Otto Šling

He was born into a Jewish family[1] in Nová Cerekev, a market town in south Bohemia, then part of the Austrian Empire.

After World War II, Šling became the Communist Party's Regional Secretary of Brno in Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic).

He never finished his course or qualified; with the outbreak Spanish Civil War in 1936, he joined the International Brigades in a medical capacity and went to Spain in 1937.

After returning home briefly and the German advance into the Sudetenland in 1938, he emigrated to exile in London with others involved in the Communist cause.

Following Yugoslavia’s expulsion from Cominform in 1948, the Communist regimes across Eastern Europe embarked on a period of terror and show trials.

In 1949, trials were conducted in Hungary, Poland, and Bulgaria, but prime minister Klement Gottwald asserted that the KSČ had not been infiltrated by any conspirators.

In the autumn of 1949, there was a push to reaffirm Soviet, not national, socialism, by routing out "bourgeois" nationalists and Zionists, and Šling came under scrutiny.

In Šling’s closing statement, he said, “I was a treacherous enemy within the Communist Party…I am justly an object of contempt and deserve the maximum and the hardest punishment.” On 27 November 1952, Rudolf Slánský, Bedrich Geminder, Ludvik Frejka, Vladimir Clementis, Bedrich Reicin, Karel Šváb, Rudolf Margolius, Otto Fischl, Otto Šling, and André Simone were sentenced to death; the remaining three, including Eugen Loebl and Artur London, received life sentences.

In the Dubček Government’s Commission of Inquiry, Václav Kopecký’s report in February 1951 is labeled a “mass of fabrications, idle gossip, and irresponsible dramatics about the Šling-Švermová case.”[citation needed] This rehabilitation came at a time of de-Stalinization, when governments blamed the previous regimes and ideologies for the current situation.

Reports on the trials came out during the Prague Spring period of 1968 in Czechoslovakia, though were quickly suppressed after the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops in August that year.

Please be advised that of the sources used, the Dubček Government’s report came out as part of a political push for the reform of socialism, and the Loebl, London, and Šlings texts are all memoirs that reference Czech records.