When the uprising broke out in Prague on May 5, 1945, Herbert Heller, together with other anti-fascists, took power in Jetřichovice on behalf of the Czechoslovak Revolutionary Committee. He was appointed chairman of the National Committee because he was the only one in the village who spoke Czech. However, the Jetřichovice National Committee had a fundamental problem: it was made up of locals. When the first Czechs began to arrive in the village, they had a problem with the participation of local communists and socialists in the municipal administration: they were Germans.
Herbert resigned as chairman at the end of June 1945 and became the administrator of the children's sanatorium in Jetřichovice. The reaction of the people was not long in coming. Read a reader's letter, published in the "Letters from the Borderlands" section of the North Bohemian Young Front on October 4, 1945:
Do not cover for Germans in leading positions
Jetřichovice has a run-down sanatorium, located in the Dečín district. Children of poor workers were supposed to come to this sanatorium for recreation. The sanatorium has been in the process of being cleaned since the beginning of June, yet it is not yet done.
"The head of this sanatorium is Herbert Heller, who still doesn't know what he actually is, whether he is a Czech or a German. He has a German wife, when she meets any person in the village, she prefers not to talk, for she speaks only German. On the contrary, she apparently helped the Germans who were being deported. It is quite possible that this German woman is also receiving Czech food stamps. First of all, the appointed officials of the district commission in Dečín should explain who gave Herbert Heller the proof for national reliability: how could he be accepted to such a prestigious position? Did they know how he speaks Czech? Heller's sheets are written poorly, full of grammatical errors. We hope that this was some kind of a mistake and that it will be soon corrected. or did the official who appointed him still think along the old bureaucracy?"
There were apparently more attacks like this one, so Herbert was relieved of his position as administrator of the sanatorium in November 1945. He was kept as accountant until the end of 1947, "because none of the new people were capable of managing the administration of the institution". He was then finally dismissed on the grounds that he was "not of Slavic nationality". He became unemployed, although he tried to defend himself by saying that "the reason for the dismissal was not recognized by the employment office".
What do you think the justification for the dismissal, that Herbert Heller is not of Slavic nationality, did actually mean?