While tens of thousands of refugees from Nazi-occupied territories tried to reach the remaining Czechoslovak territory, the police authorities of the truncated republic, now known as the Second Republic, refused to admit Jewish refugees, claiming that they were Germans.
Many residents of Czecho-Slovakia, as the country was now called, believed, along with Western politicians, that peace had been saved, and that Jews and German anti-fascists were only complicating matters. Popular demonstrations in defense of the republic demanded the deportation of all “non-Czech” refugees from Hitler back to the Nazi empire.
Whoever did not flee in time and could be labeled as a Jew by the Nazi laws, and did not enjoy the fuzzy protection of marriage to an “Aryan man” or an “Aryan woman”, found themselves in a death trap. Arrests in Ústí began on the very first day of the occupation, people disappeared without a trace, for the time being to prisons and concentration camps in Germany. Later, deportations took place, to the ghetto in Terezín and to death camps in occupied Poland. Men from “mixed marriages” with “Aryans” were deported to forced labor in Germany and occupied France.
How long did world peace, secured by the cession of Czechoslovak territory, actually last?