Czech Police have reopened the case of the death of former Czechoslovak Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk, who died on 10 March 1948. The police investigation at the time concluded that he had committed suicide, but the Office for Documentation and Investigation of Crimes of Communism, a unit of the Czech Police, now suspects murder.
The reopening of the case follows the receipt of documents from the diplomatic archives of France, the United States and Great Britain, obtained by the Foreign Ministry last August, according to reports from Aktualne.cz at the time.
The police announced the news on their website, stating that: “The aim is to compare this new information with the facts established so far and to reveal any new connections that could provide answers to some long-unanswered questions.”
Masaryk, the first post-war foreign minister of Czechoslovakia, died after falling from the window of his official apartment in Czernin Palace in Prague. What happened in the apartment is the subject of much speculation. Contrary to the contemporary version, for example, an investigation from 2001 to 2003 concluded that Masaryk was most likely assassinated. Despite several investigations, and the attention from dozens of experts, none have been able to completely rule out any of the possibilities: suicide, murder or accident.
The last time prosecutors shelved the case was in March 2021, when the Department of Homicide closed the investigation without reaching a clear conclusion. However, it has now been reopened yet again. “The bureau is investigating the matter as a suspected homicide offence,” said the police. The supervising Municipal Prosecutor’s Office will be informed about the case.
According to the server, Pavel Zacek (ODS), the chairman of the parliamentary security committee, initiated the collection of documents about Masaryk’s death from abroad, and they were requested from Czech embassies in the three countries mentioned by Foreign Minister Jan Lipavsky.
According to Aktualne.cz, one document states that Masaryk had a violent argument with three men on 9 March 1948, the evening before his death, during which he allegedly shouted: “I won’t do this for you. I will sign everything, but not this. I will do everything, but this will only happen over my dead body!” The author of the record relied on the testimony of his unnamed source, to whom Masaryk’s alleged words were related by Bohumil Prihoda, Masaryk’s butler. The record does not specify the identity of the three men with whom Masaryk was arguing, nor does it mention what he refused to sign.
The British Secret Service, in turn, reportedly worked on a theory that Masaryk was injected with a violently poisonous cyanide and then thrown out of a window, the site said.
A secret dispatch from the U.S. embassy in London, written on 5 April 1948, tells another story. It states that Masaryk wrote a letter to a U.S. national living in Prague before his death, saying he would leave Czechoslovakia at the earliest opportunity. “The Communists learned of the message. They visited the woman in question before she could destroy it. Afterwards, several Russian and Czech agents visited Masaryk, whose body subsequently ended up in the courtyard with bruises on his neck,” the dispatch said. The autopsy report makes no mention of the bruises on Masaryk’s neck.
Jan Masaryk (1886-1948) was the son of the first Czechoslovak President T. G. Masaryk, a diplomat and politician. In 1940, during the war, he became Foreign Minister of the London government-in-exile, and after the war he remained in the same position in the governments of both Zdenek Fierlinger and Klement Gottwald as an independent. He did not join the resignation of non-communist ministers in February 1948. After the Communist coup and the collapse of democracy in Czechoslovakia, he hoped to settle in London and start a new life. Instead, he met a tragic end on the night of 10 March 1948.
