The 1st Czechoslovak Partisan Brigade of Jan Žižka ( or Partyzánská brigáda Jana Žižky z Trocnova), initially known as Ušiak-Murzin Unit, was the largest partisan unit in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (modern day Czech Republic) during the German occupation of Czechoslovakia. After its core of Soviet-trained paratroopers was dropped into Slovakia in August 1944, the brigade crossed into Moravia and began operations in earnest at the end of 1944. Its focus was guerrilla warfare, especially sabotage and intelligence gathering.

Background

German occupation

In 1938, German Chancellor Adolf Hitler announced his intentions to annex the Sudetenland, a region of Czechoslovakia with a high ethnic German population. As the previous appeasement of Hitler had shown, the governments of both France and Britain were intent on avoiding war. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and other Western political leaders negotiated with German Chancellor Adolf Hitler and ultimately acquiesced to his demands at the Munich Agreement, in exchange for guarantees from Nazi Germany that no additional lands would be annexed. No Czechoslovak representatives were present at the negotiations. Five months later, when the Slovak Diet declared the independence of Slovakia, Hitler summoned Czechoslovak President Emil Hácha to Berlin and forced him to accept the German occupation of the Czech rump state and its re-organisation into the German-dominated Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Germany promptly invaded and occupied the remaining Czech territories. Although France had a defensive alliance with Czechoslovakia, neither Paris nor London intervened militarily.

The Nazis considered many Czechs to be ethnically Aryan, and therefore suitable for Germanisation. As a consequence, the German occupation was less harsh than in other Slavic nations. For example, food rations in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia were almost identical to those in Germany. The occupation influenced the daily life of ordinary Czechs by the militarisation of the economy, the elimination of political rights, and transportation to Germany for forced labour. More than 20,000 Czechs were executed, and thousands more were deported to concentration camps. While the general violence of the occupation was less severe than in Eastern Europe, it nevertheless caused many Czech people to hate the Germans living within the Protectorate, and support partisan groups.

Military situation

Although there was wide popular support for the resistance, in other ways the Protectorate was ill-suited to partisan activity. There were very few guns, despite the relatively liberal firearms policies in place prior to the occupation. The Protectorate was highly urbanized, which made the establishment of partisan field camps in woods or mountains impractical, and the excellent transport and communications infrastructure was at the disposal of the Nazi security apparatus. Also, the ethnic German minority tended to cooperate with the occupiers and some local Germans joined the security forces, which benefited from their fluency in Czech and knowledge of the local geography.

The Nazi administration brought in Reinhard Heydrich as Deputy Protector of Bohemia and Moravia in order to enforce policy more harshly. His brutality led to the Allies ordering his assassination in May 1942. In the violent crackdown that followed, known in Czech as the , more than a thousand Czechs were murdered, including the entire village of Lidice. Some former members of the resistance evaded arrest by fleeing into the Moravian mountains and forming partisan groups. The first documented partisan group was the Green Cadre (), active in the Hostýn-Vsetín Mountains along the Czech–Slovak border from early 1942. There were also urban resistance groups, such as the White Lioness () active in the areas of Silesia around Frýdek-Místek and Ostrava. Such partisan groups depended on the support of the local population and acted by cutting power lines and sabotaging railways. Beginning in April 1944, several paratrooper groups trained in Britain were dropped in Moravia in order to gather intelligence. However, according to historian Detlef Brandes, the emergence of the Žižka brigade was the beginning of effective guerilla resistance in the Protectorate.

History

Formation of the unit

At the end of 1943, Czechoslovak Communist politicians asked the Soviet government to organize a partisan movement in the Protectorate and Slovakia. Partisan units for deployment in Czechoslovakia received training in Sviatoshyn, a suburb of Kiev. To support advancing Soviet troops, paratroopers were deployed in advance, initially in Carpathian Ruthenia, then in Slovakia and finally also in Moravia.

The partisan group that would become known as the Jan Žižka brigade was formed during training in Sviatoshyn. Most of its initial twenty-one members, including the commander, Lieutenant , were ethnic Slovaks, in accordance with the initial plans to deploy in Slovakia. Before the training at Sviatoshyn, some of them had fought as partisans in Belarus or in the Crimea/Odessa region. The unit also included Hungarian defectors and seven Soviets, including Captain , second-in-command.

The "Ušiak-Murzin Unit" parachuted near Sklabiňa, Slovakia in two groups, on the night of 21–22 August 1944 and the night of 30–31 August. The day before the first group arrived, a local partisan group which controlled the area had publicly announced the restoration of the Czechoslovak state. The original orders had been for the unit to cross the Fatra mountain range and begin operations in northwest Slovakia. However, the plans were disrupted by the Slovak National Uprising, began on 29 August. Initially, the unit conducted reconnaissance on a German counter-offensive, but soon Ušiak received orders to redeploy to Moravia, and on 6 September they began to move north. The Ušiak-Murzin Unit was joined by many Czech fugitives who wanted to fight on their own territory. Other recruits were former Slovak Army soldiers.

Transfer to Moravia

Although the partisans had intended to reach the border undetected, there were two skirmishes before the unit reached Štiavnik, a Slovak town near the border. Since the Štiavnik police and other Slovak forces in the area had defected to join the Slovak National Uprising, the unit, now grown to 150 members, established itself around Štiavnik, controlling a small area to the rear of the German forces. In Štiavnik more troops joined the unit, mostly Czechs crossing the border from the Protectorate in order to join the Uprising, but they also included escaped Soviet prisoners of war who had fled from camps as far away as Saxony and crossed Bohemia and Moravia with the help of the local population. The unit was formally named after Jan Žižka, the 15th-century leader of the Hussite army, whose fight for religious freedom and use of innovative military techniques had made him a Czech national hero.

In order to stem the flow of Czechs joining the Slovak National Uprising, the Germans closed the border and made unauthorized crossing punishable by death on 16 September. Attempts to cross the border as a unit were made on the nights of 21-22 and 24–25 September near Velké Karlovice. As both attempts failed after skirmishes with German border guards, Murzin crossed the border with a smaller group of 60 partisans on the night of 28–29 September. Some 300 partisans remained in Slovakia, their numbers daily augmented by newcomers. In early October, the border was reinforced by about 300 SS military policemen, making it more difficult for the Žižka partisans to cross back into Moravia. On 10 October, the Germans attacked Štiavnik. Fighting lasted for about three days with partisan losses estimated at 200 around Štiavnik and in skirmishes with border guards while attempting to cross into Moravia. Only 130-140 guerrillas managed to cross the border; those left behind included twelve of the fourteen Soviet-trained Slovaks.

Consolidation at Čertův Mlýn

In Moravia, the unit settled in a hunting lodge on the slopes of and made contact with the British-trained Wolfram partisan group. Concerned that an attack by American bombers on 14 October had drawn unwanted attention from German security forces, the Murzin partisans took refuge in the Wolfram group's base at . Because the Wolfram group was expecting an airdrop of supplies from Britain, twenty-one partisans were transferred from the Murzin group to Wolfram. In exchange, Murzin received a significant amount of money necessary to fund his operations.

One of those transferred was , a petty thief who had joined the partisans to avoid detention in a concentration camp. After murdering a Wolfram partisan, he turned himself in and offered to inform on the partisans in exchange for erasing his criminal record. At 4:30 on 23 October, he led 300 German soldiers to the base, but the partisans managed to escape. While German security forces burned buildings and terrorized civilians in the area around Trojačka, the Žižka partisans separated from the Wolfram group and established a new, more permanent base at . They benefited from supplies and information provided by friendly Czech civilians, some of the members of Obrana Národa.

Two groups were sent further southwest, under the command of Ivan Petrovič Stěpanov and Viktor Ševcov-Grekovskij. They made contact with other groups already established in and around Vsetín. The groups gathered clothing and provisions for the winter and raided police stations (sometimes in cooperation with local Czech policemen) for firearms and ammunition. By the end of October, the unit had grown to over 200 men and women, divided into four sub-groups: one guarded the base while the other three operated in the surrounding area.

German countermeasures

Gestapo ruse

The Gestapo attempted to lure the unit's leaders into a meeting with agents who presented themselves as leaders of communist resistance groups. Ušiak was unaware that almost all resistance organizations had been infiltrated by the Gestapo and their members caught and executed. Therefore, he agreed to a meeting on 2 November, in a location not far from the base. Unbeknownst to the Gestapo, however, anti-partisan army units were also deployed in the area and by chance turned up at the meeting, spoiling the Gestapo's plans. Both Ušiak and Murzin were wounded in the ensuing gunfight, and fled in different directions. Ušiak was hidden by civilians in Čeladná, but was soon tracked down and committed suicide to avoid capture. Murzin was hidden for three weeks in a forest dugout, but the partisans did not know his whereabouts. Meanwhile, Germans captured another partisan who revealed names of civilians who had aided the partisans. In a raid on the base the next day, four partisans were killed and two others captured.

On 3 November, Higher SS and Police Leader Karl Hermann Frank ordered the summary executions of suspected partisans along with those suspected of helping them. The bodies of executed suspects were to be hanged in public for 48 hours. A wave of arrests and executions decimated the civilian supporters of the partisans. Although the Czech police forces often supported the partisans, they undermined the public approval for them by stealing from Czechs, and some civilians did inform on the partisans. Due to the increasing partisan activity in the area, the Germans posted guards at railway bridges to prevent sabotage.

Operation Grouse