Jan Masaryk

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(b. Prague, 1886; d. Prague, 10 Mar. 1948) Czech; Czechoslovak Ambassador to London 1925 – 38, Foreign Minister 1941 – 8 Jan Masaryk was the son of T. G. Masaryk. He travelled widely as a young man and was educated at the universities of Prague and Vienna. He emigrated to the United States in 1907. He entered the newly created Czechoslovak diplomatic service in 1918 and from 1919 to 1920 was Beneš's main aide at the Paris Peace Conference. In 1925 he was appointed Czechoslovak ambassador to London, where his charm and fluent English won him great popularity. He was one of the few commoners allowed to tell rude jokes to George VI. He resigned in 1938 after the Munich Agreement and in July 1941 became Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister of the Czechoslovak government in exile in London.

Masaryk returned to Prague with Beneš in 1945 and was Foreign Minister in the coalition government. He continued in this post after the elections of May 1946, serving without party affiliation. Like Beneš, he hoped that Czechoslovakia might serve as a bridge between East and West. Opposed to the Soviet Union's refusal to allow Czechoslovakia's acceptance of Marshall Aid in 1947 he criticized the non-Communist ministers' decision to resign from Beneš's government in February 1947, which prompted the Communist coup. At Beneš's request he did not resign as Foreign Minister after the Communist seizure of power. Three weeks later his body was found in the courtyard of the Foreign Ministry beneath an open window. The official verdict was suicide. An official re-examination of his death in 1968 was closed after the failure of the "Prague Spring".

Jan Masaryk (1886-1948) was the popular and internationally respected foreign minister of Czechoslovakia for a number of years and son of the country's first president. His life came to an abrupt end in an infamous 1948 incident, just weeks after a swift Communist takeover of the government. Masaryk's body was found in the courtyard of the Czernin Palace, the government building in which the foreign ministry and his private quarters were housed. His death was announced as a suicide.

Jan Garrigue Masaryk was born on September 14, 1886 in Prague, where his father was a professor of philosophy. He was the third of four Masaryk children. His mother, Charlotte Garrigue Masaryk, was an American. She and her husband created a household that was decidedly liberal and intellectual in atmosphere. Masaryk emerged as the black sheep of the children, however. He was a poor student, described as restless and excitable in temperament, though musically gifted and convivial.

Certainly the elder Masaryk did not foresee that his son would earn a living from his piano-playing abilities when he sent him to the United States in 1904 with a gift of $100. The sum quickly disappeared in the hands of the reckless Masaryk, and he found work as a pianist in a movie house in New York City. He later worked at a brass foundry in Connecticut, among several other jobs during his decade abroad. Though he was reportedly fond of gambling and attractive women, Masaryk had a serious side to him as well. When he worked in the foundry, he held English literacy classes for his co-workers, who came from a variety of European backgrounds. He later reported that this was his greatest training for a diplomatic career.

Era of Freedom

Masaryk returned to his homeland in time for the onset of World War I. He was conscripted into the army of the Austro-Hungarian empire and served in Poland as an infantry soldier. Tensions among nationalities in this part of Europe would launch a series of important political changes after the war's end. Relegated to second-class citizens in the Empire, the Czechs and Slovaks also possessed a strong anti-German sentiment. Many of them resented fighting on behalf of Austria-Hungary's ruling Hapsburg dynasty. A renewed push for a separate nation gained ground, and Thomas Masaryk played a key role in this movement. He was elected president of the new nation in 1918.

As the son of the president, Masaryk was given a post in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He was assigned to various posts - charge d'affaires in Washington, D.C., a member of the Czechoslovak legation in London after 1921, and private secretary to Eduard Benes, another leading figure in the new government. Masaryk married during this time, but the union with Frances Crane Leatherbee ended in divorce by 1931.

In 1925, Masaryk was named minister to Great Britain, and his Grosvenor Square chancery and residence became a popular spot for members of the international diplomatic community. Masaryk was a well-liked figure in London, known for his wit, erudition, and piano talents at parties. It was said that he also liked to tell somewhat risque stories. Like his father, he oriented himself toward the West more than the East; he rejected the pan-Slavic movement, and saw Bolshevik Russia as a potential threat to the stability and independence of Czechoslovakia.

Threat from Fascist Germany

Throughout the 1930s Masaryk continued to shuttle between London and Prague, and made occasional forays to the United States as well. His father died in 1937, and the loss seemed to instill in him a dedication to Benes, the man who succeeded to the presidency. When German chancellor Adolf Hitler moved to take the Sudetenland, the territory in the western part of Czechoslovakia that had long been home to a large emigrant German population, an emergency conference in Munich was held by representatives of the western European powers-though neither Benes nor Masaryk was invited. There, a policy of "appeasement" was decided, and Benes agreed to it. Hitler was allowed to take the Sudetenland. Less than six months later, German troops were sent into Prague and effectively abolished the independent nation state that Thomas Masaryk had created.

Exile in London

The Munich Pact was considered a political betrayal by the West. Though Masaryk had worked for the last several years to create strong ties between Czechoslovakia and Great Britain, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain spoke infamously on the matter in defense of the Munich Pact. "How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing," said Chamberlain.

Benes and Masaryk both resigned from what would become a puppet Nazi government in Czechoslovakia, and established a government in exile in London. Benes became president of this "provisional" government, while Masaryk served as its foreign minister. The Allies-the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union-did not grant them full diplomatic recognition until July of 1941. The change in status was an important political triumph for which Masaryk had fought tenaciously. It would mean, in part, that after the end of present hostilities, leaders of the exiled government would have a voice in their country's future. As Masaryk pointed out, there were many Czechs who had fled the country with the government and were now fighting on side of the Allies to defeat Germany-he wondered if their deaths were "provisional." With characteristic wry humor, he sometimes signed letters to his friends, "Provisionally yours."

A European Visionary

During World War II, Masaryk worked in London and traveled to the United States, arguing, writing, and lecturing on European politics and the right for self-determination in Eastern Europe. Under Nazi rule, the Czechs and Slovaks suffered tremendous human-rights abuses. The entire country, from its massive industrial complexes in the west to vast Slovak farmlands, produced goods that kept the German war machine humming. Masaryk believed that the postwar plans should call for a decentralized German confederation, to be followed by other regional confederations in the Balkans, Scandinavia, and Western Europe, and ultimately a European Federation.

At the invitation of the British Broadcasting Corporation, Masaryk began making short-wave radio broadcasts into Czechoslovakia, which became extremely popular-though under Nazi occupation law they were stringently prohibited. The Nazis even ordered all short-wave circuits to be removed from radio sets and turned in to authorities. To be caught listening to Masaryk speak about his father's achievements, the war, the Czech state, and democracy in postwar Eastern Europe became a crime punishable by death. In his broadcasts, Masaryk did not advocate participation in an underground resistance movement, but suggested instead a slowdown in factory production or other covert means of defiance.

Into the Soviet Sphere

Benes, like some Czech and Slovak leaders, distrusted the Western Allies to a certain extent, especially after the Munich Pact. Masaryk, who had spent a good deal of his life in London or America, was more pragmatic. In 1943, the government-in-exile signed a mutual assistance pact with the U.S.S.R. The following spring, Masaryk spoke in positive terms about the advancing Russian troops, calling them "armies of liberation" in his radio broadcasts. That same year, Benes's government-in-exile signed a liberation pact with the Soviets. This meant that the following year, though General George Patton's Third Army had nearly reached Prague, the Americans were not allowed to liberate the city. Instead the Soviet Army entered to the cheers of crowds in May of 1945.

A multiparty government, which included the Czech Communists, was established in 1946, with Benes as its president in the first postwar national elections. Meanwhile, Masaryk worked for the United Nations Refugee Relief Organization, and headed the Czech delegation to the United Nations itself. In 1947, an edition of his wartime BBC broadcasts sold out of its first run of 60,000 copies. That same year, he returned to Prague to assume once again the post of foreign minister. Masaryk moved into the Czernin Palace, part of the massive Hradcany Castle complex and the traditional seat of power in the country. He urged Czech participation in a Paris conference that established guidelines for the Marshall Plan, which delivered $12 billion in funds to foster economic recovery in Europe. The terms of the plan, however, stipulated that countries with Communists in their government would be exempt. Masaryk flew to Moscow to argue with Soviet leader Josef Stalin over the matter, but returned home in defeat.

Growing Tension in Prague

Nevertheless, observers and insiders optimistically believed that Czechoslovakia was tiring of its brief experiment with a multi-party system and would eject the Communists from power on its own. In September 1947, an assassination attempt was made on Masaryk. It was revealed that the sonin-law of one of the leading Czech communists, Clement Gottwald - a man Masaryk detested - was behind it. He was widely expected to replace Benes, now in his sixties and suffering from increasingly frail health.

During these crucial months, Masaryk traveled to New York and London to drum up support, but was informed by intelligence sources that a return to his homeland would be unwise. In February 1948, Gottwald and others engineered a coup by putting Communists in top police posts, and then taking over the government itself a few days later. All non-Communists were purged. Benes convinced the leaders to retain Masaryk as foreign minister, given his strong and credible ties with the West. Masaryk agreed, but within weeks realized that the situation was untenable. He made secret plans to leave and managed to transfer some of his funds out of the country. He also managed to send word of his plan to a London associate whom he had worked with during the war. His American girlfriend, writer Marcia Davenport, left Prague and arrived in London on March 8 with a reiteration of the same message.

Cold War Casualty

On the morning of March 10, 1948, Masaryk's body was found in the courtyard of the Czernin Palace in Prague, where he appeared to have jumped or been pushed from his bathroom window. The Communist leadership announced the death as a suicide, asserting that Masaryk was devastated by the rebukes he received from his pro-Western colleagues for remaining as foreign minister after the coup. The doctor who examined his body later claimed that the official post-mortem was not conducted properly. Police, who were holding him in custody at the time of his death, claimed that he committed suicide. Others who questioned Masaryk's death were sentenced to death or jailed. Later inquiries pointed to Major Augustin Sram, a Sudeten German who had been trained in the Soviet Union, as Masaryk's murderer. Just a few weeks after Masaryk's death, an unidentified male caller killed Sram at his home. Authorities rounded up over 200 Czechs in an attempt to find the culprit. Some were executed or sentenced to long prison terms.

After Masaryk's death, Czechoslovakia remained under repressive Soviet supervision for 41 more years. Questions about the incident arose, however, during what became known as the Prague Spring of 1968, when liberal reforms were put in place briefly. An investigation was launched, but after Soviet tanks arrived to forcefully end this pro-democracy movement. Those who had spoken out on the Masaryk matter were jailed. A few years after the disintegration of the Soviet bloc in 1989, Czech Communists "found" a letter allegedly written by Masaryk to Stalin, which claimed that he was going to commit suicide. Historians dismiss the letter as a fraud, pointing out that if Masaryk wished to confess his deep dissatisfaction with Communism, he would have expressed this in the West, not the Soviets.

Further Reading

Sterling, Claire, The Masaryk Case, Nonpareil/David R. Godine, 1982.

Zeman, Zbynek, The Masaryks: The Making of Czechoslovakia, Barnes and Noble, 1976.

History Today, September, 1992, p. 42.

Czechoslovak diplomat and politician Jan Masaryk (1886-1948)

Jan Garrigue Masaryk (September 14, 1886 – March 10, 1948) was a Czechoslovak diplomat and politician and Foreign Minister of Czechoslovakia from 1940 to 1948.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Wartime 3 After the war 4 Death 5 Private life 6 References 7 Further reading

Early life

Born in Prague, he was a son of professor and politician Tomáš Masaryk who became the first President of Czechoslovakia (1918), and his American wife, Charlotte Garrigue. Masaryk was educated in Prague and also in the USA where he also for a time lived as a drifter and lived on the earnings of his manual labor. He returned home in 1913 and served in the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War. He then joined the diplomatic service and became chargé d'affaires to the USA in 1919, a post he held until 1922. In 1925 he was made ambassador to Britain. His father resigned as President in 1935 and died two years later. He was succeeded by Edvard Beneš.

Wartime

In September 1938 the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia was occupied by German forces and Masaryk resigned as Ambassador in protest, although he remained in London. Other government members including Beneš also resigned. In March 1939 Germany occupied the remaining Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia, and a puppet Slovak state was established in Slovakia. When a Czechoslovak Government-in-Exile was established in Britain in 1940, Masaryk was appointed Foreign Minister. During the war he regularly made broadcasts over the BBC to occupied Czechoslovakia. He had a flat at Westminster Gardens, Marsham Street in London but often stayed at the Czechoslovak Chancellery residence at Wingrave or with President Beneš at Aston Abbotts, both near Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire. In 1942 Masaryk received a LL.D. from Bates College.

After the war

Masaryk remained Foreign Minister following the liberation of Czechoslovakia as part of the multi-party, communist-dominated National Front government. The Communists under Klement Gottwald saw their position strengthened after the 1946 elections but Masaryk stayed on as Foreign Minister. He was concerned with retaining the friendship of the Soviet Union, but was dismayed by the veto they put on Czechoslovak participation in the Marshall Plan. In February 1948 the majority of the non-communist cabinet members resigned hoping to force new elections, but instead a communist government under Gottwald was formed in what became known as the Czech coup (Victorious February in the Eastern Bloc). Masaryk remained Foreign Minister, although he was apparently uncertain about his decision and possibly regretted his decision not to oppose the communist coup by broadcasting to the Czech people of national radio, where he was a much loved celebrity.

Death

Memorial plaque

On March 10, 1948 Masaryk was found dead, dressed in his pajamas, in the courtyard of the Foreign Ministry below his bathroom window. The initial 'investigation' stated that he had committed suicide by jumping out of the window, although for a long time it has been believed by some that he may have been murdered by the nascent Communist government.^[1] In a second investigation taken in 1968 during the Prague Spring, Masaryk's death was ruled an accident,^[2] although a third investigation in the early 1990s after the Velvet Revolution once again concluded that it had been suicide. Despite the outcomes of all three investigations, discussions about the mysterious circumstances of his death are still continuing, without apparent consensus. Those who believe that Masaryk was murdered have called it the Third Defenestration of Prague and point to the presence of nail marks on the window sill from which Masaryk fell, as well as smearings of feces and Masaryk's stated intention to leave Prague the next day for London. Members of Masaryk's family—including his former wife, (Frances Crane Leatherbee), a former in-law named Sylvia E. Crane, and his sister Alice Masaryk —stated their belief that he had indeed killed himself, according to a letter written by Sylvia E. Crane to The New York Times, and considered the possibility of murder a "cold war cliché".^[3] However, a Prague police report in 2004 concluded after forensic research that he was indeed murdered.^[4] This report was seemingly corroborated in 2006 when a Russian journalist claimed that his mother knew the Russian intelligence office who threw Masaryk out the window.^[5]

The highest-ranking Soviet Bloc intelligence defector, Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, described his conversation with Nicolae Ceauşescu, who told him about "ten international leaders the Kremlin killed or tried to kill". Jan Masaryk was one of them.^[6] es: In the Spring of 1948 there was a rumour in Prague that the Soviet NKVD was responsible for the death of Jan Masaryk. NKVD major G. Schramm, who was involved with the Czechoslovak intelligence, and secret communist police, was according to that rumour responsible for Mararyk's death. Schramm was shot dead in his Prague flat on the 27.05.1948, a possible "silencing" of an inconvenient witness, the NKVD and/or KGB were famous for. Two young Czech philosophy students were arrested, tortured and later executed for shooting major Schramm. They were Milan Choc, who, in spite of torture at the hands of the Czech secret police, denied any involvement in the shooting to the end. The other youth was Sadek of whom little is known.

Private life

From 1924 until their divorce in 1931, Masaryk was married to Frances Crane Leatherbee. She was an heiress to the Crane plumbing and elevator fortune, the former wife of Robert Leatherbee, a daughter of Charles R. Crane, a U.S. minister to China, and a sister of Richard Teller Crane 2nd, a U.S. ambassador to Czechoslovakia. By that marriage, he had three stepchildren: Charles Leatherbee, Robert Leatherbee Jr., and Richard Crane Leatherbee.[2] Stepson Charles Leatherbee (Harvard 1929) co-founded the University Players, a summer stock company in Falmouth, Massachusetts, in 1928 with Bretaigne Windust. He married Mary Lee Logan, younger sister of Joshua Logan, who became one of the co-directors of the University Players in 1931.^[7]

Masaryk was a skilled amateur pianist. In that capacity, he accompanied Jarmila Novotna in a recital of Czech folk songs issued on 78 RPM records to commemorate the victims of the Nazi eradication of Lidice.^[8]

At the time of his death, Masaryk was reportedly planning to marry the American writer Marcia Davenport.

References

1. ^ Horáková, Pavla (11-03-2002). "Jan Masaryk died 54 years ago". Radio Prague. http://www.radio.cz/en/article/24973. Retrieved 4 April 2009. 
2. ^ http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,942192-1,00.html
3. ^ http://www.nytimes.com/1990/01/28/opinion/l-east-europe-could-shed-light-on-trotsky-and-some-americans-masaryk-a-suicide-060390.html?scp=1&sq=%27%27Masaryk%20a%20Suicide%27%27%20%20Sylvia%20E.%20Crane&st=cse
4. ^ http://www.radio.cz/en/article/49113
5. ^ http://www.radio.cz/en/article/86404
6. ^ The Kremlin’s Killing Ways - by Ion Mihai Pacepa, National Review Online, November 28, 2006
7. ^ See, Houghton, Norris. But Not Forgotten: The Adventure of the University Players. New York, William Sloane Associates: 1951.
8. ^ [1] Crutchfield, Will, "CLASSICAL MUSIC; Once, the Voice Was Melody Itself. In Fact, It Still Is," The New York Times, March 7, 1993, accessed October 30, 2008.

Further reading

• Claire Sterling (1969). The Masaryk Case. New York: Harper & Row. 

Government offices
Preceded by German occupational ministry	Minister of Foreign Affairs of Czechoslovakia 1945–1948	Succeeded by Vladimír Clementis

v • d • e Ministers of Foreign Affairs of Czechoslovakia First Republic Edvard Beneš · Milan Hodža · Kamil Krofta Second Republic František Chvalkovský Transition to Communism Jan Masaryk Communist era Vladimír Clementis · Viliam Široký · Václav David · Jiří Hájek · Ján Marko · Bohuslav Chňoupek · Jaromír Johanes Czech and Slovak Federal Republic Jiří Dienstbier · Jozef Moravčík

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