Rudolf Slansky

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Rudolf Slánský (born July 31, 1901 in Nezvěstice , Bohemia , Austria-Hungary , † December 3, 1952 in Prague ) was General Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) from 1945 to 1951 .

Life

German Minutes of the Slansky Trial , Ministry of Justice, Prague (1953)

Slansky grew up as the son of a trader in Pilsen . In 1921, a year after graduating from high school, he joined the Communist Party and was in fact a party official from that time. He joined the radical, Moscow and Comintern-oriented group around Klement Gottwald , which later went down in history under the nickname " Buben von Karlín " ("karlínští kluci"). At the 5th party congress of the CPC in February 1929, these young functionaries took over power in the CPC. Slansky became a member of the Central Committee and the Politburo. From 1935 to 1938 he was a member of parliament , in 1938 he went to Moscow and there became a member of the KSČ's foreign leadership, in which position he also took part in the Slovak National Uprising in 1944 .

In 1945 he returned to Czechoslovakia and in the same year became Secretary General of KSČ. In this role he played a key role in the fight against the bourgeois democratic parties and the communists' seizure of power in February 1948 and was responsible for the persecution of numerous opponents of the communists. On September 8, 1951, he was dismissed as General Secretary and received the post of Deputy Prime Minister. On November 23, 1951, he was arrested in the course of the Field affair and charged with high treason . On the one hand, the motivation can be seen in the fact that Gottwald wanted to get rid of a potential rival, and anti-Semitism, inspired by the Soviet model of an alleged medical conspiracy , also played an important role. Like most of his co-defendants, Slansky was of Jewish origin. In the show trial named after him in November 1952, he was in a show trial before the newly established State Court together with Foreign Minister Vladimír Clementis , Otto Fischl , Josef Frank , Ludvík Frejka , Bedřich Geminder , Vavro Hajdů , Evžen Löbl , Artur London , Rudolf Margolius , Bedřich Reicin , Otto Katz , Otto Sling and Karel Šváb accused as alleged "head of an anti-state conspiracy center", sentenced to death and on December 3, 1952 along with ten other co-defendants by hanging in the Prague prison Pankrác executed . Their bodies were burned. State Security employees scattered the ashes in a field outside of Prague.

On September 8, 1963, Slansky was legally rehabilitated, along with Mordechai Oren , a member of the Israeli Mapam , who had been pardoned after serving three years of a ten-year prison sentence and repatriated to Israel. In 1968 he was rehabilitated by the party in the course of the Prague Spring .

Film recordings from the show trial

In March 2018, a total of 20 hours of historical film and sound recordings from the show trial of Rudolf Slánský, which had previously been lost, were discovered in the disused metal research institute Výzkumného ústavu kovů (VÚK) in Panenské Břežany .

filming

The 1970 French feature film The Confession is based on the factual report by co-defendant Artur London .

literature

  • Jan Gerber: A trial in Prague. The people against Rudolf Slansky and comrades. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2016, ISBN 978-3-525-37047-6 .
  • Jan Gerber: Prague Perspectives. The Slansky Trial 1952. In: Yearbook of the Simon Dubnow Institute / Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 9 (2010). Pp. 575-620
  • Jan Gerber: Slansky trial. In: Dan Diner (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture (EJGK). Volume 5: Pr-Sy. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2014, ISBN 978-3-476-02505-0 , pp. 508-513.
  • Georg Hermann Hodos: Show trials. Stalinist purges in Eastern Europe 1948–1954 . Campus, Frankfurt am Main / New York, NY 1988, ISBN 3-593-33912-9 .
  • Ministry of Justice (ed.): Trial against the leadership of the anti-state conspiratorial center headed by Rudolf Slánsky , Orbis, Praha 1953 (Contains the minutes of the eight-day trial. Indictment in one sentence: “Criminal Trotskyist and Titoist clique, which together with Gestapo agents and US -Imperialists who wanted to overthrow people's democracies. ”Published in several languages.).
  • Karel Kaplan: The Political Processes in Czechoslovakia 1948–1954 . Oldenbourg, Munich 1986, ISBN 3-486-51081-9 .
  • Karel Kaplan: Zpráva o zavraždění generálního tajemníka , Mladá fronta, Praha 1992, ISBN 80-204-0269-1 (Czech).
  • Karel Kaplan, Pavel Kosatík: Gottwaldovi muži , Paseka, Praha / Litomyšl 2004, ISBN 80-7185-616-9 (Czech).
  • Heda Margolius Kovály: A Jew in Prague . Under the shadow of Hitler and Stalin (Original title: Under A Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941–1968 . Holmes & Meier, New York, 1997, ISBN 0-8419-1377-3 , translated and edited by Francis Epstein, Helen Epstein and the author, translated from the American by H.-H. Harbort), Rowohlt, Berlin 1992, ISBN 3-87134-035-9 ( autobiography 1941–1968).
  • Artur Gérard London : I admit . The trial of Rudolf Slánský (original title: L 'aveu , Dans l'engrenage du procés de Prague, Gallimard, Paris 1968, translated from the French by Willy Thaler), Hoffmann and Campe , Hamburg 1982, ISBN 3-455-04500-6 .
  • Miroslav Šiška; Eckart Mehls (Ed.): Conspirators, enemies of the state, spies ... Political trials in Czechoslovakia 1948–1954 (original title: Bíla místa naší historie - 50. léta translated by Bärbel Birnstengel), Dietz, Berlin, 1991, ISBN 3-320-01674 -1 .
  • Walther Skaupy, Great Trials of World History, The "Trial against the management of the anti-state conspiratorial center headed by Rudolf Slansky", p. 307 ff, Magnus Verlag, Essen
  • Josefa Slánská: Zpráva o mém muži . Svoboda, Praha, 1990, ISBN 80-205-0165-7 (The book could not appear in Czechoslovakia until 1990, but was published in 1969 in various translations, including a report about my husband: The Slansky Affair (translated by Peter Aschner). Europa-Verlag, Vienna / Frankfurt am Main, Zurich 1969 / Report on My Husband (translated by Edith Pargeter. Hutchinson, London / New York, NY 1969)
  • Rudolf Ströbinger : The murder of the Secretary General . Stalin's last show trial - the tribunal with Rudolf Slánský in Prague [documentary novel for television films], Burg, Stuttgart / Bonn 1983, ISBN 3-922801-39-0 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Klement Gottwald , curriculum vitae of the portal of the office of the President of the Czech Republic, online at: hrad.cz / ...
  2. ↑ Karel Kaplan: Report on the murder of the general secretary . IBTauris, 1990, ISBN 978-1-85043-211-1 , p. 234.
  3. ↑ Markéta Kachlíková: Unique find: show trial from 1952 in film. In: Radio Praha . March 23, 2018, accessed April 8, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Slansky, Rudolf
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Czech politician, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KPČ) (1945–1951)
DATE OF BIRTH July 31, 1901
PLACE OF BIRTH Nezvěstice (near Kladno )
DATE OF DEATH 3rd December 1952
Place of death Prague