Woman of courage Milada Horáková: “Her execution was meant to intimidate the nation”
Czechs are paying tribute to Milada Horáková, politician and freedom fighter who was sent to the gallows by the communist regime on June 27, 1950. She was executed together with three close associates after a show trial that mirrored the brutal tactics of the Great Purge in the Soviet Union.
“My actions were conscious and deliberate, and I wish to take full and complete responsibility for them. I will accept, with resignation, the punishment that shall be decided for me,” Milada Horáková said in her closing statement to the court shortly before the judge delivered a guilty verdict for “treason and conspiracy against the state”. The show trial, which made headlines far beyond Czechoslovakia’s borders, led to the judicial murder of a freedom fighter who stood up to two totalitarian regimes.
In the years of the First Republic, Milada Horaková was a prominent MP for the Czechoslovak National Socialist Party known for her forthright rhetoric and dedication to women’s rights. During the Nazi occupation, she joined the resistance and was arrested by the Gestapo in June of 1940. A Nazi prosecutor demanded the death penalty, but the verdict was eight years in prison. She survived the war in the women’s prison in Aichach.
A vocal opponent of the communist regime, she was arrested again in 1949, and became the central figure in a show trial that was meant to intimidate the entire nation. Historian Jan Adamec explains.
“The aim of the show trial was essentially to identify an enemy, to turn them into a scapegoat, and to intimidate not just opponents of the regime, but the broad public. The show trial was marked by brutal torture behind the scenes and theatrical confessions in the courtroom. The witnesses who spoke against those prosecuted had to memorize their confessions by heart, because no other evidence existed.”
The show trial lasted for eight days and was accompanied by a massive propaganda campaign—in film, on radio, and in print. The communists organized workplace assemblies and petitions in which “the voice of the people” demanded the harshest possible sentences for the “enemies of the state”.
Over the eight days of Milada Horaková’s trial, the courtroom was packed, but her closest family members were not allowed in. Her sister and her daughter were only allowed to see Milada Horáková the night before her execution. Jana Kánská, who is 91 today and lives in the United States, recalled her mother’s courage in the face of the merciless regime.
"I think my mother was a formidable opponent of the communists from the very beginning, even while she was still serving as a member of Parliament. First they tried to win her over, and when that failed they decided to silence her."
A request for clemency landed on the desk of then president Klement Gottwald, who knew Horáková personally from the pre-war years in Parliament. But neither this, nor appeals from prominent personalities such as Winston Churchill, Bertrand Russell, Eleanore Roosevelt or Albert Einstein helped. The communists didn’t even deliver Horáková’s last letter to her family. She was executed at dawn on June 27, 1950 – the only woman to be sent to the gallows by the regime.
In 1968, during the time of the Prague Spring reforms, the court verdicts were annulled, but it was not until after the Velvet Revolution that Milada Horáková was fully rehabilitated.
Milada Horáková has only a symbolic grave in Prague’s Vyšehrad cemetery. Her ashes were never returned to her family and to this day no one knows where they are.
