He was named after his father, a Prague lawyer, who was born in 1891 and killed in 1942 by the Nazis. As a child Veleslav went to a local grammar school in Pankrác at Bělá pod Bezdězem. He also worked in the zoo at Prague from 1941 to 1944 while also working in the underground Czech resistance. When the war ended he studied law at Charles University. He was also active in the Prague uprising as a student activist. He established an anti-communist organization along with Jaromír Nechanský which collaborated with the Office of Strategic Services, particularly the American secretary Walter Birge who was posted to the Prague embassy. For this he was arrested in 1949 and sentenced to death after a trial. The Wahl-Nechanský trial also led to the Czechoslovakian government notifying the Americans that their embassy was too large due to their espionage activities and ordered them to reduce it to a third of its size. His wife, Tatiána Růžičková, was also kept under arrest and she later moved to the United States.