A towering gallows cast its shadow over a seething crowd of 50,000 in Prague on September 6, 1945, as the city delivered its final, brutal verdict on a man who had embodied Nazi terror. Yoseph Fitzner, the former Nazi deputy mayor, became the last person publicly executed in Czechoslovakia, meeting his end before the very walls of the Pankrác prison where he had once condemned countless others.

The air crackled with a collective hatred as Fitzner was led onto the high scaffold. For the masses of survivors gathered, he was not just an official but a traitor and a brute directly responsible for atrocities during the German occupation. His crimes included ordering street hangings from lampposts and presiding over a regime of censorship, deportation, and cultural annihilation.

Born in Czech lands in 1901, Fitzner’s path to infamy began with his embrace of Nazism in the 1930s. Fluent in Czech and a former history professor, he leveraged his local knowledge after the 1939 occupation, swiftly rising through the ranks. He welcomed Hitler to Prague Castle and was installed as deputy mayor, a position he used to systematically dismantle Prague’s Czech and Jewish heritage.

His tenure was marked by ruthless efficiency. Fitzner banned publications, destroyed synagogues and monuments, and filled government posts with fellow Nazis. He arrested and executed his enemies, sending many to the dreaded Pankrác prison. His ambition, however, eventually clashed with more powerful figures like Reinhard Heydrich, whose even more brutal reign of martial law temporarily sidelined him.

Arrested by American forces as the war collapsed, Fitzner was handed to Czech authorities. During interrogation, the once-arrogant official attempted to reinvent himself, claiming German nationality and distancing himself from the SS’s worst crimes. He portrayed himself as a disliked figure within the Nazi party, but to the Extraordinary People’s Court in Prague, he was simply a perpetrator.

The court found him guilty of treason, collaboration, propaganda, and fraud against the city. His sentence was death, and he was transferred to the very Pankrác prison he had once weaponized. Inmates there endured horrific conditions: freezing or sweltering cells, starvation rations, and daily beatings. It was also home to a guillotine that had claimed many lives on Fitzner’s orders.

On that September morning, a massive wooden scaffold was erected outside the prison gates. The structure was built intentionally high to ensure the vast crowd could witness justice served. As Fitzner was brought forward, three black-uniformed executioners—university students he had once sent to a concentration camp—awaited him.

A witness account describes a tense murmur sweeping the square as the sentence was read. The executioners lifted Fitzner, secured the noose, and in his final moment, he shouted in guttural German, “I die for Germany!” An executioner, enraged by the defiant gesture, slapped the condemned man’s face and sprang the trapdoor.

Fitzner dropped, and for several long minutes, the crowd watched as he struggled, kicked, and slowly strangled. The spectacle of his death throes was visible even to those watching from nearby rooftops. Only when his body finally hung still did the cheers erupt from the multitude, a cathartic release for years of suffering.

The public hanging of Yoseph Fitzner was a raw and violent punctuation mark to the war in Czechoslovakia. It was a conscious act of communal vengeance, a symbolic end to a period of terror administered not in a hidden courtyard but before the eyes of a nation he had betrayed. The 50,000 witnesses did not just see an execution; they witnessed a ritual of closure, however grim, for a city beginning its painful recovery.