Members of a U.S. spy mission and the only foreign correspondent executed by the Nazis were honored Sunday, a half-century after being captured during the Slovak national uprising.
Six men from the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA, and Associated Press war correspondent Joseph Morton were seized by the Nazis in a mountain hut in the soaring hills above Polomka on Dec. 26, 1944.They were taken to the Nazi concentration camp at Mauthausen, Austria, where they were interrogated, tortured and finally shot on Jan. 24, 1945.
Maria Gulovich, a surviving Slovak partisan who guided the Americans through the mountains on a two-month run from the Nazis, traveled from her current home in Oxnard, Calif., for the ceremony.
She was greeted in Polomka town hall by teary-eyed former comrades she had not seen for 50 years. U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright also greeted Gulovich and commended her heroism.
Albright is in Slovakia for this weekend's commemoration of the Slovak national uprising, Europe's second-largest revolt against the Nazis. The largest was the Warsaw uprising of 1944.
Under communist rule in Czechoslovakia, the uprising was painted as a pro-Soviet revolt.
Since communism fell in 1989, revising that version of history has proved difficult. It involves examining popular support for the wartime Nazi puppet regime headed by Josef Tiso, a Roman Catholic priest hanged for treason in 1947. Under Tiso, 70,000 Slovak Jews were sent to Nazi death camps.