Atentát na Aloise Rašína / Assassination of Alois Rašín - Praha, Czech republic - Infamous Crime Scenes on Waymarking.com

""Rasin was shot in the spine by 19-year-old bank clerk Josef Soupal, an anarcho-communist by political creed. It was not his first attempt at killing Rasin but he had never been able to get close enough to him before. Soupal waited for Rasin in front of his house on that morning before Rasin was to leave for work. He shot him believing he was removing a symbol of the capitalist system he despised and wanted to see destroyed. There was nothing personal in his act."

The shots injured Rasin in the spine. He was immediately taken to hospital in Podoli - never to recover from the injury. For six weeks he struggled for his life but eventually succumbed to his fatal injuries, on February 18, 1923, at the age of 55. Who exactly was Rasin's assassin Josef Soupal and what was his fate after he was arrested?

"If someone is capable of killing another person for such a dubious idea, he is certainly a fanatic. To a certain degree, we can also attribute Soupal's act to youthful foolishness. Other young men had tried to attack Prime Minister Karel Kramar and other people as well. The post-revolutionary radicalism among the young generation was quite strong in those days. Soupal at the time of the crime had not yet reached the age of 21, and was still a minor in the eyes of the law, and therefore he was not sentenced to death. He was given 20 years in prison and under the German protectorate, he was given an early release. After the Second World War he changed his name and became publicly active in the east-Bohemian town of Havlickuv Brod. He stayed faithful to his pre-war ideas. He remained a staunch communist."

The embankment along which Alois Rasin was driven from his house to the hospital bears his name today. Before the fall of communism in 1989 the embankment was named after Friedrich Engels, the 19-century German theorist of modern socialism and communism. Names like his replaced those of Alois Rasin and other pre-war Czechoslovak politicians from history books after the communist takeover in 1948. However, now, eighty years after Alois Rasin's death, his memory and his political and economic ideas still remain alive and inspiring for modern Czech political thinking. "

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Date of crime: 01/05/1923 Public access allowed: yes Fee required: no Web site: [Web Link]

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