Students For Liberty

First the N***s Came for Her in 1940

She was a Czech lawyer and one of the original signatories of the 1938 public manifesto Věrni zůstaneme (“We Remain Faithful”), a pledge of loyalty to the republic against N**i pressure that drew over a million Czechoslovak signatures before Munich.

After the occupation she went underground in the resistance network that took its name from that petition. On August 2, 1940, the Gestapo arrested her and her husband. They tortured her at Pankrác and later at Terezín. She gave them no names.

The N**i Prosecutor Demanded Her Ex*****on

At her 1944 trial in Dresden, the prosecution argued for the death penalty. The court sentenced her to eight years of hard labor instead.

American troops liberated the prison in April 1945. She walked back to Prague and joined the work of rebuilding the country.

She Won a Seat in Parliament

She rejoined her prewar party, the Czechoslovak National Socialists, a left-of-centre, anti-Marxist party, and was elected to the National Assembly in 1946.

She chaired the Council of Czechoslovak Women, the country's leading women's rights organization, founded the magazine Vlasta in 1947, and spent the next three years arguing inside parliament for the constitutional order
she had nearly died protecting.

Then Came the Communist Coup

In February 1948 the Communist Party, led by Klement Gottwald, seized full control of Czechoslovakia.

On March 10, democratic Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk was found dead below his bathroom window at the Czernin Palace; the regime called it a su***de. Horáková chose that same day to resign her parliamentary mandate in protest. Most of her democratic colleagues fled to the West. She stayed in Prague and kept organizing the opposition from outside parliament.

He Stalinized the Country

As president, Gottwald presided over the Stalinization of Czechoslovakia: nationalizations, collectivization, purges, and the wave of Soviet-modeled show trials. Action Committees stripped democrats from public life. Forced-labor camps opened across the country, including the uranium mine at Jáchymov.

By the end of his presidency the regime had executed more than 190 political prisoners and sent roughly 200,000 Czechoslovaks to camps and prisons.

They Came for Her Again on September 27, 1949

This time it was the StB, the Czechoslovak secret police. The regime she had helped resist the N***s to preserve had become the regime that arrested her. Soviet advisors flown in from Moscow drafted her interrogation protocols and the script the defendants were ordered to memorize.

The First Soviet-Style Monster Trial in Czechoslovakia

Her trial opened on May 31, 1950 and was broadcast nationally on Czechoslovak radio. The verdicts had been decided in advance. Defendants were ordered to recite scripted confessions of guilt.

Horáková broke the script on the air and defended her democratic convictions against prosecutor Josef Urválek. In her final statement she told the court her conscience was completely clear, that she had betrayed no one, least of all herself.

Einstein, Churchill, and Eleanor Roosevelt Wrote Directly to the President

They sent personal pleas for clemency directly to Gottwald. Bertrand Russell joined them. Foreign correspondents reported the trial across the world. Gottwald signed her death warrant on June 8 and ignored every appeal that followed.

June 27, 1950, 5:35 in the Morning

At Pankrác Prison in Prague, the regime had ordered the ex*****oners not to break her neck. They used a short rope on purpose. Milada Horáková was strangled for more than thirteen minutes. She was 48 years old.

The regime cremated her at Strašnice and refused to return her ashes to the family. They have never been found. Her daughter Jana received her last letter forty years later, after the Velvet Revolution.

Her last words, recorded by an anonymous eyewitness at the ex*****on:

“I'm falling. I lost this fight but I'm leaving in an honourable way. I love this country. I love these people. I don't feel any hatred towards you. I wish you well.”

Capitalism didn't just create wealth. It ended slavery.

New data shows that British MPs with industrial interests were by far the strongest supporters of abolition legislation. Landowners, aristocrats, merchants, Oxford graduates, no correlation.

The 1806 Manchester petition, one of the oldest anti-slavery petitions on record, was signed mostly by manufacturers and textile workers.

Industrialists signed first, donated most, and were the most overrepresented members of the Anti-Slavery Society.

The more industrialized a region of Britain was, the more anti-slavery petitions it produced.