Viliam Žingor

Viliam Žingor (30 July 1912 – 18 December 1950) was a Slovak partisan, one of the leaders of the Slovak National Uprising.

Early life Viliam Žingor was born on 30 July 1912 in the village of Bystrička, Turóc County, Austria-Hungary to a Lutheran family. He started his education at the local school and in 1930 he graduated from a Gymnasium in the town of Martin.

Žingor studied for two years, but did not graduate, at the Mendel University in Brno. Instead of finishing his studies, he married young, had four children and helped at the family farm. Later on, he held several clerical and sales jobs. In his early adulthood, Žingor received basic military training during his military military service with the artillery regiment in Žilina. At this time, he supported the Slovak National Party and advocated for autonomy of Slovakia within Czechoslovakia, but not its independence.

When Slovakia declared independence as a satellite of Nazi Germany, Žingor joined the fascist militia Hlinka Guard. He later explained this association as a part of the effort of the antifascists in his village to sabotage the organization from within. He briefly studied at the officer school in Bratislava and reached the rank of lieutenant.

On 4 July 1943, Žingor received an order to return to the front as a part of a Slovak forces detachment set to reinforce the Axis troops at the Eastern Front. This time, Žingor ignored the order and instead hid in the mountains close to his home village. Over the course of the spring of 1944, he organized fellow deserters into a partisan group. During the following the summer, the newly formed group trained new recruits and gathered weapons and supplies. In August 1944, Žingor's group made contact with another partisan group established in the vicinity of a nearby village of Sklabiňa by the Soviet officer Pyotr Alexievich Velichko.

Velichko was dispatched to Slovakia by the command of the Soviet Army to organize resistance in Slovakia. Žingor was tasked by the resistance command to support Velichko. As a result of these developments, Žingor was given command of the Slovak unit within the 1st Czechoslovak Brigade. Nonetheless, relations between the two commanders quickly deteriorated. The cooling of relations was largely caused by the incident when partisans under the command of Velichko raided Sklabiňa and massacred over 140 locals suspected of being of German nationality of otherwise supporting the regime.

The partisan group under Žingor's command continued growing in size. At its peak it counted about 1,500 men. Žingor was arrested on 27 November 1947 and accused of being a "mercenary in service of Capitalism" as well as a follower of Titoism, a common accusation at the time of the Tito–Stalin split. According to the usual practice imported from the Soviet Union, the trial with Žingor was proceeded by organized letters of his friends, co-workers. The Ministry of Justice published a pamphlet Red Hemingway written by Ladislav Mňačko, a fellow partisan, in which he accused Žingor of being a traitor to the Slovak National Uprising. Other formed partisan commanders also joined the ranks of the accusers, although some later claimed their signatures under a letter denouncing Žingor were fake. Žingor himself was tortured and forced to admit all his crimes and ideological sins. The execution by hanging took place on 18 December 1950 in Bratislava. Žingor's last hours were later described by the Lutheran pastor Ondrej Bartko who tended to him before the execution.

Rehabilitation and legacy The process of Žingor's rehabilitation was started in 1968, due to the shifting political climate caused by the Prague Spring. A court in Banská Bystrica ruled Žingor and his fellow accused were innocent. Nonetheless, the process was put on hold after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. Only after the return to democracy following the Velvet Revolution was Žingor fully rehabilitated, posthumously promoted to the rank of Brigadier General by the president Václav Havel and awarded the Milan Rastislav Stefanik Order, 3rd class.