazi regime in 1939-1945. He left the country after the 1948 communist coup and later worked for Radio Free Europe. He died in the USA.
At a conference last year, Zeman asserted that Peroutka published an article “Hitler is a Gentleman” in his Pritomnost magazine, probably in 1936.
The article has been unsuccessfully searched for since, also by Ovcacek, and the Presidential Office has been in a court dispute with Peroutka’s granddaughter over Zeman’s statement.
Pravo on Saturday refers to leading historian Jan Galandauer, 80, who found a newspaper article in archives, which is reminiscent of the one mentioned by Zeman.
However, the article appeared in 1937, not 1936, and in Rude pravo communist newspaper, not in Peroutka’s Pritomnost, the daily writes.
Moreover, the author of the article was not Peroutka and the article did not praise Hitler but on the contrary, it condemned an attack by a rightist agrarian daily against the National Socialists, a party Peroutka was close to, Pravo adds.
Ovcacek said the article uncovered by Galandauer is an interesting indication for his further search.
“It was the policy of the agrarian stream that Ferdinand Peroutka supported during the [1938-39] Second Republic era and at the beginning of the [Nazi] Protectorate [of Bohemia and Moravia as from March 1939].”
At a conference marking the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Oswiecim (Auschwitz) concentration camp in January 2015, Zeman made the statements about Peroutka. Historians then said Peroutka had never written the article in question.
Zeman insists on having read the text about Hitler.
A court recently decided that he Presidential Office must apologise to Peroutka’s granddaughter for Zeman’s words, but Ovcacek said they will seek an appellate review of the verdict and are not going to apologise for now.
