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Jews Flee Sudeten Areas in Czechoslovakia; Leaders Confer with Runciman

September 15, 1938
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As panic-stricken Jews fled from the Sudeten German area in the wake of widespread Nazi disorders, representatives of Jewish communities in the district were scheduled to confer today with Lord Runciman, British unofficial mediator in the Sudeten crisis.

Describing the endangered position of the 22,000 Jews living in the territory dominated by Konrad Henlein’s Sudeten German Party, the delegation, headed by Dr. Emil Margulies of Leitmeritz, was prepared to request a close study of the Jewish situation, and a guarantee of full minority rights in the event the country is rantionized.

Jews converged on Praha as the exodus from the Sudeten area continued. Jewish shopkeepers fled from Marienbad. Jews were molested in several other Sudeten towns. Swastika banners were in evidence everywhere throughout the territory, and were daubed on store windows and pavements as shouting crowds called for a plebiscite.

(New York Times correspondent G.E.R. Gedye, who toured the scenes of Monday night’s worst disorders, wirelessed from Karlovy vary (Karlsbad) that property damage ran into many hundreds of thousands of dollars. In Eger, Falkenau, KarLsbad and Asch, Mr. Gedye said, Henleinist mobs, headed by storm troopers with swastika armlets, set out to wreck and plunder immediately after Hitler had concluded his speech in Nuremberg. They hurled rocks through windows of all shops bearing Czech and Jewish names, in some cases plundering the contents. Mr. Gedye interviewed panic-stricken Jewish shopkeepers behind shuttered windows in Chischern, and in Eger found Czech, German-Democratic and Jewish shops wrecked and plundered on street after street. The united press reported from Eger that Jews, Czechs and Social-Democrats were crowding the railway station, frantically seeking trains out of the area.)

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