German Agency Charges Czech Invasion; Hitler Reported Meeting Aids

The German News Agency tonight charged that Czechoslovak soldiers had penetrated Reich territory and attempted to dynamite a bridge. German frontier guards succeeded in routing a Czechoslovak squad of soldiers which tried to set explosives under a wooden bridge near Berharstall, a D.N.B., communique declared on the basis of an alleged report from a German police post at Mistelbach.

The incident reportedly took place Saturday between noon and 2 p.m., when the Czechoslovak soldiers, according to D.N.B., smuggled 20 small cases of explosives past the German frontier and placed them at various points on the bridge, which points toward the Czechoslovak frontier. The explosives were equipped with fuses and are still on the bridge, the communique said. Thanks to the vigilance of Reich guards, the Czechoslovaks were driven off before they could light the fuses, said the communique.

Unconfirmed reports here declared that a large number of high Reich military leaders gathered at Berchtesgaden tonight to confer with Chancellor Adolf Hitler on the Czechoslovak crisis. No confirmation was immediately available of such a meeting at Hitler’s Bavarian Mountain retreat. It was understood, however, that Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop had left Berlin for a conference with the Fuehrer at Berchtesgaden.

Earlier, with the entire Reich press thundering against the Czechoslovak “murderers Hitler today warned that Germany’s power rests on “the force of a people of 75,000,000 men.” Hitler’s reverberating proclamation of German unity in the current crisis, marked by reports of German troops movements toward the Czechoslovak frontier, the killing of two Sudeten Germans, and Praha’s call of two full reserve classes to the colors, was made at ceremonies in Munich marking the beginning of construction of a new subway.