Josef Balabán, Josef Mašín, and Václav Morávek

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The code name coined by the Gestapo in Prague for three Czech resistance fighters—Josef Balabán, Josef Mašín, and Václav Morávek—was the Three Kings. The acts of sabotage and intelligence gathering they provided the Czechoslovak government-in-exile greatly aided the resistance effort from 1939 to 1942. All three were former army officers.
Trained as a locksmith, Balabán enlisted in the army and went to the Russian front. After his capture in 1915, he joined the Czechoslovak Legion. When he returned to Czechoslovakia as a war veteran, he rose through the ranks to lieutenant colonel. As the Nazis began to occupy Bohemia and Moravia, he led the Three Kings. Josef Mašín fought with the Czechoslovak Legion in Russia from 1916 to 1921 and became an officer in the Czechoslovak Army, commanding an artillery regiment. During the 1920s, he left the army to join the resistance. Václav Morávek graduated from a Czech military academy and became a staff officer with the rank of captain and a champion pistol shooter. When the occupation began and the army demobilized, he was demoted to a clerk. As a member of the resistance, he always carried two pistols, many gun magazines, and a pocket Bible. Devoutly Christian, he said, “I believe in God and in my pistols.”
The three established a resistance group known as Defense of the Nation. Reporting news to the government-in-exile in London was one of the group’s main tasks. They used radio transmitters to convey news about the movement of goods and German transports as well as political and economic developments to the government-in-exile in London. They received information from resistance double agent Paul Thümmel and cooperated with railway employees and postal workers. Czech policemen serving as translators for the Germans also supplied them information. The Three Kings also kept in contact with Soviet diplomats and helped publish and distribute an underground resistance magazine.
Mašín began his resistance work alone before joining Defense of the Nation. Shortly after the occupation began, he hid weapons he took from the Ruzyně garrison, which he had commanded. Disguised as a Nazi soldier, Mašín entered the barracks in Prague’s Vršovice district, and, using false documents, left with a car full of weapons.
Known for his adventures, Morávek had many secret identities. Once, a disguised Morávek entered a bar frequented by Oskar Fleischer, the leader of the Gestapo team trying to capture the Three Kings. Morávek even lit a cigarette for Fleischer, who did not recognize him. Later he wrote Fleischer a letter bragging about the incident and telling him that he’d won a 1,000-crown bet because of it. In March 1940, 2,000 German policemen and 200 secret agents searched for Jan Smudek, who had shot a German police officer. Morávek had accompanied Smudek to a Prague train station, allowing him to escape the country safely. When the Gestapo eventually caught Morávek’s colleague Mašín broadcasting to London from his Prague apartment, Morávek and the radio operator escaped through the balcony.
The Three Kings also carried out bomb attacks in Leipzig, Munich, and Berlin and set factories afire. The two most successful bombings, in Berlin, involved Ctirad Novák, Mašín’s brother-in-law, a resistance agent pretending to collaborate with the Germans. He put one suitcase of explosives at the Ministry of Air Travel, assassinating the German head of Air Travel, and another that blew up police headquarters. But when the group tried to bomb a train thought to bear military commander and leading Nazi Party member Heinrich Himmler in 1941, the bomb went off as expected but Himmler was not aboard. The group bombed transports of German soldiers by adding an explosive to the coal in the locomotive’s tender.
All three gave their lives to their cause. Balabán was arrested in Prague’s Dejvice district in April 1941 after a gunfight. Though tortured, he did not betray his colleagues. He was executed on October 3, 1941. The Gestapo caught and arrested Mašín in May 1941 while he was transmitting that important message to the Czechoslovakian government in London from his apartment in Prague. Held prisoner and tortured for months, Mašín attempted suicide several times. But he revealed no information. He was executed in Prague on June 30, 1942, at age 45. “Long live Czechoslovakia!” were his last words. Mašín’s two sons, Ctirad and Josef Jr., became renowned Communist resistance fighters after the war and escaped through the Iron Curtain. Punished for her sons’ activities, the wife of the elder Josef was sentenced to 25 years in prison and died incarcerated. Morávek was finally caught by the Nazis while meeting with agent Paul Thümmel. During the shootout that followed, he was killed by an enemy bullet, though the Germans called it a suicide.
On May 8, 2005, Czech President Václav Klaus made all three men major-generals in memoriam. The following year a commemorative plaque was placed on the spot on Studenská Street of Prague 6, the site of Balabán’s arrest in 1941. The Three Kings gave the ultimate sacrifice for Czechoslovakia and the cause of freedom.

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