STATE SECRETARY FOR THE RUSSIAN PROTECTOR IN THINGS AND IN MORAVA, PRAGUE, inv. 2562, sig. 109-12/12209

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English Translation

- zimal oan fra r pl Vrufyhan hou is rer tavacpaupt prah fqurepu Labau- semt velemaf daltu I would like to point out that hostile propaganda theses of the present, born of pure purpose, cannot be a programme for the European reorganization. From the beginning, there was no lack of warners, nor of British warners who saw in Czechoslovakia with its various tribes only a new reduced Austria-Hungary, but without its enormous historical brackets. Even one of the Committees of the Versailles Conference, in a report on "Czechoslovakia", had described the sudetenGerman question as the central problem of the state and had almost prophetically added that it would probably become a question of life for the new state whether it succeeded in winning the Germans as willing citizens. Over the course of the 20 years, the world became increasingly aware of the fact that the ruling Czech circle had thrown this warning into the wind, which had not only made the Germans worse, but rather made them the most bitter opponents of this state. No less became known, however, that the sudetenGerman question was the first but not the only part of the Czechoslovak state problem. In addition to the other questions of nationality, above all the ever stronger bitterness of the Slovak people drove the state, which was based on the fiction of a united Czechoslovak nation, into a total crisis from this side as well. Today, Slovakia's nationalism is suspected of being a "nutritional finder", so that no historical and popular facts are removed: not that Hlinka