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5 - After the Failure of Deportation Plans – Forced Labor of Czech Jews, 1939–1945

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Wolf Gruner
Affiliation:
Institute of Contemporary History, Munich and Berlin
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Summary

OCCUPATION: UNEMPLOYMENT AND IMPOVERISHMENT

On March 15, 1939, Germany occupied the territory of the Czech Republic, which had already been reduced after cession of the Sudeten regions. The occupiers installed a Czech government headed by General Alois Eliaš (after April 1939) and President Emil Hácha, as well as a German Protectorate Administration headed by Baron Konstantin von Neurath, the former Foreign Minister of Germany. Karl Hermann Frank, formerly Deputy Chairman of the Sudeten German Party and later HSSPF, became von Neurath's State Secretary. The Office of the Reich Protector included a central administration and four main departments. The administrative office of the Commander of the Security Police, and the SD (Befehlshaber des Sicherheitspolizei und des SD, or BdS) and the Order Police, were attached to the office. One hundred eighteen thousand, three hundred ten persons later classified by Nazis as Jews – possibly even more – lived at this point in the remaining Czech territory annexed by Germany.

Because the Nazi leadership actually expected war, the specialist for Jewish Affairs in the Reich Interior Ministry, Ministerial Councillor Bernhard Lösener, held a meeting on “the service of Jews in case of war” immediately before annexation, at the end of February 1939. He invited representatives of the OKW, the main Gestapo offices and the Order Police, and the Chief of the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps. The “service,” forced labor, was to affect all Jewish men between eighteen and fifty-five years old.

Type
Chapter
Information
Jewish Forced Labor under the Nazis
Economic Needs and Racial Aims, 1938–1944
, pp. 141 - 174
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

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