Rudolf Margolius
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Rudolf Margolius (born August 31, 1913, Prague, died December 3, 1952, Prague), Deputy Minister of Foreign Trade, Czechoslovakia 1949-1952, co-defendant in the Slansky trial (November 1952)
The 1952 show trial involved the Communist Party General Secretary, Rudolf Slansky, and his thirteen co-defendants. They were arrested, unjustly accused, tried, and executed as western spies. The destruction of the Czech communist leaders by their own colleagues has defied attempts to explain it, and our understanding of the affair remains superficial to this day. One of the people who were thrown into the murderous maelstrom was JUDr Rudolf Margolius. He is unknown to most people, and those who remember him at all automatically connect him with Slansky, a hard-core Stalinist. It is a dismal reflection on our times that Margolius should be either cast into oblivion or forced to exist merely as an appendage of a fictitious conspiracy invented by the communist regime. Stalinist propaganda dealt with the executed victims as if they were a monolith. Sadly, we perceive them in a similar light even today.
In reality, the Slansky group consisted of a large range of personalities. On one side was Slansky, an extremist and one of those who helped usher Czechoslovakia into the Stalinist mold. At the center stood Vladimir Clementis (Minister of Foreign Affairs), a communist and one of the conductors of the February 1948 communist coup, but also a man who had dared to criticize the unforgivable, the Stalin-Hitler Pact. On the other extreme of the scale was Margolius. Unlike others in the Slansky group, he joined the Communist Party late – in December 1945 – and acquired faith in socialism as a result of his experience in Hitler’s death camps.
Rudolf Margolius had much more in common with Milada Horakova, a Czech democratic politician executed by the Communists, than with the Stalinist Slansky. He experienced the First Republic, the war and the after-war period differently than Slansky and other Stalinists.
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[edit] Life
Rudolf Margolius was born in Prague into a patriotic Czech, middle-class milieu. As a law student in the thirties, he devoted much of his time to the YMCA. While Czech communists preferred going to Moscow, Rudolf spent his free time to travel in Western Europe and America. During Czechoslovakia’s crisis with Nazi Germany he was an Army reserve officer serving together with his friend Jan Hanuš. As Europe was inching closer to the abyss, in 1939, he married Heda Margolius Kovaly.
In 1941 he was deported to some of the most terrifying death-camps. He survived, but the experience caused him to doubt that it would make sense to reconstruct the prewar political system, the one that started on the path of democracy in 1918 but collapsed to Nazism twenty years later. This is why Rudolf decided to embrace “socialism”. Like many others at the time, he had no idea what it meant. To him it was an attempt not to blindly imitate what had delivered his Czechoslovakia to Hitler.
Joining the Communist Party was not an easy decision for Rudolf, but he made it for the most honorable reasons: Hitler, Auschwitz, Stalingrad, the red flag in Berlin.
Klement Gottwald and Slansky returned to Prague as leaders of the powerful Communist Party; they moved directly to state-owned villas. Rudolf came home penniless from the concentration camps. His parents were executed by the Nazis and Heda also lost her entire family. As a Deputy Minister, Rudolf dedicated himself entirely to complex economic matters. He excelled at his job, in part because there was no space for ideology. What mattered were results and hard currency for the state. This is why Rudolf felt relatively safe even in late 1949 when the first waves of mass arrests hit government and party officials around him. But life at the top of the new communist regime in Prague was rapidly becoming confusing and dangerous. This was true especially for those in positions of authority. It was one thing for the communists to fight against their domestic opponents or agents dispatched to Czechoslovakia by Western intelligence agencies. But when the Soviet NKVD advisors came to Prague in October 1949, their main targets were the bosses of the communist regime, that is, the very people who had invited them.
The first arrests took place within days after the Soviet advisors arrived. Rudolf refused to panic. He was a problem-solver involved in complicated transactions that kept Czechoslovakia afloat, and the purge victims, so far, were people who had spent the war in the West. But after Slansky’s arrest it became clear to Rudolf and Heda that nobody was safe. In December 1951, a secret service official formally proposed Rudolf’s arrest on the grounds that he was guilty of “anti-state activities and sabotage in the area of foreign trade”.
Rudolf was not arrested because of what he had done. He was arrested because he held the job of Deputy Minister of Foreign Trade, and the secret policemen writing the script of the show-trial needed to cast a character with exactly such a position.
The arrest took place on January 10, 1952. After months of psychological and physical pressure, in November 1952, Rudolf appeared as a tragic figure in the Slansky trial. As had been determined in advance in Moscow and at the Communist Party’s Central Committee, the court sentenced Rudolf and ten others to death, three received life sentences.
[edit] Media
“Czech ‘Martyr’ Honoured, Executed in 1952”
Czechoslovak President Ludvík Svoboda has awarded the Order of the Republic posthumously to Rudolf Margolius, former Deputy Foreign Trade Minister executed in 1952 after the Stalinist Slánský trial. Margolius was accused of being a member of the “anti-party conspiratorial centre,” and was sentenced to death along with former Party Secretary Rudolf Slánský and nine others on November 27, 1952. Slánský and the others were judicially rehabilitated by the Supreme Court in 1963. All had been accused of high treason, espionage and sabotage and organizing a Jewish plot to bring down the régime. Scotsman, May 16, 1968
[edit] Memorial Plaque
Memorial plaque dedicated to JUDr Rudolf Margolius is located on the family tomb at New Jewish Cemetery, Izraelská 1, Prague 3, sector no. 21, row no. 13, plot no. 33, directly behind Franz Kafka’s grave.
[edit] Literature
- Margolius Kovaly, Heda (1997): Under A Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941-1968 New York: Holmes & Meier ISBN 0841913773
- Margolius, Ivan (2006): Reflections of Prague: Journeys through the 20th Century London: Wiley ISBN 0470022191
- London, Artur (1971): The Confession. New York: Ballantine Books. ISBN 0345221702.
[edit] References
- James, Clive (2007). Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts. New York: W. W. Norton. ISBN 0393061167.
- Kaplan, Karel (1990). Report on the Murder of the General Secretary. London: I. B. Tauris & Co. ISBN 1850432112.
