SOU OBÉ DùJINY - Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV - Akademie věd ČR

242 Soudobé dějiny XIV / 1SummariesArticlesThe Czech Refugee Trust Fund and Czechoslovak Émigrés:Part One, Its Genesis and FundingJan Kuklík and Jana ČechurováThis is the first part of a two-part article on the creation and financing of theCzech Refugee Trust Fund. The article considers the state of affairs that emergedafter the Munich Agreement of September 1938: the break-up of the Republic ofCzechoslovakia, the accession of parts of Czechoslovakia to Hitler’s Germany, thecreation of the short lived Czecho-Slovakia (or Second Republic), and the greatnumber of refugees fleeing the country.The most important prerequisite for the creation of the Czech Refugee TrustFund, which was active in Great Britain throughout the Second World War and,in fact, all the way into the 1970s, was the provision of Anglo-French loans forthe reconstruction of post-Munich-Agreement Czecho-Slovakia in January 1939,and, in particular, the £4 million British grant in support of refugees. The primaryrecipients of British support were, as intended, ethnic Germans (particularly SocialDemocrats and other opponents of Nazism) and Jews, who sought to escape theSecond Republic and whose emigration to British dominions and Palestine wassupported by Great Britain. By the time the rump Czechoslovakia was occupiedby Germany (15 March 1939), however, only part of the loan had been used.Moreover, a problem arose with the support of Czech (and also Slovak) émigrés onBritish territory. These difficulties were surmounted by the creation of the CzechRefugee Trust Fund, to which the remaining funds from the British grant werefinally transferred in January 1940, and then used to support refugees.The means of support and the actual work of the Fund are analyzed in greaterdetail by the authors in Part Two of their article, which will be published in a futureissue of Soudobé dějiny.