Jewish Brno outside the city walls

Prejudice and reality

The picture shows a classic Nazi caricature of a Jewish conspiracy being crushed by a brave hero. But the picture doesn't date back to the WWII. It's from the cover of the 1952 Communist humor magazine Dikobraz. The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia unleashed a hateful anti-Jewish campaign then, under the slogans of fighting Zionism, which in many ways astonished even its creators.

The floodgates of anti-Jewish hatred were opened primarily by the monster trial of the so-called Anti-state Conspiracy Centre, better known as the Slánský trial. The total failure of the Communist economy, necessarily leading to monetary reform and the theft of private property by the state, was attributed to a mysterious Jewish conspiracy.

Workers at factory meetings demanded by written resolutions "the deportation of the Jews to Palestine" or "the completion of what Hitler had not finished". The Stalinist regime in the Communist countries ruled from Moscow did not hesitate to use the construction of the enemy with which the Nazi occupiers worked in the same territory: the Jews were to blame for all evil. State security police began compiling lists of the country's Jewish population.

The slogan was adopted: every Jew is a Zionist, and every Zionist is an American spy.


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