The first person to find the body lying in the stone courtyard of the Czechoslovak Foreign Ministry at 6:15 a.m. on March 10, 1948, was a janitor. Clothed in pajamas, the corpse was cold, lying face up, feet pointed toward the building, the man said, according to a police report.
Seventy-seven years later, Czechs still don't have final clarity on a pivotal moment of Cold War history, which came as Communist parties seized power in Czechoslovakia and across Central and Eastern Europe.
During and after the Communist era, Czech authorities and historians made at least four formal efforts to reach an authoritative conclusion: Did Masaryk fall from the window by accident? Did he kill himself by jumping from the window?
Or was he pushed, and if so, by whom? Czechoslovak Communists? Soviet secret police? Loyalists who thought he had betrayed his country?
This year, on January 10, Czech Police surprised the entire country when they announced the reopening of the criminal investigation into Masaryk's death, citing "suspicion of the commission of the crime of murder." The catalyst, the agency said, came in part from decades-old diplomatic cables from Britain, France, and the United States that the Czech Foreign Ministry announced it had obtained last year. RFE/RL examined those cables in October.
"The goal is to compare this new information with the facts found so far and thus reveal possible new connections that could bring answers to some long-unanswered questions," the police statement said.
For many Czechs, Masaryk's death is a historical symbol, a grim marker accompanying the beginning of five decades of Communist rule, Michal Stehlik, a scholar who has written extensively about the country's modern history, said in an interview with RFE/RL.
And the mystery surrounding the death, also for many, Czechs, echoes persistent speculation surrounding a more famous 20th-century political death: the 1963 assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas.
"The death of Jan Masaryk is, for Czechoslovak or Czech society, the same situation as Kennedy in Dallas," Stehlik said.
Founding Family
Masaryk was part of Czechoslovakia's political nobility. His father, Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, helped forge the independent First Czechoslovak Republic from the wreckage of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, and he served as president until 1935.
The younger Masaryk, who was educated in Britain and the United States, joined the diplomatic corps and became a top aide to Foreign Minister Edvard Benes.
After the 1938 Munich Agreement, which paved the way for Adolf Hitler to annex parts of Czechoslovakia, Masaryk lived in London and was a foreign minister for the government-in-exile. His Czech-language London Calling broadcasts on the BBC during World War II made him a celebrity among Czech speakers.
After the war, Masaryk returned to Prague as foreign minister and stayed on even after Communist leader Klement Gottwald became prime minister in 1946. Masaryk traveled to Moscow the following year, where Soviet officials pressured Czechoslovakia into spurning the offer of aid under the Marshall Plan, when the United States poured billions of dollars into rebuilding Europe.
In late February 1948, 12 non-Communist members of the cabinet resigned in protest, accusing Gottwald of packing police agencies with Communist party members. Armed Communist militias and a sympathetic police force marched in Prague, in a show of force. Days later, Benes -- now president -- gave in to Communist demands and formed a new, Communist-dominated government.
Czech and Western historians widely consider this a coup. For the next 41 years, Czechoslovakia was controlled by the Communist Party, locked behind the Iron Curtain.
Falling Bodies
Roughly three weeks later, on the evening of March 9, Masaryk, who had not resigned from the government, was in the official residential apartment on the second floor of the Foreign Ministry, located in an imperial-era building known as the Cernin Palace.
According to an account given by his valet, included in one packet of diplomatic correspondence provided by the U.S. State Department, Masaryk was in the residence that evening and had dinner there by himself. Around 8:30 p.m. three Czech-speaking men arrived to meet with Masaryk. The valet, who did not know them, brought the four black coffee about an hour later.
At about 10 p.m., the valet, who was dozing near the residence's main door, said he was awoken by shouting inside the room by Masaryk, who said, "I will not do this for you. I will sign everything, but not this. I will do everything, but this can happen only over my dead body."
The valet reported hearing shouting several more times between 10 p.m. and 11 p.m., then brought Masaryk another cup of black coffee around 11:45 p.m. before being dismissed for the night. "That's all. You go to bed. Good night and God bless you," he quoted Masaryk as saying.
The valet was the last person known to have seen Masaryk alive.
Who Were The Three Men?
About six hours after his body was found, the official Czechoslovak Press Agency announced his death, declaring it a suicide. Over the years, the absence of compelling evidence pointing to a crime has led many to accept that version.
In a 1949 diplomatic cable relayed by a top official at U.S. Embassy in Prague, a former secretary general in the Czechoslovak Foreign Ministry reported that Masaryk had discussed killing himself just days before his body was found. The former ministry official said Masaryk had confided that he had not declared several thousand dollars in New York, and the new Communist government might find him in violation of financial regulations, according to the cable.
But even after decades of poring over court records and testimonies from ministry employees and friends and allies of Masaryk, historians -- professional and amateur -- are still divided.
Among the holes in the record: Who were the three men who visited Masaryk on the evening before his death? To this day, their identities are unknown to Czech officials.
"As far as I know, we still don't know who the three were," Stehlik said.
Other major holes: The officials who were initially summoned to the scene where Masaryk's body was found were not forensic police investigators; after the janitor, a firefighter was summoned.
In 1968, during the brief thaw in Communist rule known as the Prague Spring, there was a renewal of interest in the circumstances of Masaryk's death.
A cable from the British Embassy in Prague, dated April 15, 1968, cited a duty clerk at the Foreign Ministry's passport office reporting cars entering the ministry's courtyard at 11 p.m., and shortly after that his door was abruptly locked from the outside, and his telephone lines were disconnected. Four hours later, the clerk's door was unlocked and his phone lines activated. He said he heard cars departing around that time.
A Prague police official, meanwhile, reported finding in Masaryk's apartment a half-eaten apple, an open Bible, and pills -- believed to be sedatives -- spilled on the floor, according to another cable. There was also human excrement on the waist-high windowsill of the bathroom that Masaryk was believed to have fallen from. A wooden chair was found in the shower stall, and a pillow on the bathroom floor.
The police official also reported that two top officials from the country's security and intelligence agencies had been in the building prior to his arrival.
News of the new investigation dominated Czech headlines and newscasts for days after the January 10 announcement. "Was Masaryk Assassinated? New Documents Will Help, But Russia Is Silent'" read one headline in the online paper Seznam Zpravy, reflecting some Czechs' longstanding suspicion of Soviet involvement.
Czech Police did not immediately respond to an e-mail from RFE/RL seeking more details about the reasons for reopening the probe.
Divergence Of Opinion
Four official inquiries have been conducted over the years into Masaryk's death. The initial conclusion that he had died by suicide remained the conclusion of record until the 1968 Prague Spring. At that point, historians and other officials arrived at a different explanation: It was either suicide or an accident, but murder was definitely ruled out.
Following the end of Communism, two more inquiries were conducted. One three-year effort ended in 1996, settling on the explanation that Masaryk had fallen from the bathroom window while fleeing from someone. The second, from 2001-2003, focused on known forensics -- for example, the position of the body in relation to the window -- and concluded Masaryk had been murdered.
"I'm very skeptical still [that] we will get any real good information about this process from 1948," Stehlik said, "about this moment in the palace when Masaryk died."
