Similar to his fellow actor and theater director Vlasta Burian, Čeněk Šlégl also ended up before the investigative commission of the Extraordinary People’s Court after the war.
As early as 1933, he caricatured Hitler in his play Nice Please, They’ll Cut Me! He distributed anti-German leaflets, so after the rise of Nazism, the Gestapo had him on their list. In the magazine Vlajka, the Fascist Student Movement defined itself against him, and the famous actor was stabbed in the neck. He who does not go with us, goes against us. A slogan that became the motto of the new order for the next ten years.
Šlegl’s daughter Blanka arranged another big disadvantage with the Germans through her acquaintance with a Jewish official, whom she married a little later. The classic carousel of interrogations and arrests began. And of course the brutal pressure on the actor. If you don’t join us, we will destroy you and your whole family. Standard procedure of all totalitarian systems.
In March 1940, he became a member of the Flag and, as an experienced professional actor, put on the mask of his new role – a collaborator. He played so well that everyone who knew him believed in his suddenly awakened admiration for the gentry race and Nazi ideology.
The reward for the successful role was the release of his son-in-law Weise from the Terezin ghetto, where he spent six weeks. His daughter collapsed and attempted suicide. Šlégl fed and protected both young spouses until the end of the war.
At Christmas 1941, he was forced to act in pro-Nazi sketches by collaborating journalist Josef Opluštil. He was not alone in this. Vlasta Burian, Ferenc Futurista or Jára Kohout succumbed to the pressure. He managed to fake an injury to get out of it, but the eleven episodes he played in could not be erased.
As a useful idiot, he was ceremoniously decorated with the Saint Wenceslas Eagle in 1944. He was not alone in this either. For example, the director Otakar Vávra, adored by the communist regime, received the Nazi award.
The company, which once admired the darling of the audience, now saw him as a collaborator and let him know it during the performance. He was booed several times during the play at the Vlasty Buriana Theater, his friends and acquaintances stopped contacting him.
The war ended and so did the double role of the actor Čeňko Šlégl. Now he was just a collaborator and a “Nazi pig”. At the Extraordinary People’s Court, he was sentenced for supporting and promoting Nazism to six months’ imprisonment and work in the Jáchymov uranium mines. From the representative of salon gentlemen, factory workers and elderly men surrounded by women, he became a criminal. The confiscation of the property, the car and the villa was just the revenge of the new regime.
The defense did not help that everything he did was to save the lives of his daughter, son-in-law and their young daughter. The substantiated claims that he saved several lives with his influence had no weight before the court.
The Union of Czechoslovak Film Workers granted Šlégl a lifetime ban on artistic activity. He was the only artist so punished. Some received shorter or longer bans, but none for life. And others began to write and shoot for new masters, so that their old sins were thereby blotted out.
After his release, he worked in Žižkov in Uhelné Sklady. His wife died and his daughter and granddaughter immigrated to Austria in the 1960s. He was left alone as a subtenant in his former villa on a minimum pension. After work, he painted naive pictures on glass, which he sold in pubs for a few small coins.
He died abandoned and poor as the last beggar on February 17, 1970.
