Rudolf Margolius - Life

Life

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 reserve officer 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).

In 1941 he was deported to the Lodz Ghetto and subsequently to concentration camps in Auschwitz and Dachau. In May 1945 after escaping from Dachau, he was made a leader of the Garmisch-Partenkirchen camp for the war refugees. In December 1945 he joined the Czechoslovak Communist Party influenced by his war experiences and murder of his parents and relatives in the concentration camps and hope of instituting better future for the country. Between 1945 and 1948 he worked for the Association of Czechoslovak Industry in Prague. Afterwards he was promoted to a Chief of Staff of the Minister of Foreign Trade (1948-49) and subsequently became Deputy Minister of Foreign Trade responsible for the sector trading with Western countries (1949-52). Together with his colleague, Evžen Löbl, Margolius was the author of dollar offensive in the Czechoslovak economic policy. In 1949 in London Margolius negotiated and signed several important economic and financial agreements with Ernest Bevin and Sir William Strang who represented the British Government. Margolius was a lawyer and economist and was not directly involved in the contemporary Communist Party machinations or politics.

Dr. Rudolf Margolius was arrested on January 10, 1952. After months of physical and psychological coercion in addition to being forced to sign a false confession, Margolius met for the first time his alleged co-inspirators led by Rudolf Slánský at the Czechoslovak High Court attached to the Pankrác Prison in Prague in November 1952. Margolius was chosen as a member of the ‘conspiracy’ because in his capacity as Deputy Minister at the Ministry of Foreign Trade he made trade agreements with capitalist countries against the wishes of the Soviet Union to increase trade with other socialist countries and he dealt with large sums of money. These details had a great impact on contemporary public opinion. As had been determined in advance in Moscow and by the Czechoslovak Communist Party’s Central Committee, the court sentenced Margolius and ten others to death, three received life sentences. On December 3, 1952, at the execution, Margolius did not pronounce any last words.

Pavel Tigrid wrote: 'Margolius… survived the Nazi concentration camps and after the war enrolled into the Communist Party from the real conviction: that never again would be repeated what had happened in the past, that no one would be persecuted for his or hers racial, national or social origins, in order for all people to be equal, in order to establish an era of real freedom. A couple of years later the comrades succeeded in what the Nazis had not managed: they killed him.'