Eugen Loebl, 80; Survived Stalin Purge

Eugen Loebl, the last survivor of a Stalinist purge known as the Slansky Trial, died of heart failure Saturday at a hospital here. He was 80.

Loebl, a former Czechoslovakian deputy trade minister who was imprisoned for 11 years after the anti-Semitic show trial in 1952, emigrated to the United States in 1968 after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

He became a well-known economic and political theorist. He wrote 10 books, including “Humanomics” and his autobiography, “My Mind on Trial,” both published in 1976.

Loebl was an economic adviser to Jan Masaryk, minister of foreign affairs of the Czechoslovak exile government during World War II. In 1948 he became first deputy minister of foreign trade.

Loebl was arrested in 1949 and eventually became one of 14 high officials, including former party leader Rudolf Slansky, who were forced to confess to high treason and espionage in the 1952 trial. Eleven of the accused were Jews.

Of the 14, 11 were hanged. Loebl and two deputy foreign ministers were sentenced to life imprisonment.

After serving the 11 years in prison, five in solitary confinement, Loebl was rehabilitated in 1963 and appointed director of the Czechoslovak State Bank in Bratislava.

In 1969, Loebl became a professor of political science and economics at Vassar College. After his retirement in 1976, he lectured in the United States and abroad on economic and political theory and served as a consultant to the State Department.