English Translation

Shortly after 15 March 1939, all former Czechoslovak citizens in the Protectorate had to decide either for Reich or Protectorial jurisdiction (175), while the criteria laid down allowed a relatively wide interpretation of the conditions for granting Reich citizenship. According to the guidelines of the Reich Ministry of the Interior, the population of the Protectorate could become a citizen of the Empire on the basis of a declaration that he was a German if his Germanism could be confirmed by certain factors such as language, education, culture, etc. According to the directives, the admission of persons with a non-German heritage was to be kept to a minimum, but it was also said that applicants with a partial or completely different family background, such as Czechs, Slovaks, Ukrainians, Hungarians or Poles, could become reichs citizens. (176) Despite the efforts mentioned above, only about 200,000 Germans registered in Bohemia against more than 8 million Czechs. According to Stuckart's statement before the Americans investigated, quoted by V. Mastný, this result led Hitler to cancel the election for the Reichstag in the Protectorate, because the registration of voters could reveal a small number of Germans. (177) Even after the fall of France, in June 1940, when Reich citizenship was considered desirable by more Czechs than ever before and after, the total number of applicants for the population of the Protectorate was irrelevant and, moreover, it hardly represented the expected contribution to the German nation, because due to the benevolent conditions for obtaining German jurisdiction, many applicants could hardly be regarded as Germans, because many could not even speak German. (178) The SD had the worst opinion of their qualities. In the report of SD Prague for June 1940 , among other things , it is stated: "Crimes with Czech names and without the slightest knowledge of German have recently applied for Germans in order to avoid investigations by Czech courts...in the county prison in Pardubice, fourteen have declared themselves to be German nationalities and some have volunteered for military service. All of them had records in the criminal record - some of them more than twenty and one fifty-four previous convictions. Oberlandrat of Klatovy remarked that until now the decent and blameless Czechs had not applied, only the scum - ©Gesindel. (179)