Hagana representative in Prague, Ehud Avriel, bought Czech planes to smuggle into Palestine. To do so, the planes had to be disassembled at the Czech Zatec airfield with their parts flown on smaller planes to Palestine. The pilots were foreign volunteers for the Hagana.
Where Art Thou?
All last night I was examined. A woman acted like my defense attorney. I owned the proof I was chosen when my Bond book came true.
Two days ago I recited my Bohemian Ancestors. Wenzel Anton Prescowitz came from Bohemia (the Czech Republic) in 1849. My father said his grandfather was Gregory Roth, a Jew. I was looking at my peace plan when I noticed this image of moon and stars.
I may have found my walk-on in Jan Masaryk.
John Presco
It’s happening tonight—don’t miss this stunning sky show!
On April 19, step outside and look toward the western horizon about 30 minutes after sunset. A beautiful celestial lineup will be visible in the evening sky.
A thin crescent Moon will sit close to bright Venus, which will shine like a brilliant star. Not far away, the sparkling Pleiades star cluster will add extra beauty to the scene. If you’re in a dark location with clear skies, you might even catch a glimpse of faint Uranus joining the view.
Minister-plenipotentiary in London
Right from his arrival in London, Masaryk in his reports to Prague warned that many officials in the United Kingdom’s Foreign Office were in the grip of nostalgia for the Austrian empire, haunted by what he called the “ghost of the Habsburg empire”.[10] Masaryk expressed concern that many in the Foreign Office were openly hostile towards Czechoslovakia and considered the nation a mistake that should never have been allowed to happen.[10]
The Birth of Israel: Prague’s Crucial Role
By: Jiri Valenta, Leni Friedman Valenta
While the United States and the Soviet Union orchestrated the November 1947 partition resolution underpinning Israel’s establishment, [1] Czechoslovakia provided the nascent Jewish state with vital war material for rebuffing the Arab attempt to destroy it at birth. So vital was it that David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, commented, “Without these weapons, we would have not survived.”[2]
The Czechoslovak support tends to be seen as an adjunct of Stalin’s decisions. But a close examination of untapped Czech sources reveals, amid a Shakespearean drama of intrigues, twists, and deception, including the murder of the architect of this policy, that the Czechoslovak leaders, both democrats and communists, had a major role in the support for Israel.
Relentless Foe of Antisemitism
Few would have suspected that the Israeli miracle would depend on the foreign minister of the small country called by native son Franz Kafka, “a little anomaly within a space of great powers.” But the support of Jan Masaryk (1886-1948) for the Jews was virtually genetic, being the son of professor Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, the defender of a poor, Bohemian, Jewish peddler, Leopold Hilsner, falsely accused of the ritual murder of a young Czech girl.
“If my father did not do in his beautiful life anything else but support for poor Hilsner,” the younger Masaryk explained, “he would have been always for me the most celebrated man in the world.” [3]
A determined foe of anti-Semitism, in 1918, the elder Masaryk became the founder of an imperfect Czechoslovak democracy from the remnants of the crumbling Austro-Hungarian empire. Its system partly modeled on the U.S. Constitution, during the interwar period, Czechoslovakia became an oasis of freedom for anti-fascist refugees from Nazi Germany and the site of three Zionist congresses. Czechoslovakia’s president also undertook a historical journey to Jerusalem and Cairo.
In the shadow of his famous father, Masaryk’s youth had not been promising. The son of an American mother, he had what his friend, British intelligence agent Robert Bruce Lockhart, described as “an artistic temperament.” He enjoyed wine, women, and song, and sported the nickname “the playboy of the Western world.” [4]Yet he rose to become Czechoslovak ambassador to the Court of St. James in 1925, apparently at the instigation of his father who was “eager to widen Jan’s horizon and to mature the crudeness of his spirit.” [5]
Although England would later provide a home for the exiled Czechoslovak government, Masaryk’s feelings would always be tempered by the British government’s 1938 Munich betrayal: “They’ve sold me into slavery to the Germans, like they used to sell Negroes into slavery in America.”[6]
Shortly after Munich, Masaryk became minister of foreign affairs in President Eduard Benes’s exiled Czechoslovak government in London. There, his brilliant and witty BBC radio broadcasts, “Honza’s Talks,” to the homeland and to America made him, in Lockhart’s words, “the chief propagandist and ambassador at large for his country.”[7]
Helping Holocaust Survivors
Appalled by 1945 post-liberation pogroms in Slovakia, a former fascist state once again part of Czechoslovakia, Masaryk worked with Gaynor Jacobson, the Prague representative of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (AJJDC) to aid the Hagana’s smuggling of Jews into Mandatory Palestine in defiance of the British naval blockade. By the autumn of 1945, he provided nine trains to carry Jews through Czechoslovakia to displaced persons camps in the U.S. zones in Germany and Austria, from where they were taken to boats bound for Palestine. Significantly, the trains avoided Prague, where British diplomats kept a watchful eye with a view to preventing the possible move of Jews to Palestine. [8]
Following the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Poland, which culminated in the July 4, 1946 pogrom in the town of Kielce, thousands of Polish Jews sought to escape to Czechoslovakia, only to find themselves bottled up at the border, frequently closed to Jewish movement due to British pressure. At that time, Czechoslovakia was ruled by a unique coalition government—its parliament almost evenly divided between communist parties and democrats. Joined by Prime Minister Klement Gottwald, who professed to be first Czech and then communist, Masaryk, a democrat, convinced his ministerial colleagues to offer all possible assistance to Jews entering their country.[9]
“You know what’s my konicek [hobby]?” Masaryk asked Zdenek Toman, the deputy interior minister in charge of military intelligence and border guards. “Jews! I beg you to close your eyes if some Polish Jews are crossing our borders.”[10]
Toman warned that “the British embassy could view this as a hostile act and exploit it against us in Paris [postwar negotiations],” yet he told Masaryk that the Czech government was providing large financial resources for the Jews and would do its utmost to comply with his wish. “We are for the liberal solution,” he said, “and as soon as it is possible, we’ll allow transit of Polish Jews across Czechoslovakia … you can see from our orders on German and Hungarian Jews, we act in a human way.” Relieved by this reassurance, Masaryk declared that Czech money for Jewish immigration was not only a humanitarian necessity but “an excellent investment” that could help defend Prague’s national interests in Washington with the aid of prominent Jewish figures such as Bernard Baruch.[11]
Born Zolten Goldberger in Slovakia, Toman was actually Jewish. He was also deeply involved on his own in helping Jews. Before long, the non-Jewish Czech foreign minister, an avowed democrat, and the Jewish deputy interior minister, an idealistic communist, became major figures in the Zionist effort to rescue the Jews in Central Europe and help them reach their ancestral homeland.
Toman made good on his promise, instructing all border police that the words “I’m Jewish” sufficed for entry into Czechoslovakia. With the borders once again open, some 90,000 Jewish refugees flooded into Czechoslovakia from July to November 1946. The influx required not only food, lodging, and clothing for the hungry and penniless Jews but also attention to religious and dietary needs.
By now, a quiet war existed between Prague and London with the British largely backed by key figures in the U.S. State Department. As President Harry Truman was battling his bureaucrats in support of the Jews, Masaryk increasingly defied the hostile attitudes of British and U.S. diplomats and intelligence services. There was, however, a third party that unexpectedly came to the aid of the Jews—the Soviet Union.
Stalin’s About-Face
On May 14, 1947, during a session of the General Assembly, April 28-May 15, to discuss the creation of a U.N. Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), the young Soviet representative, Andrei Gromyko, surprised his listeners by making a spirited defense of the Jewish right to statehood. “During the last war, the Jewish people underwent exceptional sorrow and suffering,” he argued emphatically:
The total number of members of the Jewish population who perished at the hands of the Nazi executioners is estimated at approximately six million. Only about a million and a half Jews in Western Europe survived the war. … Large numbers of the surviving Jews of Europe were deprived of their countries, their homes and their means of existence. Hundreds of thousands of Jews are wandering about in various countries of Europe in search of means of existence and in search of shelter. A large number of them are in camps for displaced persons and are still continuing to undergo great privations. … The fact that no Western European State has been able to ensure the defense of the elementary rights of the Jewish people, and to safeguard it against the violence of the fascist executioners, explains the aspirations of the Jews to establish their own State. It would be unjust not to take this into consideration and to deny the right of the Jewish people to realize this aspiration.[12]
How to explain the Soviet about-turn—from categorical rejection of Zionism to endorsement of the establishment of a Jewish state? Part of the change can be attributed to Ivan Maisky, Stalin’s astute and influential ambassador to London. In 1941, Maisky, himself Jewish, was lobbied by both Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion for a Jewish state in Palestine. Returning to Moscow through Cairo and Jerusalem two years later, the ambassador delivered a report to Stalin on the political and strategic merits of a possible Jewish homeland in Palestine. [13] The homeland idea was also encouraged by Polina Zhemchuzhina, the Jewish wife of Stalin’s number-two man, Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov.
By the spring of 1947, Stalin had decided to support the Jewish homeland in Palestine. In his memoirs, Molotov argued that prior to April 1947, he and Stalin had proposed an Arab-Israeli union … if it could have been arranged … Otherwise we favored a separate Israeli state …We are supporters of international freedom … to refuse a people the right to statehood would mean oppressing them. … Yet, we remained anti-Zionist.[14]
These fine words notwithstanding, underlying Stalin’s dramatic about-face lay the all too familiar age-old Russian ambitions, notably obtaining a firm foothold on the Mediterranean Sea and undermining Britain’s Middle Eastern position. First, Molotov pitched the British foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, on Russia’s traditional geopolitical objective: joint control of the Dardanelles with Turkey. That denied, he made other requests including building Soviet naval facilities in Libya, only to be rebuffed yet again by the British foreign secretary, leading Molotov to complain that the Western powers did not want to give Moscow “even a corner of the Mediterranean.” [15]Meanwhile, with the unfurling of a new Cold War in Europe, Stalin’s desire for a foothold in the Middle East only grew. The end result was Gromyko’s extraordinary speech at the United Nations.
Stalin, however, pursued dual policies. While supporting the Jewish struggle in Palestine, he decried the Soviet and East European Zionists conducting this struggle as “ruthless cosmopolitans” (i.e., Jews with Western ideas or ties). [16]
Resisting Anglo-U.S.-Soviet Pressure
Stalin’s dual policies and dislike of Zionism and Jewish immigration became evident when the Soviet ambassador to Prague, Valerian Zorin, demanded to know why Czechoslovak border guards were letting Jews into their country without travel documents. Prime Minister Gottwald complained to Toman that he had never been informed of this, but Toman convinced him that closing the borders would mean concessions to “imperialist” Britain, which was unacceptable. [17]
Toman and Masaryk also had to deal with Soviet complaints that Jews in the Czech camps had arms. Some indeed did: Toman permitted Hagana instructors to train arriving Jews with rifles and machine guns in preparation for the imminent war in Palestine. [18] Aware of these policies, U.S. ambassador Lawrence Steinhardt joined his British counterpart, Philip Nichols, in demanding that Prague not only close its borders to Jewish immigrants but also expel Gaynor Jacobson, Joint Distribution Committee head, and remove Toman from his post. In a confrontation with Toman, Steinhardt, himself a Jew, argued that “the Jews are always in favor of the Jews” and that the government “should have there a Christian, not a Jew.” Toman wound up shouting at Steinhardt, “I am going to send the national guard, and they will take you out of the office, and like a sack of potatoes, we shall throw you out.”[19] But this was a turning point for Toman: Steinhardt and Nichols became his deadly enemies. Two Western ambassadors were now all too eager to get rid of this Czech Jewish official who dared disregard their wishes and support Jewish immigration. Unorthodox support for Jewish immigration was also noticed by the Soviets. A complaint was lodged by a subordinate about Toman’s black market shopping in London. It was made to Communist Party general-secretary Rudolf Slansky, bypassing Interior Minister Vaclav Nosek (himself a communist), and suggesting that another service might have been involved. In January 1948, a plan was devised to arrest Toman.
In a letter to U.S. secretary of state George Marshall on April 30, 1948, Steinhardt, reflecting on his Prague experience, would describe the Czechs as
In the chronic state of being a little people with their devious mental characteristics having caused them to … indulge in double talk [for example the statements of Jan Masaryk during the past two years], and to place bets on both sides.[20]
For the leader of a small country trading with the West, but residing in the Soviet orbit, double talk was sometimes necessary. One need only consider Masaryk’s dialogue with Stalin at a July 1947 meeting in Moscow in which the dictator denied Czechoslovakia’s request to join the Marshall plan. Endlessly repeated by diplomats is Masaryk’s subsequent comment, “I went to Moscow as foreign minister of an independent sovereign state. I returned as a lackey of the Soviet government.”[21]
An often-overlooked transcript of the discussion shows that Masaryk, while submitting to Stalin’s wishes, did not behave like a lackey. He engaged the tyrant with a polite polemic about the importance of Czechoslovak economic ties with the West. He then asked for a gesture, a sort of Band-aid from Moscow, as compensation for the loss of the Marshall plan. Stalin proffered the usual Soviet panegyric: wheat. But in early 1948, the Kremlin would find another Band-aid for the Czechs: Stalin’s support for selling their weapons to the Jews in Palestine. Should things go wrong, Moscow, not directly involved, could not be blamed.
Weapons for the “Ethiopian Friends”
In December 1947, in deference to the U.N.’s appeal to avoid inflaming the Palestine situation still further, Washington imposed an arms embargo on the Middle East. This move hurt Jewish efforts to arm while having no impact on the Arab states—Transjordan, Egypt, and Iraq—which were armed and trained by Britain. Czechoslovakia had a highly developed and sophisticated arms industry as well as overstock from former wartime production for the Germans. This made the small country a highly coveted, potential arms supplier for the Jewish state in the making. In addition, with the traditional Czech arms markets in Argentina and Turkey shrinking, Prague found its market largely limited to the Middle East.
In these circumstances, Masaryk tried to limit arms sales to Syria and Egypt, then acting as proxies for the Palestinian Arabs. But he was bettered by both the Czechoslovak weapons industry captains and the ministers responsible for foreign trade and industry, who sought to sell to both sides for maximum profits. [22] Another key question for the Jews became how to evade the U.N. embargo and the efforts of London and Washington to confiscate any arms they uncovered.
On December 24, 1947, the Jewish Agency’s “foreign minister” Moshe Shertok (later Sharett) sent a telegram to the Hagana representative in Prague, Ehud Avriel, stating that “the Syrians had been sent weapons” but that “Nahum” was helping the Jews. Nahum, a Biblical prophet, was the Hagana code name for Masaryk.
Fortunately for the Jews,the Syrians could only pay in British sterling, a currency at that point economically and financially weak. In contrast, the Jews could pay in dollars, raised by Golda Meyerson (later Meir) in the United States, from her fund-raising tour of seventeen cities. Championed by former U.S secretary of the treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., chairman of the United Jewish Appeal, Meyerson eventually raised some $50 million.[23]
On January 14, 1948, Avriel and Masaryk signed a $750,000 deal for the sale of 4,570 Mauser rifles, 225 light machine guns, and five million bullets to the Jews.[24]But according to Czech regulations, arms could only be transferred to a state, not to an organization like the Hagana. The Jewish state would not yet exist for another four months.
Avriel soon found a solution. Earlier in Paris, he had purchased three unused letterheads of the Ethiopian consulate, originally meant for transit visas.[25]Masaryk himself “helped Avriel to falsify cover Ethiopian documents” to show Ethiopia as the recipient of the weapons. The foreign minister’s deputy, Vladimir Clementis, a lawyer, labored over “other technical, legal and bureaucratic hurdles.” The agreement was concluded in the name of the government of Ethiopia.[26]
Although most of the foreign ministry’s senior officials were winking at Masaryk’s ploy regarding “our Ethiopian friends,” not all of them were amused. The communist coup in Czechoslovakia in late February jeopardized it further. After the communist interior minister Nosek dismissed several police commissioners, twelve of the twenty-five ministers in the coalition government—all democrats—resigned in protest. At this point, Masaryk became the key to resolving the crisis. As the thirteenth democrat, if he had also resigned, it would have changed the equilibrium in the government in their favor.
As the coup developed, London, Washington, and Moscow waited anxiously. Would Masaryk resign and escape to London with many of the other democrats, or would he stay on as foreign minister in Gottwald’s communist government? Also at stake, but not publicly discussed, was the continuing Czechoslovak arming of the Jews in Palestine.
Observing the overwhelming popular support for the communists, evident in resolutions sent to President Benes and in public demonstrations, Masaryk did not resign. With Benes very ill, Masaryk, as the country’s most popular politician, was considering a run for the presidency. As he told Toman and others, he had decided to “go with the people” and remain in the government to work with Gottwald.[27]
Meanwhile, Pavel Sudoplatov, then of the Soviet secret police and key Kremlin expert on assassination and blackmail of foreign leaders, arrived in Prague with four hundred troops in civilian dress to oversee the artful and successful blackmail of Benes. Under multiple pressures, Benes accepted the resignations of the democratic ministers.[28] The coup was complete.
Death in Prague
On March 10, 1948, however, all the questions about Masaryk’s intentions became moot: He was found dead in the courtyard below the bathroom window of his apartment. The Czech police quickly called it a suicide.
Czechs were thunderstruck. Women openly cried; citizens gathered to console each other. For many years, the question lingered: Was Masaryk’s death due to suicide or murder? In 2004, the official Czech finding was changed to murder. A leading forensic expert, Dr. Jiri Straus, concluded that Masaryk was thrown from his window.[29] But who committed this violent act and why?
Contrary to most assumptions, the Czech communists did not have incentives to kill the popular Masaryk, who had just indicated his readiness to remain as foreign minister in Gottwald’s government. Indeed, Masaryk was preparing to appear publicly with the prime minister a day after he died.
Nor did the Soviet secret police seem to have anything to do with Masaryk’s death. Sudoplatov, the man who had arranged Trotsky’s murder, mentions nothing about Masaryk in his memoirs. During the coup, Ambassador Zorin rushed to Masaryk’s residence for assurance he would not become the thirteenth minister to resign his cabinet post. Masaryk gave it. His response must have been viewed by theKremlin as a strong indication of his intention to sustain Prague’s support for Moscow’s policies in Europe and the Middle East, including the arms sales to the Hagana.
On the other hand, in 1950, Jan Bydzovsky, a Czech cryptologist and member of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), who had been arrested the previous year by the Czechoslovak authorities, suddenly confessed
to Masaryk’s murder. [30]
In his account, it was Ambassador Arnost Heidrich, the chief administrator of the Czech foreign ministry and the SIS’s top man in Prague, who masterminded Masaryk’s killing. The “SIS has a long hand,” Bydzovsky said, and Heidrich threatened the SIS would harm him and his family if he refused the murder assignment.
According to Bydzovsky, on March 9, 1948, Heidrich provided him with coded messages for the minister’s immediate review and pills with which he drugged Masaryk’s coffee. After the foreign minister was unconscious, an accomplice—first Bydzovsky mentioned George Fryc, an intelligence officer; the second time, Heidrich’s secretary, Jiri Liska—entered, and the two men threw Masaryk out of his bathroom window. Moreover, a day prior to the murder, the manager of the ministry building who lived in the apartment above, was unexpectedly asked by Heidrich to vacate it.
The likely culpability of the British SIS is also supported by their efforts to confirm the debunked suicide theory. One of these is Masaryk’s alleged, and unlikely, suicide letter to Stalin of March 9. The artful tale is that a copy of the letter was delivered to the British SIS, presumably by a Soviet colonel-turned-defector Ivan Kryloff in West Berlin. He claimed to have gotten it from the office of Soviet defense minister Nikolai Bulganin.
No less indicative is the fact that within a day of Masaryk’s death, Heidrich met Gottwald and Masaryk’s deputy Clementis, presenting them with a self-drafted document ensuring that henceforth, foreign firms buying Czech weapons would be compelled to demonstrate “proper authorizations,” i.e., be ordered by the government of the country (or its ministry of national defense, interior, air force, or navy). In other words, arms dealings with “our Ethiopian friends” were now out of the question. [31]It is important to note that Heidrich was not in the government command structure dealing with arms deliveries.
There is also Heidrich’s belated, highly questionable testimony in 1967 that Masaryk confided to him repeatedly and graphically his suicidal intentions. It ends with the gratuitous gruesome detail, “If he [Masaryk] was thrown on the street … his body would have been so mutilated that it could not have been put together for public display.”[32]
Masaryk’s Arms Policy Continues Apace
If whoever caused Masaryk’s death expected a change in policy towards Palestine, he was disappointed. Vladimir Clementis, Masaryk’s deputy, the communist writer-poet and former member of the Czech parliament, and a determined foe of British “imperialist” policies in Palestine, replaced him. Clementis not only continued but expanded Masaryk’s aid to the Jews, in concert with Gen. Bedrich (Fritzek) Reicin, the head of Czech Defense Intelligence (the OBZ).
“The most powerful man in Czechoslovakia,” was how some U.S. diplomats viewed Reicin. The son of a poor Jewish cantor and a former member of the Tkhelet Lavan, Czech Jewish youth organization, Reicin was described by his close associates, Vilem Kahan and Bedrich Kopold, as “brilliant but condescending” and “the real minister of defense.”[33]
After the coup, Reicin was approached by Prague’s two top Hagana officials, Avriel and Moravian-born Otto Felix (later Uriel Doron). Explaining how the British SIS constantly tried to “jeopardize deliveries of weapons with sabotage, impounding, delaying, and destruction,” the two appealed to Reicin for help with their purchases of arms. In return, they offered all the information they had on the SIS Prague operations. [34]Reicin, a dedicated communist at times involved in illicit activities, was of course amenable to receiving, presumably for his department, the first 20 percent of the profit and later, 6 percent of all arms sales. [35]To Avriel, Reicin became “the key figure in all subsequent purchases by the Hagana.”[36]
Indeed, on March 30, 1948, shepherded by Reicin and Clementis, the Czech weapons Masaryk had illegally obtained for “our Ethiopian friends” were flown from Prague to Palestine. Code-named Balak 1—referencing Numbers 22.2 where the Moabite King Balak was deterred from attacking the Israelites by the prophet Balaam—the successful air operation was accompanied by the transport of weapons, buried beneath a mountain of onions, on the ship Nora. The arms would soon be used in Operation Nahshon, opening the road to besieged Jerusalem. Hagana commander-in-chief Israel Galili related that “there came the riflesand machine guns from Czechia [sic], and the boys kissed them, even before they cleaned them from the grease [shemen hamishha, lit. anointment oil].” [37]
Hagana representative in Prague, Ehud Avriel, bought Czech planes to smuggle into Palestine. To do so, the planes had to be disassembled at the Czech Zatec airfield with their parts flown on smaller planes to Palestine. The pilots were foreign volunteers for the Hagana.
The Balak crew was detained and investigated on its return journey by U.S. diplomats and intelligence. Reicin realized that subsequent flights had to be conducted in full secrecy from a military airport and allocated the Zatec air base to the Hagana. He also permitted it to buy and install a powerful wireless station at Avriel’s office in Prague to coordinate future air and sea bridge activities related to Palestine. [38]
The following month, Avriel began buying Czech planes. The first ten were the Czech Avia-S-199s, a version of the Messerschmidt BF 109 G, which had beenproduced during WWII. To smuggle the planes to Palestine, however, required that they be disassembled at Zatec, with their parts flown on smaller DC4s to Palestine for the next twenty-nine Balak flights. The pilots chosen were foreign volunteers to the Hagana (or Mahal as they were known). With each plane, Reicin also sent a small team of Czech technicians and mechanics to help reassemble the planes.
On May 5, as the deadline for British Mandate for Palestine’s expiration was approaching, a group of eight Israeli pilots were sent to Ceska Budejovice military airport for retraining. Among them was Ezer Weizman, a future Israeli air force commander, minister of defense, and president.[39] On May 14, 1948, Ben-Gurion proclaimed the establishment of the state of Israel in accordance with the November 1947 U.N. partition resolution. President Truman recognized the new state immediately, later saying it was “the proudest moment of my life.” Yet neither the United States nor the other Western nations who had voted Israel into existence responded to its urgent request for weapons. On the contrary, a new British-initiated U.N. resolution on May 29 continued to ban arms to all sides including the new State of Israel.[40]
On May 21, however, the first Czech Avia S 199s arrived in Israel, and more followed. The planes were reassembled and upgraded in time for the newly-trained Israeli pilots to bomb Egyptian armored columns some thirty miles from Tel Aviv. As Ben-Gurion and Meyerson recognized, the Czech weapons had again proved critical to Israel.
The Czechs expanded their cooperative military program for Israel into a much larger Operation DI (in Czech “Duverne [Confidential] Israel”). Selling 84 planes in the next several months, as well as heavy and light machine guns, rifles, and ammunition, Czechoslovakia now became the only country to train more than 200 volunteer pilots for Israel, along with 60 air mechanics, 43 paratroopers, and 43 tank, infantry and artillery specialists. A “Gottwald Brigade” of 1,200 Jewish volunteers was also trained, led by a Czech hero of World War II, Gen. Antonin Sochor, and administered by Reicin’s aide Vilem Kahan. It included 281 women and a few Orthodox rabbis. [41]Militarily insignificant, it nevertheless became a symbol of the close and unique defense cooperation between the two small states.
On July 15, 1948, a group of American citizens, including both Christians and Jews, illegally flew three B-17 fortress bombers to Zatec. Loading up with Czech bombs, they staged a surprise attack on King Farouk’s Cairo palace and on Gaza and El Arish. Angry U.S. and British diplomats had had enough. In coordinated actions with Egypt, they finally forced the Czechs to close Zatec. Yet, they could not stop their sales of British Spitfires to Israel from a secret military base in Moravia Kunovice, helping the nascent Jewish state win its war for independence.
Conclusion
It is a testament to Masaryk’s political and diplomatic acumen that he managed to overcome not only Stalin’s innate anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist sentiments but also the concerted opposition of the British government, which went out of its way to prevent the creation of a Jewish state, and the no less spirited efforts of U.S. diplomats, who sought to undermine President Truman’s support for Jewish statehood. [42] No less importantly, he managed to win over his communist partners to the evenly divided coalition government—first and foremost Prime Minister Gottwald—for his exertions on behalf of the Jewish national liberation struggle. So much so that this support was sustained, and even expanded, after the communist takeover of late February 1948 and Masaryk’s tragic death shortly afterwards.
Masaryk’s own words are his best epitaph:
To make a Jewish state, this is one of the greatest political ideas of our times. It is such a great thing that people are missing the imagination to understand it. Even many Jews. But for me, not. I believe in it. I am a Zionist. [43]
Jiri Valenta, the author of Soviet Intervention in Czechoslovakia, 1968 (Johns Hopkins, 1991), is president of the Institute of Post-Communist Studies and Terrorism and a non-resident senior research associate with the BESA Center for Strategic Studies, Bar Ilan University. Leni Friedman Valenta is author and co-author of articles that have appeared in The National Interest, Aspen Review, Middle East Quarterly, Miami Herald, and others.
Notes
United Nations General Assembly, res. 181, Nov. 29, 1947.
Clark Clifford, with Richard Holbrooke, Counsel to the President: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1991), p. 116.
Viktor Fischl, Hovory S Janem Masarykem (Prague: Garamond, 2017), pp. 92-3.
Robert H. Bruce Lockhart, Jan Masaryk: A Personal Memoir (London: Putnam, 1956), pp. 9, 12.
Ibid., pp. 13-15.
Ivan Maisky, The Maisky Diaries. Red Ambassador to the Court of St. James, 1932-42 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), pp. 143-4.
Lockhart, Jan Masaryk, p. 40.
Arnold Krammer, The Forgotten Friendship. Israel and the Soviet Bloc, 1947-53 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1974), p. 67.
Tad Szulc, The Secret Alliance: The Extraordinary Story of the Rescue of the Jews since World War II (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), pp. 127, 129.
Marie Bulinova, Jiri Dufek, Karel Kaplan, Vladimir Slosar, eds., Ceskoslovensko a Izrael, 1945-56 (Prague: Institute for Contemporary History, 1993), doc. 11, p. 61.
Ibid.
“Discussion of the report of the First Committee on the establishment of a special committee on Palestine,” United Nations, Seventy-seventh Plenary Meeting, General Assembly Hall, Flushing Meadow, N.Y., May 14, 1947, docs. A/307 and A/307/Corr. 1.
Maisky, The Maisky Diaries, p. 54.
Albert Resis, ed., Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Politics. Conversations with Felix Chuev (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1993), pp. 65-6.
Ibid., p. 74; Geoffrey Roberts, Molotov, Stalin’s Cold Warrior (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2012), pp. 94-5.
Pavel and Anatoli Sudoplatov, Special Tasks: The Memoirs of a Soviet Spymaster (New York: Little Brown and Co., 1995), p. 317.
Bulinova et al., Ceskoslovensko a Izrael, 1945-56, doc. 11, pp. 61-2; Szulc, The Secret Alliance, pp. 153-5.
Szulc, The Secret Alliance, pp. 155-6.
Ibid., p. 157.
Lawrence Steinhardt, “The Ambassador in Czechoslovakia (Steinhardt) to the Secretary of State,” no. 309, Prague, Apr. 30, 1948, in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1948 Eastern Europe; The Soviet Union, vol. IV.
Lockhart, Jan Masaryk, p. 66.
Bulinova et al., Ceskoslovensko a Izrael, 1945-1956, docs. 18, 21, pp. 65-6.
Francine Klagsbrun, Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel (New York: Schocken Books, 2017), pp. 306-7.
Bulinova et al., Ceskoslovensko a Izrael, 1945-56, p. 123.
Moshe Yegar, Ceskoslovensko, Sionismus, Izrael, 1945-56 (Prague: Victoria Publishing and East Publishing, 1997), pp. 88, 90.
Ibid., p. 88.
Jiri Solc, Uteky a Navraty, Bohumil Lausman a Osud ceskeho Politka (Prague: Nase vojsko, 2008), pp. 168-9.
Sudoplatov, Special Tasks, pp. 233-4.
“Police Close Case on 1948 Death of Masaryk – Murder, not Suicide,” Radio Prague, June 1, 2004.
Vaclava Jandeckova, Kauza Jan Masaryk, Novy Pohled (Domažlice: Nakladatelství Českého lesa, 2016), pp. 304, 254, 10; “Book sparks fresh debate over suspicious death of Jan Masaryk,” Radio Praha, Feb. 20, 2016.
Bulinova et al., “Subject: Export of Czechoslovak Weapons Abroad,” based on parliament meeting, Mar. 11,1948, Ceskoslovensko a Izrael, doc. 27, pp. 100-1.
Arnost Heidrich: “Posledni dny Jana Masaryka,” in Karel L. Feierabend, Politicke Vzpominky (Brno: Atlantis, 1996), pp. 473-9
Authors’ interviews with Vilem Kahan, Amsterdam, Oct. 22-23, 1976, and Maj. Bedrich Kopold, Prague, Aug. 15, 1999.
Frantisek Hanzlik, Bez milosti a slitovani (Prague: Bestrode, 2011), p. 158.
Ibid.
Krammer, “Letter to Arnold Krammer from Shimon Ornstein,” p. 84.
Martin Wein, A History of Czechs and Jews: A Slavic Jerusalem (London: Routledge, 2015), pp. 151-2.
Authors’ interview with Vilem Kahan, Amsterdam, Oct. 22-23, 1976.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA, New York), Jan. 11, 1996.
Wein, A History of Czechs and Jews, p. 150.
Authors’ interviews with colonels Peter Uruba and Milan Maly, Ceske Budejovice Airport, Czech Republic, Aug. 10, 1999; authors’ interview with Polish-born Capt. Bernard Menachovsky, Prague, Aug. 7, 1999.
Jan Garrigue Masaryk (14 September 1886 – 10 March 1948) was a Czech diplomat and politician who served as the Foreign Minister of Czechoslovakia from 1940 to 1948. American journalist John Gunther described Masaryk as “a brave, honest, turbulent, and impulsive man”.[1]
Early life
Born in Prague, he was the son of professor and politician Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (who became the first president of Czechoslovakia in 1918) and Charlotte Garrigue, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk’s American wife. Masaryk was educated in Prague and also in the United States, where he lived for a time as a drifter before finding employment as a steelworker.[2] Because of his youth in the United States, Masaryk always spoke both Czech and English with a strong American accent.[3] He returned home in 1913 and served in the Austro-Hungarian Army during the First World War.[4] Masaryk served in Galicia and learned Polish during his wartime career.[5] The fact that his father was in exile, working for Czech independence from the Austrian empire, made him the subject of bullying and hazing during his military service as the son of a “traitor”.[6] His unhappy military service made him unwilling to speak very much of his time as a soldier after the war as it held too many painful memories.[6]
He then joined the diplomatic service and became chargé d’affaires to the US in 1919 and then as counselor to the legation in London.[5] In 1922, he became secretary to the Czechoslovak foreign minister Edvard Beneš.[5] In 1925, he was made minister-plenipotentiary to Britain.[7] The British scholar Robert Powell described Masaryk as “the most unconventional of diplomats. None was less tied to protocol. Witty, shrewd, with an abundance of common sense, he often triumphed over circumstances, which baffled others more intellectually cleverer, but lacking his psychological insight… He could be disconcertingly direct in his conversation and he considerably embarrassed certain types of English people. His manner was American rather than English, his racy language often shocking to people who had not the wit or patience to look beyond the actual expressions used.”[5] By contrast, the Czech historian Zbyněk Zeman and the German historian Rainer Karlsch described Masaryk as a weak man who drifted during his time in the United States, was psychologically unstable, and needed someone to guide him through life.[8] His father resigned as president in 1935 and died two years later. He was succeeded by Edvard Beneš. Masaryk had been dominated by his father, and afterward by Beneš, who played the role of a surrogate father.[9]
Minister-plenipotentiary in London
Right from his arrival in London, Masaryk in his reports to Prague warned that many officials in the United Kingdom’s Foreign Office were in the grip of nostalgia for the Austrian empire, haunted by what he called the “ghost of the Habsburg empire”.[10] Masaryk expressed concern that many in the Foreign Office were openly hostile towards Czechoslovakia and considered the nation a mistake that should never have been allowed to happen.[10]
On 21 June 1927, under the influence of his Hungarian mistress, Princess Stephanie von Hohenlohe, the British press baron Lord Rothermere published a leader (editorial) in The Daily Mail newspaper calling for Hungary to regain lands lost under the Treaty of Trianon.[11] Rothermere deemed it unjust that Hungary—a nation dominated by what he admiringly called a “chivalrous and warlike aristocracy”—should have its borders truncated and that Magyars should be placed under the rule of the peoples of Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, whom Rothermere described as “cruder and more barbaric races”.[11] Through primarily concerned about what he called “justice for Hungary”, Rothermere also argued that the Sudetenland should go to Germany.[11] Rothermere’s leader caused much worry in Prague and Beneš rushed to London to inquire if Rothermere was acting on behalf of the British government.[11]
To counter the pro-Hungarian articles in The Daily Mail, the hostility of the Foreign Office, and the indifference of the British people to Czechoslovakia, Masaryk had money given to British journalists who wrote pro-Czechoslovak articles to make these articles widely available in a bid to influence British public opinion.[12] The two most important British intellectuals whom Masaryk supported were the journalist Wickham Steed and the historian Robert Seton-Watson, both of whom were staunch supporters of Czechoslovakia and longtime friends of his father, President Masaryk.[13] Masaryk provided the funds to make the writings of Steed and Seton-Watson available to the widest possible audience.[13] The faculty and students at the School of East European and Slavonic Studies at King’s College London tended to be very sympathetic towards Czechoslovakia, which was seen as a model democracy, and Masaryk often provided the funds to publicise their work.[12] In 1930, when Steed’s journal The Review of Reviews went bankrupt, Masaryk granted him enough money to keep his journal afloat.[14] As part of his cultural diplomacy, Masaryk sometimes worked with Yugoslav diplomats to provide the money for journalists willing to challenge the pro-Hungarian slant of The Daily Mail, which was just as alarming to Belgrade as it was to Prague.[12]
When Joachim von Ribbentrop arrived in London in October 1936 as the new German ambassador to the Court of St. James, he sent out invitations to the other ambassadors to attend a ball to introduce himself as was the normal practice at the time.[15] Instead of using French (the language of diplomacy) in his invitations, which was the standard protocol, Ribbentrop insisted on using German as way to show the superiority of Germany.[15] Masaryk responded to this gross violation of diplomatic protocol by giving his reply to Ribbentrop’s letter in Czech, instead of German as Ribbentrop had expected. The other ambassadors did likewise with the Japanese ambassador responding in Japanese and the Turkish ambassador responding in Turkish, which caused chaos at the German embassy as nobody was certain who was attending the ball, as the German embassy lacked people able to translate the various replies.[15] During the Abdication crisis, Masaryk was hostile to the new king Edward VIII, whom he described as a Nazi sympathizer, writing in a dispatch to Prague that the king “felt closer to fascism and Nazism than democracy, which he found slow and boring.”[16] Masaryk was equally hostile towards the king’s mistress, Mrs. Wallis Simpson, whom he reported has stated she felt at home in Vienna and Budapest while loathing Prague.[16] When Edward abdicated to marry Mrs. Simpson, Masaryk was relieved, writing that Ribbentrop had “lost in Mrs. Simpson a dangerous ally”.[16]
Unlike Beneš, Masaryk understood that the pro-Hungarian slant of The Daily Mail was caused by the influence on Lord Rothermere of Princess von Hohenlohe, whom Masaryk also knew was the mistress of Fritz Wiedemann, the adjunct to Adolf Hitler.[17] Masaryk described Rothermere as dominated by Hohenlohe, writing that he would do anything to please her.[17] In a dispatch to Prague, Masaryk wrote: “Is there any decency left in the world? A great scandal will erupt one day when the role which Steffi von Hohenlohe, née Richter, played during the visit of Wiedemann is revealed. This world-famous secret agent, spy, and swindler, who is a full Jewess, constitutes today the centre of Hitler’s propaganda in London. Wiedemann stayed at her place. She keeps Hitler’s photograph on her desk, inscribed “To my dear Princess Hohenlohe-Adolf Hitler”, and next to it a photograph of Horthy, dedicated to the ‘great stateswoman’.” [17]
Starting in 1935, the Sudeten German leader Konrad Henlein had visited London four times between 1935-1938 to give speeches criticising Czechoslovakia. Masaryk realized belatedly that Czechoslovakia was losing the propaganda war as the British media became enamoured of Henlein. In late December 1936 Masaryk gave an address to a group of British MPs to make the case for Czechoslovakia.[16] Much of the address concerned defending the decision by Beneš to sign an alliance with the Soviet Union in 1935, which was unpopular in Britain.[16] Masaryk argued that the alliance was necessary as it brought the Soviet Union around to defending the international order created by the Treaty of Versailles instead of trying to undermine it as had previously been the case.[16] Masaryk concluded: “If we treat Russia as a pariah, it cannot be excluded that Russia and Germany could again get together.”[16] After his speech, Masaryk had an informal question and answer session with the assembled MPs.[16] The two MPs that Masaryk spoke to the most were Sir Austen Chamberlain and Winston Churchill.[16] Churchill warned Masaryk that British public opinion was turning against Czechoslovakia because of the Sudetenland issue, which the German government “would be able to use against us”.[16]
In May 1937, the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, introduced Masaryk to the newly crowned king, George VI.[16] Eden told the king that “the political and economic situation in Czechoslovakia, Sir, is good and firm.”[16] At the same audience, Ribbentrop greeted the king by giving him the Nazi salute, to which the king responded to with a bemused smile.[16] The interaction between Ribbentrop and George left Masaryk uncertain as to whether to regard this as either silly or sinister. Masaryk reported to Prague that it would be unwise to place too much trust in Britain, which regarded Czechoslovakia as a problem in Europe.[16] By 1938, Masaryk was reporting: “The English dislike us intensely. We are a deadweight for them and they curse the day on which we were founded.”[18]
During the Sudetenland crisis in the summer and fall of 1938, Masaryk traveled between London and Prague to meet with Beneš.[5] To resolve the Sudetenland crisis, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain visited Germany to meet Adolf Hitler in his vacation home near Berchtesgaden on 15 September 1938. At the Berchtesgaden summit, it was agreed that the Sudetenland would “go home to the Reich” as Hitler had been demanding ever since the Nazi Party Congress at Nuremberg (Reichsparteitag) on 12 September 1938. In an attempt to sway British public opinion against the policy of the Chamberlain government, Masaryk, together with the Soviet ambassador Ivan Maisky, was in contact with Clement Attlee, the leader of the Labour Party, which was the Official Opposition to the Conservative-dominated National Government.[19] Maisky and Masaryk encouraged Attlee to challenge the government’s policy in the House of Commons.[19] Masaryk was also in contact with Charles Corbin, the French ambassador in London. As a further step, Beneš had a large sum of money transferred to the Czechoslovak legation for Masaryk to spend on winning over British public opinion.[20] Masaryk donated much of the money to Churchill’s group “The Focus”.[20] Unknown to Masaryk, the Forschungsamt (“Research Office”) had broken the Czechoslovak diplomatic codes.[20] Hermann Göring, who was a close friend of Sir Nevile Henderson, the British ambassador to Germany, informed him that Masaryk was donating money to Churchill, information which Henderson in turn passed on to Chamberlain. The British historian Victor Rothwell noted that the revelation that Masaryk was subsidising Chamberlain’s domestic critics such as Churchill made an extremely bad impression on Chamberlain, and that much of the hostility that Chamberlain displayed towards Masaryk was due to this revelation.[20] In a letter to his sister, Chamberlain wrote that Churchill “…is carrying on a regular campaign against me with the aid of Masaryk, the Czech minister. They, of course, are totally unaware of my knowledge of their proceedings”.[21]
Under very strong Anglo-French pressure, President Beneš agreed to the terms of the Berchtesgaden summit on 19 September 1938.[22] However, at the Bad Godesberg summit on 24 September 1938, Hitler rejected the Anglo-French plan for ceding the Sudetenland to Germany, telling Chamberlain that the Sudetenland needed to be annexed to Germany before 1 October 1938 rather than after October 1 as the Anglo-French plan called for. The Bad Godesberg summit pushed Europe to the brink of war. On 25 September 1938, Masaryk arrived at 10 Downing Street to tell Chamberlain that through Beneš had accepted the results of the Berchtesgaden summit, he rejected the German timetable for handing over the Sudetenland put forward at the Bad Godesberg summit.[23] Much to Masaryk’s annoyance, both Chamberlain and the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, seemed more angry at Beneš for not withdrawing Czechoslovak troops from the border forts in the Sudetenland rather than at Hitler, leading Masaryk in a dispatch to Beneš recounting the meeting to call both Chamberlain and Halifax “stupid”.[24] To resolve the crisis on 28 September 1938, it was announced that an emergency summit would be held in Munich the next day to be attended by Hitler, Chamberlain, Benito Mussolini, and Édouard Daladier. To Masaryk’s fury, the Munich conference was a return to the congress diplomacy of the 19th century where the leaders of the great powers would meet to decide the fate of Europe with no involvement from the small powers.[25] Halifax told Masaryk that Vojtěch Mastný, the Czechoslovak minister-plenipotentiary in Berlin, would be allowed to attend the Munich conference only as an “observer” for “information only” with no power to be actually involved in the conference.[25]
The resulting Munich Agreement of 30 September 1938 put an end to the crisis. The Munich Agreement was actually a compromise as Hitler dropped the demand to have the Sudetenland before 1 October 1938, but it was agreed that the Sudetenland would go to Germany in stages over the course of October 1938. When the terms of the Munich Agreement were announced, Masaryk was at the Soviet embassy in London and clinging to the arm of the Soviet ambassador, Ivan Maisky, Masaryk broke down in tears while muttering “they sold us into slavery to the Germans”.[26] Without the natural defensive barrier posed by the mountains of the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia was defenseless against Germany, and the new Czechoslovak president Emil Hácha therefore promptly performed a volte-face in foreign policy. A sign of the new foreign policy came with the order that the staff of the legation in London should remove all the portraits of President Beneš and President Masaryk from the walls.[27] After the Munich conference, Masaryk met with Chamberlain and Halifax at 10 Downing Street where he stated: “If you have sacrificed my nation for the sake of peace, I will be the first to applaud you. But if not, gentlemen, then God help your souls.”[28] On 1 October 1938, Churchill telephoned Masaryk to tell him that Beneš should delay handing over the border forts in the Sudetenland for the next 48 hours, because he was convinced that “a great reaction against the betrayal committed on us” would occur within the 48 hours that would topple the Chamberlain government and presumably install Churchill as prime minister.[29] Masaryk did not believe this and advised Beneš to disregard Churchill’s advice, warning that Churchill was reckless and that – however much he hoped that Chamberlain’s government might fall because of the Munich Agreement – he did not believe that this was very likely.[29] Neither Churchill nor Masaryk knew that their phones had been tapped by MI5 and that the conversation recording Churchill’s attempt to sabotage the Munich Agreement was passed on to Chamberlain, who was not impressed.[29]
In October 1938, the Sudetenland was occupied by Germany and Masaryk resigned as ambassador in protest, although he remained in London. Other government members (including Beneš) also resigned. In his last dispatch to Prague on 5 December 1938, Masaryk reported that the British now regarded Czecho-Slovakia (as the country had been renamed) as a German satellite state.[30] In the letter announcing his resignation as minister on 30 December 1938, Masaryk wrote of the “prophylactic measures towards establishing permanent peace in Europe” where “my country was subjected to surgical appeasement with unprecedented vigor and not the slightest trace of anesthetic.”[5] Masaryk then left Britain to visit the United States, where he gave speeches criticizing appeasement.[5] In a speech in January 1939, he argued that the Munich Agreement would have been justified if it brought about “permanent peace” in Europe, but he argued that it was very unlikely to do so.[5]
On 15 March 1939, Germany occupied the remaining parts of the Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia, and a puppet Slovak state was established in Slovakia. The next day, 16 March 1939, Masaryk went on a radio station in New York, where in a radio address to the American people given in English, he stated: “Can I hope that this last blow to my homeland should dispel all doubts as to the future policy of the masters of central Europe? The rape of Bohemia in all its vulgarity is more than I can describe. Forgive me-“.[5] At that point, Masaryk broke down in tears.[5] Upon regaining his composure, Masaryk stated: “I do not envy those who are perpetuating this horrible drama, either by vandal force or by turning their faces to the wall. They have committed sins against God.”[5] In July 1939, Masaryk returned to London, where he rented a flat in Westminster.[5]
Wartime
During the war he regularly made broadcasts over the BBC to occupied Czechoslovakia starting in September 1939 and ending in April 1945.[31] Masaryk’s speeches on the BBC’s Czech language station made him into a national hero.[3] It was illegal to listen to the BBC in the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia, but that did not stop people from tuning in to the BBC every Wednesday night to hear him speak on a radio program entitled Volá Londýn (London Calling).[32] On 8 September 1939, Masaryk gave his first radio broadcast on the Volá Londýn show, where he called for “a free Czechoslovakia in a free Europe”.[33] During the war, the Volá Londýn radio show was the most popular radio program in Czechoslovakia and Masaryk was the most popular speaker on the show.[33]
In an article published in Central European Observer on 1 February 1940, Masaryk declared his war aims as: “My conviction is that our little country is not going to be saved by any of these grand ‘isms’-neither Fascism nor Bolshevism, Pan-Germanism or Pan-Slavism…I am definitely a Slav, but I hope an European first. I am convinced that the fate of our people cannot be separated from that of other Central European and Danubian peoples, whether they are Slavs or not…Narrow nationalism should disappear…An equal partnership in the cause of an European Risorgimento, a breakaway from isms of every kind. A Free Germany in a Free Europe; and besides her the Czechoslovakia of St. Wenceslas, Hus, Comenius, Palacký, Smetana, Masaryk and Čapek…A Free Czechoslovakia in a Free Europe”.[2]
When a Czechoslovak government-in-exile was established in Britain in July 1940, Masaryk was appointed Foreign Minister.[33] R. H. Bruce Lockhart, who served as the British ambassador to the government-in-exile stated that the appointment of Masaryk as foreign minister was a clear sign that Beneš intended to run foreign policy himself as he noted that Masaryk was unlikely to offer forceful opposition to any policy Beneš pursued.[34] Masaryk 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.[35] Beneš had lived in France for much of his life, and was described as someone who “knew France” well, but in contrast, he found the British to be something of a “mystery”.[36] Masaryk who lived in London for so long often made suggestions to appeal to a British audience.[37] Powell wrote: “An understanding of human psychology was not one of the President’s outstanding achievements, nor was his knowledge of languages. Masaryk made up for these deficiencies”.[37]
Beneš’s main interest as president of a government-in-exile was to have the British agree to abrogate the Munich Agreement and accept that after the war the Sudetenland was to become part of Czechoslovakia again. The British were initially opposed to this war aim. Their position until August 1942 was that the Munich Agreement was still in effect and that the Sudetenland was therefore legally part of Germany.[38] This unwillingness to renounce the Munich Agreement was primarily due to the desire to keep British options open should Hitler be overthrown and a peace treaty signed with a new German government.[39] In their talks with various emissaries from the German resistance such as Adam von Trott zu Solz and Ulrich von Hassell in 1939-1940, the British representatives (namely John Wheeler-Bennett in the case of Trott and James Lonsdale-Bryans in the case of Hassell) were told quite firmly that there was absolutely no possibility of a post-Hitler government returning the Sudetenland to Czechoslovakia because both Trott and Hassell were adamant that the Sudetenland was going to stay a part of the Reich forever.[40] The picture that Trott and Hassell painted to their British interlocutors was one where the majority of the Wehrmacht generals were desperate to overthrow Hitler and were only being held back by the unwillingness of Britain to make “honorable peace” terms.[40] The “honorable peace” that Trott and Hassell wanted was one where Germany would keep not only the Sudetenland, but also Austria, the Memelland, Danzig, Upper Silesia and the Polish Corridor as well the return of the former German colonies in Africa.[40] From the viewpoint of decision-makers in the Chamberlain government (and also for a time the Churchill government), the offer of making a “honorable peace” in exchange for having the Wehrmacht generals stage a coup d’etat that would overthrow Hitler and avoid another long, bloody “total war” against Germany was very tempting.[40] For this reason, H.M. government often hinted in the early years of the war that it was prepared to offer the “honorable peace” that the Wehrmacht generals were said to crave, and tended to cold-shoulder the Czechoslovak government-in-exile with its insistent demands that the Sudetenland being returned to Czechoslovakia.[39] Masaryk found both Lord Halifax and his successor as Foreign Secretary, Eden, very evasive when came to the question of the Sudetenland.[39] The standard reply that both Halifax and Eden gave him from 1940 to 1942 was that the question of the Sudetenland could only be discussed at the peace conference expected after the war and could not be discussed at present while the war was still going on.[39] Churchill did not initially seek the destruction of Germany as a great power as a war aim, but instead envisioned a peace where Hitler would be overthrown and the Reich would continue as one of Europe’s great powers.[41] In a memo to Chamberlain written on 8 October 1939 while he was serving as the First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill advocated a negotiated peace with a post-Hitler government that would ensure “a free, peaceful, and a prosperous Europe in which Germany, as one of its greatest nations, should play a leading and a honored part”.[41] In the same memo, Churchill called for the restoration of Czechoslovak and Polish independence, but stated that the future frontiers of Poland and Czechoslovakia would be determined when Britain negotiated peace with a post-Hitler government, a statement that implied that the Reich might be allowed to keep some of Hitler’s conquests.[41] As Prime Minister, Churchill made statements in private throughout 1940-1941 similar to those he expressed in his memo of 8 October 1939, saying he expected the war to end with Britain gaining the upper hand to such an extent that the Wehrmacht generals would overthrow Hitler rather than risk the destruction of the Reich and the war would end with a negotiated peace similar to the way that the First World War had ended.[42] It was only in January 1943 that Churchil adhered to the “unconditional surrender” formula promoted by the U.S President Franklin D. Roosevelt which stated the Allies would not negotiate any sort of peace with Germany and would only accept unconditional surrender.[43]
The fact that Britain had offered “provisional” recognition to the Czechoslovak government-in-exile while extending full recognition to the governments-in-exile of other states such as Poland and Belgium was a further source of tension.[44] On 12 June 1941, Eden, who was again serving as Foreign Secretary, told Masaryk that Britain could not extend full recognition to Czechoslovakia because the Dominions were all opposed.[44] Eden noted that the Dominion prime ministers all felt that the Treaty of Versailles was too harsh towards Germany and were opposed to having the Sudetenland being returned to Czechoslovakia after the war. The Dominions were playing an important role in sustaining the British war effort. Of the divisions in the British 8th Army in North Africa, three were Australian, two were South African and one was New Zealander. Lockhart wrote in his diary that “Jan is depressed” after his meeting with Eden.[44] Lockhart tried to explain to Masaryk that the Dominions were dubious about the idea of restoring Czechoslovakia in general and favored some sort of Central European federation after the war, leading to Masaryk to snap in fury that he believed in Czechoslovakia and that anything less than its restoration would be a betrayal.[44] Masaryk with much sarcasm told Lockhart that according to British policy all of the Czechoslovak pilots killed in the Battle of Britain should be regarded as “provisionally dead”.[44]
With the launch of Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941, Beneš had unlimited faith in the potential of the Soviet Union, believing that Germany would be defeated by the spring of 1942 at the latest.[45] Masaryk told the other cabinet members: “he [Beneš] now only has Russia on his mind. We must hold him, so that he won’t fly off to the sky”.[45] In 1942, Masaryk received an LL.D. from Bates College.[46] In a letter to Eden on 25 August 1941, Masaryk expressed much concern that the Atlantic Charter would mean that the Sudetenland would remain a part of Germany.[47] Masaryk argued to Eden that Czechoslovakia and Germany’s other neighbors needed a situation after the war that “would enable them to defend peace for themselves and for the world against any future attempts by aggression by Germany”; and that this in turn required a defendable frontier (i.e. returning the Sudetenland to Czechoslovakia).[47] The Foreign Office regarded Masaryk as foreign minister as more reasonable than Beneš, who was viewed as obstinate on the Sudetenland issue.[48] On 29 September 1941, Baron Konstantin von Neurath was replaced as the Reichsprotektor of Bohemia-Moravia by SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich. Masaryk in a broadcast on the Volá Londýn show urged his listeners not to provoke Heydrich and starkly stated “I find it hard to wish you goodnight tonight” as he predicated that Heydrich’s appointment was a sign that German policy towards the Czechs was now moving in a much hasher direction.[49] After Heydrich’s appointment, Masaryks’s speeches on the Volá Londýn show took a significantly more anti-German tone, and much like Beneš he ceased to draw a distinction between the “good” Sudeten Germans loyal to Czechoslovakia vs. the “bad” Sudeten Germans who were not.[50] In a radio broadcast in September 1941, Masaryk stated aggression against the Czechs was a national characteristic of the Germans and argued the current German occupation was merely a continuation of past policies, linking the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia to the Austrian Empire, the Thirty Years War, the Hussite Wars, and the medieval German colonisation of Bohemia.[50] Masaryk ended his speech by saying “the entire German population has been overtaken by that animalistically egoistical Prusso-Nazi mentality”.[50] Much of the increased anti-German tone along with suggestions of collective guilt for the Sudeten Germans by the government-in-exile in London was driven by the resistance groups in the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia who disliked Beneš’s early wartime speeches.[51] In one such speech in November 1939 Beneš praised the “wise and progressive Germans amongst us” who “stood united with us against Nazism”, a statement that suggested at least some of the Sudeten Germans who were also victims of Nazism.[51] Beneš received messages from resistance groups that his speeches were out of touch with Czech opinion and that ordinary Czechs “will tear you to pieces” if he continued with his distinction between the “good” Sudeten Germans vs. the “bad” Sudeten Germans.[51]
Masaryk’s case for the return of the Sudetenland was helped in 1942 by the reprisals undertaken by the Nazi regime following the assassination in Prague of Reinhard Heydrich, the acting Reichsprotektor of Bohemia-Moravia, by Czechoslovak agents of the Special Operations Executive.[52] British officials did not seem to be especially moved by the reprisals, but the atrocities had been give much publicity and it was argued that Britain now owned a “psychological debt” to Beneš, whose people had suffered greatly at the hands of the Nazi regime.[52] As late as 29 July 1942, Churchill advocated in a memo to the Deputy Prime Minister Clement Attlee a policy of wining the war via strategic bombing as he argued if Bomber Command just dropped enough bombs on German cities, the Wehrmacht generals would have to overthrow Hitler and negotiate peace.[53] Churchill based this hope upon the way that the First World War had ended with the German generals forcing Kaiser Wilhelm II to abdicate in November 1918 rather than risk the destruction of the Reich as a great power. Churchill argued to Attlee that he did not think the British Army nor the US Army could face the Wehrmacht on equal terms at present and that strategic bombing was Britain’s best hope of victory.[53] However, in the same memo, Churchill stated that he embarked in 1940 upon a policy of strategic bombing as a way to induce the overthrow of Hitler because it was the only way that he could envision winning the war at the time, but now the United Kingdom had the Soviet Union and the United States as allies, he felt that Britain could seek harsher peace terms than those he envisioned seeking in 1940.[53] Churchill argued with the Soviets and the Americans as allies, it was inevitable that the Allies would win the war.[53] He argued to Attlee that he still saw strategic bombing and a negotiated peace as the best way to end the war for economic reasons, namely that nearly three years of war had seriously damaged the British economy and an all-out struggle to destroy Germany as a great power would leave a victorious Britain so weakened that it would be a lesser power compared to the United States and the Soviet Union.[53] Churchill added with an Allied victory inevitable, he wanted peace terms that would ensure the “future security” of all of Germany’s neighbors.[53] On 5 August 1942, Eden gave a statement to the House of Commons abrogating the Munich Agreement and declared that the British government now legally recognised the Sudetenland as part of Czechoslovakia.[54] Both Beneš and Masaryk were present in the visitor’s gallery of the House of Commons to cheer on Eden’s statement, which Beneš saw as a personal triumph that would finally guarantee the return of the Sudetenland to Czechoslovakia after Germany’s defeat.[55] On 29 September 1942, General Charles de Gaulle, the leader of the Free French forces, gave Masaryk a letter stating that France had now considered the Munich Agreement “null and void” and as such gave his support for the return of the Sudetenland to Czechoslovakia.
Masaryk supported Beneš’s plans to expel all of the Sudeten Germans after the return of the Sudetenland.[56] In a speech in December 1942, he advocated a collective guilt thesis for the Germans, saying that “not only the Nazis but the whole German nation” would be punished for everything that had done to the Czechs since 1938.[50] In a 1943 speech in London, he declared that the vast majority of the Sudeten Germans had welcomed Germany annexing the Sudetenland in 1938 and warned there would be a “reckoning” with them after “liberation”.[57] Masaryk stated that the Sudeten Germans had no right to live in the Sudetenland as their ancestors had all arrived as “settlers” in the Middle Ages on what was Czech land and stated it had been a mistake after the “first liberation” in 1918 not to seek “retribution” against them, saying after the “second liberation”, there would be “retribution” against the Sudeten Germans.[58] Masaryk ended his speech by saying the “minority problem will be settled radically and with finality” by expelling all of the Sudeten Germans into Germany and replacing them with Czechs.[58] Like almost all Czechs, Masaryk had been greatly embittered by the way that the Sudeten Germans had behaved in 1938, and he shared Beneš’s viewpoint that there was no place for the Sudeten Germans in a restored Czechoslovakia.[58]
In June 1943, Masaryk spoke with Philip Nichols of the Foreign Office and expressed much doubt about a proposed treaty to create a military alliance between Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union that was being energetically championed by Zdeněk Fierlinger, the Czechoslovak ambassador in Moscow.[9] Masaryk did not oppose the proposed treaty outright but hinted to Nichols that his preference was for Czechoslovakia to move closer to Poland than to the Soviet Union after the war.[9] In a 1943 speech on the Volá Londýn radio show to celebrate the Jewish new year, Masaryk urged people in the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia to assist the Jewish community, saying it was incumbent to extend a helping hand to the “most wretched of the wretched” as he called the Jews of the protectorate, and saying that he wanted ordinary Czechs to be able to say after the war that “we remained decent people”.[59] Masaryk was a supporter of Zionism and a friend of Dr. Chaim Weizmann.[59]
Between 17 October 1943 and 10 February 1944, Masaryk went on a lengthy speaking tour of the United States, which removed him from the meetings of the Czechoslovak cabinet.[9] In December 1943, Beneš went to Moscow to sign a treaty creating a 25-year military alliance between Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union.[9] Upon his return to London, Masaryk was forced to accept the fait accompli.[9] In a radio speech on 16 February 1944, Masaryk stated that the Soviet-Czechoslovak alliance “was approved of in America”, though “there were a few reactionaries who hide their own selfish interests behind the pretense of the fear of Bolshevism”.[9] Masaryk added that “we should get used to calling it the Soviet empire. Because it will be the Soviet empire which will play the most important role on the continent”.[9]
In an unauthorised act, Fierlinger in July 1944 sent out a public telegram to Edward Osóbka-Morawski, celebrating the entry of the Polish People’s Army onto Polish soil. This led Beneš to rebuke Fierlinger for an act that implied support for the Soviet puppet Lublin government.[60] Masaryk wanted to fire Fierlinger for that letter, complaining that he was no longer representing Czechoslovakia in Moscow in any meaningful sense of the term.[60] On 28 July 1944, the entire Czechoslovak cabinet recommended to Beneš that he sack Fierlinger as ambassador in Moscow and appoint a new ambassador who would represent the interests of the government-in-exile instead of the Soviet Union, but Beneš refused to accept this recommendation.[60]
In April 1945, Beneš and Masaryk travelled to Moscow to meet Stalin, where it was agreed that Czechoslovakia’s foreign policy would be aligned with the Soviet Union, but that Czechoslovakia would retain its independence and democracy.[37]
After the war
Masaryk remained Foreign Minister following the liberation of Czechoslovakia as part of the multi-party, communist-dominated National Front government.[61] The Communists under Klement Gottwald saw their position strengthened after the 1946 elections, but Masaryk stayed on as Foreign Minister.[61][62] He was concerned with retaining the friendship of the Soviet Union, but was dismayed by the Soviet veto on Czechoslovak participation in the Marshall Plan.[61][62]
Czechoslovakia sold arms to Israel during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. The deliveries from Czechoslovakia proved important for the establishment of Israel. Masaryk personally signed the first contract on 14 January 1948.[63] Masaryk was viewed as the most sympathetic to the Jews of members of the postwar government, so was given the task of “appeasing Jewish organisations in the west” in terms of the government’s plans to expel the country’s German population, including German-speaking Jews.[64]
In February 1948, the majority of the non-communist cabinet members resigned, hoping to force new elections. Instead, a communist government under Gottwald was formed in what became known as the Czech coup (“Victorious February” in the Eastern Bloc).[61][62] Masaryk met the visiting Soviet deputy foreign minister, Zorin, who told him that he hoped that he would become a member of the “new government”. This confused Masaryk because the current government had not fallen.[65] Zorin told him that “Gottwald is our only guarantee. The government must be cleaned up. We are determined to build a new one, which is more friendly to us and we shall support Gottwald”.[65] Masaryk remained Foreign Minister and was the only prominent minister in the new government who was neither a Communist nor a fellow traveller.[62] On 27 February 1948, Bob Dixon, the British ambassador in Prague, reported to London: “Masaryk was pathetic and at one point broke down (or put on an act of breaking down). He was of course looking for sympathy and said that by staying in the Govt. he hoped he might be able to help a little; he had saved about 50 people from being purged by doing so; & finally Benes had asked him to stay. But I fear that the predominant consideration was his personal safety: he admitted that he would have been arrested at once if he had resigned and said that he did not hanker after a martyr’s crown”.[66] Dixon grimly reported: “My guess is that he will not be with us long.”[67]
Masaryk served as the President of the World Federation of United Nations Associations. A memorial to his memory and his presidency of the Organisation is located in Geneva, Switzerland.
Death
On 10 March 1948, Masaryk was found dead, dressed only in his pajamas, in the courtyard of the Foreign Ministry (the Černín Palace in Prague) below his bathroom window.[68] Jan Masaryk’s remains were buried next to his parents in a plot at Lány cemetery, where in 1994 also the ashes of his sister Alice Masaryková were laid to rest.
The Ministry of the Interior claimed that he had committed suicide by jumping out of the window, but it was widely assumed at the time that he had been murdered at the behest of the nascent Communist government.[61][68][69] On the other hand, many of his close associates (e.g. his secretary Antonín Sum, his press assistant Josef Josten, his sister Olga and Viktor Fischl) have always defended the suicide story.[70][71] After Masaryk’s death, Dixon reported to R. H. Bruce Lockhart: “The last time I saw him – Saturday 28 February just after Benes’s capitulation – he was absolutely wretched. I told him I sympathised with his position and he opened his heart to me, even to the extent of saying that he would find a way out soon. I think he was even then contemplating suicide, for there really was no other way out for him, a prisoner in the Czernin Palace. He was suffering the tortures of the damned because he knew that by joining the new government he had betrayed his trust, and though he kidded himself into believing that he could do some good and save some lives, he knew that he had sold his soul to the devil”.[67]
In a second investigation undertaken in 1968 during the Prague Spring, Masaryk’s death was ruled an accident, not excluding a murder[72] and a third investigation in the early 1990s after the Velvet Revolution concluded that it had been a murder.[citation needed] In his 1980 autobiography History and Memory, US Ambassador Charles W. Yost, a friend of Masaryk who worked with him in Prague in 1947, and also a friend of Masaryk’s fiancée Marcia Davenport, wrote, “The Communists used him and, when his usefulness was past, flung him out of a window to his death.”[73]
Discussions about the mysterious circumstances of his death continued for some time.[68] Those who believe that Masaryk was murdered called it the Third (or Fourth) 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 Masaryková — 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”.[74][75] However, a Prague police report in 2004 concluded after forensic research that Masaryk had indeed been thrown out of the window to his death.[76] This report was seemingly corroborated in 2006 when a Russian journalist claimed that his mother knew the Russian intelligence officer who threw Masaryk out of the window of the west bathroom of Masaryk’s flat.[77][78]
The highest-ranking Soviet Bloc intelligence defector, Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, claimed he had a conversation with Nicolae Ceauşescu, who told him about “ten international leaders the Kremlin killed or tried to kill”. Jan Masaryk was one of them.[79]
Czech historian Václava Jandečková has tentatively suggested in her 2015 monograph “Kauza Jan Masaryk: Nový pohled”[80] (The Jan Masaryk Case: A New Perspective) that Masaryk might have been murdered by Jan Bydžovský and František Fryč, who believed they were working for the British intelligence service SIS but most probably fell victim to NKVD agents. Bydžovský confessed to murdering Masaryk when interrogated in prison by the Czech secret police StB in the 1950s (in an unrelated case); but later denied it. Jandečková argues that this confession cannot be so easily dismissed as has been believed, especially because Bydžovský was certainly not hallucinating or drugged, but also because the interrogators seem to have been surprised by his confession (at his trial, the Masaryk murder was not “used” or even mentioned, although a separate re-investigation by the StB continued for more than a year).[citation needed]
A new investigation that opened in 2019 included a new expert opinion regarding the mechanics of the fall, and an old tape by the policeman who was among the first at the crime scene, testifying that the body had already been moved by the time he arrived. The investigation closed in 2021, with murder, accident or suicide all considered possible.[81]
According to Czech press, newly released archival documents from Britain, France, and the United States have prompted the Czech authorities to reopen the investigation into Masaryk’s death. The recent discoveries of about 150 pages of diplomatic dispatches, reports and analyses suggest inconsistencies in the original narrative. Notably, one document indicates that, on the evening before his death, Masaryk’s valet, Bohumil Příhoda, served coffee to three unidentified men – contradicting prior statements that no visitors were present. During this encounter, Masaryk was reportedly heard exclaiming, “I will do everything for you, but I will never sign this — only over my dead body.” These revelations led the Czech Police’s Office for Documentation and Investigation of Crimes of Communism to reopen the case in January 2025, aiming to reassess the circumstances surrounding Masaryk’s death.[82][83][84]
Private life
From 1924 until their divorce in 1931, Masaryk was married to Frances Crane Leatherbee (1887–1954). An heiress to the Crane piping, valves and elevator fortune, and the former wife of Robert Leatherbee, she was a daughter of Charles R. Crane, a U.S. minister to China; and a sister of Richard Teller Crane II, a U.S. ambassador to Czechoslovakia. By that marriage, Masaryk had three stepchildren: Charles Leatherbee, Robert Leatherbee Jr., and Richard Crane Leatherbee.[85] 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 (1910–1972), younger sister of Joshua Logan, who became one of the co-directors of the University Players in 1931.[86]
In 1945 the exile Masaryk became close to the American writer Marcia Davenport, whom he felt had a strong affinity to Czechs and to the city of Prague, depicted in several of her books. Davenport had in 1944 divorced her husband Russell Davenport and is known to have followed Masaryk to post-war Prague and lived with him there from 1945 to 1948. Following the Communist coup she returned to London, where she and Masaryk planned to be married as soon as he could join her, but only a few days later he was found dead.[87][88]
Masaryk was a skilled amateur pianist. In that capacity, he accompanied Jarmila Novotná in a recital of Czech folk songs issued on 78 RPM records to commemorate the victims of the Nazi eradication of Lidice.[89]
He is reputed to have had an exquisite sense of humour. It is reported that when he was a young Czechoslovak Ambassador to the US, he attended many parties and once the hostess invited him to play the violin. Accepting graciously, he played a Czech nursery song to enthusiastic applause from the audience. Leaving the party with a friend, he was asked why had he been asked to play the violin, to which he replied: “Oh, it’s all very simple– don’t you see? They have mixed me up with my father; they mixed him up with Paderewski. And they mixed the piano up with the violin.”[90] Jan Masaryk was active in many societies, notably an active freemason.[91]
Jan Masaryk Medal
The Honorary Silver Medal of Jan Masaryk (Czech: Stříbrná medaile Jana Masaryka) is awarded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic and is one of the highest awards that can be received by foreign nationals.[92][93]
Clifford, Counsel to the President, pp. 11-15.
Fischl, Hovory S Janem Masarykem, p. 50.
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