Keep in mind for your story that fascist governments were not efficient and all-knowing.

#The Four Year Plan sets the Punishment

If the "show trial" was a local affair and not on national television, perhaps the Dear Leader has given plan numbers not just to the steel industry but also to the secret police. Every month, so many traitors sentenced to death, so many sent to exile, and so on. The characters were lucky that they went to trial on the 27th of the month and not a week later.

If they went on national TV that doesn't quite work, because the fascists had no problem breaking their own rules. So how about this?

#A Fate Worse Than Death

Things are happening in the Falklands camps. Things that fill regime critics with dread and loyalists with glee, even if neither groups knows what exactly is happening. The speculations are contradictory. Former prisoners know that every now and then, a bunch of camp inmates disappears. They may be working on chemical weapons, or entirely different forms of abuse.

Early Nazi concentration camps -- mostly holding the German opposition -- were quite brutal, often lethal, but inmates could also get released alive after some weeks or months, to spread the tales of terror and to return to the workforce.

Keep in mind for your story that fascist governments were not efficient and all-knowing.

The Four Year Plan sets the Punishment

If the "show trial" was a local affair and not on national television, perhaps the Dear Leader has given plan numbers not just to the steel industry but also to the secret police. Every month, so many traitors sentenced to death, so many sent to exile, and so on. The characters were lucky that they went to trial on the 27th of the month and not a week later.

If they went on national TV that doesn't quite work, because the fascists had no problem breaking their own rules. So how about this?

A Fate Worse Than Death

Things are happening in the Falklands camps. Things that fill regime critics with dread and loyalists with glee, even if neither groups knows what exactly is happening. The speculations are contradictory. Former prisoners know that every now and then, a bunch of camp inmates disappears. They may be working on chemical weapons, or entirely different forms of abuse.

Early Nazi concentration camps -- mostly holding the German opposition -- were quite brutal, often lethal, but inmates could also get released alive after some weeks or months, to spread the tales of terror and to return to the workforce.