Veleslav Wahl, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death
TweetVeleslav Wahl
Czech ornithologist
Date of Birth: 15-May-1922
Place of Birth: Prague, Czech Republic
Date of Death: 16-Jun-1950
Profession: ornithologist
Zodiac Sign: Taurus 
About Veleslav Wahl
- Veleslav Wahl (15 May 1922, Prague - 16 June 1950, Prague) was a Czech ornithologist and resistance activist who was executed in 1950.
- He was named after his father, a Prague lawyer, who was born in 1891 and killed in 1942 by the Nazis.
- As a child Veleslav went to a local grammar school in Pankrác at Belá pod Bezdezem.
- He also worked in the zoo at Prague from 1941 to 1944 while also working in the underground Czech resistance.
- When the war ended he studied law at Charles University.
- He was also active in the Prague uprising as a student activist.
- He established an anti-communist organization along with Jaromír Nechanský which collaborated with the Office of Strategic Services, particularly the American secretary Walter Birge who was posted to the Prague embassy.
- For this he was arrested in 1949 and sentenced to death after a trial.
- The Wahl-Nechanský trial also led to the Czechoslovakian government notifying the Americans that their embassy was too large due to their espionage activities and ordered them to reduce it to a third of its size.
- His wife, Tatiána Ružicková, was also kept under arrest and she later moved to the United States.
- A memorial to Wahl and others executed and tortured from the 1950s was established at Dáblice, Prague, and in 2000, he was posthumously awarded the Honorary Medal of T.G.
- Masaryk by the Masaryk Democratic Movement.
- In 1995 he was posthumously decorated with the Order of the White Lion (Civil Division, Second Class).
- In 2017, a memorial plaque was installed on the Swedish embassy where he had lived before his execution. Wahl wrote a landmark work on the birds of Prague (Pražské ptactvo), published first in 1944 with a second edition in 1945.
Read more at Wikipedia