Klaus family's secret police past fuels graffiti in Prague

TV Nova reports that the building of the PORG academic high school in Prague, run by Václav Klaus, Jr, the son of the outgoing Czech President, has been spray-painted with red stars, a swastika, and the initials Š. M. According to the TV Nova report, the vandal was evidently responding to an article published in the Saturday edition of the Czech daily Lidové noviny reporting that Štefan Miština, the father-in-law of President Klaus, was a high official in the secret political police of the Slovak state during WWII and personally participated in the persecution of Jewish people.

According to Lidové noviny, which references material from both Czech and Slovak archives, Miština, who was a lawyer, surfaces at the start of 1940 in Bratislava as the head of the censorship department at State Security Headquarters (Ústředna státní bezpečnosti). This was the headquarters of the totalitarian state’s secret political police tasked with repression and surveillance. The police had its own network of informers, its staff collaborated with the Gestapo, and its anti-communist division used particularly brutal investigative methods.

According to these sources, Miština was entrusted with handling the accounting of confiscated Slovak Jewish assets. Over the course of two days he provided several dozen lists of confiscated items, papers and valuables. A total of 186 336 Slovak crowns were attached in the bank accounts of Jewish organizations and 104 424 Slovak crowns in cash were confiscated from them.

"I am no lover of either Nazism or vandalism in any form," Klaus, Jr told TV Nova, which reported that the high school he leads was spray-painted overnight. In addition to the communist and Nazi symbols, the years 1940 and 1948 were also part of the graffiti.

According to Lidové noviny, 1940 is the year that Štefan Miština moved from Prague to Bratislava to work for the totalitarian police there. Eight years later he joined the Communist Party of Slovakia.

During the recent presidential campaign in the Czech Republic, Klaus Jr pointed out that the father-in-law of candidate Karel Schwarzenberg, Johann Hardegg, had been a Nazi. During the second round of voting, President Klaus’s family unequivocally supported Schwarzenberg’s rival, Miloš Zeman, who eventually won the country’s first-ever direct presidential election. "Václav Klaus, Jr may not suspect it, but his grandfather, Štefan Miština, has a similarly dark past to that of Johann Hardegg," the Lidové noviny article published Saturday reads.