On Wed 10th March 1948

Death of Jan Masryk, Czech politician

Jan Garrigue Masaryk (September 14, 1886 – March 10, 1948) was a Czechoslovak diplomat and politician. Born in Prague, he was a son of professor and politician Tomáš Masaryk who became the first President of Czechoslovakia (1919), and his American wife, Charlotte Garrigue. Masaryk was educated in Prague and also in the USA. 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.

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 58 Westminster Gardens 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.

Masaryk remained Foreign Minister following the liberation of Czechoslovakia as part of the multi-party 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. Masaryk remained Foreign Minister, although he was apparently uncertain about his decision.

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 committed suicide by jumping out of the window, although it is now commonly believed that he was murdered by the ascendant Communists. The 'conclusion' of death by suicide was reaffirmed by an investigation taken in 1968 during Prague Spring and in the early 1990s after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Discussions about 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. 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" (The New York Times, 28 January 1990). However, a Prague police report in 2004 claims that he was indeed murdered.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. At the time of his death, Masayrk was reportedly planning to marry the American writer Marcia Davenport.