Bohuslav Ečer

Bohuslav Ečer (31 July 1893 – 14 March 1954) was a Czechoslovak general of the judicial service and professor of international criminal law. He was also a member of the United Nations Commission for the Investigation of War Crimes, chairman of the Czechoslovak delegation to the International Military Tribunal for the Punishment of War Criminals in Nuremberg and an ad hoc judge of the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

Life Before the occupation Ečer was born on 31 July 1893. He was born into a family of a merchant, later a railway worker. He graduated in 1911 from the classical gymnasium in Kroměříž, then he enrolled at the law faculty of University of Vienna, but he did not graduate because he had to enlist in the army in 1915. After the war, he completed his legal studies at Charles University in Prague, where he received his Doctorate of Law in 1920, and for a short time was a trainee at the district court in Kroměříž, and later at the territorial court in Brno.

Eventually, however, he established his own law practice specializing in criminal law in Brno, where he also married Ludmila Galleová in 1922. The couple eventually had two daughters, Naděžda (born 1922) and Jarmila (born 1926). He published his first work, Guilt and Morality, which is devoted to the trial of Hilda Haniková, who hired a murderer to kill her own husband.

Ečer actively opposed the rising German Nazism, which he recognized as a major danger for the future, and became, for example, a member of the Committee for the Relief of Democratic Spain. In 1938, he publicly agitated for Czechoslovakia's readiness to defend itself against the threat of Nazi Germany, and lectured and persuaded public officials in England, which brought him to the attention of the Gestapo.

After the occupation After the occupation of the rest of Czechoslovakia, he emigrated with his family via Zagreb and Belgrade to Paris, where he participated in the Czechoslovak National Committee. There he also wrote a thesis The Occupation of Bohemia and Moravia and the Establishment of the "Protectorate" in the Light of International Law, which, however, was not published due to the German attack. After the fall of France, they went to Marseille, where the Czechoslovak consulate was still functioning, but they were deemed undesirable by the Vichist government and so they moved to Nice, where the Institute for the Study of International Law was moved from Paris. However, as the city was threatened with occupation by Fascist Italy, they fled to the UK in 1942 via Spain and Portugal. Here Bohuslav Ečer became an employee of the Foreign Office Czechoslovak Government in Exile, and later was an associate of the Minister of Justice Jaroslav Stránský. He was delegated by the government-in-exile as Czechoslovakia's representative to the United Nations War Crimes Commission, where he eventually successfully pushed for the declaration of United Nations as an international crime.

In addition to him, he also interviewed e.g. Reich Protector Kurt Daluege, Reich Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, SS General Bernhard Voss and Reich Minister and Reich Chancellery Chief Hans Lammers.

In 2012, he was awarded the Václav Benda Prize (in memoriam). In 2019, President Miloš Zeman conferred on him in memoriam the Order of the White Lion of the Military Group, First Class.

On 1 October 2021, a memorial plaque was unveiled on the gymnasium building in Kroměříž.