English Translation

Z 20 municipal elections in the spring of 1938 as well as the amnesty at that time were the first fruits of these meetings. Strongest had opposed his meetings with Eisenlohr the Jew Dr. St r a n s k y . At the end of May 1938 these meetings had stopped. Eisenlohr may have been inhibited by the events in connection with the May mobilization, and Benesch, too, at that time, had obviously thought that he had found new ways. It was already some time ago that two confidants of the Führer had been with Benesch and Krofta. Maybe Benesch had thought that on this way he would advance further than over Eisenlohr. When the internal political crisis became acute, he (Peroutka) had realized that the question of sudeten was only to be solved by cession of the Sudeten German territories. Also certain gentlemen of the so-called "castle" had secretly carried themselves with such thoughts at that time. So he remembered that the envoy, Jan Masaryk, had shown him a map at the Prague Castle in June l938, into which he had mapped those areas which, according to his private opinion, could be ceded. Peroutka remembers very well that in this map, for example, the whole of Egerland was marked as transferable. When I asked Peroutka why he did not express his conviction in his articles as well, why he had, on the contrary, written sharp-making essays in the summer and autumn crisis of 1938, he evasively replied that it was not a democratic practice on the one hand to reveal his secret goals and views in a journalistic way. He believes that every policy has its secret objectives, i.e. its limits, how far it can go, does not speak of this international but publicistically, and, for tactical reasons, sometimes represents a completely opposite view in the press. In addition, he should have beenware of becoming a caller again for a "revision of borders", since he had already got into a big affair in 1933 because of such tendencies. I followed Peroutka's typical democratic statements of the necessary ambiguity of politics in his sense by quoting him from his according to protectorate.