CZECHO-SLOVAKIA

Evening Post, Volume CXXVIII, Issue 58, 6 September 1939, Page 18

CZECHO-SLOVAKIA

♦ A GERMAN COLONY RUTHLESS EXPLOITATION Slovakia has been so plundered by the "Germans that less than five months after she was "liberated" from Czech "domination" the country is ruined, wrote the diplomatic correspondent of the "Manchester Guardian" on August 3. Under Czech "domination" the "races," religions, and political parties of Slovakia had rights and liberties such as they never had before, and the Slovak Budget was balanced with, the help of subsidies granted by the Government in Prague. The rights and liberties are gone, expenditure amounts to 1,535,000,000 crowns, and the revenue to 1,229,000,000, so that there is a deficit of 306,000,000, a huge sum for a poverty-stricken population of only 2,656,000. The Germans have robbed Slovakia of all her war material; they are depleting her' forests and even her timber yards; they have taken away foodstuffs in great quantities, the stocks of entire factories, and a vast amount of machinery and industrial plant. The resulting scarcity has raised the cost of living and thus spread distress throughout the country. Slovak workmen have been sent to Germany in multitudes—most of them are now employed in the neighbourhood of Hanover. A GERMAN MARKET. Slovakia is becoming an exclusively German market. Germany alone is supplying the country with industrial products. Slovak firms that cannot compete with the German firms are doomed; those that can compete are taken over —whether directly or iniirectly—by the Germans. The German minority (about 150,000 in all) behave as though they were masters of the country. The region bounded by the borders of Moravia and Poland and by a line extending from Bratislava to Pistyany and along the River Waag and the crests of, the Tatra has been declared a special area by the Germans. It is officially known as "the region occupied by German troops and under German sovereignty." These words are printed on the permits issued to persons who wish to enter the area, the existence of which is a violation • of the statute under which Home Rule was granted to Slovakia by the Reich. TWO COLONIES. Slovak "home rule" is a fiction. It is untrue that Germany has no colonies.! Both the "protectorate" of BohemiaMoravia and the "autonomous" Slovak State are colonies in the full, or rather in the worst, sense of the word. Monsignor Tiso, the. Slovak Premier, is Hitler's* lieutenant, without a will or policy of his own, while the Slovak people are like cattle who have to accept the decisions arranged between the Premier and the Fuhrer, or rather the orders of the Fuhrer as carried out by Monsignor Tiso, though these orders are sometimes preceded by discussions, for which Monsignor Tiso is summoned to Berlin. The Germans take no interest in Slovakia except as an object of economic exploitation, as a source of cheap labour, and as a military base for further conquests. Slovakia is in fact not governed at all, but administered despotically by the Fuhrer and his lieutenant, by the Gestapo, and by the German military authorities.