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Collaboration of Ottomar von Pelikan?

Publication at Faculty of Humanities |
2018

Abstract

Following paper deals with an unclear relationship towards the Nazi ideology in case of Otomar von Pelikan, a German speaking nobleman. Otomar Pelikan owned a manor farm estate in Hlavňovice in south--west Bohemia which, in autumn 1938, after the cession of the Sudetenland, became mostly part of the Czecho--Slovakia and future Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

Otomar Pelikan was tried after 1945 at the Regional Court in Klatovy within the retributive justice for his collaboration (specifically for his Sudeten German Party and National Socialist German Worker's Party membership and for his membership at paramilitary Sturmabteilung). The unequivocal case started to tangle when people from Hlavňovice and its surroundings interceded for Pelikan because he helped them during the war (e.g. warned them about Gestapo or saved them from forced labour in the Third Reich).

Pelikan was afterwards under investigation at liberty. Finally, he was transferred to Germany with Sudeten Germans and therefore, his case remained without a verdict.

The following paper is trying to reveal the reasons for Pelikan's decisions and map the thin boundary between collaboration and non--collaboration.