Prague, Sept 27 (CTK) – The Czech Union of Auxiliary Technical Battalions (PTP)-Military Labour Camps, to which men labelled as politically unreliable were sent under the communist regime in Czechoslovakia, will terminate its activities as from the end of the year due to ageing, it decided on Tuesday.
The Moravian-Silesian organisation will take the same step at the end of the year.
The PTP Union was founded in May 1968 during the Prague Spring reform movement, but it terminated its activities after the invasion of Warsaw Pact troops to crush the movement in August of the same year.
Widows of the PTP members are also represented in the union.
The organisation alerted to communist crimes of the 1950s. It built a museum on the PTP history in Brandys nad Labem, central Bohemia.
Tuesday’s decision of the Czech union to abolish itself is explained by the growing fatigue of the leaders many of whom are close to the age of 90.
PTP Union chairman Jan Decker called on the delegates’ meeting on Tuesday to listen to reason rather than heart and terminate the union’s activities.
He said he believes that individual clubs will continue meeting and that their members will attend meetings with the public.
The leadership of the Czech PTP Union agreed with the National Museum in Prague that it will take over the Brandys nad Labem exposition and continue to operate it.
Decker told CTK that an upgraded museum in the Brandys chateau would open still this autumn.
The PTP were established in 1950, two years after the Communists seized power in former Czechoslovakia. Dozens of thousands of people qualified as enemies of the regime were forced to serve in them. They included priests, former businessmen, private farmers, who refused to join the collective farming cooperatives, intellectuals, noblemen and students expelled from universities for their class origin.
Manual work in hard conditions combined with military training, ideological brainwashing and various forms of humiliation were to wear down the people and “re-educate” them for the needs of the communist regime.
The PTP Union now associates abut 3000 former PTP members and about 1000 widows of them.
Frantisek Mozny, deputy chairman of the Moravian-Silesian PTP Union, said the national union had 16,000 members still in the early 1990s.
The last PTP battalions were abolished in 1954, following the death of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.
