Miloš Klika

Miloš Klika was a Bohemian fencer who competed at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics in both foil and épée. After serving in World War I, he fenced at the 1919 Inter-Allied Games. Klika was a physician who became head of urology at Charles University in Praha, after serving as a professor urology at Comenius University in Bratislava. He also excelled at tennis (was an honorary member of LTK Bratislava); motorcycling (was an honorary member of Motorklub Bratislava), shooting; and alpinism.

During World War II, Klika became the personal physician of General Alois Eliáš, who was the first head of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia that was set up by Nazi Germany after they invaded Czechoslovakia. Elias worked with the Czech underground and sometimes, when he went to meet with them, Klika would enter false entries in Elias’s medical record that he was being treated by Klika during that time.

In September of 1941, the Czech underground decided to kill seven pro-Nazi Czech journalists but did not want it to look like an assassination in order to avoid reprisals. Klika suggested using cultures of typhus, tuberculosis, and botulism injected into sandwiches which would be served to the journalists during a meeting with General Eliáš. Only five of the sandwiches would be so treated and it would take several days before they would fall ill and so the link to their meeting with Eliáš would not be obvious. Six days after the meeting, four of the journalists fell ill but three recovered and only one died. Shortly afterwards, General Eliáš’s work with the underground was discovered and he was executed by the Nazis.