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Rudolf Máčel Edit

Born 26.8.1897 in Arad
Died 1942 in Mauthausen

Biography

Rudolf Máčel was born the son of a mechanic. He was of Czech nationality and a botanist by profession.

After completing his primary and secondary education and a two-year course at a business school in Brno, he became a clerk at the Brno firm of Waeger und Eichler, a wholesale company for medicinal herbs, where he worked until 1914. It was not until 1925 that he passed his school leaving certificate at a Brno secondary school and, in 1927, a supplementary examination for adults at a grammar school. Between 1933 and 1937 he studied botany at the Faculty of Sciences of the Masaryk University in Brno.

He focused in particular on phytopaleontology, published studies into fossilised plants, especially in the southern part of the Moravian Kulm, where he collected plants in 1939 and 1940, shortly before his arrest. In 1940 he described several previously unknown species (including Lepidodendron volkmannianum Stemberg and Lepidendron f. oboratum Sternberg) in the 23rd collected volume of the Natural Sciences Club.

Máčel was arrested in November 1941, almost exactly at the same time as Vladimír Krist. After sentencing he was deported to the Mauthausen concentration camp, where he died in 1942 at the age of 45.

 

Michal V. Šimůnek

Translation into English: Joanna White

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