Stopping over the manuscript of the new book by the researcher Josef Doškář

The publicist, who mainly focuses on the war and post-war history of the two World Wars in North Bohemia from Nova Bor, entered literature in 2019, when his book Rumburk Revolt and its Second Life was published. Currently, Josef Doškář has completed his treatment of a case that has strongly raised the level of public opinion for the last five years. It concerns the fate of the Nazi monument at the Štěpánka lookout tower in the municipality of Kořenov, which was torn down by Czech patriots in 1945 and illegally installed back on the site in 2011 to become a secret memorial meeting place for border neo-Nazis. It has now been rolled up again.

Josef Doškář (born 1943) in Dobrovica in the Mladá Boleslav region, but he spent his youth in Dolní Bousov. He is a long-time member and chairman of the Czechoslovak Legionnaires' Union in Nový Bor, North Bohemia, where his love of glass, his lifelong profession, led him. His father, Josef the Elder, as a result of the Sokol mobilisation in 1919 which he took part in as a seventeen-year-old soldier. He took part in the Hungarian-Czechoslovak war for Slovakia. During World War II, Josef Doškář Sr. joined the anti-Nazi resistance and in 1944 was arrested by the Gestapo and subsequently imprisoned in the Prague Gestapo police prison in the Terezín Small Fortress. He lived to see his liberation, but died of typhus the next day. All this strongly influenced not only his views but also the research development of his son, an amateur historian, who was a glass technologist by civilian profession.

He began to resent the gradual distortion of history

Josef Doškář has long lived and worked in northernmost North Bohemia, where in the 1930s the ancient coexistence of Germans and Czechs, who had inhabited this part of our country since ancient times, began to intensify. From Nový Bor, it is not so far to Liberec, where Konrad Henlein raised a Nazi salute at the end of the 1930s and kept calling for a return and integration into the so-called Third Reich. He enthusiastically welcomed the fall of the previous regime in 1989. Gradually, however, he discovered that some people were trying to exploit the charged freedom to distort some historical events. Josef Doškář first discovered such an effort in the privatized Our Army, which not long after privatization began selling T-shirts and mugs with portraits of Hitler. He filed a criminal complaint against this outrage in 2017.

Something similar was discovered under the Štěpánka lookout tower near Kořenov, where local citizens illegally, secretly and with the help of lies and deceit, unveiled the granite symbol of the Third Reich in 2011, which Konrad Henlein unveiled in 1944. This was one of the main reasons why Josef Doškář became interested in how and what everything really was.

Amazing index of activities

Where to start so we don't forget something? Josef Doškář counts on the fingers of both hands - and remembers, for example, how he began to map the so-called death marches that went from the Nazi concentration camps through Nový Bor and Horní Bousov at the end of the war, including the legendary march of the Lidice women from Rawensbrủck. He recorded them for posterity in his articles and contributions, and also participated in the installation of information boards along their routes.
Josef Doškář even wrote a book about the so-called Rumburk revolt, which also renewed its fame. He even initiated the restoration of its monument in Bor, which was destroyed by the Nazis in 1942. If that wasn't enough, as the chairman of the Nový Bor CSO Unity, he created a project to restore seven monuments to T.G.M. that were destroyed in the 1950s. He sought funds, sculptors, models, period photographs and it should be added that Josef Doškář was instrumental in the construction of six more monuments at schools and squares that bore the name of TGM. He is currently working on a biography of his godfather, army general Josef Votruba.

Book The Cross with the Cross, Henlein Returns

He has been working on the book practically since December 2019, when he learned from the daily Právo about the secret illegal restoration of the granite symbol of the Third Reich under the Štěpánka lookout tower, which was toppled by Czech patriots in 1945. In March 2020, he filed a criminal complaint against the unknown group that had secretly uncovered the granite cross without permission, mostly at night in 2011. In time, he discovered that it had been restored by a group calling themselves FRIENDS OF THE CROSS, led by the tower's caretaker, Štěpánka Jan Stanek.
Josef Doškář soon afterwards discovered that immediately after this restoration, this cross was deliberately presented to the public falsely, until July 2019, as a Maltese cross, erected in memory of the fallen German soldiers in the First World War, and later in memory of the fallen soldiers in the Second World War.

Sometime in 2017 or 2018, PhDr. Jan Boris Uhlíř, during a random walk around the granite cross below the Štěpánka lookout tower, discovered that several local citizens had illegally uncovered a Nazi memorial, the only one of its kind in the Czech Republic. For visitors to the lookout tower, it was deliberately misrepresented in books and guidebooks as an innocent Maltese cross in memory of the victims of fallen soldiers in World War I. Later, they modified this information and started to deliberately claim that it was the victims of World War II. Dr. Uhlíř was initially of the opinion that the granite cross must be immediately taken to the museum.

Error of PhDr. Jan B. Uhlíř

PhDr. Jana B. Uhlíř responded, as did the researcher Josef Doškář in 2020. Unlike the researcher Josef Doškář, he did not do a literary historical research. So to speak, he fell for influential local councillors who were in one person also influential local businessmen. Namely Stanislav Pelc and Vlastislav Plecháč. Instead of filing a criminal complaint against them, he complied with the wishes of both gentlemen and, after a year of their pleas and persuasion, wrote a justification so that the secretly restored symbol of the Third Reich did not have to move to the museum. And so that no one would dare to complain, he signed this justification as an expert witness. Dr. Uhlíř, without knowing the historical facts, began to support the fiction of Messrs. Pelc, Plecháč, Ing. Fischer and Mr. Jakoubě.
This historically unsubstantiated fiction was refuted by articles published by Josef Doškář from Nazi war newspapers. The final deciphering was then brought about by a letter discovered by chance in the archives in Litoměřice in July 2025. In the letter to Henlein, Professor Roth, an architect and specialist in memorial sites, informs us in detail about the Nazi Heroes' Grove under the Štěpánka lookout tower, which was built by the District Secretary of the NSDAP of the Jablonec nad Nisou district, Wilhelm Dressler.

Local defenders of the symbol of the Third Reich, on old information boards, still claim otherwise. In his book, Doškář also describes in detail the second toppling of the cross in March 2023, including efforts to restore it again. While working on the manuscript, he also reached out to memorials and historians not only from home but also from Germany. The publication will soon be published by the Czechoslovak Legionary Community. A dedicated foreword was written by Markéta Pánková, PhD, from which we take the liberty to quote:

...the author describes step by step the incredible story of the illegal restoration of the Nazi cross in the Czech Republic in 2011. Suffice it to say that it was modeled after the Iron Cross with a swastika in the middle, which Adolf Hitler declared the official German decoration of the National Socialist Workers' Party (NSDAP) in 1939. The reader will learn the history of the creation of the granite cross and the amphitheater built between 1943 and 1944 as part of the Nazis' wartime rampage. The cross was unveiled on October 22, 1944 in the presence of Konrad Henlein (1898-1945), the leader of the Sudeten Germans in pre-war Czechoslovakia, and centrally located in a natural Nazi youth training area. The author of the book examines the efforts and actions of contemporary neo-Nazis who did not accept the fact that the Czech patriots removed the following after the liberation in 1945. They managed to re-erect this symbol of Nazism. Only some people protested against the restoration of the cross, but were silenced by the claim that it was a supposed symbol of reconciliation...

Fight against evil

Among those who have spoken out against this falsification of history is the scholar and publicist Josef Doškář, who is not afraid of possible problems and attacks on his person. He was the first to file a lawsuit against those responsible when he learned that the largest Nazi cross under the Štěpánka lookout tower in the Krkonoše Mountains had been secretly restored without permission. He is supported by many of his friends and colleagues, including members of the Association of Liberated Political Prisoners, of which he is a member. Let us ask ourselves, together with him, what is and what has been behind the recent restoration of the cross in the Jizera Mountains. Who is behind the people who are interested in restoring Nazi symbols again? How is it possible, as Dr. Pánková, the author of the foreword to the book presented in these lines, also asks, that some people do not even hide their views and confidently admit their part in the illegal restoration of the Nazi symbol? And what do political scientists and journalists have to say that they have not seen the current rise of neo-Nazism and neo-fascism in Europe?

Documentary value of the manuscript

The publication is accompanied by a number of copies of articles, relevant documents and photographs, including the granite cross as it originally looked and as it looks today. The author also quotes selected local politicians in his book who have commented on the subject. Significant is, for example, the statement of the director of the Military Historical Institute in Prague, Brigadier General Mgr. Aleš Knížek, who appreciates Doškář's interest in the fate of the Nazi monument at the Štěpánka lookout tower.

Josef Doškář devotes his research efforts mainly to preventing the falsification of our recent history. He is the chairman of the Czechoslovak Legionary Community in Nový Bor and a member of the republican committee of this organization. He is also a member of the Association of Liberated Political Prisoners and Survivors and the Society for the Preservation of the Legacy of the Czech Resistance. Originally a glass technologist, he was instrumental in the restoration of a number of statues of T.G.M., demolished in the 1950s.

Ivan Cerny