English Translation

401 Absch r Presseabteilung der Reichsregierung - W - Berlin W 8, den 28.I1.41 Wilhelmplatz 8-9 Abteiligung Deutsche Presse redl 22 Hauptreferat Kulturpresseedis SC Geschäftszeichen: DP. 4190=04/18,2,41/87-1.8. An adl ed Herrn Friedrich Heiss, Hauptschriftleiter der Zeitschrift C "Böhmen und Mähren I1 I_ Volk und Reich Verlag in B1dey in Berlin LETO You publish in issue 1 Jahr l94l of the magazine "BÖHmen und Moravian" an essay by Mr. Gustav Lerch "Die Mar- tal komannen in Böhmen und Mähren. Ein Beitrag zur deutschen Kriegsgeschichte". This essay should never have been published; the views of Germanic early history in it are so dilettantic that everyone in this field, too, must notice from the outset that these are completely deviant theories. How lay the author deals with the subject is already evident from the first paragraph of the article, in which he declares the name "Markomanne" as the "man of the Marches"! He thus pretends that the concept of the border mark, which is a creation of the medieval German imperial era, already exists in Germanic prehistory. This attempt to explain is, by the way, as if someone wanted to explain the name Gotthard as "hard as God" or to define God's love as "love as God". In addition, Mr. Lerch compares the Mar- komanns with "indiscriminate gangs as they would be used in the Balkans" and quotes a statement by Caesar that "it is not a shame for the Germans to carry out raids outside their own country". (That the Czech public, who reads such forms, draws the corresponding comparisons to recent events, is probably a matter of course!)