Josef and Ctirad Mašín

Following World War II, Mašín's sons, who were both born in Prague, attended a high school in Poděbrady.

After the Communists seized power, they witnessed how some of their family's friends—opponents of the regime—were silenced, vanished without a trace or were sentenced to death in public show trials.

They believed a shooting war was imminent, and they wanted to return to Czechoslovakia in the vanguard of the "liberating" western armies.

A first escape attempt failed when a CIC agent who was supposed to accompany them was arrested by the Czechoslovak Secret Service StB.

Ctirad Mašín was sentenced to two years of slave labor for knowing about someone else's planned escape but failing to denounce them, and was sent to work in a uranium mine near Jáchymov, noted for its high death rate.

In several Moravian villages Václav Švéda and Ctirad Mašín placed incendiary composition with time fuses into straw stacks.

At that time, even straw was in short supply, so the Mašíns' intention was not only spreading "shock and awe" but really harming the economy of the agricultural collectives.

While one source states he died with one bullet in his eye and one in his lungs, most others mention only three casualties in Czechoslovakia which means he must have survived.

Radio Free Europe broadcasts made it sound like World War III was imminent, and the Mašíns and their friends wanted to take part in the invasion.

The Berlin Wall had not yet been erected, and numerous streets and footpathes, trams and suburban trains connected the parts of the divided city.

The policeman in charge, hit by 6 bullets, quit his job when the head of the East German police (Volkspolizei) held him responsible for the Mašín brothers finally escaping to the West.

Barbara Mašín assumes that the number of 5,000 was a first attempt by East German officialdom to minimize the manhunt and the scope of the humiliation.

They did not get any official information from their officers, and therefore rumours spread in which the Czechs were depicted as savages who had killed countless pursuers.

Moreover, the Mašíns, after arriving in the West, consciously changed some details of their story in order to protect people who had helped them.

For instance they claimed they had crossed the autobahn between Berlin and Dresden after the Waldow battle and found refuge with a family in "Schönwalde".

Though later there were people in Schönwalde who "remembered" the Mašíns' visit, several researchers found out that they never made it there: the highway was under permanent surveillance; passing it was simply impossible.

The Mašíns' mother, Zdena Mašínová, who was not involved at all in the military resistance of her sons, died in prison on June 12, 1956.

According to the family, their mother received no medical aid, nor were the scandalous conditions of detention improved when she was terminally ill.

In Czechoslovakia, communist propaganda made full use of the Mašín's actions, describing them as looters and brutal murderers of innocent passersby.

The last one, "Mrtví nemluví" (Dead do not talk) was translated into German and published in the GDR in 1989, a few months before the end of Socialism.

The Mašíns themselves, after losing the illusion that the West would wage a war to end Communism in Eastern Europe, were reluctant to talk about their past.

While many people sat in East European jails accused of being American spies, Rambousek was one of the few who were not innocent: He had indeed been an agent of the US Counter Intelligence Corps.

As Eastern archives were not yet open, the book and the interviews were based only on the Mašíns' memories and on what they read about the manhunt in the newspapers after arriving in West Berlin.

They contain the "Schönwalde Fake" (see above) and wrongly claim the group shot four instead of three Volkspolizei officers: Western press had copied the East German propaganda account which had added one of the friendly fire casualties to the Mašín's victims.

For him this overreaction was due to the ambitions of a single person, Chefinspekteur (Lieutenant General) Willi Seifert, proxy of the head of the Volkspolizei, who wanted to catch the "fascist bandits", no matter what the cost.

Their documentary "Der Luckauer Krieg" (The Luckau War) met with severe criticism because they "displayed murderers as heroes".

In 2004 the Czech-American writer Jan Novák (not related to Ctibor Novak) wrote a biographical novel on the father's and the sons' stories.

Ota Rambousek's book "Jenom ne strach" (see below) was published in Czechoslovakia in 1990 and realistic descriptions of how the brothers killed a cashier or how they cut the throat of an unarmed policeman rendered incapable by chloroform did not fit well into "velvet" mood of Czechs.

Even fifty-five years later the case of Mašíns is able to deeply divide the Czech public into two groups: one seeing them as heroes, the other abhorring their sometimes brutal killings.

[2] In 2005, the Czech and Slovak Association of Canada gave the Thomas Masaryk Award to the Mašín Brothers and Milan Paumer.