Václav Jaroslav Klofác

Born Sept. 21, 1868, in Něrnecký Brod (present-day Havlíčkův Brod); died 1942. Czech political figure.

Klofáč aligned himself with the Young Czechs in 1890. He founded the National Socialist Party in 1897 (from 1926, the Czechoslovak National Socialist Party), and he served as its chairman from 1918 to 1938. He was a deputy to the Austrian Reichsrat between 1901 and 1918. At the beginning of World War I (1914–18), Klofáč was arrested by the Austrian authorities on charges of treason. He was granted amnesty and freed in 1917. In 1918 he was vice-chairman of the Czech National Committee, and in 1918–20, defense minister for the bourgeois Czechoslovak republic. Klofáč helped organize an armed intervention into the Soviet Republic of Hungary. From 1920 to 1938 (with interruptions) he was vice-chairman of the Czechoslovak senate, and in 1925–26 he was the senate’s chairman. Prior to World War II (1939–45), Klofáč adhered to national-socialist views and preached the community of ideology between the Czech and German forms of national socialism.