Hangman
For thirteen months František Kolečkář worked at Auxiliary Technical Battalions on the construction of the airport in Pilsen-Líně. He worked in the workshop as a lathe operator and miller. Even today he remembers a sad story that happened in local barracks: “It happened on Christmas Eve. We had a Christmas tree in the workshop, right at the window, but the dinner was in the barracks. While we had dinner, the boys noticed a light in the workshop and thought that the tree is on fire. We went to check it out, but instead of fire we found a hangman on that pine tree. He was a desperate man, he did not hang himself by the neck, but the chin and we cut him off in time. He had a family, two children and even wrote a goodbye letter. Finally they found out that he went crazy and released him.” The soldiers in the Auxiliary Technical Battalions did not have any leaves of absence and some who were less mentally resistant could not handle the situation so the suicide attempts were not rare. In most cases it depended on each commander, how strict regime he had in his battalion. “I was released by a commander who was there to be punished – the first lieutenant Šulc from the eastern front. Then a former commander of a prison superseded Šulc, and he was hard to us. He let us stand outside in cold to punish us. I do not like to remember those things, but I think it made me a real man.”
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Auxiliary Technical Battalions (Pomocné technické prapory in Czech – PTP)
Auxiliary Technical Battalions (Pomocné technické prapory in Czech – PTP) were the units of Czechoslovak People´s Army, which worked as a tool of persecution and re-education of politically unreliable people between the years 1950 and 1954. The existence of Auxiliary Technical Battalions was in contrary to the then valid defence act that allowed using the soldiers in active service to work only under special conditions and temporary. Although the recruits considered being politically unreliable spent their military service and often more months after its end in Auxiliary Technical Battalions. The then applicable laws allowed the classification of soldiers based only on health criteria, not political. According to the classification used by the Czechoslovak army, the politically unreliable recruits were marked with “E”, regardless their health. Those men did not have an access to guns and could not have higher rank than private. The members of the Auxiliary Technical Battalions were used as a cheap power for chosen economic sectors. They worked in mines (in Ostrava region, Kladno region and Slovakia), on the constructions (airports, barracks, blocks of flats and other objects), in military forests, quarries and agriculture. According to different estimates, between forty and sixty thousands of people went through the Auxiliary Technical Battalions. In Czech they were called “pétépáci” or “černí baroni” (black barons – they had black epaulettes) and these expressions were used even after 1953 for soldiers of Technical Battalions (Technické Prapory in Czech) and military work units (Vojenské Pracovní Jednotky in Czech). On December 1, 1950, the Auxiliary Technical Battalions had the total number of 9900 men and 7780 of them had the political classification “E”, 1001 of the total number were men from religious or spiritual orders. The Auxiliary Technical Battalions, as political and punishment units, were cancelled on May 1, 1954. The “E” political classification was cancelled a year earlier in May 1, 1953. However, the placing of cadre unsuitable people placing into military technical units continued.
