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A president’s apparent warning to his nation’s leading officials five years before a Nazi conquest lay hidden for over 90 years until Czech officials unsealed it Wednesday.
The mysterious envelope, its contents private since Czechoslovakia’s founding president Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk died in 1937, revealed handwritten pages from 1934 when the leader believed death was near, Radio Prague International reported. Czech officials opened it Wednesday at Lány Chateau, the summer residence of the president, before President Petr Pavel and a live audience.
“I am ill, seriously ill — it is the end, but I am not afraid. You will continue the work, you know how, but you must be careful. You know how to behave; I don’t need to tell you anything more,” Masaryk dictated to his son Jan, who wrote down the words mostly in English.
Masaryk recorded these thoughts just five years before Nazi Germany would swallow his young democracy whole in 1939. Historian Dagmar Hájková, who read the documents aloud, noted that some passages seemed intended as political guidance, possibly witnessed by Masaryk’s daughter Alice or future president Edvard Beneš. (RELATED: Researchers Find World War 2 Shipwreck From Famous Pacific Battle)
His words about Czechoslovakia’s German minority were notable, said Historian Dagmar Hájková, who read the documents aloud. “Give them what they deserve, but no more,” Masaryk said about the Germans living within his nation’s borders, according to the historian.
This mysterious sealed envelope contains the last words of the founding father of Czechoslovakia, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk. hé wished that it would be opened on 19.9.2025 which is tomorrow pic.twitter.com/hkvLwfBS71
— non aesthetic things (@PicturesFoIder) September 18, 2025
Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler would demand that Czechoslovakia cede the Sudetenland, where roughly 3 million people of German origin resided, to the Third Reich following his annexation of Austria in 1938, according to Britannica. The tensions between the two countries led to the the intervention of Britain and France, the latter of whom had an alliance with Czechoslovakia.
Following discussions between British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and Hitler, the 1938 negotiations in Munich resulted in Britain and France agreeing to Hitler annexing the Sudetenland and telling the Czechs that they would have to fight the Nazis alone or submit. The Czechs ceded the Sudetenland, only for Germany to conquer the country in 1939.
The papers also included Masaryk’s blunt assessment of human nature, according to Radio Prague International. “If people are uneducated and foolish, there is not much that can be done. People are glad to be foolish — do not make it easy for them, and argue with them,” they read.
The envelope survived an incredible journey through war and exile. Jan, the country’s future foreign minister, possessed them first before his mysterious demise in 1948. After passing through London, Prague, Scotland and France, it returned to the Czech National Archives in 2005, where it remained sealed until this week’s opening.
The formal findings from the archives’ restoration and research will be made public in roughly a month’s time.
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