On this date in 1945, Slovene resistance member Majda Vrhovnik was executed by the Gestapo in Klagenfurt, days before the end of World War II.

A University of Ljubljana medical student and Communist destined to be honored as a national hero of Yugoslavia, Vrhovnik (English Wikipedia entry | Slovenian) joined the underground resistance when the Nazis occupied Yugoslvia in 1941. She’d spend the bulk of the war years producing and distributing illicit anti-occupation propaganda but by war’s end she had been detailed to nearby Klagenfurt — a heavily Slovene city just over the border in Austria.

She was finally caught there and arrested on February 28, 1945, and shot in prison even as Klagenfurt awaited Allied occupation which would arrive on May 8.

Her credentials as a patriotic martyr — there’s a Majda Vrhovnik school named for her — would surface her name in 1988 in connection with an affair that helped begin the breakup of Yugoslavia into ethnic statelets, when an opposition journalist published a censored article under the pseudonym “Majda Vrhovnik”.

On this day..

• 1630: Stine Teipel and Grete Halman, nine-year-old witches
• 1812: David Thompson Myers, "Lord, remember me!"
• 1916: Edward Daly, Michael O'Hanrahan, Willie Pearse, and Joseph Plunkett
• 1943: Rev. Leonard Kentish, kidnapped Australian civilian
• 1685: John Nevison, speed demon
• 1471: Edward of Westminster, Prince of Wales, after the Battle of Tewkesbury
• 1996: Ravji Rao aka Ramchandra, on questionable jurisprudence
• 1897: Five Barcelona anarchists
• 1948: Dieter Wisliceny, Eichmann aide
• 1677: Seven at Tyburn
• 1826: Matthew Brady, gentleman bushranger
• 1763: Hannah Dagoe, violently