The Czech Conspiracy
A Phase in the World-War Plot

1. Prologue
2. Concealment of the Truth
3. Origin of the Czecho-Slovak Republic
4. The National Minorities and their Czech Masters
5. The Reward for Desertion and Betrayal: The Czechs in Russia
6. Under the Czech Terror in Bohemia:
    Arrest of English Investigators by the Czech Police
7. Towards Armageddon up to September 26th
8. Epilogue
9. Notes and References

This book is about the latest phase of the World-War Plot and its Consequences, for Europe and for us. It was first published as a pamphlet under the title Czecho-Slovakia during the recent crisis, and was written immediately after my return from a tour in Central Europe. As the result of requests from some Members of Parliament and some friends who wished to have in handy form, before the national crisis was debated in Parliament, some inside information as well as access to sources and documents not easily procurable or available, the pamphlet was compiled under circumstances of great difficulty within the space of a very few days.

The second, and much enlarged, edition now called for meets a wider need. It provides, on the one hand, a historical record in which the seeds of the present world situation are traced back to the balance of European powers at the time of the Treaty of Berlin in 1878, and on the other reveals some of those hidden undercurrents that run beneath the diplomatic and political records of the present and past which still threaten us with catastrophe and disaster, unless we are in a position to recognise and understand their meaning.

Since the end of the World War I have devoted myself to the related studies of anthropology, agriculture, the science of population and of international affairs. In their pursuit I have made frequent visits, sometimes on university lecture tours, to Germany, France, Spain, Belgium, Poland, and Czecho-Slovakia, as well as to other countries.

In 1936 I visited Spain after the outbreak of the Civil War. The same year found me studying the minority problems in Czecho-Slovakia. Events in these two countries have been closely connected and are linked with events in France and England. It was Lenin who once said: "Poignardez d'abord l'Espagne et puis la France." It was the Comintern and the "Internationals" which planned to Bolshevise Spain, not without the complicity of some English politicians. When plans miscarried, owing to General Franco's victory, Czecho-Slovakia, which had for long been used in the game, was chosen as the readiest means to bring about a world war.

I make no profession of having "purely academic interests." Invariably such pretensions conceal ulterior motives or fail to conceal the cautious pedantry and the dullness of those who have no living interests at all. Of course I am strongly, even passionately, biased - but only in favour of the truth. And I am careless - whether the truth be welcome or not.

The very English and learned Dr. Johnson once wrote: "The true lover of his country is ready to communicate his fears, and to sound the alarm, whenever he perceives the approach of mischief. He sounds no alarm when there is no enemy. Popular instructions are commonly the work, not of the wise and steady but the violent and rash, whose meetings are seldom attended but by the idle and dissolute. As war is one of the heaviest of national evils, a calamity in which every species of misery is involved, no man who desires the public prosperity will inflame general resentment."

It is in the control of public instruction that the greatest danger to peace and prosperity now lies. It is in the contrast revealed between the true facts and public distortion of them that the value of this work may be found. My readers may, in this study, be helped to decide whether it is better that the publication of lies, damaging to the interests of the nation, should be punished or, as in England, that the publication of the truth, damaging to individuals and to political interests, should so often be treated as a criminal offence and a source of lucrative profit to affluent and privileged rogues. We may even consider whether it is better, as in England, that the Press should control the Government or, as in Germany, that the Government should control the Press.

Just returned from my tour around the "tinder-box of Europe," I was asked by Lord Lymington, on September 16th [1938], with some others, to address a packed and enthusiastic meeting in the Caxton Hall. Almost, if not actually, the only newspaper to mention the meeting was the New Statesman and Nation, a journal whose enthusiasm for another "war to make the world safe for democracy" led it to bemoan the failure of Monsieur Mandel and Monsieur Paul Reynaud to bring it about, in an article in the same number, September 24th, under the title "Cold Feet in Paris". This was the same Monsieur Mandel who was Monsieur Clemenceau's Private Secretary at the Peace Conference. Could it have been M. Mandel's Jewishness which accounted for his waning influence during the crisis in Paris? This journal, which hoped that, with the help of Mr. Churchill, Mr. Eden, and Sir Archibald Sinclair, "Mr. Chamberlain can be overthrown in the next fortnight" also noted with satisfaction that the three press reporters, sitting at the table in Caxton Hall, bit their pencils and hung their heads without taking down a word. The New Statesman, however, also appears to have had an attentive correspondent in the hall who reported in its pages that "the audience yelled its disapproval of Czecho-Slovakia, of Soviet Russia, of the Jews, of the Communists, of 'howling Deans from the wilds of Kent,' and of the whole British press."

I do not recollect that any speaker, including myself, was guilty of coupling together in one sweeping condemnation this galaxy of political talent, on whose behalf we were expected to send our sons to the shambles. We must, therefore, be grateful to this journal for making the connection clear, and for saving from oblivion this significant indication of the audience's native English opinion. I preserve, also, from its pages a reference to the fact that I was, anonymously, given the credit for quoting Isaac d'Israeli with approval. The actual quotation, however, was not, curiously enough, given by the New Statesman. It was Isaac d'Israeli's definition of politics: "The art of governing mankind by deceiving them."

The next reverberation of the Caxton Hall meeting fluttered in the pages of the Jewish Chronicle, which in its issue of September 30th quoted the New Statesman's account of the meeting. This so alarmed the gentleman who took the chair at that meeting, Mr. Michael Beaumont, former M.P. for Aylesbury and described as a Territorial officer, that he rushed into print in the issue of October 7th of the Jewish Chronicle in order to explain that the New Statesman had not the decency to say that he was no party to any racial dispute and opposed to any form of "anti-Semitism." He was, moreover, "a life-long and violent opponent of anti-Semitism in any form." He had, however, "received a pledge, which was not kept, that no anti-Jewish doctrine would be advanced."

This was the first and only indication I received that I had been invited on a platform, not, as I had been led to believe, to talk about Czecho-Slovakia and the crisis, including, of course, the minority problems of Central Europe, but apparently in order to avoid all mention of only one minority - and a very important one - the Jewish minority. It should be needless to say that under such conditions no scientific ethnographer could ever mention the minority problem at all; nor could he intelligently mention Czecho-Slovakia, nor the crisis, nor international affairs, nor Palestine, nor the domestic politics of England, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Hungary, Roumania, Russia, Spain, Mexico, or the United States of America.

Of course it is equally important not to over-emphasise unduly and unnecessarily any one minority; nor is a scientific ethnographer likely to talk about "philo-Semitism" and "anti-Semitism," as though any such race as a "Semitic" race existed. The Arabs and Jews of Palestine, for example, do not belong to the same racial group. "Semitic" is a linguistic, not a racial, distinction and group. The word "Semite" derives, as everyone knows, from the mythological Hebrew account of the descendants of Shem the son of Noah. It has no ethnological meaning.

In Czecho-Slovakia the problem of the Jews was particularly difficult for a demographer to deal with because of the lack of proper statistics. Under the administration of President Masaryk and Benesh a Jew could either register as belonging to a "Jewish national minority" or, if he preferred, as belonging to other of the national minorities, German, Hungarian, Polish, Ruthenian, or Czech. In addition to his choice of "national registration" he might also register, at the same time, as belonging to the Confessional, or Orthodox Jewish, congregation: as a Czech, a German, or Pole of the Jewish faith. Consequently there was no correspondence between the "Confessional" Jews, the "National" Jews, and those non-Orthodox persons of Jewish origin and race who might be registered as German or Czech, etc.

The importance of Jews in this part of the world was recognised long before the Czech state existed and Mr. Wickham Steed, in his Hapsburg Monarchy (1913), wrote: "Among the peoples of Austria-Hungary the Jewish people stands first in importance. It is not usually enumerated among the Hapsburg 'nationalities,' though the Zionist movement has brought into being a Jewish National Organisation which was represented in the Parliament of 1907 by two Zionist deputies and by a politician who was described as a 'Moderate Israelite'. In Statistical Year Books the Jews figure only as a 'denomination.'"

For the purpose of clear definition and statistics it would be desirable, especially with the assistance and collaboration of the Jewish Community itself, to distinguish the three categories of modern Israelites as: Political and cultural Jews (including Zionists); denominational and Orthodox Jews; and racial Jews, or Jews by origin and extraction.

For convenience, both Jews and non-Jews may agree to employ the term "Jew" to cover all three categories; this would, I believe, conform to its use by such scholars as Professor Gilbert Murray, President of the League of Nations Union.

It is the Jew himself, not the Gentile, who has insisted that his nationality, his religion, and his race should be inseparable. Mr. Leon Simon in his Studies in Jewish Nationalism (1920) refers to this insistence as "that deep-rooted instinct which makes him insist at all costs on being something different from his surroundings - an instinct which is religious as well as national only because the nationality of the Jew is inseparable from his national and universal God.... It is misleading to speak of the Jewish system of life as a religious system if we are using the term 'religious' in the sense in which it is ordinarily taken.... The Messianic age means for the Jew... the universal recognition of the Jew and his God."

Professor Gilbert Murray once wrote me in a somewhat jocular vein under date January 20th, 1936, in reply to some questions I had raised regarding the League of Nations and the Zionist movement. He wrote as follows: "It is sad that the Jews have so much influence over the Conservatives, the Bishops and the Cecil family, but I am still more disturbed by the rumours I hear of the control exercised by the devil-worshipping Yezidis over the Wessex farmers and the Pitt-Rivers family. How little we suspected these things when we had that pleasant dinner together. Yours sincerely, Gilbert Murray." This ironic letter may have had no more than a flippant intention but the President of the League of Nations Union, a man of affairs and a great scholar, should surely have been able to say what meaning he attaches to the term "Jew".

In 1920 he wrote in the Contemporary Review a very serious article about Satan and the League of Nations, entitled: "Satanism and the World Order," which has since become very well known and much quoted. The article ended with the following exhortation: "We have clear schemes set before us of the road ahead which will lead... into regions of safety: the League of Nations. If the great democracies permanently prefer to follow low motives and to be governed by inferior men, it looks as if not the British Empire only, but the whole World Order established by the end of the War and summarised roughly in the League of Nations, may pass from history under the same fatal sentence as the great empires of the past."

In reminding Professor Gilbert Murray of his prophecy, uttered over the cradle of the League, I suggested on March 8th, 1936 that the League of Nations had already been fatally stabbed by the javelin of Nemesis, which venerable goddess had already, long ago, prophesied that the League could not survive the Abyssinian War, then being brought to a close, and wrote:

"Since the ghost of the League of Nations only now manifests itself under the guise of the scholarship of Professor Gilbert Murray, the political activities of the Cecil family and the sartorial effects of Mr. Anthony Eden, the discussion seems relegated to the academic realms of history and the literary commentaries of Francis Bacon on former Ethiopian conflicts.

"'Nemesis' was said by Francis Bacon to be 'a venerable Goddess feared by Fortune's favourites, portrayed with a javelin in her right hand and in her left a pitcher with the similitudes of Ethiopians engraved upon it. And before those whom she destroys, not in their calamity and misfortune but when Fortune's favourites come before the Common People, she ever presents the black and dismal spectacle of the Troops of Ethiopia.'

"With regard to the Jewish question, I do not think you quite correctly appreciated my use of the term.... In its broader cultural sense I use the term 'Jewish' rather like you use the word 'Hellenic' when you (in Four Stages of Greek Religion) write: 'The new spirit of classical Greece with its humanity, its intellectual life, its genius for poetry and art, describes itself as being Hellenic - like the Hellenes. But where no man's ancestry would bear much inspection the only way to show you were a true Hellene was to behave as such.' Similarly, the new spirit of international Jewry, with its genius for finance, manipulation and usury, for racial, intellectual and religious confusions, describes itself as merely being 'Jewish' - like the Jews; the English language has even made a verb of it - 'to Jew'.

"How little I suspected many years ago when I read your article on 'Satanism' in the Contemporary Review that you were describing Satan as a gentleman who did not like Jewish methods nor the League of Nations."

It is gratifying to think that, when we were writing eighteen years ago, so great a scholar as Gilbert Murray and so little known an author as myself were both such good prophets.

The wave of anti-Jewish rioting and agitation, now more marked than ever before, was and is a disquieting feature of the aftermath of the Armageddon that failed. It was particularly noticeable and widespread in France, and was renewed after a young Polish Jew walked into the German Embassy in Paris, on November 7th, and shot and mortally wounded the young German Third Secretary. Even in the Czech areas of Bohemia and Moravia, since the collapse of the Benesh régime, anti-Jew rioting broke out, and a new "anti-Semitic" weekly, the Obnowa, appeared in Prague in November. The B.B.C. suggested, however, without reason, that the reaction was almost confined to Germany. What is the truth?

Is it not significant that a prominent English newspaper, the Daily Express, on March 24th, 1933, the year of Hitler's rise to power, streamed a headline across the front page: "JUDEA DECLARES WAR ON GERMANY"? Beneath it was produced a picture of Hitler being judged by four Rabbis, and the leading article was: "Jews of all the World Unite" - "Boycott German Goods." Was it then to have been a war of racial revenge that we, together with France and as the ally of Bolshevik Russia, were asked to wage war in 1938?

In conclusion it remains to me to thank all those friends whose encouragements or impetuous demands that I should offer such special knowledge, training, and expertise as I may possess, to the public for whatever good use they may care to make of it, were responsible for this book being written. In particular I would thank Seaton Fox for making available his valuable collection of rare documents and books and for equally valuable suggestions, to my old friend Georges Batault and Léon de Poncins, to my publishers, and lastly and above all to Becky Sharpe, my private secretary and companion on many scientific excursions and travels, lecture tours and congresses, which took us together to Spain during the Civil War and to the famine districts of Czecho-Slovakia.

In the belief that the ages should be explained by the hours as the hours can be instructed by the ages, I address this volume to those in Parliament or outside who, for good or evil, direct our national destiny, to those who take part in public affairs or local government, in education or public instruction, and to all those amongst my friends, as well as those I have not met, especially in England, France, Germany, and Italy, who believe that the future peace of the world, the prosperity of their own nations, the security of their homes, and the happiness of future generations, depend upon the will to organise, not for war but for peace, upon the foundations laid by the four statesmen who signed the Four-Power Pact at Munich on September 29th, and by the British Premier and the German Führer who signed the Goodwill Declaration on September 30th, 1938.

Until, in August and September 1938, the newsboys shrieked the scare-line headings in the streets of London: "Gravest Crisis Since the War" - "Peace or War" - "Hitler Unmasked" - "Herr Henlein's Demands" - "Czechs Ready to Die for their Country", few people in England knew much about the Czechs or the country they lived in; it had occurred to very few Englishmen why they should take any great interest in that country unless they wanted to buy cheap coloured glass, "made in Czecho-Slovakia", or unless, maybe, they remembered that Karlsbad plums and Pilsener beer were pleasant comestibles which took their names from two towns in what was once Austria before the twenty-year Balkan Republic ever existed, and for which the name "Czecho-Slovakia" was invented.

It certainly never occurred to the man-in-the-street twenty years ago, at the end of the "War to end War and make the World Safe for Democracy", that old soldiers should be invited again so soon to send their sons to die, not for their own country, not for liberty and their homes, but, so the democratic press vociferously explained, in order that seven million Czechs, allied to 260-million-odd Russians, Frenchmen, and Englishmen, should prevent a little handful of 3½ million half-starved German Bohemians being allowed to vote for Home Rule or even to have enough to eat.

The questions that every Englishman wants answered stand out:

Who wants war?
Why? Who profits by war?
How are we concerned?

I have undertaken here to set out calmly, dispassionately, and briefly, the principal facts known to me, by personal observation and experiences, by twenty years' study of these problems in Central Europe, and by my recent adventures in the country which is the Tinder-Box of Europe.

True words are not pleasant: pleasant words are not true. So the greatest Chinese sage of all time addressed the small glib liars of the world, who are hired to use words in order to confuse and mislead, and those greater liars who have the power, and use it, to suppress and outlaw the truth. I stand aghast at the power of falsehood!

Let every good man and true who knows any hidden fact in the many-sided crystal which makes the whole truth, speak it at the bar of public opinion and shout it above the chattering and lying din.

"Let him take both reputation and life in his hands, and with perfect urbanity, dare the gibbet and the mob by the absolute truth of his speech and the rectitude of his behaviour." (Emerson.)

If, then, in the cause of Truth, I must accuse and give the lie to the printed or the spoken word - I do!

The state of Czecho-Slovakia came into existence on October 28th, 1918, as the result of the Czech cause being espoused by President Wilson at the Peace Conference, and after Great Britain had given recognition to the Czech legionaries, composed of prisoners of war and deserters from the Austro-Hungarian army, who had been formed into a Czech Legion in Russia.

The Czech nationalist movement was first organized some twenty years before the War, and its influence was largely due to the efforts of the first Czech President, the late Thomas G. Masaryk, in America. During the War, these Austrian-Czech deserters were formed into a Czech battalion, which the British Government recognised in June 1918 as one of the White Russian and Allied forces in the war against Austro-Hungary and Germany, for which purpose they were equipped. On the collapse of the Austrian Empire, a Czecho-Slovak "National" Committee was encouraged by the Allies to proclaim itself a government in Prague and was afterwards recognised in the Treaty of Versailles.

Before the end of 1917 nothing remained of Imperial Russia's war aims. No longer could she aspire to control Constantinople, the Bosphorus, and the Dardanelles, nor to annex Bukovina. No longer could her pre-war pan-Slav ambitions and intrigues serve to rally to her assistance her Czech and Slav Balkan allies, now that the Red standard of World Revolution had replaced the double-headed eagle in Moscow.

Russia was defeated and her army broken before America would consent to join the Allies. Lenin accepted Germany's offer of an armistice and Russian delegates crossed the Russian lines. So Allied diplomacy and propaganda was directed in 1918 to preventing Russia being driven into the arms of Germany. Thus it came about that war aims had to be reconsidered, as it was time to liquidate Imperial Russia's aims which stood in the way of a separate peace with Turkey.

The Bolshevik-internationalist destroyers of our war ally, Russia, and the Bolsheviki's powerful financial friends in the United States of America, who were subsidising world revolution as well as Czech and Serbian agitation, now had to be conciliated. At the same time, Mr. Lloyd George and his Foreign Secretary, Mr. Arthur Balfour, decided that it was necessary to counter the policy of those members of the British Government who were "inclined to take up a strong anti-Bolshevik attitude." Accordingly, the Prime Minister requested Mr. Balfour to draw up a Memorandum in which he embodied the new policy of "winning the goodwill of the present rulers of Petrograd" together with the new "war aims," which circular Memorandum of December 9th, 1917, was sent to members of the Cabinet. It was, according to Mr. Lloyd George, one of Mr. Balfour's "most notable State documents." In this Memorandum Mr. Balfour sets out:

"I have already indicated my view that we ought, if possible, not to come to an open breach with the Bolsheviks or drive them into the enemy's (Germany's) camp.... If we drive Russia into the hands of Germany, we shall hasten the organisation of the country by German officials on German lines.... The policy of avoiding the active malevolence of the Bolshevik Party raises most important diplomatic issues...."

It now became the keystone of British diplomatic policy to conciliate Mr. Trotsky and Mr. Litvinov, even though it was well known, as Mr. Lloyd George records, that:

"The Home Office drew our attention to an article in the Woolwich Pioneer by Mr. Litvinov, given under his official seal, inviting the munition workers of Woolwich to start a revolution. The War Office reported that he had also been endeavoring to tamper with the discipline of British troops, notably Russian Canadians. These were some of the difficulties confronting us...."

Representatives of the Great Powers, who were signatories to the Treaty of London, dated September 4th, 1914, and the secret pact of April 26th, 1915, by which other powers adhered to it, now had to review their "war aims" in the light of a new balance of power. By this Treaty Great Britain, France and Russia had promised certain Austrian territories, inhabited by the Southern Slavs, to Italy. The Serbs, Croats and Slovenes took alarm at the prospect of the partition of Dalmatia by the victorious Allies, and under the leadership of Dr. Trumbitch, President of the Southern Slav Committee, and M. Pasich, Prime Minister of Serbia, assembled in Corfu, where, on June 2th, 1917, they issued a Southern Slav Unitary Declaration proclaiming the unity of the three peoples and claiming the territory inhabited by them.

Thus it came about that the Great Powers, Great Britain, France, Russia and Italy, who were signatories to the 1914-1915 pacts of London, were obliged in 1918 "to proceed to the examination of the war aims and of the possible conditions of a just and durable peace in concert with Russia, as soon as a regular government, having the right to speak in the name of the nation, should be established in Russia."

Henry Wickham Steed [Spartacus Educational]

In February 1918, Lord Northcliffe became, at Mr. Lloyd George's invitation, Director of Propaganda in Enemy Countries. An Advisory Committee was set up at Crewe House, which included in its membership various well-known publicists and journalists, including Sir Roderick Jones, Managing Director of Reuter's Agency, Sir Sidney Low, Mr. H. G. Wells, and Mr. Wickham Steed, Foreign Editor and later Editor-in-Chief of the London Times. One branch of the department was divided into sections devoted to propaganda in Germany, Austro-Hungary, and Bulgaria. Co-directors of this Austro-Hungarian section were Mr. Wickham Steed and Dr. R. W. Seton-Watson, afterwards Masaryk Professor of Central European history in the University of London. On the initiative of Messrs. Wickham Steed and Seton-Watson, both members of the Serbian Society of Great Britain, meetings took place between leading Italians and Southern Slavs, which led to these two official propagandists representing their department at a Congress of the "Oppressed Hapsburg Nationalities," which they arranged in Rome in April, 1918.

The main objective and aim of our propaganda department was to form a strong anti-German chain of Central European and Danubian states and to dismember the Austro-Hungarian Empire with the aid of the Czechs and the Southern Slavs. The difficulties of winning over the Southern Slavs to our rapid changes of policy and our new "war aims" were, as I have shown, their misgivings on the "Adriatic question." Nevertheless, the representatives of the Italian, and of the Yugo-Slav people in particular, found it politic to declare categorically at the Rome Congress that:

"They pledge themselves.... in the future to solve amicably the various territorial controversies on the basis of the principles of nationality and of the right of peoples to decide their own fate.... To such racial groups of one people as may be found necessary to include within the frontiers of the other, there shall be recognised and guaranteed the right of their language, culture, and moral and economic interests."

Amongst the principal points of the Memorandum on propaganda issued by the British Director of Propaganda in 1918 is found the following:

"For propaganda among the anti-German peoples the agencies already existing should be utilised. These agencies are chiefly the Bohemian (Czecho-Slovak) National Alliance, the Southern Slav Committee, and various Polish organisations."

In reply to this Memorandum the British Foreign Secretary, Mr. Balfour, wrote:

"Everything which encourages the anti-German element in the Hapsburg dominions really helps to compel the Emperor to a separate peace.... A propaganda which aids the struggle of the nationalities now subject either to Austrian-Germans or to Magyar-Hungarians towards freedom and self-determination, must be right, whether the complete break up of the Austrian Empire or its de-Germanisation under Hapsburg rule be the final goal of our efforts."

It becomes quite clear, then, that the official British interpretation of self-determination and freedom of subject nationalities was intended to mean the permanent subjugation of German and Magyar peoples under the yoke of Czechs and Serbs. For twenty years this propaganda, with these objects and aims in view, under the specious cloak of "self-determination" and "collective security," has been unrelentingly and unremittingly pursued to the very brink of yet another world war, with the able assistance and direction of such official expert Balkan propagandists as Messrs. Wickham Steed and Seton-Watson, Masaryk Professor of the London University.

In 1877 Bosnia-Herzegovina was emancipated from Turkish rule, whilst Bulgaria was about to emerge as an autonomous principality under Russia's protection but remaining a tributary under the suzerainty of the Sultan. At the same time Bosnia-Herzegovina was occupied and administered by Austria, though never formally annexed until the Austro-Turkish Convention of February, 1909. Thus these inflammable South-Slav provinces became and remained for sixty years the focal point of Central European power politics. Out of the Treaty of Berlin of the following year emerged also an independent Serbia and an independent Roumania. (Articles 34 and 43.)

The confused and rapid changes in British foreign policy towards the German Empire and towards Germans, which is not the same thing, have for a century and more been intimately connected with the influence of European Jewry upon both Empires, and with the dramatic changes in Jewish allegiance that mass migrations and obscure movements in the financial world have brought about. These changes have been signalled in recent history, for example, by the Treaty of Berlin in 1878, after the Russo-Turkish war of 1877, whereby the interests of Jewry brought about an apparent rapprochement in the foreign policy of Great Britain and Germany. This event, however, at the same time marked the set-back to the pan-Slav and expansionist ambitions of Imperial Russia in the West, which dates from the first phase of a new era of power politics, whose precarious diplomatic equilibrium has since been so often disturbed and reversed by oscillations caused by hidden currents.

Engraving of Bismarck and Disraeli at the Treaty of Berlin [Eastern Michigan University]

At the time, the Treaty of Berlin was hailed as the brilliant achievement of two great statesmen, Bismarck and Disraeli - then Lord Beaconsfield - which would ensure for generations to come the peace of Europe. British as well as German interests were thought to have been safeguarded, Turkey's hold on Europe checked, and Russia isolated by the revision of her gains in the Russo-Turkish war acquired by the Treaty of San Stefano; while Austria was induced to follow the lead of Great Britain. Except for the cession of Bessarabia, Russian appetites were directed towards the East.

Apart from her enhanced prestige, England's material reward, Cyprus, she obtained secretly from the Turks, who were led to believe that, with Cyprus as a base, a philo-Turkish England would be in a better position to defend the Asiatic possessions of the Ottoman Empire against Russian designs directed towards Constantinople and the Dardanelles. The British plenipotentiaries at the Congress of Berlin were Disraeli, the Prime Minister, and his Foreign Secretary, Lord Salisbury.

Thus was the long-time fuse lit which eventually detonated the Balkan powder magazine and threw Tzarist Russia into the arms of the French Republic.

British opinion was particularly delighted when the news of England's Cypriot plum was made public; and when Disraeli returned from Berlin to London, proclaiming "Peace with Honour," he received the Order of the Garter at the hands of Queen Victoria.

Mr. Wickham Steed's retrospective comments on this passage in the annals of British history, while consistent with his pan-Slav and anti-Austrian partisanship and sympathies, also provide food for reflection upon the rapid changes and reversals of foreign policy which alone are characteristic of British diplomacy. Referring to it in his Hapsburg Monarchy, he wrote:

"British policy has rarely been worse inspired than when, under the Oriental guidance of Disraeli, it secured Cyprus as the price of peace with dishonour, helped Austria-Hungary and Germany to tear up the Treaty of San Stefano, and incurred the moral responsibility for the carnage and havoc of the recent Balkan wars."

Mr. Wickham Steed, indeed, supplies an explanation of German-Austrian policy which, it would appear, could even more forcibly be applied to British policy to account for its changes towards Germany and Austria, corresponding to the successive periods when Ashkenazic, or the German-Austrian-Polish-Russian wing of, Jewry exhibited pro-German or anti-German leanings. The theory which Mr. Wickham Steed puts forward he claims was in fact advanced to him by a learned Austrian Hebrew in order to explain the "pro-German tendencies displayed by the Ashkenazim Jews the world over." "German," he quotes this pundit as saying, "is the basis of our jargon, and next to Palestine, Germany is the country which we regard as our home. Hence our sentimental leaning towards Germany." Another less sentimental theory put forward by Mr. Steed of the former undoubted pro-German leanings of the Ashkenazim he summarises in the assertion that:

"Since 1870, the Jews have believed Germany to be the rising power and have consequently striven to 'back the winner.' No observer who has had dealings with the Jews of Austria will doubt that some impulse more subtle than the expectation of immediate advantages drives them to pose as Germans and to associate themselves with Germanism rather than with any non-German tendency. The Jews who have deliberately associated themselves with and sought to become assimilated by Slav races like the Czechs, the Serbo-Croatians [sic], the Slovenes, the Slovaks, or by the Roumanes of Hungary, are exceedingly few in number. The case of the Hungarian Jews - who appear to have accepted Magyarisation - is peculiar, and the sincerity of their attachment to Magyarism has yet to be proved. The bulk of the Galician and Hungarian Jews who migrate to Vienna and other parts of Austria claim German 'nationality.' When authentic Germans disown them, these Jews reply that they 'feel like Germans,' an assertion which authentic Germans passionately deny.... So large a part does this distinction play in Austrian-German politics that a leading Jewish journalist has declared, bitterly but truthfully, that anti-Semitism forms the only bond between the various sections of the Austrian-German 'national' party. Pan-Germanism, in Austria at least, has always had an anti-Jewish tendency.... The historian Dr. Friedjung, who had drawn up the programme of the Austrian Pan-German party, and whose pan-German leanings were strong, was thus, as a full-blooded Jew, excluded from the party he had helped to form. It is an irony of fate that while these exclusive tendencies prevail among the 'Germanic' German 'Liberals,' the whole 'Liberal' i.e. non-clerical press of Austria should be in Jewish hands; and that the home policy of the German 'national' parties in Austria should be largely determined by the influence of the 'Germans' of Prague, most of whom are Jews. The political interests of the veritable Germans have long been subordinated to the exigencies of the struggle between Czechs and Germans of Bohemia, in which the Jewish-German press of Prague and of Vienna have been important if not determining factors. 'As long as the Czech-German quarrel lasted,' wrote a Jewish weekly review, 'the Jews were often protected by the circumstance that the decision lay in their hands.... Henceforth the Jews must pursue none but a Jewish policy, and must so determine their conduct as to inflict damage upon economic and moral anti-Semitism.' Whether ungrateful or not, this frank declaration must be regarded as a healthy sign. The Jewish 'danger,' if danger it be, does not lie in the proclamation and defence of a specifically Jewish standpoint, but in the dissimulation of Jewish ideas under a non-Jewish cloak."

In 1871 the Anglo-Jewish Association was established. Its first president was Jacob Waley, Professor of Political Economy at University College, London. From its foundation the Association was prominent in ventilating the disabilities and the interests of the Jewries of Russia, Roumania, Turkey, Persia, North Africa and the Balkan States. Whenever a suitable occasion presented itself the association sought the intervention of the Government in the interests of international Jewry through the British Foreign Office. It was mainly through the efforts of the Association that the Berlin Congress included clauses in the Treaty safeguarding the political and civil liberties of the Jews of Roumania and Serbia. This was the first time before Versailles that Jews were recognised by Treaty as a National Minority. The credit for this has rightly been accorded by Jewry to the influence of Disraeli, the British Prime Minister.

Italy's pre-war attachment to the Central Powers in the Triple Alliance was always precarious and did not survive the outbreak of hostilities. Her ambitions and interests in the Adriatic and in the Southern-Slav bloc in fact conflicted with those of the Central Empires.

Italy, even when she was our ally at the end of the War, never whole-heartedly entered into the plot so dear to the hearts of international revolutionists, to secure Czecho-Slovakia disguised in democratic trappings as a Trojan horse, to be pushed into the centre of Europe by troops of rose-garlanded enthusiasts for the League of Nations and elderly English professors waving olive branches, out of whose belly were to jump in the fullness of time fully armed Bolshevik warriors pledged to slay Nazi monsters and win Europe for "the permanent revolution."

The Department of Propaganda recorded regretfully in 1920:

"Unhappily the propaganda... were impaired by reactionary tendencies within the Italian Government. Had the Italian Government been prepared in May, 1918, to join with their Allies and Associates in making a joint public

Ethnographic Map of Austria-Hungary. Map used by the British Department of Propaganda during the War. The Czech-German area is marked in a rectangle. (Reproduced in "Secrets of Crewe House," by Sir Campbell Stuart, K.B.E.; Hodder & Stoughton, 1920.)

declaration in strong and unmistakeable language in favour of the creation of a united and independent Southern Slav State and in recognising the Czecho-Slovaks as an Allied and belligerent nation, the result would undoubtedly have precipitated the collapse of Austria in the early part of the summer of 1918."

It is of special interest to-day to examine the Ethnographic Map of Austria-Hungary used by the British Department of Propaganda and published in his book by Sir Campbell Stuart in 1920. It is reproduced here and may be studied in relation to Herr Hitler's claims for the Sudeten Germans in the Godesberg Memorandum. The map also serves to illustrate forcibly how every guarantee of self-determination of minority peoples has been violated. It is the same map which was used and relied upon by Seton-Watson and Wickham Steed, Co-Directors of the Austro-Hungarian

The Map attached to the Godesberg Memorandum. (Sketch map based on the Map annexed to the Memorandum handed to the Prime Minister by the Reichs-Chancellor on September 23, 1938.)

Section of our Department of Propaganda twenty years ago, as the basis on which the ethnographic character an language groups of the mixed areas in what became Czecho-Slovakia were determined. (See Maps 1 and 2.)

Mr. Wickham Steed, whose weighty pronouncements always have priority in the columns of the Times, a priority apparently refused to all other dissentient experts, writing in its issue of October 10th, 1938, appeared to have forgotten his war-time service as Director of Propaganda in Enemy Countries. He writes:

"It appears that the Austrian Census of 1910 is to be the basis on which the racial character of mixed areas in Czecho-Slovakia is to be determined.... In 1910 I was the correspondent of the Times in Vienna...."

He then relates that he was asked to return his Umgangssprache, or usual language of adoption, in the Census return of that year. He gave his nationality as British and informed the Austrian official that he habitually used the German language, and ironically adds to his account:

"And this is the Census which is apparently to serve as a 'guide' in determining the character of mixed districts in Czecho-Slovakia today!"

As a matter of fact, this was the Census which served as the basis of the ethnographic map of Austria-Hungary, used by Mr. Wickham Steed's propaganda department since 1918!

That he confused or misled the Census officials has little bearing on the value or otherwise of the maps on which he himself afterwards relied. Foreigners are not, in any case, included in the ethnographic divisions of those maps. In my map of population foreigners are expressly excluded. Fortunately neither Mr. Wickham Steed nor Mr. Seton-Watson, nor any other of their former colleagues and members of the Serbian Society of Great Britain would have been eligible to vote in plebiscite areas. Mr. Wickham Steed may also be reminded that he himself relates how during the War he assisted an Austrian enemy subject, no less a one than ex-President Benesh of Czecho-Slovakia, to come to England on a forged Serbian passport, while he also records how his Co-Director of Propaganda, "Seton-Watson, once spent a lurid forty-eight hours saving Masaryk from arrest at Hampstead."

Mr. Wickham Steed goes on to tell us in his book, Through Thirty Years (Vol. II, p. 100): "I felt it would be hopeless to explain to this worthy detective the intricacies of Austrian politics, and how an 'Austrian' might be in possession of a Serbian passport." We feel after this long lapse of time that Mr. Wickham Steed may also have equal difficulties in explaining the ethnology and the intricacies of Czecho-Bolshevik politics in the mixed areas of Czecho-Slovakia. May we not forgive the perplexity of an Austrian Census official in 1910 who appears to have understood Mr. Steed's ethnographic and political explanations no more clearly than did an English Detective-Inspector in 1917?

As already noted, the spokesmen for the "Oppressed Hapsburg Nationalities" being the Serbian, Southern Slav, and Italian as well as the English representatives of our "anti-Austrian and German Department of Propaganda," in the persons of Messrs. Wickham Steed and Seton-Watson, at the Rome Congress in April, 1918, pledged themselves "to guarantee to such racial groups of one people, as it may be found necessary to include within the frontiers of the other, the right of their language, culture, and moral and economic interests." All the Allied Powers, except the U.S.A., declared, however, that Wilson's Fourteen Points and "self-determination" did not apply to the settlements with Austria and Hungary - nor to Germany, and, at the same time, they recognised Hungary as a separate power independent of Austria. On April 14th, Wilson agreed to grant Italy the Tyrol south of the Brenner Pass, with about 250,000 Germans, as well as the Trentino. Austria was reduced by about two-thirds of her German-speaking territories, which were distributed between her various Slav and Italian neighbours. Through the influence of M. Clemenceau the Allies decided to prohibit union between Austria and Germany, without, that is to say, the safe proviso embodied in the draft treaty with Germany of first obtaining the unanimous consent of the Council of the League. This proviso was embodied in Article 88 of the Treaty of St. Germain.

There can be no doubt that South Tyrol, forcibly torn from her Northern other half by a new frontier at the Brenner Pass, owing to her annexation by Italy in 1919, lost most of that provincial autonomy which the Tyroleans, like all provinces in the old Hapsburg Empire, enjoyed under Austrian rule. Instead of an elected provincial council (Landtag), the truncated province was placed under administration of a prefect at Trent. Its administrative inclusion in the Trentino, the suppression of the German language, and the persevering attempts to Italianise the German-speaking people were for long deeply resented by the Tyroleans; but it was not until the national unification of Italy, under the leadership of Benito Mussolini and the inspiration of the fascist ideology, that good democratic propagandists and enthusiasts for the League of Nations started an agitation to ventilate the grievances of the Germans of the Tyrol. They ignored the fact that the Allied Powers and the League of Nations were alone responsible for handing over the South Tyrol to Italy, and they either ignore or else heartily approve the much greater sufferings of the far greater population of Germans handed over, against their will, to the tyranny of Czech and Serbian pirate states in the name of democracy. Similarly, they ignored the worse sufferings of the Northern Tyrol under a dictatorial usurpation of power inspired by Moscow or the Vatican city.

After the German-Austrian Anschluss of March 1938, in response to the appeal of the overwhelming majority of Austrian Germans, had effected a common German-Italian frontier and, later, after the Sudeten Germans of Bohemia had been rescued from Czech tyranny, and German-Italian interests had been cemented in a common front against the world Bolshevik threat from Soviet Russia and her vassal Czech state and, finally, just when the position of the Tyrolean Germans of Oberbozen (Bolsano) had improved in the general atmosphere of German-Italian accord, world democracy was thinking and talking of self-determination only for the Southern Tyrol.

This, then, was the occasion chosen for a hypocritically-voiced concern for the German-speaking South Tyroleans, when the interchange of German and Italian tourists, artificers, and workmen had reached a maximum; when Italian opera in Germany and German music in Italy were being increasingly popularised, I received this October, 1938, an illustrated edition de luxe of a propaganda pamphlet  informing me that in Italy "lectures and theatre performances conducted in German are generally prevented and films with a German text are forbidden, while the cafés are prohibited from tuning in

Hitler speaks at the Sportspalast, September 26, 1938 [Steven Lehrer, Hitler Sites]

to a German broadcast." Yet when, on September 26th, I tuned in to hear Hitler's famous speech to the German nation I found that all the German stations were deliberately jammed by transmitters in England, and I only succeeded in hearing this speech with perfect clarity by tuning in to an Italian station.

This speech of Hitler's was made on September 26th, 1938, the day on which the issue of peace or war between England and Germany was trembling in the balance. This was the day, it so happened, that the first edition of this small volume went to press in pamphlet form. It contained the evidence for the Sudeten case, which, for the first time, Herr Hitler pledged himself before the world to solve. This was the speech relayed from all Italian stations.

Was there a single cry from these humanitarians to save the oppressed Tyroleans and the National Socialist majority in Austria from wholesale persecution, imprisonment, torture, and execution at the hands of dictator Dollfuss's government for the crime of professing their political faith and their passionate wish for union with their German kinsmen in the Reich?

Oscar Spangaro

I have before me the photograph of one of my Austrian Tyrolean friends. Oscar Spangaro was descended from an old Ritter family once settled in Straubing, in Bavaria, before it migrated to the South Tyrol in the sixteenth century, where, in the course of time, the family name of Sprenger became Spangaro. Some five generations later his family had crossed into the neighbouring province of Carinthia, in Austria. In 1933 my friend was the leader of a small district group of National Socialists in this part of Austria. That year eleven of his comrades were assassinated in the streets within three months. Soon afterwards, with about 800 of his party, he was arrested and thrown into prison. None were brought to trial until, nearly a year later, the survivors were tried in camera and convicted, afterwards brought again to a mock-trial in open court where sentence was confirmed and over one hundred, including Spangaro, were condemned to death. Their first taste of prison discipline was their "examination" during the days immediately following their arrest. In batches they were taken, handcuffed, into the prison courtyard. They were knocked into unconsciousness with rubber truncheons. My friend's nose and jaws were smashed, his teeth knocked out, and through his thick hair three years later I felt the deep scarified grooves where his scalp had been cut through. He was one of four, condemned to death, who had succeeded in escaping by a piece of miraculous good luck and ingenuity from prison the day before he was to have been executed. When I met him in Berlin, at the end of September 1936, he was still under sentence of death, unable to return to his Austrian home.

Who, then, has a right to talk about the self-determination of the Tyroleans?

Czecho-Slovakia was not the only monstrous political fraud perpetrated upon the helpless minority peoples of the dismembered Austro-Hungarian Empire - the other one was Yugoslavia by the incorporation into Serbia of Croatian, Macedonian, Hungarian, Slovakian, Dalmatian, and Montenegrin territories. The sufferings of the Croats and Slovenes under Serbian

Stefan Raditch [hercegbosna.org]

tyranny and a brutal dictatorship has rivalled the sufferings of Sudeten Germans and Magyars under the Czech yoke: but even less has been heard about them by the English public. The Croats, deprived of all administrative rights and the civic liberties they had enjoyed under Hungary, made common cause with the Slovenes. By the beginning of 1920 the Croats and Slovenes combined in a valiant attempt to throw off Serbian domination under the inspiring leadership of Stefan Raditch. By 1926, Raditch was strong enough to induce the late King Alexander to give him a place as a Minister. Three years later Raditch was murdered in the Yugoslav Parliament by the bullet of a pan-Serb representative. Six months later parliamentary government was brought to an end in favour of a Serbian military dictatorship. That is the Serbian method.

Since 1928 the Croats, bowed under the Serbian heel, crippled by an ever increasing load of taxation, outlawed in their own land, have worked and plotted only for freedom from the Serbs. The civil war has continued ever since and the British public, which sends its tourists by the hundreds in luxury steamers to the Dalmatian coast, knows nothing of it.

"The unity of Yugoslavia!" said Dr. Trumbitch (President of the Southern Slav Committee in 1917) to a distinguished French author in 1935, "There has never been such a thing! There is a Serbia who has seized Croatia, Slovenia, Banat, Macedonia, Montenegro, Dalmatia, and more, and who has tried for fourteen years to transform them into mere Serb provinces.... They have swept away traditions, customs, local liberties - all that had made for centuries the qualities, the faults, the distinct personalities of our diverse peoples. Serbianisation is carried to extremes under the name of national unity. It is the illiterate who command the educated, imbeciles who command the intelligent.... Yugoslavia has never existed but on the paper of bank notes, stamps, and official documents. Before the War, Croatia and Slovenia were theoretically dependent upon Hungary, but in reality they administered themselves. Their prosperity was legendary and their devotion to public interests made them an élite. But the corruption of the Serbs made them a laughing stock of Europe...."

An eminent English authority, an expert in Balkan ethnography, Miss Edith Durham, writes to me in a private letter, dated October 6th, 1938, which I am permitted to quote:

"We are now paying for our folly in breaking up the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Whatever its faults it managed its various peoples more justly than the succession states have done. Why did we fight Austria? Because her heir to the throne had been brutally murdered and she quite justifiably wanted to punish the murderers.
      "She was not allowed to do so because Russia was behind the murderers and the death of the Archduke was determined upon at a meeting in Toulouse. Neither the French nor the Russians could afford to have the matter investigated by Austrian police. So we fought on the side of the murderers and now we are paying for it.
      "Austria was condemned to be destroyed and a pan-Slav heaven constructed out of its remains. Czech doctors, tourists, engineers, bankers all preached on this text.
      "Continuously for fourteen years before the War I spent a large part of my time among the Slav-speaking peoples of the Near East; I found the Czechs everywhere working a violent propaganda against the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Towards the end of the Balkan war I worked for a time in Montenegro under a Czech doctor. His persistent encouragement to the Montenegrins to annex all possible Albanian territory for the Slavs and his hopes that the Serbs would stick to Macedonia and not allow the Bulgars to claim any, so disgusted me that I left his hospital.
      "The Czechs, meanwhile, were working hand in glove with the Serb revolutionary gang, 'Black Hand,' which was conspiring to undermine Austria-Hungary and finally to precipitate the war by murdering the Archduke. A 'Black Hand' man told me enthusiastically that Masaryk had been their great friend. They started enlisting young Serbian and Croatian Austrian subjects to join their revolutionary work and break their oath of allegiance when doing their military service. He added that the cleverest thing Masaryk did was get away so soon as the thing was set going and to start propaganda in the U.S.A. and in England. In the U.S.A. he came in contact with the millionaire iron-master Charles Crane, and his son, Jan Masaryk, now Czech Minister in London, married Crane's daughter. This helped to spread Czech propaganda in the U.S.A., where Crane had great influence.
      "I have sent much of this information to the Press but have failed to get it printed. Lastly, we allowed the Czechs to subsidise London University. A big university should surely be above accepting propaganda pay."

It is a matter of history and common knowledge that on July 23rd, 1914, at six o'clock in the afternoon, the Austro-Hungarian Minister to the Court of King Peter of Serbia presented the famous note to the Serbian Government at Belgrade, demanding inter alia that judicial proceedings should be taken against the accessories to the plot of June 28th, 1914, who are on Serbian territory, which resulted in the murder of the Austrian heir to the throne, and that delegates of the Austro-Hungarian Government should take part in the investigation. A reply was demanded within forty-eight hours. War was declared on July 28th. What is not so well known is the part played by the "Black Hand" of Serbia and the pan-Slav terrorist organisation known as the "Narodna Odbrana", whose responsibility for the murder is declared in the Austrian Note, and other connected secret societies, who were responsible for bringing about the war in the revolutionary interests.

What is also not so well known is the collaboration which existed, and which has continued ever since, between Serbian and Czech secret terrorist organisations. It is therefore of interest and great importance to find recorded in official or semi-official Czech publications evidence of these activities.

In a book published by the official Orbis Publishing House in Prague, in 1928, entitled The Czechoslovak Nation's Struggle for Independence, by Jaroslav Papousek, it is stated and here quoted in a slightly abridged form, that on the outbreak of war Professor Masaryk,

"having entrusted the organisation of the preparations for revolution to his friends, especially Dr. Benesh, departed for Italy.... The journey of Dr. Benesh to Switzerland was of historic importance, for the centre of the revolutionary organisation was in this way transferred abroad, where it remained during the entire subsequent course of the War. After Masaryk's departure the secret organisation known as 'Maffie' continued, of course, to work on the lines agreed upon by Dr. Benesh and Professor Masaryk. Its activities, although never discovered by the Austrian authorities, were, however, gradually crippled when certain Czech political leaders were arrested and imprisoned at the instigation of the Austrian Military Command.... When Dr. Benesh was obliged to transfer his activities abroad, the members of 'Maffie' had necessarily to restrict the scope of their political work.... Although the leaders of some parties diverged from the policy drawn up by Professor Masaryk in agreement with 'Maffie' and some desired, by an apparent loyalty, to divert from the Czech nation the danger of a harsher persecution, the Austrian Government failed to obtain from these leaders any statement repudiating Professor Masaryk's work.... The Czechoslovak movement against the Austro-Hungarian Empire did not originate nor develop only at home, but also in all the countries in which the Czechs and Slovaks were living, not only in Russia, France, and England, but also in America."

If, possibly, the modern state of Czecho-Slovakia was not actually conceived in America it is certainly no exaggeration to say that it was incubated, hatched, nourished, and finally canned for export to Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia by its American foster-parents, in time for the baptismal celebrations after the War to end War, at which France, and her ally England, as proxy for Bolshevik Russia, stood sponsors at the front of the League of Nations. Czecho-Slovakia in truth was actually born in America on May 30th, 1918, at Pittsburg, and announced to the world by the "Pittsburg Pact", signed by T. G. Masaryk and others. The text read as follows (translated from the Slovakian language):

"The representatives of the Slovak and Czech organisations in the U.S.A., of the Czech National Association, and of the Society of Czech Catholics have, in the presence of the President of the Czecho-Slovak National Council, Professor Masaryk, considered the Czecho-Slovak question and the existing declarations of policy and are agreed upon the following:
      "We agree to the political programme which endeavours to bring about a unity of Czechs and Slovaks in an independent state of the lands of Bohemia and Slovakia.
      "Slovakia shall have its own government, parliament, and laws. The Slovak language shall be the official language in the schools, amongst officials and in public life.
      "The Czecho-Slovak State shall be a republic, and its constitution shall be democratic. The organisation of co-operation between Czechs and Slovaks in the U.S.A. shall be studied and improved in the light of requirements and changing conditions in an atmosphere of mutual understanding.
      "The details of the formation of the Czecho-Slovak State shall be reserved for the freed Czechs and Slovaks and their legal representatives."
 
Signed by T. G. Masaryk and the other signatories.

Previous to the Pittsburg Pact, an International Masonic Congress, held under the auspices of the Grand Orient and Grand Loge de France in June, 1917, took place in Paris. At this Congress resolutions were put forward for the promotion of a League of Nations. The Czech agents in Paris, in pursuance of the policy of Professors Masaryk and Benesh, supported a resolution proclaiming the proximate foundation of a Czech state.

Because, in its early stages, Czecho-Bolshevik collaboration was organised and conducted in secret lodges and at secret meetings of revolutionary and terrorist organisations of which the evidence has taken years to come to light, and has then been systematically suppressed, particularly in England, the real purpose of the activities of Professors Masaryk and Benesh was hidden from the world. The most irrefutable evidence, however, can now be quoted from the organs of the international revolutionary movement and the Comintern.

In pursuance of Czecho-Bolshevik plans the Czechs betrayed national Russia in Siberia at the end of the War and received as a quid pro quo for the betrayal of Kolchak a free passage and other benefits from the Bolsheviks. Between the formation of the Czech state and the Bolshevik October Revolution of 1917 there is a close dependency, as can well be seen from Kopensky's account in the Communist International, the central organ of the Comintern, of July 7th, 1937:

"The great October Revolution had a strong and positive influence upon the fate of the Czech people. The national freedom bestowed upon the Czech people, the independence of the Czechs, the existence of the Czechs as a state - all that is primarily the result of the influence of the October Revolution. The whole Czech nation will always recollect with gratitude that Comrade Stalin came to understand the position of the Czechs during his trip to Austria in 1912, and demanded the independence of the Czechs before the War in his work Marxism and the National Question. Without the Bolshevik October of 1917, there would have been no Czech October, 1918. With this strong influence of the October Revolution we must associate the fact that the bulk of organised workers in Czecho-Slovakia fell into line with the proletarian movement, and that the Communist movement in Czecho-Slovakia has reached a point in which it includes one million adult citizens and voters out of a population of 15 millions.
      "The close historical connection between the proletariat and the October Revolution in the Soviet Union has strengthened the revolutionary Communist movement."

The Czechs, originally a scattered Slav people settled primarily in the Imperial Austrian provinces of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia, owe their existence as a nation above all else to the ideology of President Wilson and his ecstatic affection for the birth of Bolshevik Russia, with which the Czechs have always been allied, secretly or openly, for the purpose of world revolution and the destruction of Germany and Austria. To the same inspiration the Czechs also owe their power to control and exploit the territory which once formed the richest part of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Although the territory of the Republic represents only 22 per cent of the former Austrian Empire, it contains by far the greater part of its industries. In addition to the greater part of the textile industries, the Czech Republic has taken over the industries in the old Empire according to the following proportions:

Of the 282 coal mines formerly in the Austrian Empire, 219, or 79 per cent, were included in the Bohemian province of the new Czecho-Slovak Republic.

Registered Unemployment in Czechoslovakia since 1929. More than 400,000 unemployed are German. German sector of total population = 23%. German sector of total unemployment = <50%. Figure of German unemployment in Czechoslovakia equals local unemployment in France.

Is it not strange, then, that, as we shall see, having seized all the richest and most prosperous districts within the old Austrian Empire, the Czechs have, in the course of twenty years, succeeded in reducing German Bohemia to a state of destitution and misery with the highest rate of unemployment in Europe? (See Map 3.)

What then is Czecho-Slovakia? And who are the Czecho-Slovaks? The very name is a senseless absurdity and is intended to imply that there exists such a people called Czechoslovaks. "One might as well," wrote Lord Rothermere in the Daily Mail, 12th February, 1937, "talk of Anglo-Holland." No such people exists. Germans, Slovaks, Hungarians, Poles, and Ruthenians (Carpatho-Ukrainians) were forced into a Czech state, invented by an American professor, afterwards President of the United States, who was as ignorant of the elements of geography as he was of European politics, ethnology, or Bohemian history.

Yet Czech propagandists and English journalists continue to talk about Czechoslovaks as though any such united national or racial people existed. Dr. Antonin Bohác, the Czech Official Statistician (Councillor of the State Bureau of Statistics, Prague), in giving the distribution of the native population by race, enumerates as separate racial groups: "Czechoslovaks," without distinguishing Czechs and Slovaks; Russians, including Ukrainians or Little Russian Ruthenians and Great Russians; Poles; German; Magyars; Jews - and "others". The English Press, similarly, continues to state (e.g. Sunday Pictorial, September 18th, 1938):

"As a fact the Czechoslovaks themselves number 9,688,942, or two-thirds of the population. A third of the inhabitants, therefore, belong to various racial minorities."

But the Czechs themselves, by their own figures, swelled by Jewish or other immigrants not racially discriminated, number only 7,406,493 (1930 Census) out of a total 14,729,536; at most, then, they can only claim to be 51.15 per cent of the total. While every other minority, and especially the Slovaks, have protested for years and have presented petitions to the League of Nations against being placed under Czech rule.

The word 'Czech' is the native name for the Slavonic inhabitants of Bohemia and Moravia, and 'Czechy' is Slavonic for 'Bohemia'. This branch of the Slav family arrived, so far as is known, in Bohemia, then tenanted by Germanic tribes, about the 7th century A.D.

The Slovak Council, under the hands of their President, Professor Francis Jehlicka, and their Chairman, Victor Dvorchak, in an "Appeal to British Common Sense for the Sake of World Peace" (June 1937) wrote:

"The public opinion of Great Britain must be made to understand that our Slovak soldiers will not fight for the Czechs and the Soviet Russians. Nor will the Sudeten-Germans, the Hungarians, the Poles, or the Ruthenians fight for them.
      "English fathers and mothers, do not allow your sons to sacrifice their lives for a bad cause like the Czecho-Bolshevik cause."

In the name of common sense, then, let us once and for all understand that there are no such people as Czechoslovaks.

From the beginning the Czechs have been used as the tools and the decoy of the Comintern and have been the protected allies of the Russian Soviet Dictatorship. It must also be remembered that it was not until the 1917 March revolution finally broke up the old Russian Empire in order to set up what soon became, and still aspires to be, a world Communist Dictatorship, that the financial interests of capitalistic America consented to join the Allies in the Great War. President Wilson, the friend of the late President Masaryk, and of ex-President Benesh, having borrowed the phrase "self-determination" from the Bolsheviks, was allowed to carve up Europe, which he hardly knew and which he never understood, in order to sow the seeds of endless future wars, cause endless persecution, terrorism, and tyranny because the votes of emigré Czechs were useful to him at home, in Pittsburg, Washington, and especially Chicago, where the Czechs were numerous and active. Even President Wilson's great admirer, Dr. H. A. L. Fisher, is constrained to admit: "Wilson did not represent his countrymen." Neither, we must insist, did he serve any other national interests except those of the Czechs and the internationalist dictators of Russia.

This is how the minority nationalities and racial groups are divided amongst the population according to the 1930 Census:

N.B. - The Zionist and non-Orthodox Jewish population is far greater than the figure given for confessional Jews and is distributed amongst the figures which cover the other groups.
      Orthodox Jewry claim a much greater number of Confessional Jews in the population of Czecho-Slovakia than that allowed them in the census figures under the category of Jews "by nationality," by which Jews had the option of registering

Population according to Nationalities in Czecho-Slovakia. 1930 Census (foreigners omitted)

as an alternative to electing to belong to one of the other nationalities; the Census gives 186,642. The Jewish Chronicle of London on September 30th, 1938, states: "But beyond the 32,000 Jews in Sudetenland stand, or tremble, the nearly 320,000 other Jews in Czecho-Slovakia."

No plebiscites of minority peoples in the new synthetic State of Czecho-Slovakia were allowed or considered necessary before half the total population in its five provinces were given over to its new and inexperienced democratic masters. By Article 84 of the Treaty of Versailles German nationals habitually resident in any of the territories defined as forming part of the Czecho-Slovakia State "will obtain Czecho-Slovakia nationality ipso facto and lose their German nationality." No other national minority was allowed to determine its own political or national allegiance.

Teschen, the small but important mining area in Polish Silesia, was occupied and seized by the Czechs in January 1919, after deputies had been elected to represent Teschen in the new Polish constitutional parliament. When in 1920 Bolshevik troops under Tuckachewski were invading Poland and drawing nearer to Warsaw, before the Poles had had time to organise and equip an effective national army, the Hungarians offered to send two divisions to their assistance. The Hungarian and Polish Governments were agreed, but the Czech Government refused to allow the Hungarian troops passage through their territory; territory which, after all, had been Hungarian land. Similarly, they assisted the Bolsheviks by refusing to allow any munitions or supplies to reach Poland from Hungary. With this memory of Czecho-Bolshevik treachery and collaboration, the Polish and Hungarian Governments, not unnaturally, agreed in 1938 to demand a common frontier in Slovakia.

The Czechs have always been the aggressors, not of the bold highwayman type, with a shouting challenge to "stand and deliver," but like the receiver of stolen goods and the sneak-thief, who picks the pockets of the weak.

By Article 23, members of the League of Nations undertook to "endeavour to secure and maintain fair and humane conditions of labour for men, women, and children, both in their own countries and in all countries to which their commercial and industrial relations extend." The clause has been consistently ignored and violated in Czecho-Slovakia - as it has been in Soviet Russia - the country to which they are allied.

President Wilson had many excellent notions but no sense of reality. The League of Nations which bears his mark has, with disastrous efficiency, turned every profession of peace into a rankling cause of war, every profession of democracy and liberty into an alliance with dictatorship and tyranny, every promise of self-determination and nationality into the subjection of racial and national minorities under the oppressive yoke of their enemies and persecutors. The idea of racial "self-determination" was the cover and pretence for wrenching Germans from their motherland in Silesia, the Saar, Memel, East Prussia, Danzig, and Eupen and Malmedy; of wrenching Poles from Poland in Silesian Teschen; of wrenching Hungarians from Hungary in Slovakia; of wrenching sub-Carpathian Ukrainians from the Ukraine, whilst the Slovaks themselves were placed under the oppressive and incompetent yoke of Czech rulers in their own homeland.

Of the eleven Memoirs which were presented by the Czech delegation to the Peace Conference in 1919, Memoir No. 3 deals with the problems of the Germans of Bohemia: "Les Problèmes des Allemands de Bohème." The rights of the German minority, as set out in the extract from the text, read as follows:

"The right of the minority to their own schools, their own judges and their own courts of justice will never be disputed in any way whatsoever.
      "The Czechs have no intention of suppressing, for instance, the schools, universities, and technical schools of the Germans. The Germans in Bohemia will have the same rights as the Czecho-Slovaks. The German language will be the second language of the country and no discriminatory measures will be taken against the German element in the population.
      "The régime is to be analogous to that existing in Switzerland."

Every one of those professions and undertakings has been consistently violated by the Czechs. These Memoirs and the existing conditions in Czecho-Slovakia have been deliberately concealed from the English public.

We assume that the rights of the minorities in Czecho-Slovakia were guaranteed by the Covenant of the League of Nations, yet England is invited to assist the violators of those rights and the oppressors of the minorities. Their own frequent petitions to the League of Nations since then indicate the extent to which these rights have been violated. The Czecho-Slovakian Republic pays annually to the League of Nations 7,300,000 Kronen. As taxpayers the Sudeten Germans, to take only one instance, contribute a considerable portion of this. Since the League of Nations came into existence the Sudeten Germans alone have submitted twenty-two different petitions. No result has come of these beyond an announcement, reported in the English Press on October 1st, 1936, that a Committee of the League Council was considering a petition from the German minority with Anthony Eden as rapporteur.

The Slovak National Council have also submitted a number of unheard petitions to the League. In one of these petitions, addressed to the League of Nations in January 1936, the Slovak National Council gives evidence of the existence of seven underground aerodromes in the process of construction under the supervision of Russian experts and officers. The Slovak National Council considered it urgent to bring the matter to the attention of the League of Nations while there was yet time to avoid a catastrophe.

Edouard Benesh [Fotoarchiv Scriptorium]

The eleven Memoirs of the Czech delegation, from which I have quoted, were never made public until in 1937 they were published by the Berlin Institute "Für Ausländisches Öffentliches Recht und Völkerrecht"; although the Hungarian representations were published in Hungary in four volumes by the Hungarian Ministry for Foreign Affairs, on behalf of their delegation to the Peace Conference: the latter are obtainable to-day. It was on the basis of the Czech documents, however, that the Czech-Hungarian frontier was fixed. The Czech Memoranda to the Peace Conference were rapidly compiled, without the assistance of either documents or books, for the most part by M. Benesh personally before the arrival of the Czech delegation composed of sixty-three members, of whom all except five Slovaks and one Ruthenian Slav were Czechs.

Let it be observed that, by M. Benesh's own admission, no members of the delegation represented either the Hungarians or the Bohemian Germans. These facts are attested by M. Benesh in his memoirs: Souvenirs de Guerre et de Révolution, 1914-1918.

Czecho-Slovakia, it must be remembered, was the only one of the new artificial States, created by Versailles, allowed to take part in the Armistice deliberations. Poland was not admitted, and was only recognised in February 1919; whilst Roumania, although an Ally, was not invited. The Yugoslavs, as such, had as yet been refused recognition by Italy and the Allies. Yugoslav unity only acquired juridical recognition in time to become a signatory to the Treaty of Versailles, up to which time Serbia alone was represented. In truth, the privileged state of Czecho-Slovakia depended upon the fiat and the person of M. Benesh himself.

Thus it came about that Benesh, as provisional Foreign Secretary, had represented the newly-created Czech Government at the Inter-Allied Armistice negotiations with Austro-Hungary and Germany, which began at Versailles on October 31st, 1918, and was able to outline and present his principal demands in the name of Czecho-Slovakia before, even, he received any news of the revolutionary events then taking place in Prague.

The First Czech Government, under the Presidency of Masaryk and under the Premiership of Kramár, was announced, with much solemnity, on November 14th, 1918; and was formed out of the personnel of the self-appointed National Committee. The announcement of this de facto and de jure historic achievement was made at the first session of the new Assembly, after much wordy rhetoric about their very free and democratic Republic. This was received, according to Benesh, with rapturous and "indescribable" applause. With the exception of two Slovaks, all the nominated Ministers were Czechs, and neither Magyars, nor Germans, nor Ruthenes, nor Poles were represented.

The Slovak National Council categorically states that:

Thomas Masaryk [Wikipedia]

"The creation of Czecho-Slovakia was decided on at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, the decision being based on one-sided information and false statistics supplied by President Masaryk, Dr. Benesh, M. Pasich, and others. Recourse was also had to forged maps, curtailed documents and other discreditable devices."

Even Mr. Lloyd George, in 1928, wrote that:

"The data and documents which some of our Allies have submitted to us at the Peace Conference [in support of Czech, Roumanian and Serbian claims] from certain quarters were false, and it was upon the basis of this false data and upon evidence that was neither satisfactory nor true, but which showed Europe's situation at that time in an entirely false light to the eyes of the Allied Powers, that we decided upon frontiers and races. Our decision was based on forgeries."

Benesh and Masaryk used the Allied victory to annihilate Hungary; not only Eastern Slovakia and Ruthenia were wrested from her but a vast block of purely Magyar land and population. Banat was divided between Serbia and Roumania, and the idea of a plebiscite turned down when it became apparent that the population of Banat would have voted in favour of going to Hungary. Mr. Seton-Watson's expert "ethnological" vision as an official of the anti-Austro-Hungarian Propaganda Department had previously suggested the line of such a dismemberment!

By the Treaty of Trianon the Serbs became the rulers of over 1,200,000 Hungarians and Germans and only 400,000 Slavs. By it Hungary lost to other races over 3,000,000 Magyars, of whom nearly 1,000,000 were consigned to Czech misrule, and 1,500,000 to Roumania. This was the "New Empire" left by the vultures at Trianon in 1920. And this brigandage had been planned by the vultures for years beforehand. In 1916, Professor Masaryk, with Mr. Seton-Watson, Mr. Wickham Steed and others, founded a weekly journal called the New Europe. And this is what they published in the first number (October 19th, 1916):

"Its foremost aim is to further and consolidate that Entente Cordiale of Allied publicists.... Its highest ambition will be to provide a rallying ground for all those who see in European reconstruction, on a basis of nationality, the rights of minorities and the hard facts of geography and economics, the sole guarantee against an early repetition of the horrors of the present war."

And, then, lest this pious rhetoric should even now conceal the real motive, read on:

"It will be our endeavour to unmask the great designs of German war policy, to provide the historical, racial and strategic background of problems too long neglected in our comfortable island, and to emphasize the need for a carefully thought out counter-plan, as an essential condition to Allied victory."

All, they say, is fair in war, but now we, who once fought with the sword when professors in our rear fought with the poison gas of lying words and dark mistrust, may fight for peace with the weapons of peace and answer back in the words of the prophet: "Against whom do ye sport yourselves? Against whom make ye a wide mouth, and draw out the tongue? Are ye not children of transgression, a seed of falsehood, enflaming yourselves with idols under every green tree?" (Isaiah, lvii. 4.)

Let me repeat then what an honest Frenchman has said before me: "The jerry-built foundations of the State of Czecho-Slovakia, set in the quicksand of artificiality, repose entirely on violence and deceit."

Examine the maps and reports submitted to the Peace Conference by Professors Masaryk and Benesh.

The geographical maps relating to the texts of the reports contain the most obvious errors, inaccuracies, and omissions and numerous self-contradictions, all designed to suggest a diminution and relative insignificance of the German, Hungarian, and Slovak minorities in favour of the Czechs. Several of the more important Hungarian towns, with a population upwards of 8,000, are not shown on the maps at all, whereas the districts are shown marked as though they were Czech or Slav, whilst in some the numbers of Slovaks are grossly exaggerated at the expense of the Magyars and Germans.

We are told that German aggression must be resisted because they have listened to the cry of their own nationals, threatened with extinction and calling for help. Can we forget, those of us who have seen and can bear witness to persecution and discrimination, falsehood, and the suppression of the truth in its extremest form, on the part of a predatory Czech state, that aggression has come continuously and with increasing violence from the very people we are invited to defend?

General Depression of Masses - Maximum of Suicides. 1921-1931: More than 20,000 suicides among Germans in Czechoslovakia. Next to Austria the Germans of Czechoslovakia are afflicted with the highest percentage of suicides in Europe. German district of Auscha - 1934: 243 natural deaths, 44 suicides.

Because all mention of the Sudeten German and other minority grievances was systematically suppressed and their petitions pigeon-holed in Genevan cachets until the coming of German National Socialism, there is no excuse for believing that these grievances did not exist. Before 1931, distress in the Sudeten area was so acute that their suicide rate was, with Austria, the highest in Europe. See Map 5.

Confirming the countless deputations and petitions of the German minority under Czech rule long before the advent of National Socialism in Germany, the Chairman of the Women's International League from 1915-1922, member of the British Empire Delegation to the fifth and tenth assemblies of the League and editor of Foreign Affairs from 1924-1928, Mrs. H. M. Swanwick, in a letter to the Manchester Guardian (8. 9. 38) writes:

"I was the recipient of countless articles, resolutions, deputations, and letters setting forth the disabilities of the Germans under Czech rule and the breaches of the Minorities Treaty and the neglect by the League of those breaches..."

The Russian Government decided to form a Czech battalion soon after the outbreak of war, which reached regimental strength in 1916. The ever-increasing number of Czech deserters and prisoners of war enabled them to enlist enough Czech soldiers to form a brigade: by the spring of 1918 they reached a strength of 50,000 men. Masaryk was in Russia from May, 1917, until April, 1918, after which he became President of Czecho-Slovakia. After the outbreak of the Bolshevik Revolution it was announced that the Czech Legionaries were to take the field in the Allied and White Russian cause. Every White Russian success was announced to the world as a Czech victory. In the tortuous and rapid change of front of the Czech Legion and the intrigues of Benesh at Prague twenty years ago were sown the seeds of a policy which today has borne full fruit, mystified our short-memoried politicians, and brought us again to the brink of war.

In 1918, Masaryk was vaunting in Europe the valiant aid rendered by the Czech refugee army in the diversified causes of the Allies, of Social-Democracy, of the Russian White Army Expeditions and, lest it be forgotten, the cause of Czech aspirations and claims to the lion's share of the dismembered Austro-Hungarian Empire. It is true that their political services were more highly regarded than their military exploits. When the Bolsheviks were driven out of Siberian cities the Czechs invariably remained at their bases - they were more conspicuous after the fighting was over in the conquered sector when their enthusiasm in the cause of democracy made them valued as political instructors. Meanwhile Kramár, first Premier of the Republic, and pioneer of pan-Slavism, espoused the Russian emigrés as a contribution to the Czech national cause. Foreign Secretary Benesh, on the other hand, refused further succour to the forlorn White Armies, having concluded a neutrality pact with the Bolsheviks. Thus the latter achieved the difficult task of avoiding a conflict with Moscow in the East, while earning the favours of the anti-Communist, democratic engineers of the Treaty of Versailles in the West.

Some of these events I described in a book, published in 1920:

"In the Red Army were Chinese, Letts, international mercenaries and a sprinkling of German military experts on their staffs. In the White Armies were Czechs, alien ex-prisoners of war, and a sprinkling of Allied Staff officers....
      "Conflict of purpose and a purposeful sabotage ultimately defeated the White cause. The Czech cause and purpose alone triumphed in the end. A system of sabotage began with the first organisation of the Volunteer Army in Siberia, where a few loyal officers rallied around the Czechs, that same Czech army which trekked across Russia and Siberia between 1917 and 1919, and eventually stabbed Admiral Kolchak in the back and secured his defeat, finally surrendering him to the Bolsheviks for execution.
      "This act of treachery in betraying Kolchak was confirmed by the Bolsheviks, whose Chairman of the Revolutionary Committee at Irkutsk, Schirjamov, wrote: 'The General's head was the price fixed for a free passage for the Czechs.' Before leaving Irkutsk, the Czechs removed all the money lying at the State Bank, and on their way to Vladivostock were busy printing Russian paper money.
      "As a reward for their services the officers of the Czech Legion, returning from Vladivostock in December, 1919, were given tracts of land seized from the dispossessed German peasantry and landowners in Bohemia.
      "The Czechs being, as they now are, in a minority in their own artificial state, were able, from 1918 onwards, to reap the fruits bestowed by victors and vanquished alike as, by turn and turn about, new triumphant forces entered upon the stage of international conflict and world revolution."

With the entry of Soviet Russia into the arena of Genevan diplomacy and the influence of Litvinov at the League of Nations, Germano-Russian relations became increasingly strained. Benesh's ambitions of Czecho-Russian alliances saw their fulfilment after 1930 in the final abandonment of all that was left of early pan-Slav aspirations, which had originally attracted the Czechs towards Imperial Russia, and his final ambition was attained in a closer rapprochement towards Bolshevik Russia and France. In the Soviet-Comintern policy of Bolshevising the world he saw the formation of a block of anti-German and so-called anti-Fascist states allied to the bourgeois democratic governments.

Benesh himself clearly avowed the ultimate aims of Czech policy when he wrote in 1931:

"Russia will always play a decisive role in our destiny if only on account of our geographic situation. We could not stay the positive direction of our exterior politics in so far as Russia becomes a decisive factor in Central Europe, with her massing forces, as the effective instrument of her own interests. In order to secure our proper place in Europe we depend absolutely upon Russia and, in consequence, it will no longer be possible for us to take a merely passive line towards the Soviet."

This policy was opportunely aided by the circumstance of Benesh finding himself President of the Council of the League of Nations in 1934, when Russia entered the League. There followed as a consequence the three-power reciprocal undertaking not to conclude any uni-lateral pact without the joint consent of the three powers, Czecho-Slovakia, France, and Russia, signed in Paris on the 6th and 10th of December, 1934, respectively. These commitments were finally cemented in the conclusion of the bi-lateral mutual assistance pacts between France and the Soviet Union, followed by Czecho-Slovakia in May, 1935, which set the seal to Franco-Soviet-Czech military collaboration. The following month Benesh and Litvinov were toasting each other amidst popular ovation in Moscow and celebrated the renewal of friendship and collaboration between the two countries, which dated from the pre-war period.

By the military pact which President Benesh concluded with the Russian Soviet Government at Moscow, assistance was to be provided for the Bolshevik air force and for the Red Army to march through the Carpathian Ukraine when the time should come.

On this festive occasion these two spokesmen of belligerent internationalism toasted afresh the new Russo-Czech entente with as much eloquence as on other occasions under democratic auspices they have been applauded as professors of peaceful nationalism. This Moscow meeting was a prelude to the visit shortly afterwards of Russian military and aeronautical experts to Prague when they assisted at the Czech army manoeuvres.

The ultimate aims of Czecho-Soviet military collaboration were to lay the foundations for military collaboration in the world war which it was hoped to bring about as a prelude to the world revolution and a World Communist Dictatorship. In furtherance of this scheme Czecho-Slovakia was to become incorporated into the Soviet Union. Some details of the scheme are given in a book published in 1938 by the official Orbis Publishing House in Prague, written by the Czech Ambassador, Jan Seba, entitled Soviet Russia and the Little Entente in World Politics: a foreword is contributed by Foreign Secretary Krofta. It has remained impossible to procure this book through the usual channels in England. For this eulogy of Bolshevism the author was presented with the "Masaryk Prize". In his book the author considers it necessary that the Soviet Union should be directly connected with Czecho-Slovakia by means of a corridor, for which purpose he proposes that the land should be taken from Poland and a small strip from Roumania. With the realisation of this scheme the Soviet Union would virtually have incorporated Czecho-Slovakia within her territories.

In this connection it is significant that at the last Congress of the Comintern, Popoff, a delegate of the Ukraine Communist Party, declared that the Soviet Government considered war inevitable but was exerting every effort to complete the necessary preparations while seeking to postpone the outbreak of hostilities before they were ready. Throughout 1937 and 1938 Stalin's Government, in an excess of democratic zeal, were still very busy re-organising the Red Army by shooting their leading generals and senior officers. One of the first objects of the war would be to seize those Ukrainian territories still outside the Soviet Union.

With the collapse of the old Russian Empire and of the Habsburg Dual Monarchy after the War, the Ukraine, which had been partitioned between the two Empires, enjoyed a brief spell of independence. A national movement for an independent Ukrainian state had been actively prosecuted before the War and had been as energetically suppressed by the Russian Police. In 1917, Professor Michael Hrushevsky, a famous Ukrainian historian, who taught in Lemberg University, became President of the Ukrainian Republic, and in 1918 attended the Brest-Litovsk peace negotiations as political adviser to the Ukrainian Peace Delegation. During the War the Ukrainian nationalists co-operated with the Central Powers in order to bring about the independence of the Ukraine. When the German forces retired, the Bolsheviks overran the country, and the Ukraine was split up between Soviet Russia, Poland, Czecho-Slovakia, and Roumania. The total population of the Ukrainian nation, most of which is now included in the Russian Soviet State, is rather larger than that of Great Britain. The Ruthenian province of Ukraine, which was seized by the Czechs, has only a population of some 730,000 people, of whom 78.1% are Ukrainians; Magyars and Jews being the largest minority groups. The strength of the Ukrainian national movement within the borders of the Soviet State is also a source of danger and anxiety to the Judeo-Muscovite dictators.

The lot of the native Ruthenia population has been no whit better than the lot of the other native minorities in Czecho-Slovakia, and famine conditions have prevailed in the Sub-Carpathian province. The large Jewish minority and the Communist emigrants from Soviet Russia, being inimical to Ukrainian national sentiments, were actively supported by the Czechs against the native population. When in 1934 Dr. Benesh, in a speech at Ungvar, declared of Ruthenia, "this part of the Czechoslovakian Republic belongs to us and will always belong to us," he was expressing a boast bolstered with more misgivings than real assurance.

All the rivalries and strivings of national minorities in the polyglot Czech empire, already crumbling on its insecure foundations, are cut across by the single big issue of international Communism directed from Moscow and nationalistic aspirations rooted in the soil where generations have raised families and left sons to till it, until they, in turn, shelter their bones in its folds, whether German or Magyar or Slav. And internationalism, however it be disguised under ephemeral party-political labels, professing democracy, socialism, social-democracy, or Communism is, in Czecho-Slovakia as elsewhere, inevitably fostered and organized by the all-pervading Jewish minorities. The influx of many thousands of émigré Jews from Germany into Czecho-Slovakia during the past twenty years had swollen considerably the ranks of the Social Democratic Party, which supports the Communists and their Soviet allies. Before the elections in May, 1935, the Sudeten's had a fierce and bitter struggle with the Communists and Social Democrats, who did not hesitate to use the weapon of Red Terror when fighting their opponents.

Notwithstanding all the arguments and propaganda in favour of Czech domination over the Germans, Slovaks, Magyars, Ukrainians, and Poles in the Republic, one thing is certain, the cultural heritage of the Czechs is German. Bohemia and what is today the greater part of Czecho-Slovakia looks back upon two thousand years of German settlement. Right at the beginning of the Christian era a vast German Empire had been established there, and the annals of Roman history tell of battles against the Germans and describe their manners and customs. Charles IV, King of Bohemia and German Emperor, founded the famous German University of Prague in 1348, the oldest university in Central Europe, which the Czechs have consistently tried to suppress and destroy since their coming to power by the nomination of Government supporters and discrimination against its German professors and men of science. In 1934 the German students successfully prevented the Czechs from forcibly removing the ancient university regalia. Written Czech, as a language distinguishable from the ancient dialect of the Slovaks (Slovénsky), is barely one hundred years old and Czech schooling was first inaugurated by the German administrator of Austria. Masaryk himself has acknowledged that the Germans were the cultural instructors of the Slavs and that it is only by way of German channels that the benefits of Western civilisation have been transmitted to the Czechs.

John Hus, the famous leader who raised the standard of revolt against the Holy Roman Empire, is one of the few Czech heroes in early history to whom they can lay claim, and the Hussites conducted their rebel propaganda mainly in the German language and in Latin. Hus received his education in the German University of Prague and adopted Wycliff's theology.

Professor Antonin Bohác, the official Czech statistician, in his reply to my report on demographic conditions in Bohemia, writes ironically, July, 1937, that he has no need to argue with me the case for the cultural achievements of the Czechs and Germans of Bohemia. If he had omitted the word "Czechs and", he would be perfectly right. He says:

"The Secretary-General of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, Captain Pitt-Rivers, challenges the possibility of Czechoslovak contributions to scientific and demographic studies. He has declared conspicuously that the learned heritage, the traditions and the institutions of learning in the country have for long been the exclusive appanage of the German-speaking population. The children of a nation which gave birth to a John Hus and such a leader as Comenius (emigrant Bishop, 1592-1670), and latterly to an illustrious philosopher and politician like T. G. Masaryk, have no need to argue with Captain Pitt-Rivers on the relative value of the cultural element contributed by the Czechs and the Germans of Bohemia. I am content to protest against the extension to the whole history of a nation that cultural decadence inflicted upon it by the loss of her independence in the 17th century.
      "Besides it is not true that the science of population is pursued almost exclusively in the (German) University of Prague by Germans, nor that German men of science are excluded from the Czech National Committee.... Since 1929 I have given each term one or two courses in demographic science in the Czech University of Prague.... In the German University there is no one who has obtained the necessary qualifications to teach the demographic sciences and neither is there any course in demography. The truth is, consequently, quite other than the contention of Captain Pitt-Rivers." (Translated from the French.)

Masaryk, the champion of the Czech cause, I might here observe, although the point is a minor one, was himself a Slovak, not a Czech, and yet, as such, was an opponent of Slovak national autonomy.

At the end of this year, 1938, there appeared from the press yet another volume by Mr. Lloyd George, entitled The Truth About the Peace Treaties, Vol. I., published by Victor Gollancz, Ltd. In his introduction, Mr. Lloyd George quotes for the first time long extracts from a Foreign Office Memorandum composed in the autumn of 1916, which he describes, in his own words and in his own style, as follows:

"It is an impressive document, well informed, bold and far-seeing. Some of its proposals are startling. They are all well worthy of a careful perusal in view of recent developments. It is the first official pronouncement in which what came to be known as self-determination constituted the principle of a re-adjustment of national boundaries. It is also the first official document which contains a declaration in favor of the establishment of a League of Nations and a reduction of armaments."

The origin of the slogan "self-determination" has been discussed; it came from a very different source than the British Foreign Office, whilst the declaration in favour of a "League of Nations" also originated long before the war and was early associated with the activities of Benesh and Masaryk in Paris and Pittsburgh for the purpose of founding a "Czech State'. Nor will those familiar with the pre-war activities of the internationalist revolutionary movement find anything very original in this Memorandum bearing upon its proposals and aims regarding the "breaking-up" of the Austro-Hungarian and German Empires. There is no information in it of any value touching the racial composition or the cultural affinities of the various nationalities of Central Europe. In view of its alleged importance, it is perhaps a pity that the anonymity of the authors of this document has been preserved. All Mr. Lloyd George tells us with regard to its authorship is:

"This remarkable document was prepared and signed by two prominent officials of the Foreign Office. It was circulated to the Cabinet without any covering recommendation or comment from Sir Edward Grey."

There appears, however, in Appendix III of this quoted Memorandum a reference to the low cultural development of the Czechs, which may serve as an additional comment, coming as it does from a presumably highly-sympathetic source, to M. Bohác's claims about Czech contributions to Bohemian culture:

"As to Bohemia, they (the Foreign Office experts) examined three different proposals: The formation of an independent state; secondly, the linking of Bohemia with a Southern-Slav state; and, thirdly, tacking it on to the Kingdom of Poland. They (the Foreign Office experts) are of the opinion that the third solution is desired both by far-seeing Czechs and Poles."

The reasons given for the Czechs being in favour of their incorporation in the kingdom of Poland is interesting, and is refreshingly candid in comparison with recent pro-Czech propaganda:

"The Czechs, on the other hand, fully appreciate that they could benefit by the superior culture and civilisation of the Poles."

It would appear, therefore, that any solution that did not involve ceding German-speaking territories to Germany or Austria, or involve acknowledging the age-long cultural heritage of the Germans in Bohemia, was, as far back as 1916, thought by our official pundits to be "impressive, well-informed, and far-seeing." And Mr. Lloyd George still thinks this impressive and well-informed at the end of 1938!

Dr. Bohác maintains in his reply to my report that there are no German men of science in the German University of Prague qualified to teach the sciences of population. On the other hand I had received, under date July 20th, 1937, as a result of my request, from the Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy in the German University of Prague the names of fifteen German professors and members of the German Association of Science and Art whose qualifications and faculties cover the range of population sciences in Bohemia, relating especially to ethnography, biology, history, geography, sociology, and German-Bohemian folk studies (deutsche Volkskunde Böhmens), who were teaching these subjects in the University, none of whom were permitted to adhere to the Czecho-Slovak National Committee for the Study of Population. (Text of letter in German.)

In the name of history and the truth it should hardly be necessary to protest against a claim, so easily refuted, that the Bohemian nation ever owed its culture to the Czechs.

It was largely owing to the fact that the German scientists in the German University of Prague were not allowed to participate in the activities of the Czecho-Slovak National Committee and were not allowed to attend Congresses of the International Population Union, that I was led to visit Czecho-Slovakia in September, 1916, in order to make my own investigations and discover the truth.

The outcome of my visit was the collection of facts, figures, and photographs, relating especially to the Sudeten German districts, which were confiscated in Karlsbad. It also led to my arrest by the Czech police on a trumped-up charge of espionage, and a year later to the suppression of my reports on the subject at the International Population Congress in Paris in July, 1937. All these facts have been deliberately withheld from and by the British Press. I now reveal those facts!

With my private secretary I crossed the Czecho-Slovak frontier by car into Bohemia at Fürth-im-Wald, en route for Pilsen and Prague, on August 31st, 1936. A few days later I travelled from Prague to enter the Sudeten area around Karlsbad. On Sunday, September 6th, Conrad Henlein, leader of the Sudeten German Party, the largest single political party in Czecho-Slovakia, whose membership includes 95 per cent of the Sudeten

Sudeten German leaders: 1936. On the right - Konrad Henlein. On the left (facing camera) - Dr. Wilhelm Sebekowsky.

German population, addressed a large gathering of his supporters at Meierhofen. There were over 20,000 people present. Armed Czech police were conspicuous everywhere in their uniform. After the meeting I met Henlein for the first time over a cup of coffee. That twenty minutes was the first time I have ever spoken to the leader of the Sudetens. At that time he assured me that every precaution was taken by the leaders of his Party to expel the idea that they were working for an alliance with Germany. Every opportunity was taken to emphasise that in repudiating the control of the Czech Government they were intent only upon becoming autonomous. At that time, there is no doubt, the Sudetens, like the other minorities, Slovaks, Hungarians, and Poles, were working only for Home Rule and for deliverance from Czech mis-rule and tyranny.

One of many derelict Sudeten factories.

Two evicted Sudetens living in a "shack".

territory - all this long before Hitler's advent to power in Germany. For miles around tall, smokeless factory chimneys dot the landscape, but there is no sign of the smoke of industrial activity. The once busy and prosperous workmen who manned them now live idle and starving in huts and hovels in their derelict villages. We passed through village after village in this cemetery of industry. In the village of Ellbogen we visited the dilapidated German hospital, with a nominal accommodation for seventy patients. This served a very large district and, in spite of the restricted accommodation, had for long been made to accommodate as many as 140 patients. The hospital comprised a general ward, surgical ward, an infectious diseases war, a gynaecological ward, and a children's ward. In the children's and infectious diseases ward patients were accommodated two in a bed. The overworked staff consisted only of the German surgeon, one medical assistant and several Roman Catholic nuns. The hospital had received no help or subsidies from the State for a very long time. They were appallingly short of equipment and the building was in a shocking state of disrepair.

Author's car in front of Czech school in Neusattl.

The surgeon-in-charg