For the first time, the Czech Republic has paid compensation to a bereaved family of a killed border refugee from the former communist East German state.

Gerhard Schmidt from Stassfurt in the state of Saxony-Anhalt was shot dead by a Czechoslovak border guard in August 1977 in front of his wife and three children.

He had tried to break through the Iron Curtain with his family and flee to West Germany near Maehring in the Upper Palatinate region of Bavaria.

The Czech Ministry of Justice had now awarded the daughter 33,740 crowns ($1,574 ), her lawyer Lubomir Mueller said in Prague on Wednesday.

A court in the Czech town of Tachov had vindicated the entire family last July.

Investigations after the fall of the Iron Curtain and East Germany’s shift to democracy in 1989 revealed that the group was still about 1,600 metres away from the actual state border.

Meaning that the family could have been arrested without the use of firearms.

This was according to a report by the Office for the Documentation and Investigation of the Crimes of Communism (UDV).

Nevertheless, the shooter was never held accountable.

Czechoslovakia heavily guarded its borders with West Germany and Austria during the Cold War to prevent escape attempts to the West.

The number of border guards was around 20,000.

Recent research estimates show that there were up to 450 civilian deaths at this section of the Iron Curtain.