Rudolf Margolius

Rudolf Margolius (August 31, 1913, Prague – December 3, 1952, Prague) was Deputy Minister of Foreign Trade, Czechoslovakia (1949–1952), and a co-defendant in the Slánský trial in November 1952.

The 1952 show trial involved the Communist Party General Secretary, Rudolf Slánský, and his thirteen co-defendants. They were arrested, unjustly accused, tried, and executed as traitors and western spies. The trial was orchestrated by Soviet advisors, sent to Prague by Soviet premier Joseph Stalin, and assisted by Czechoslovak Secret Service interrogators and the members of Czechoslovak Communist Party Central Committee. The destruction of the Czechoslovak Communist high-ranking party officials by their own colleagues has defied attempts to rationalize it, and our understanding of the affair remains superficial. One of the people who were thrown into the alleged conspiracy was Dr Rudolf Margolius.

The Slánský group consisted of many personalities. On one side was Slánský, an extremist and one of those who helped to usher Czechoslovakia into the Stalinist era. At the centre stood Vladimír 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 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. On the other extreme of the scale was Margolius. Unlike others in the Slánský group, he joined the Communist Party late – in December 1945 – and acquired faith in socialism as a result of his experience in Adolf Hitler’s concentration camps.

Rudolf Margolius was born in Prague into a patriotic Czech, middle-class milieu. As a law student in the thirties at Charles University, studying together with the Czech poet Hanuš Bonn, he devoted much of his time to the YMCA travelling in Western Europe, Middle East and America. During Czechoslovakia’s Munich crisis with Nazi Germany he was an Army reservist serving together with his friend, music composer, Jan Hanuš. In 1939, while Czechoslovakia was already occupied by the Third Reich, he married Heda Bloch (later known as Heda Margolius Kovály).

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