Slánský trial

Waldheim Trial in East Germany, 21 June 1950

After World War II, Czechoslovakia initially enjoyed limited democracy. This changed with the February 1948 coup, carried out by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia without the assistance of the Soviet Union.[3] According to literature scholar Peter Steiner, the one-party Communist state had to find or conjure up imaginary enemies from within to justify its continuing existence; this was the motive for show trials.[4] After the 1948 Yugoslav–Soviet split, a number of political trials against alleged Titoite and Western imperialist elements were carried out in Bulgaria, Hungary, and Albania, but these trials were not overtly antisemitic.[5] The anti-cosmopolitan campaign, a thinly disguised antisemitic campaign in the Soviet Union, began in the fall of 1948 and continued until the dictator Joseph Stalin's 1953 death. During this period, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee's leadership was murdered and antisemitic purges spread to other countries in the Eastern Bloc, including East Germany, Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary.[5][6] The Slánský trial was immediately proceeded by the 1949 trial of Hungarian communist László Rajk and his co-defendants, the first show trial victims accused of organizing a "worldwide Zionist conspiracy". Although Rajk was not Jewish, six of the other defendants were. Linking Zionism with Trotskyism and Titoism, as Rajk's prosecutors did, defied logic because both leftist movements were noted for their anti-Zionism.[7]

The trial was orchestrated (and the subsequent terror staged in Czechoslovakia) on the order of Moscow leadership by Soviet advisors, who were invited by Rudolf Slánský and Klement Gottwald, with the help of the Czechoslovak State Security personnel following the László Rajk trial in Budapest in September 1949.[8] Klement Gottwald, president of Czechoslovakia and leader of the Communist Party, feared being purged and decided to sacrifice Slánský, a longtime collaborator and personal friend, who was the second-in-command of the party. The others were picked to convey a clear threat to different groups in the state bureaucracy. A couple of them (Šváb, Reicin) were brutal sadists, conveniently added for a more realistic show.[9]

Those put on trial confessed to all crimes (under duress or after torture) and were sentenced to punishment. Slánský attempted suicide while in prison. The people of Czechoslovakia signed petitions asking for death for the alleged traitors.[9] Apropos of the conspiracy theories of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, prosecutors claimed that a "Zionist-Imperialist" summit had taken place in Washington DC in April 1947 with President Truman, undersecretary of state Dean Acheson, former treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr., David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Sharret in attendance. The prosecution charged that defendants were acting in accordance with a so-called "Morgenthau Plan" (not to be confused with the contemporaneous Morgenthau Plan plan for German heavy industry) to commit espionage and sabotage against Czechoslovakia for the US in exchange for American support for Israel. Czechoslovakia was seen as especially pro-Zionist due to their armament support for Israel during the Palestine War. Ironically, most of the defendants were known to be ardent anti-Zionists.[10]

In November 1952 Slánský and 13 other high-ranking Communist bureaucrats (10 of whom were Jews) were arrested and charged with being Titoists and Zionists. The trial lasted eight days. Many of the defendants admitted their guilt and requested death.[11] On the last day of the trial, Rudolf Slánský, General Secretary of the KSČ, and other leading party members were pronounced guilty. Eleven, including Slánský, were hanged in Prague on 3 December,[12] and three were sentenced to life imprisonment. The state prosecutor at the trial in Prague was Josef Urválek.[9]

Many Czechoslovak citizens were in favor of harsh measures against the supposed traitors. Czech poet Ivan Skála infamously called for "a dog's death for [such] dogs" (Czech: Psovi psí smrt!).[13][14]

Eleven, including Slánský were publicly hanged at Pankrác Prison on December 3, 1952.[11]

Martin Wein noted that although Slánský was not guilty of the charges he was forced to admit, he was guilty of mass murder as a Communist apparatchik. In Wein's opinion, because all of the defendants (except Simone) occupied high positions in the Czechoslovak Communist regime, they had command responsibility for crimes committed by it.[22] Wein further noted that the three reprieved defendants all came from an upper-class background, while all of the middle-class and working-class defendants were executed. He hypothesizes that this was because if an upper-class person was a traitor to the Communist party, he was not a traitor to his class.[23] According to Stephen Norwood, the Slánský trial was the "clearest illustration yet of state-sponsored antisemitism in the Soviet bloc" and "a secularized version of the Spanish Inquisition’s racialized antisemitism", because it insisted on that Jewish origin was an indelible defect which would pass to all descendents (similar to the guilt of Jewish deicide).[24]

Bust of Clementis in Tisovec, Slovakia

The Slánský trial was dramatised in the 1970 film L'Aveu ("The Confession"), directed by Costa-Gavras and starring Yves Montand and Simone Signoret. The film was based on the book of the same name by Artur London, who was a survivor of the trial.[25]

The Slánský trial is a key element of the book Under a Cruel Star. A memoir by Heda Margolius Kovály, the book follows the life of a Jewish woman, starting with her escape from a concentration camp during World War II, up until her departure from Czechoslovakia after the Warsaw Pact countries invasion of 1968. Kovály's husband, Rudolf Margolius, a fellow Holocaust survivor, was one of the 11 men executed during the Slánský trial.[26] More encompassing information is available in the more recent book Hitler, Stalin and I, an interview of Heda Margolius Kovály by Helena Třeštíková published in 2018.[27] Wein was critical of the positive image of Margolius in Kovály's book and in other media (Igor Lukes described him as "a clean man in a filthy time"), which he felt downplayed Margolius' complicity with the Stalinist regime.[28]

The Slánský trial is the subject of the documentary A Trial in Prague, directed by Zuzana Justman (2000, 83 min).[29]

On 22 March 2018, it was announced that insolvency administrators discovered 8.5 hours of original footage from the trial at a factory near Prague. The film was heavily damaged, and restoration is expected to take several years, to be paid for by the Ministry of Culture.[30][31]

• Slánská, Josefa (1969). Report on My Husband. New York: Atheneum.
• Margolius Kovály, Heda (1997). Under A Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941-1968, New York: Holmes & Meier, ISBN 0-8419-1377-3
  Na vlastní kůži, Academia, Praha 2003.
• Margolius Kovály, Heda and Třeštíková, Helena (2018). Hitler, Stalin and I: An Oral History. DoppelHouse Press (Los Angeles). ISBN 978-0-9987770-0-9, ISBN 978-0-9978184-7-5.
• Margolius, Ivan (2006). Reflections of Prague: Journeys through the 20th Century, Chichester: Wiley, ISBN 0-470-02219-1
  Praha za zrcadlem: Putování 20. stoletím, Argo, Praha 2007, ISBN 978-80-7203-947-0.
• London, Artur (1971). The Confession, New York: Ballantine Books, ISBN 0-345-22170-2.
• Blumenthal, Helaine Debra (2012). Fourteen Convicted, Three Million Condemned: The Slansky Affair and the Reconstitution of Jewish Identities After the Holocaust (PhD thesis). University of California, Berkeley.

• Transcripts and original footage of the trials at National Archives of the Czech Republic (in Czech)
• Full transcript in English translation, at Internet Archive