Baer's biography of the former Czechoslovak Foreign Minister Vladimír Clementis (1902-1952) is
the first historical study on the Communist politician who was executed with Rudolf Slánský and
other top Communist Party members after the show trial of 1952. Born in Tisovec Central
Slovakia Clementis studied law at Charles University in Prague in the 1920s and had his own
law firm in Bratislava in the 1930s. After the Munich Agreement of 1938 he went into exile to
France and Great Britain where he worked at the Czechoslovak broadcast at the BBC for the
exile government of Edvard Bene¿. After the Second World War Clementis' political career at
the Czechoslovak Foreign Ministry blossomed: In 1945 he became Assistant Secretary of State
under Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk. After Masaryk's mysterious death in 1948 Clementis was
appointed Foreign Minister. This biography offers an unprecedented insight into the mind of a
Slovak leftist intellectual of the interwar generation who died at the command of the comrade
he had admired since his youth: Generalissimus Stalin.
