The first person to find the body in the stone courtyard of the Czechoslovak Ministry of Foreign Affairs was a janitor at 10:1948 a.m. on March 6.15, XNUMX. Dressed in pajamas, the corpse was cold, face up, and with its feet pointing toward the building, he said, according to a police report.
Seventy-seven years later, Czechs still have no clear idea of one of the key moments in Cold War history, which came after communist parties took power in Czechoslovakia and across Central and Eastern Europe.
During and after the communist era, Czech authorities and historians conducted a formal procedure at least four times to reach a reliable conclusion: did Jan Masaryk fall from a window by accident? Did he kill himself by jumping from a window?
Or was he pushed, and if so, who did it? Czechoslovak communists? Soviet secret police? Loyalists who thought he had betrayed the country?
This year, on January 10, Czech police surprised the entire country when they announced the reopening of a criminal investigation into Masaryk's death, citing "suspicion of the commission of the criminal act of murder." The catalyst, the police say, comes in part from decades-old diplomatic cables from Great Britain, France and the United States that the Czech Foreign Ministry said it had obtained last year. RFE/RL reviewed the cables in October.
"The goal is to compare this new information with the facts found so far and thus uncover possible new connections that could provide answers to some long-unanswered questions," the police said in a statement.
For many Czechs, Masaryk's death is a historical symbol, a somber moment that coincides with the beginning of five decades of communist rule, Michal Stehlik, a historian who has written extensively about the country's modern history, said in an interview with RFE/RL.
And the mystery surrounding that death also resembles, for many Czechs, the persistent speculation surrounding a more famous political death in the 20th century: the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy in 1963 in Dallas, Texas.
"The death of Jan Masaryk is, for Czechoslovakian or Czech society, the same situation as Kennedy in Dallas," Stehlik said.
Founding family
Masaryk was part of the political nobility of Czechoslovakia. His father, Tomas Garrig Masaryk (Garrigue), helped create the independent First Czechoslovak Republic from the remnants of Austria-Hungary in 1918, and served as president until 1935.
The younger Masaryk, who was educated in Great Britain and the United States, entered the diplomatic service and became chief assistant to Foreign Minister Edvard Beneš.
After the Munich Agreement of 1938, which paved the way for Adolf Hitler to annex parts of Czechoslovakia, Masaryk lived in London and served as Foreign Minister in the government-in-exile. His Czech-language "London Calling" broadcasts on the BBC during World War II made him a celebrity among Czech-speaking people.
After the war, Masaryk returned to Prague as foreign minister and remained even after communist leader Klement Gottwald became prime minister in 1946. The following year, Masaryk traveled to Moscow, where Soviet officials pressured Czechoslovakia to reject the Marshall Plan, which provided billions of dollars in aid to rebuild Europe.
In late February 1948, 12 non-communist cabinet members resigned in protest, accusing Gottwald of filling the police force with Communist Party members. Armed communist militias and allied police forces marched through Prague in a show of force. A few days later, Beneš – then president – gave in to the communist demands and formed a new government dominated by the communists.
Czech and Western historians consider it a coup. For the next 41 years, the Communist Party controlled Czechoslovakia, locked behind the Iron Curtain.
pad
About three weeks later, on the evening of March 9, Masaryk, who had not resigned from the government, was in his official residence on the second floor of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs building, located in the tsarist-era building known as the Czerny Palace.
According to a report by his valet, included in a package of diplomatic correspondence provided by the U.S. State Department, Masaryk was at the residence that evening, where he was having dinner alone. At about 20.30:XNUMX p.m., three men who spoke Czech came to meet Masaryk. The valet, who did not know them, brought four black coffees about an hour later.
At around 22 p.m., a valet, who was dozing near the main door of the residence, said he was awakened by Masaryk shouting, "I won't do it for you. I'll sign everything, but not this. I'll do everything, but this can only happen through me dead."
The valet reported hearing the shouting several more times between 22 and 23 p.m., after which he brought Masarik another cup of black coffee at around 23.45:XNUMX p.m., before finishing his work for the night. "That's all. Go to bed. Good night and God bless you," he quoted Masarik as saying.
The valet was the last person known to have seen Masarík alive.
Who were the three men?
About six hours after his body was found, the official Czechoslovak news agency announced his death, stating that it was a suicide. In later years, the lack of convincing evidence pointing to a crime led many to accept this version.
In a 1949 diplomatic cable passed on by a senior official at the U.S. Embassy in Prague, the former secretary general of the Czechoslovak Foreign Ministry reported that Masaryk had talked about suicide just days before his body was found. The former ministry official said that Masaryk confided that he had not declared several thousand dollars in New York and that the new communist government might find him violating financial regulations, the cable said.
However, even after decades of studying court records and testimony from ministry employees, as well as Masaryk's friends and allies, historians – professional and amateur – remain divided.
Among the disputed issues is who the three men were who visited Masaryk the night before his death. To this day, Czech officials do not know their identities.
"As far as I know, we still don't know who those three were," Stehlik said.
Another point of contention: the officials initially called to the site where Masaryk's body was found were not forensic investigators; a firefighter was called after the janitor.
During the brief thaw in communist rule in 1968, known as the Prague Spring, there was renewed interest in the circumstances of Masaryk's death.
A dispatch from the British Embassy in Prague dated 15 April 1968 quotes the officer on duty at the Foreign Office passport office as reporting that cars had entered the ministry's courtyard at 23pm and that shortly afterwards his door was suddenly locked from the outside and his telephone lines were disconnected. Four hours later, the officer's door was unlocked and his telephone lines were working. He said that at about this time he heard the cars driving away.
A Prague police officer had reported finding a half-eaten apple, an open Bible, and pills—believed to be sedatives—spilled on the floor in Masaryk's apartment, according to another dispatch. Human feces were also found on the bathroom window sill, from which Masaryk was believed to have fallen. A wooden chair was found in the shower stall, and a pillow was found on the bathroom floor.
The police official also reported that two senior officials from the Czech security and intelligence services were in the building before his arrival.
News of the new investigation dominated Czech media for days after its announcement on January 10. "Was Masaryk murdered? New documents will help, but Russia is silent," read one headline on the website Lista Zpravi, reflecting long-standing suspicions among some Czechs of Soviet involvement.
Czech police have not yet responded to RFE/RL's inquiry requesting more details about the reasons for reopening the investigation.
Differences of opinion
Over the years, four official investigations into Masaryk's death were conducted. The initial conclusion that he had committed suicide was in force until the Prague Spring of 1968. At that time, historians and other officials came up with a different explanation: it was either suicide or an accident, but murder was definitely ruled out.
After the end of communism, two more investigations were conducted. One three-year investigation ended in 1996, with the explanation that Masaryk fell from a bathroom window while running away from someone. The second, from 2001-2003, focused on known forensic details – for example, the position of the body in relation to the window – and concluded that Masaryk was murdered.
"I'm still very skeptical that we'll get any real good information about that 1948 process," Stehlik said, "about that moment in the palace when Masaryk died."
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