Slánský trial
[8] According to literature scholar Peter Steiner, the one-party Communist state had to find or conjure up imaginary enemies from within to justify its continuing existence; this was the motive for show trials.
During this period, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee's leadership was murdered and antisemitic purges spread to other countries in the Soviet's Eastern Bloc.
[13][page needed] Apropos of the conspiracy theories of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, prosecutors claimed that a "Zionist-Imperialist" summit had taken place in Washington DC in April 1947 with President Harry S. Truman, undersecretary of state Dean Acheson, former treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr., David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Sharret in attendance.
Those tried with Slánský were Bedřich Geminder, Otto Šling, André Simone, Karel Šváb, Otto Fischl, Rudolf Margolius, Vladimir Clementis, Ludvik Frejka, Bedřich Reicin, Artur London, Eugen Löbl [cs; de], Josef Frank and Vavro Hajdů [cs].
[16] On the last day of the trial, Rudolf Slánský, General Secretary of the KSČ, and other leading party members were pronounced guilty.
Eleven, including Slánský, were hanged at Pankrác Prison in Prague on 3 December,[17][16] and three (Artur London, Eugen Löbl and Vavro Hajdů) were sentenced to life imprisonment.
[15] On 14 December 1952, a few days after the execution, Zdeněk Nejedlý, Minister of Education, denied rumors that the confessions had been obtained with torture or drugs.
Later, the official historiography of the Communist Party was rather quiet on the trial, vaguely putting blame on errors that happened as a result of a "cult of personality."
[12][page needed] The full transcript of the trial was released in 1953; Steiner described it as "an utterly indigestible book, crammed with so many names, dates, and particulars that I had a hard time finishing it and remembering all the details.
[22] In Commentary, Peter Meyer wrote that "the Prague trial with its lurid tale of a 'Zionist conspiracy' recalled the Czarist-invented and Nazi-popularized legend of the Elders of Zion".
In internal discussions, Ben-Gurion suggested he would favor this even to the point of throwing communist activists in concentration camps, though he spoke of this as being a potential response rather than an imminent necessity.
This last comment referred to an earlier moment in Israel's recent history where he first warned and then approved firing on the right-wing paramilitary group Irgun.
[28] According to American historian Ronald Radosh, the Soviet Union's goal was "to deflect the world's attention from the sordid execution of the innocent [Slánský trial defendants] in Prague".
In Wein's opinion, because all of the defendants (except Simone and Margolius) occupied high positions in the Czechoslovak Communist regime, they had command responsibility for crimes committed by it.
A memoir by Heda Margolius Kovály, the book follows the life of a Jewish woman, starting with her escape from a concentration camp during World War II, up until her departure from Czechoslovakia after the Warsaw Pact countries invasion of 1968.
[33] More encompassing information is available in the more recent book Hitler, Stalin and I, an interview of Heda Margolius Kovály by Helena Třeštíková published in 2018.
