President Benes Invalidates All Forced Sales of Property in Czechoslovakia

A decree issued here by President Eduard Benes of Czechoslovakia invalidates all Nazi-forced deals and prevides the foundation for the raturn of Jewish property to the rightful owners, although very few Jewish surviors remain to claim it.

The full text of the decree, carried in today’s newspapers, says that “all contracts, transactions, judicial decisione regarding mobile or immobile private or public property are invalid, if undertaken after Sept, 27, 1938, under pressure of occupation, or political, or racial or national persecution,”

The Czechoslovak Government is greatly perturbed over the anti-Jewish and Pascist conditions still prevailing in Slovakia and is planning measures to remedy the situation. It realizes that seven years of a fascist regime in Slovakia, which intimately collaborated with the Nazi government, has left a grave heritage, and a stupendous educational task faces the government in order to revive the democratic spirit in liberated Slovakia.

The correspondent of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency was informed today by high government officials that all factories which previously belonged to Jews and were confiscated by Germans will be administered by the state and will be returned as soon as ownership is established.

(In San Francisco, Jan Masaryk, Czechoslovak Foreign Minister, in a statement today, said that he favored that a large part of the property belonging to Jews murdered by the Nazis should be used to reconstruct shattered Jewish communities. Stating that he believed that it is the duty of non-Jews to make recompense to the Jews for the sufferings they have endured, Mr. Masaryk said that the reconstruction aid “is the least we can do in order to wipe out that deep and bloody stain on our civilization.”)