Details of how Germany used enforced anti-Semitism to transfer Jewish property in Czechoslovakia into Nazi hands are revealed in a white paper entitled “Two Years of German Oppression in Czechoslovakia,” presented to the State Department on Tuesday and made public today by the Czech Legation.
The document stresses that the Nazis used anti-Semitism as a weapon to obtain control of key Czech industries. “Jewish concerns were transferred only to German hands. The “Aryan” commissars in them, with large salaries, were in every case German. Even in the cases when Jews had transferred their property to the hands of an “Aryan” Czech, this transfer was annulled and the transferred property was simply given over to a German.”
The white paper reveals that one of the ten conditions of the Munich “guarantee” of the Czach frontiers was “the promulgation of anti-Semitic laws analogous to those of Nuremberg.”
Under the heading, “Murders and Atrocities,” the document says: “Jews were arrested by thousands, without any reason, and were sent to concentration camps. This chiefly affected rich Jewish business men, lawyers and doctors, for the arrests were carried out by the Gestapo, which took this opportunity of plundering the home of the man arrested…A number of rabbis were murdered and many hundreds of Jews escaped humiliation and torture by committing suicide.”
The repercussions in Czechoslovakia have not pleased the Germans, the white paper says. “The ‘Aryan’ Cultural Union cannot conceal the fact that the Czech public decisively condemns these brutalities. Czech customers ostentatiously visit Jewish shops, insofar as they are still open. In Prague it became one of the ways of protesting against the Germans to go to Jewish coffee-houses.”
In Slovakia, the document goes on, “within recent months, the anti-Semitic policy has produced interesting effects. The Slovak public is turning away in disgust from the brutalities committed by the regime against the Jews and the official Slovak press has today to rebuke the Slovak public for being too lukewarm in its attitude to the anti-Jewish campaign and even for sympathizing with Jewish fellow citizens.”
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