Political trials of the 1950’s – Prague, Memorial to Milada Horáková

Fact of the Czech figure „Prague Spring – 1968″

Part of the „Dreaming about the democracy” topic

After February 1948, the Communist Party took control of the state apparatus and ruthlessly built socialism in Czechoslovakia. Part of the „construction” was a wave of police terror against real, potential, but often imaginary enemies of the new regime.

Soldiers and former heroes of the military anti-Nazi resistance, clerics and leaders of male and female religious orders, independent writers, artists, scientists, sportsmen, and last but not least members of non-Marxist political parties and Jews among the Communists were persecuted. Victims of police brutality were sentenced to severe punishments in fabricated trials, publicly broadcast by the contemporary media and staged as shocking spectacles of alleged shameful crimes against the revolution and just punishment.

The 1950 trial of National Socialist Party leader Milada Horáková, involving 639 people, has become a site of memory of the Communist monster trials. The trial alone resulted in 10 death sentences, 52 sentences of life imprisonment and a total of 7,850 years of imprisonment for the other falsely accused.