“Air bases in Slovakia are of great importance for the German Air Force for use against the East.”
On 12 February a Slovak delegation journeyed to Berlin. It consisted of Tuka, one of the Slovaks with whom the Germans had been in contact, and Karmasin, the paid representative of the Nazi conspirators in Slovakia. They conferred with Hitler and the Defendant Ribbentrop in the Reich Chancellery in Berlin on Sunday, 12 February 1939.
I now offer in evidence Document 2790-PS as Exhibit USA-110, the captured German Foreign Office minutes of that meeting:
“After a brief welcome Tuka thanks the Führer for granting this meeting. He addresses the Führer with ‘My Führer’ and he voices the opinion that he, though only a modest man himself, might well claim to speak for the Slovak nation. The Czech courts and prison gave him the right to make such a statement. He states that the Führer had not only opened the Slovak question but that he had been also the first one to acknowledge the dignity of the Slovak nation. The Slovakian people will gladly fight under the leadership of the Führer for the maintenance of European civilization. Obviously future association with the Czechs had become an impossibility for the Slovaks from a moral as well as an economic point of view.”
Then skipping to the last sentence: “ ‘I entrust the fate of my people to your care.’ ”—addressing that to the Führer!
During the meeting the Nazi conspirators apparently were successful in planting the idea of insurrection with the Slovak delegation. I refer to the final sentence of the document, which I have just read, the sentence spoken by Tuka, “I entrust the fate of my people to your care.”
It is apparent from these documents that in mid-February 1939 the Nazis had a well-disciplined group of Slovaks at their service, many of them drawn from the ranks of Father Hlinka’s party. Flattered by the personal attention of such men as Hitler and the Defendant Ribbentrop and subsidized by German representatives, these Slovaks proved willing tools in the hands of the Nazi conspirators.
In addition to Slovaks, the conspirators made use of the few Germans still remaining within the mutilated Czechoslovak Republic. Kundt, Henlein’s deputy who had been appointed leader of this German minority, created as many artificial “focal points of German culture” as possible. Germans from the districts handed over to Germany were ordered from Berlin to continue their studies at the German University in Prague and to make it a center of aggressive Nazism.
With the assistance of German civil servants, a deliberate campaign of Nazi infiltration into Czech public and private institutions was carried out, and the Henleinists gave full co-operation to Gestapo agents from the Reich who appeared on Czech soil. The Nazi political activity was designed to undermine and to weaken Czech resistance to the commands from Germany.