Mr Karel Kaplan (1928 – 2023), witness and above all historian of the communist regime, died on Sunday 12 March 2023. During the German occupation, he studied and then worked in the Baťa factory in Zlín, where he joined the Communist Party in 1947. In the same year, he began working as a paid official of the Communist Party, first in Vysoké Mýto and then in Pardubice. He also participated at this level in the February 1948 coup. In 1957-1960 he studied at the Institute of Social Sciences at the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in Prague. His first works were heavily burdened with communist propaganda.
In 1960 Kaplan became a member of the apparatus of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in Prague, where he worked in the ideological department. Among other things, this position made him a member of the rehabilitation commissions at the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and allowed him to study previously inaccessible documents of party and security provenance. After his forced departure from the apparatus of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in 1964, he obtained a position as a researcher at the Institute of History of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. In the second half of the 1960s he was deputy director there. During the Prague Spring he was involved in the reformist wing of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. He was secretary of the Central Rehabilitation Commission at the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.
After the August occupation and the establishment of the so-called normalisation, he was dismissed from his employment and expelled from the Communist Party. In 1972 he was briefly detained by the State Security, which conducted an action against him under the code name “Chapel”.
In 1976, under pressure from the secret police, he emigrated to the Federal Republic of Germany, where he secretly exported, with the help of Western diplomats, a large number of copies of archival documents, with the help of which he published a number of books. In 1977, his Czechoslovak citizenship was revoked.
In exile, he collaborated with the Voice of America radio station, the BBC, Radio Free Europe and the Sudeten German association Collegium Carolinum in Munich. After the fall of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia, he returned to Prague, where he began working at the Institute for Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences in October 1990. He has published a number of historical publications and editions of documents on his own or with colleagues.
Photo by Jiří Hoppe (Institute for Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences)