Czech nation pays tribute to Milada Horáková on 70th anniversary of her judicial murder

By 1950, two years after the Communists seized control in the “Victorious February” coup, Czechoslovakia was in the grip of a Stalinist terror. The show trials staged there – aimed at intimidating and silencing opponents of the new regime – were the largest in Eastern Europe. Almost a quarter of a million people were convicted on trumped up charges, of whom 178 were executed for political crimes. Milada Horáková, a democratic politician in Masaryk’s First Republic and a resistance figure during the war who had been imprisoned by the Nazis in the Terezín concentration camp, was the sole female political prisoner to be executed.