18 Facts About Jan Masaryk

Jan Garrigue Masaryk was a Czech diplomat and politician who served as the Foreign Minister of Czechoslovakia from 1940 to 1948.

Jan Masaryk returned home in 1913 and served in the Austro-Hungarian Army during the First World War.

Jan Masaryk then joined the diplomatic service and became charge d'affaires to the US in 1919 and then as counselor to the legation in London.

Jan Masaryk's father resigned as president in 1935 and died two years later.

In 1930, when Steed's journal The Review of Reviews went bankrupt, Jan Masaryk granted him enough money to keep his journal afloat.

In late December 1936 Jan Masaryk gave an address to a group of British MPs to make the case for Czechoslovakia.

On 25 September 1938, Jan Masaryk arrived at 10 Downing Street to tell Chamberlain that through Benes had accepted the results of the Berchtesgaden summit, he rejected the German timetable for handing over the Sudetenland put forward at the Bad Godesberg summit.

In October 1938, the Sudetenland was occupied by Germany and Jan Masaryk resigned as ambassador in protest, although he remained in London.

On 8 September 1939, Jan Masaryk gave his first radio broadcast on the Vola Londyn show, where he called for "a free Czechoslovakia in a free Europe".

In June 1943, Jan Masaryk spoke with Philip Nichols of the Foreign Office and expressed much doubt about a proposed treaty to create a military alliance between Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union that was being energetically championed by Zdenek Fierlinger, the Czechoslovak ambassador in Moscow.

The Communists under Klement Gottwald saw their position strengthened after the 1946 elections but Jan Masaryk stayed on as Foreign Minister.

On 10 March 1948 Jan Masaryk was found dead, dressed only in his pajamas, in the courtyard of the Foreign Ministry below his bathroom window.

Jan Masaryk's remains were buried next to his parents in a plot at Lany cemetery, where in 1994 the ashes of his sister Alice Masarykova were laid to rest.

However, a Prague police report in 2004 concluded after forensic research that Jan Masaryk had indeed been thrown out of the window to his death.

Bydzovsky confessed to murdering Jan Masaryk when interrogated in prison by the Czech secret police StB in the 1950s ; but later denied it.

From 1924 until their divorce in 1931, Jan Masaryk was married to Frances Crane Leatherbee.

Jan Masaryk married Mary Lee Logan, younger sister of Joshua Logan, who became one of the co-directors of the University Players in 1931.

In 1945 the exile Jan Masaryk became close to the American writer Marcia Davenport, whom he felt had a strong affinity to Czechs and to the city of Prague, depicted in several of her books.