Hidden weapons of the Werwolf
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Zdeněk Havránek was born on 8 June 1954 into a mixed nationality marriage. His mother Terezie Rauer was German and father Václav Havránek was Czech. During World War II, his father was deployed by the Todt organisation to build motorways around Stuttgart. He managed to escape while the Allies bombed the city and made his way to Hanušovice (Hannsdorf) where he immediately found a job as a trained butcher with a perfect command of German. Still during the war, he married Terezie Rauer, the mother of the witness. They had five children between 1944 and 1954, of whom Zdeněk Havránek was the youngest. He trained as a bricklayer. During his apprenticeship he suffered a serious eye injury, which took him out of the military register so he did not have to do the basic military service. He made his living as a fire clay worker at the Komořany power plant and a bricklayer all over the country. Among other things, he worked in the Most region during the demolition of Prunéřov and the old town of Most which had to give way to lignite mining. When his parents passed, he returned to Hanušovice where he worked with the forest management authority until retirement, first as a labourer and then a bricklayer at the service centre. He spent his subsequent life in the forests. He saw many secluded places around Hanušovice. In remote settlements, saw abandoned buildings, in which he found, among other things, hidden Werwolf guerrillas’ supplies from wartime. At the time of filming in 2023, he and his wife Dagmar were still living in their house close to the forest on the outskirts of Hanušovice.
