Status: two named sources place American prisoners in Czechoslovak hands. One was a Czechoslovak major general who defected to the United States and passed a U.S. polygraph. The other was a Czech political prisoner and Dachau survivor who says he saw Americans inside the Ministry of National Security in Prague, and was told by a prison warden that about ninety more were in the basement of Pankrác. Neither account has been confirmed by a document. Prague and the Pentagon both say there is no evidence. The records that would settle it are named at the bottom of this page.
Gen. Jan Sejna and the Czechoslovak hospital in North Korea
Jan Sejna was a major general in the Czechoslovak Army and one of the highest-ranking communist defectors of the Cold War. He came over to the United States in 1968. He later testified to Congress that the Czechoslovak hospital operating in North Korea during the war was a cover, and that American prisoners were used there as experimental subjects. Many were killed, he said, and about 100 Americans were sent on to the Soviet Union.
“The major (public) purpose for the hospital was to train Czech doctors, and Russians, for the war. But generally, it just covered deception. The top secret purpose of the hospital was to experiment on Americans and South Koreans. The POWs were used to test the effects of chemical and biological warfare agents and to test the effect of atomic radiation.”
The hospital included a crematorium for disposing of human evidence, Sejna said. He placed Beijing in the program as well, using Americans shipped into China — which matches separate reporting of Czech advisers at the secret camp at Harbin.
Sejna also described prisoners from the Vietnam War being moved through Prague to the Soviet Union, and said Pyongyang received prisoners from Hanoi. He put the second claim at a 1962 meeting in Moscow with the North Korean chief of staff and the Soviet general A. I. Antonov.
What supports him, and what does not
- He passed a U.S. polygraph examination.
- Prague later confirmed that Czechoslovakia operated a hospital in North Korea similar to the one he described.
- PIP verified the existence of a second Czech source who provided information supporting Sejna’s account.
- Both Czech and Pentagon officials say there is no evidence that Americans were held at the hospital or that it was used for experiments. The Pentagon rejects his testimony.
Václav Eminger and Pankrác prison, Prague
In the late 1990s a Czech named Václav Eminger contacted the U.S. Embassy in Prague. He had been freed from Dachau by the U.S. Army in 1945, and he said he owed it to the soldiers who freed him to report what he had seen afterward.
Kevin Smith, then an investigator for the Pentagon’s Joint Commission Support Directorate, took the account. “During 1945, Eminger had been rescued from the Nazi concentration camp in Dachau by the United States Army. Eminger stated he owed it to the US soldiers who freed him to report that he had been imprisoned during 1952 in (Prague’s) Pankrác (prison) with US POWs from Korea,” Smith recalled.
In an account published in 2004 with the journalist Hana Catalánová and the historian Zdeněk Vališ, Eminger set out what he says he saw and was told in the early 1950s:
- He said he personally saw five or six American prisoners inside the Ministry of National Security building in Prague. He had been summoned there about three times for conversations with the minister, Ladislav Kopřiva, who had been a fellow prisoner at Dachau.
- Kopřiva told him to his face that the men were Americans, that he “had nothing in common with this matter,” and that it fell under the defense minister, Alexej Čepička.
- Asked why the men were not in a military prison, Kopřiva said the military prison had been closed down.
- The Pankrác warden, Lt. Soukup — a Mauthausen survivor who spoke to him as a fellow camp inmate — told him there were about ninety American prisoners in Pankrác, in the basement of Block C.
Eminger gave this to U.S. Majs. Kevin Smith and Jean MacIntyre in 1999 and repeated it to Maj. Michael K. O’Hara. He then walked Smith through the cells, with the prison administration’s agreement. The walk-through was filmed. PIP does not know where that film is.
Smith noted one thing about the tour. The facility’s director said the prison’s records only went back nine years — and, in Smith’s words, “Not once did (the director) deny, or even express doubts about Eminger’s involvement with US POWs in Pankrác.”
What we can and cannot say about this account
- It is one witness, describing events of the early 1950s, in a document written about fifty years later.
- The figure of ninety is hearsay — it is Soukup’s number, not Eminger’s. Eminger says he saw five or six.
- Kopřiva was minister of national security only from 1950 to early 1952, which brackets the window. That is a checkable constraint, not a problem with the account.
- The 2004 article was written as a rebuttal to Czech press coverage and is polemical by design.
- This testimony does not appear in any of the standard published POW/MIA histories. PIP has found no American report of it in released records — but Eminger says he gave it to three U.S. officers, so that absence is a question for a records request, not evidence that the statement was never made.
What the investigators ran into
“During several visits to Prague it became clear to me the Czech Government, mainly their intelligence services, were unwilling to deliver on their pledge to provide us information they clearly possessed concerning our POW/MIAs,” Kevin Smith said. “It is important to keep in mind this pledge was made while the Czechs were in the process of applying for NATO membership.”
That pledge was not incidental. When former Warsaw Pact states were invited into NATO, Congress required that the process include providing information on American prisoners these countries had obtained from their old ally the Soviet Union. Norman Kass, who ran the U.S. side of the Joint Commission for years, believed that was the moment to press. U.S. investigators learned instead that the State Department intended to move the accession process through quickly and to minimize revelations that might slow it down.
Kass also described a former Warsaw Pact country that, in the late 1990s, offered to help the United States get answers about its prisoners through its own intelligence channels. Washington turned the offer down. “A foreign government was ready to do more on behalf of our missing than our own government was,” Kass said.
A separate Czechoslovak thread
Pfc. Ryeu Sup “Roy” Chung disappeared on 5 June 1979 from the Second Armored Cavalry Regiment in Germany, not far from the Czech border. His commander’s report found no evidence of foul play, drug use or defection. The Army wrote him off as a defector anyway. His parents did not accept it, and in 1982 their lawyer told the Pentagon that sources in Korea indicated the soldier had been taken against his will from Czechoslovakia to North Korea. His case is here.
Request for information
Please contact us if you can help with any of the following.
- Pankrác prisoner registers and personal prisoner files, 1950–53. Ninety men do not pass through a prison without book entries, ration lines and custody transfers. These are held by the Národní archiv, 4th Department, Prague.
- Correspondence between the Ministry of National Security and the Ministry of Defense over custody of foreign prisoners in that period. Kopřiva said the matter fell to the defense ministry; that is where his answer points.
- Military court and military prosecutor records — Vojenský historický archiv, Prague.
- StB investigation files, including the fond of the Prison Guard Administration (Správa vězeňské stráže), Lt. Soukup’s unit — Archiv bezpečnostních složek.
- The film of Eminger’s walk-through of Pankrác, made about 1999 with U.S. officers present. Any copy, in any hands.
- Jan Sejna’s StB file, cover name “Honza.”
- Records of the Czechoslovak military hospital in North Korea — its establishment, staffing, patient records and any medical-research program attached to it.
- Anyone who served at that hospital, guarded at Pankrác in the early 1950s, or worked in the ministries involved — or their families.
Write to contact@powinvestigativeproject.org. We do not publish a source’s name without permission.
Česky
Hledáme informace o amerických válečných zajatcích v Československu. Podle svědectví Václava Emingera bylo začátkem 50. let v budově ministerstva národní bezpečnosti v Praze viděno pět až šest Američanů a v suterénu bloku C v Pankrácké věznici mělo být asi devadesát amerických vězňů. Generál Jan Sejna vypověděl, že československá nemocnice v Severní Koreji sloužila k pokusům na amerických zajatcích. Žádné z těchto tvrzení nebylo dosud potvrzeno dokumentem.
Hledáme: vězeňské knihy a osobní spisy vězňů Pankráce z let 1950–1953; korespondenci mezi ministerstvem národní bezpečnosti a ministerstvem obrany o vazbě cizinců; spisy vojenských soudů a prokuratury; svazky StB včetně fondu Správy vězeňské stráže; filmový záznam prohlídky Pankráce s Václavem Emingerem z roku 1999; a svazek StB na Jana Sejnu, krycí jméno „Honza“.
Pište nám: contact@powinvestigativeproject.org. Jméno zdroje nezveřejňujeme bez souhlasu.