The Office for the Documentation and Investigation...

The Office for the Documentation and Investigation of Crimes (UDV) said in its report Performed Capital Punishments in Czechoslovakia in 1918-1989 that Czechoslovak courts sentenced to death 1,207 people between 1918 and 1989 when the capital punishment was abolished. The highest number of executions, 725, took place between 1945 and 1948 under President Edvard Benes's decrees issued against collaboration. The biggest number of executions on political grounds occurred under the tenure of the first communist president, Klement Gottwald, between June 1948 and March 1953. At that time there was a total of 234 death sentences, of which 189 on political grounds.