Eminger, Jaroslav

Jaroslav Eminger

The commander of the so-called government troops during the Protectorate, General Jaroslav Eminger (1886-1964), is a little-known historical figure today, but his žlife is a testament to the democratic spirit in which the důstanders čs were brought up. army.

Jaroslav Eminger was born on June 4, 1886 in Haslav. Following the example of his father, Knight Eminger, who was a colonel in the C.C. Army, he decided to follow a military career. After successfully completing the military academy in Vienna New Town, he joined the 7th Dragoon Regiment in Době as a 21-year-old lieutenant in August 1907. Later he entered the War College in Vienna and as a staff officer he went through the Russian and Italian fronts during the First World War.

After returning from the battlefield, Captain General Staff Jaroslav Eminger on 9. On November 1918, he enlisted in the service of the nascent Czechoslovak Army, with which he participated in the battle with the Maďary in Slovakia the following year, for which he was awarded the 1918 Czechoslovak War Cross.

After the defeat of the Mažar Republic, Eminger was sent to Budapest in August 1919 as a member of the česoslovak military mission. Až until January 1922, he was there first as a česoslovak delegate of the special inter-agreement reparation commission and then as a česoslovak military attaché.

After returning to his homeland, he again linked his military career with the cavalry. Gradually he commanded a cavalry regiment, a brigade and a cavalry school. He spent his professional career with the Polish cavalry and for some time was also inspector general of the Polish cavalry units. His professional qualities could not be overlooked, and so, by decree of the President of the Republic of 13 July 1933, the seven- and thirty-year-old Jaroslav Eminger was promoted to the rank of brigadier general. In the fateful period of the rear mobilization in 1938, he commanded the 3rd Rapid Division in Slovakia. However, with the demise of Českoslovakia, he was faced with more difficult tasks.

After the departure of the Nazis, the ženate but hopeless general decided to go abroad. In April 1939, however, he was summoned by the former legionnaire and then chairman of the Protectorate government, divisional general Alois Elias, later executed by the Nazis for his collaboration with the resistance, and asked to take up the post of inspector general of the future Protectorate government army as a reliable man of little note to the Nazis. Jaroslav Eminger accepted the proposal and did not go abroad. On April 22, 1939 he was appointed as the head of the placement department of General Hrabčík's group at the "MNO in liquidation". This is where the illegal Defence of the Nation was founded. Eminger, however, had a different, ungrateful role in this situation, for he had to select suitable men for the Protectorate government army. When in the middle of July 1939 a meeting of the future government troops was held, at which Gen. Eminger presented the concept of this newly formed corps, quite openly declaring that the government army "should be led and used in such a way that it would not interfere with the interests of the nation ...".

This idea became a reality throughout the occupation, and therefore the various German attempts to make the government army a permissive instrument failed. Nothing fundamental that could compromise the government army as a whole in the eyes of the česque public could be imposed by the Němcůcům on Eminger and his workers. The government troops maintained as much as possible the traditions of the čs. army. A small army of 7,000 men ů was actually čně militarily deployed až in May 1944 in Italy, and only to guard the service.

Eminger protested against this as well, and eventually his main task became the protection of the remaining government troops and their families. Eminger, through his legal department, coined the term "committed" for the troops, and later "unacknowledged". He left each case to be investigated so thoroughly that at the end of the war there was a list of only 38 proven survivors, and the number of those who had left the government army was 800.

The generalůs attitude is illustrated by one of his interviews, in which he responded to a question about how a government troop officer should work with new German instructions on the possible use of government troops against paratroopers. The general, with typical cool-headed refinement, replied, "If there are few of them, you won't find them. If there are many, you will come to them!" That refinement protected General Možn even against the Němců for he possessed a stony face behind the "Prussian" monocle on his right eye, which he had taken to wearing during the Republic.

Lessě suitable was it for čest court, před byž Gen. Eminger stood trial on April 26, 1947. The main trial before the National Court in Prague, however, ended in moral satisfaction for Eminger, because the court acquitted him of all charges and stated that "he had reached a verdict of guilty;... he came to the irrefutable conclusion that the defendant was a man of integrity and statesmanship, and therefore the charge was found to be untenable, baseless and untrue...".

The army, however, had a different opinion; after February it lacked the nobility of the First Republic. The Minister of National Defence Ludvík Svoboda sent General Eminger out of čother service žin December 1948. The government army as a whole was not rehabilitated, and the shadow of that fact fell on its commander. He was then in seclusion and in existential trouble. Finally, he died in Prague, completely forgotten, on 14 July 1964.

A prominent moral authority of the Czech society, the literary historian Professor Václav Černý, who himself took part in the anti-Nazi resistance, wrote about the government troops in his memoirs: "It should be said right away that the government army was never a seat of collaboration with the Nazis and that both the army and the men were mostly people of political and national integrity."

If this statement was true of anyone without exception, it was certainly Brigadier General Jaroslav Eminger.

Libor Vykoupil