Vladimír Clementis

Who was Vladimír Clementis?

Vladimír "Vlado" Clementis was a Slovak minister, politician, lawyer, publicist, literary critic, author and a prominent member of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. He married Lída Pátková, a daughter of a branch director of Czech Hypothec Bank in Bratislava, in March 1933. He became a Communist MP in 1935. Before the beginning of the World War II, in 1938, he emigrated to Paris. His criticism of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in 1939, contradicted the policies of the Czechoslovak Communist Party exiled in Moscow and triggered an intra-party investigation overseen by Viliam Široký.

At the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, he was put into prison as a known Communist, and later evacuated to a British concentration camp. After release, he decided to spend the war in London, where he broadcast speeches on the radio calling for all Slovaks to fight against the Nazis. Returning in 1945, he became Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs under the first post-war government. As a representative of Czechoslovakia, he signed UN Charter in San Francisco on 26 June, 1945. After a coup d'état, which he helped organise, he succeeded Jan Masaryk as Foreign Minister. In 1948, in his new role, he played a decisive role in organising Czechoslovakian's part of the Operation Balak by providing a help to the newly founded Israeli Air Force. In 1950, he was forced to resign amid accused of being a "deviationist". He was then arrested and officially charged for an illegal attempt to cross the state boundaries, later changed for a more serious crime to be a "bourgeois nationalist" and participating in the Trotskyite-Titoite-Zionist conspiracy. After being convicted in the Slánský show trial, he was hanged, along with Rudolf Slánský, on 3 December 1952. His ashes were scattered on a road close to Prague. His wife, Lída, received only her husband's two pipes and tobacco and was discharged from a prison.