English Translation

Dr. Egon Lindner 15.9.1940. Head of teaching at the National Volite Education Institute in Sudetenland Seheim Ploschkowitz near Leitmeritz. Report to Mr. Chief Government Councillor Dr. G i e s on my informational service at the authority of the Reich Protector in Bohemia and Moravia in August l940. I. German and Czech. On the possibility of how the relationship between Germans and Czechs could finally develop in the long run, the opinion that I heard in the various places of state and party was quite uniform: it could ultimately only be about the Czechs being Germanized. It is often a question of recovering fanatics who have been lost to Germanism over the course of decades, or at least people who are partly from Germany. Various, however, were opinions about the preconditions and nearer conditions under which this development would take place: e.g. how long this would take (usually 2 to 3 generetions were referred to; whether and with what means we should promote this process; whether this process would be necessary with great exclusivity; or whether we could choose the human material that we want to take over. In general terms, it was noted and understood that this was a question on which all the competent authorities had to work in advance, but which could finally only be decided by the very highest authority If the difference between Germans and Czechs had to be established, the opposites of their nature could be noted that the native Germans of the Bohemian region saw this contrast primarily as historical-political-päge, as a contrast of ethnicity and national character, although despite all the recognition of inherent peculiarity there was a tendency to regard the historical and currently concrete German as the contrast with the Czechs so radically as to be racial, as it is for example in the Czech Republic. Book of the SudetenGerman Young about the Czechs met. On the side of the descendants of the so-called Old Reich, I have found against the tendency to see the coexistence of the two peoples as a racial question and to consider how far the racial condition of the German people would change proportionally by absorbing the Czechs. I would like to add that this second point of view often seemed somewhat theoretical and undoubtedly bore the weakness of the abstraction, especially since those who made such considerations were convinced that in the end at least a large part of today's Czechism would arise in the German people. Line generally held directive of the kind, for example, that one must gain from the Czech doing the very Vassian valuable and one German, and keep away from the inferior, such an attitude was from all sides considered to be in principle correct, but to the facts to be completely inadequate. The like, the question of the feasibility is the decisive one.