Milada Horáková

Dr Milada Horáková (25 December 1901, Prague – 27 June 1950, Prague) was a Czech politician. She was a victim of judicial murder committed by the communist party on fabricated charges of conspiracy and treason.

Dr Horáková was born Milada Králová in Prague. She studied law at Charles University and graduated in 1926. She then worked at the Prague City Council. In the same year she graduated, she joined the Czechoslovak National Socialist Party, which was a strong opponent of the Nazis, despite similarities of its name and that of Nazism, which is short for National Socialism or in German: Nationalsozialismus.

After the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939, Horáková joined the underground resistance movement, but she was arrested by the Gestapo in 1940. She was initially sentenced to death, but later the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. She was sent to the concentration camp Terezín and then to various prisons in Germany.

After the liberation in May 1945, Horáková returned to Prague and rejoined her Social Democratic party. In 1946, she was elected a member of the Constituent National Assembly of Czechoslovakia, but resigned her seat after the Communist coup in February 1948. Friends urged her to leave Czechoslovakia, but she remained in the country and continued to be politically active. On 27 September 1949, she was arrested, accused of being the leader of an alleged plot to overthrow the Communist regime.

The StB, the Czechoslovak secret police infamous for their brutal interrogation methods, tried to break up the group of the alleged plotters, and force them to confess to treason and conspiracy, using both physical and psychological torture.

The trial of Horáková and twelve of her colleagues began on 31 May 1950. It was intended to be a show trial, like those in the Soviet Great Purges of the 1930s. It was broadcast on the radio and even supervised by Soviet advisors. The State's prosecutors were Dr. Josef Urválek and Ludmila Brožová-Polednová, among others. The trial had a script that everyone involved was supposed to follow, but on several occasions both the prosecutors and the defendants managed to state their true feelings.

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