Grave consequences today threatened the more than 200,000 Jews in all sections of former Czecho-Slovakia, with immediate disaster looming for the approximately 100,000 in Bohemia-Moravia, whose capital, Prague, was entered by Chancellor Adolf Hitler on the heels of a German army of occupation.
A Government spokesman in Berlin declared: “The same principles that obtain with reference to the Jews in Greater Germany will, of course, be invoked in our protectorate also. We do not believe, however, that the problem is formidable. There has been a mass exodus of Jews ever since the Munich accord.”
Foreign legations in Prague were packed with scores of persons who had sought shelter there from German vengeance and who refused to leave, demanding the right of asylum, as German troops took possession of the broken-hearted and openly hostile former Czech capital and placed Konrad Henlein, Sudeten Nazi leader, in charge.
Herr Henlein, already Reich Commissioner and Nazi Gauleiter for Sudetenland, was given the same functions in Bohemia with power in all administrative matters. The powers were granted him by General Johannes Blaskowitz, commander of the Third Reichswehr Corps, which occupied Prague today.
While Germany’s new “protectorate” the first non-German territory to be occupied by the Nazis faced the introduction of the Nuremberg racial laws and other of the Reich’s anti-Jewish legislation, Slovakia, whose anti-Semitic Premier Josef Tiso is under Hitler’s influence, was expected also to introduce sweeping anti-Semitic legislation. Slovakia had about 90,000 Jews before recent developments. The situation in Carpatho-Ukraine, where there were about 65,000 Jews, remained unclear as an invading Hungarian military force reached the Polish border. It could be expected, however, that Hungary’s anti-Semitic laws would be applied to any territory annexed by Budapest.
The refugee question in what was formerly Czecho-Slovakia was touched on in the British House of Commons today when Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain made a statement in which he deplored that the Reich “for the first time… are effecting military occupation of a territory with people with whom they have no racial connection,” but adhered to his appeasement policy.
When William Wedgwood Benn, Laborite, interrupted Mr. Chamberlain’s statement to ask, “What about the refugees?” the Prime Minister said, with reference to the £10,000,000 loan which had been arranged for Czecho-Slovakia, partly to aid refugees: “I have no reason to suppose that these three and one quarter millions already drawn have not been applied in accordance with the arrangements made by us. A substantial portion of the sum has been directly devoted to the assistance of refugees.” He said regarding the loan that “it would seem impossible at present to say how the scheme can be carried through.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
