Abstract
The present paper discusses a seemingly episodic story of Hans Sobotka who was born in 1912 in the town of Jindřichův Hradec in Bohemia. He fell as a bomber pilot of the German Condor Legion in 1937 near Bilbao.
At a first glance it might seem as an unimportant war-time episode. Nonetheless, his plane fell on the government’s side of the front line.
Before long, photographs of his passport, personal notebook and other objects that revealed his foreign origin reached the pages of international newspapers. To prevent discrediting of their country, Czechoslovak authorities launched investigation into Sobotka’s nationality.
They must have been relieved when it transpired that while Lt. Sobotka had been born in Bohemia, following the inception of independent Czechoslovakia, his family left for neighbouring Austria (which was in March 1938 annexed by Nazi Germany).
There is another, somewhat interestingaspect to the story. Hans Sobotka, like other fallen member of the Legion Condor, was celebrated as a Nazi martyr.
Nonetheless, before long it transpired that he had been in fact a Jewish crossbreed, since his father, a former officer of the Austro-Hungarian Army, had been Jewish. To avoid he “Final Solution”, he wrote several requests for an exemption, some of which were addressed to Göring or even Hitler.
Only after four years the Nazi authorities granted the requested exemption thanks to which his personal documents no longer mentioned his Jewish origin. The rationale of the decision states that the exemption had been granted primarily with regard to the „heroic death“ of his son, as well as the Aryan origin of his wife.
Sobotka’s daughter was consequently also considered “deutschblütig” and allowed to marry a Wehrmacht member. In a cruel irony of fate, the son’s death for a Nazi cause thus saved the family from the Nazi holocaust.