Herta Kašparová: The Collaborator Who Pointed Her Neighbours Toward a Firing Squad
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On the afternoon of 7 May 1945, two days after Germany's de facto surrender and the same week that celebrations were breaking out across liberated Europe, a young woman walked through a group of detained Czech men with SS soldiers at her side. Her name was Herta Kašparová. She was 21 years old. She pointed at the men she recognised, and those men were taken away and shot. She then snapped her fingers at four more, and they were executed on the spot.
Fifteen months later, on 13 September 1946, Herta Kašparová was hanged in the town where she was born, in front of the families of the people she had helped to kill. She was 23 years old. Her execution was the last public hanging of a woman in Czechoslovakia.
A Town on the Edge of Two Worlds
Herta Kašparová was born on 21 June 1923 in Třešť, a small market town in the Vysočina region of what is now the Czech Republic. Her family were Sudeten Germans, part of the ethnic German-speaking minority that had lived in Bohemia and Moravia for centuries. Her father worked as a stationmaster at the local railway.
She was born with a deformity in her right leg that gave her a pronounced limp. In childhood this made her a target. Accounts from those who knew her describe relentless mockery from other children, the kind of sustained cruelty that leaves a mark. She joined the local Sokol gymnastics club, partly to try to correct the limp and partly in the hope of making friends. She had plenty of acquaintances, but no real intimacy. She never found a romantic partner.
Her brother Alois, by contrast, navigated the occupation years very differently. He worked for the criminal police in Jihlava and quietly destroyed denunciations that came across his desk, saving a number of Czech lives in the process. The same family, a completely different moral choice.
Working for the Gestapo
After the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, the country was reorganised as the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and ethnic Germans like the Kašpar family found themselves in a position of structural advantage. Herta was bilingual in Czech and German, and around 1940 she used connections through her brother to secure a job at the German criminal police headquarters in Jihlava, initially as a records clerk and filing assistant.
In September 1942 she transferred to the Gestapo's central office in Zlín, continuing in the same role as interpreter and administrative assistant. Her position placed her inside the interrogation system. She translated documents, sat in on interviews of detained Czech citizens, and was suspected by multiple later witnesses of acting as an informant, reporting on people she encountered who showed signs of resistance sympathies.
As the Eastern Front collapsed and the Red Army advanced westward through early 1945, Herta returned to her parents' home in Třešť. Whatever she had witnessed during five years at the centre of the Gestapo's operations had not given her pause. It had apparently given her appetite.
The Rising and the Reprisal
On 5 May 1945, news of the Prague Uprising spread across the country. Czech towns and cities that had lived under occupation for six years began to act. In Třešť, local insurgents moved quickly. They established a National Committee, took control of the town, and rounded up German residents and officials, detaining them in the local school building. German property was seized. Armed men went door to door.
A group of around twenty armed men entered the Kašpar family home at the railway station. They found an old shotgun, took what they could carry, and made threats. One of them, a railwayman named Mixa, reportedly threatened Herta's father. The family was humiliated and frightened. For Herta, this confirmed everything.
The Czech insurgents' control of Třešť lasted hours. By the evening of 7 May, two Wehrmacht punishment units had driven into the town in armoured vehicles, retaken it, and freed the detained Germans. The insurgents and a large number of civilian men were rounded up. SS soldiers were in the streets. And Herta Kašparová was among them.
The Finger and the Snap
What happened next is documented in witness testimony and confirmed by Herta herself at her trial. Walking alongside SS troops through the groups of detained Czech men, she pointed out individuals she recognised from her time in Jihlava and Zlín, men she associated with the local underground or with the previous day's uprising. Eleven men were identified this way. Ten were shot in the courtyard of the town hall. The eleventh had already been executed alongside other prisoners.
Then came the snap. Four young men were brought before her separately. She looked at them and clicked her fingers. All four were executed by firing squad the same afternoon. More than one source has since stated that at least two of those four men had been among the children who tormented her as a girl, mocking her limp. Whether or not that's true, it was widely believed in Třešť.
In total, 33 Czech men died in Třešť on 7 May 1945. Not all of them died because of Herta's identifications, and some were killed in the broader reprisal violence of the two Wehrmacht units. But she was directly responsible for the deaths of at least eleven of them, and the four she condemned with a snap of her fingers became the most notorious detail of a case already full of them.
At her trial she said: "I know that I caused the death of several people. I acted out of revenge."
For more on the women who operated within or alongside the Nazi apparatus, read about Irma Grese, the SS guard at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, and Jenny Barkmann, the Beautiful Spectre of Stutthof concentration camp.
Flight and Capture
When the Wehrmacht units withdrew from Třešť and Soviet forces arrived to complete the liberation, Herta fled. She made it to Austria, where she kept quiet and tried to disappear. She managed it for a while. But she had been too visible in too many places, and there were too many witnesses.
She was tracked down and arrested in 1946, then brought back to Třešť to face trial under Czechoslovakia's post-war retribution laws. The country had established People's Courts specifically to prosecute collaborators, building on the framework of international accountability that was simultaneously playing out at the Nuremberg Trials. You can read about the psychology of those proceedings in the piece about Dr Douglas Kelley and the minds he encountered at Nuremberg.
The case against her was built on witness testimony from survivors and the families of the dead. She didn't meaningfully contest it. "Denunciation leading to execution" was treated as aggravated collaboration under the retribution laws, particularly where the court concluded the accused had acted voluntarily and for personal reasons rather than under direct coercion. The court concluded exactly that. The sentence was death.
The Pole
The method of execution chosen for Herta Kašparová was pole hanging, a form of judicial execution used in Central and Eastern Europe that was considered, in the post-war Czech context, the appropriate punishment for traitors. It was not a quick death.
The apparatus was a wooden pole three metres long, sixty centimetres wide, and five centimetres thick, fitted with a noose. The condemned was bound to the pole with a leather strap across the chest, lifted into position, and noosed. When the platform dropped, the noose tightened. The executioner stood behind the pole and applied pressure to the rope while an assistant pushed upward on the condemned's head to encourage the neck to break. If it didn't break cleanly, death came by slow asphyxiation. Witnesses described the process as taking between ten and twenty minutes.
The execution took place on the evening of 13 September 1946 in a meadow on the edge of Třešť, in a spot known locally as Pod Kaštany, under the chestnut trees. It was half past six. Herta was brought out in a summer dress. When she saw the pole for the first time, her knees gave out and she collapsed. The guards had to lift her and walk her to the apparatus. She was visibly shaking as the ropes were tied.
She was raised, noosed, and dropped at 6:38pm. She was 23 years old.
She was buried near the execution site. No memorial marks the location. In Třešť, the memorials are for the thirty-three men killed on 7 May 1945.
What Her Case Represents
Herta Kašparová is not a figure who attracts straightforward sympathy or straightforward contempt, though most who know her story land fairly quickly on the latter. She was not a soldier. She was not following orders in any direct sense on the afternoon she walked through those detained men. She chose to be there, and she chose who to point at.
Her defenders, and there have been some, have argued that she was a marginalised young woman who had been absorbed into a system of enormous violence and whose actions on 7 May were shaped by years of humiliation and a single day of genuine fear, when armed men came into her home. Her prosecutors argued, and the court agreed, that collaborating with the Gestapo for five years and then actively participating in the identification of men for execution went well beyond anything that could be excused by personal grievance or fear.
Her brother Alois, in the same town, in comparable circumstances, made different choices. He destroyed denunciations. He saved lives. The contrast makes Herta's own decisions harder to attribute purely to circumstance.
Cases like hers were playing out across Czechoslovakia, Poland, France, and the Netherlands in the years immediately after the war, as liberated nations grappled with how to prosecute civilians who had aided the occupation. Most were handled in People's Courts, largely outside the international spotlight of Nuremberg. Most of the defendants were ordinary people, not ideologues or senior officials, but clerks, interpreters, landlords, and neighbours who had made choices that got other people killed.
Herta Kašparová remains one of the most discussed of these cases, partly because of the specific, theatrical cruelty of the finger snap, and partly because her execution was public and photographed. Her story surfaces periodically as an illustration of how occupation can turn personal grievance into something that looks very much like evil. The thirty-three men killed in Třešť on 7 May 1945 are remembered there. She is remembered mainly in court records.
For more on the lives of those who resisted rather than collaborated, read about Sophie Scholl, beheaded by the Nazis at 21 for leading anti-war student resistance, and Lepa Radic, executed by the Nazis at 17.
SOURCES
1. Životopisy Online: Případ Herta Kašparová. Poslední veřejná poprava ženy v Československu — https://zivotopisyonline.cz/pripad-herta-kasparova-posledni-verejna-poprava-zeny-v-ceskoslovensku/
2. Earth-Scope: From Denunciation to the Gallows: The Legal Case Against Herta Kašparová — https://www.earth-scope.com/2026/02/from-denunciation-to-the-gallows-the-legal-case-against-herta-kasparova-and-the-post-war-justice-system-in-czechoslovakia.html
3. Rowdiva.com: Herta Kašparová — https://www.rowdiva.com/Herta.html
4. News From The Dark: The Execution of Herta Kasparova — https://newsfromthedark.com/dark-history-the-execution-of-herta-kasparova-who-was-hanged-for-war-crimes-in-1946-at-23
5. Find A Grave: Herta Kašparová (1923–1946) — https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/291668700/herta-ka%C5%A1parov%C3%A1
6. Wikidata: Herta Kašparová — https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q106285394
