Bátora called one of the 20th century's most anti-Semitic Czech books "brilliant"

Ladislav Bátora, the controversial Czech Education Ministry appointee slated to become director of human resources at the ministry, published an evaluation of the work of Rudolf Vrba in a collection called “Czech Review – My Nation and My Homeland” (“Česká revue – Můj národ a má vlast”). In his essay, Bátora called Vrba’s “Zkáza Slovanů” (“The Adulteration of the Slavs”) a “brilliant” work.

The second edition of “The Adulteration of the Slavs from the World War, a post-war diary”, by Rudolf Vrba, was published in 1925 by the “Odkaz Žižkův” (“Žižka’s Legacy”) publishing house in České Budějovice and printed by the “Družstvotisk” printing company in Třeboň. The book is approximately 511 pages long, divided into two parts, with a total of 174 chapters. In it, Rudolf Vrba quotes entire passages from the most infamous anti-Semitic works and reprints the opinions of the main anti-Semitic ideologues of his time. He places world-famous anti-Semitic forgeries such as the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” on a pedestal, as well as a book entitled “Russlands Todtengraber” (“The Grave-Diggers of Russia”) by Dr Alfred Rosenberg, a main ideologue of Nazi Germany second only to Adolf Hitler.

During the course of the Second World War, Rosenberg became the Reichsminister in charge of occupying the eastern territories. He contributed to a significant extent to the Nazi annihilation of Jewish people throughout Europe, both at the level of ideological design and at the level of administrative performance. He was sentenced to death for his crimes and executed after being tried for war crimes at Nuremberg in 1946. He was found guilty of conspiring against the peace and of designing and carrying out a long-term plan or plot which aimed to commit crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

Elsewhere in the book, Vrba cites anti-Semitic articles from the party newspaper of the German NSDAP, Dietrich Eckart’s “Völkischer Beobachter”. Eckart was a high-ranking member of the occult organization Thule, editor-in-chief of “Völkischer Beobachter”, and a personal friend of Hitler. He was also an enthusiastic anti-Semite. In the second volume of “Mein Kampf”, Hitler calls Eckart one of the best men to have dedicated his entire life to the German nation through his deeds, his firmness, and his thinking.

“The Adulteration of the Slavs” also quotes anti-Semitic texts by Henry Ford (“The International Jew”), by Robert Archibald Wilton, an anti-Semitic British journalist, and by Lajos Méhely (1879–1953), an Hungarian anti-Semite, biologist, editor of the extremely anti-Semitic bulletin “The Goal”, and a racial theorist. Méhely was imprisoned after the Second World War and convicted of war crimes.

From beginning to end, the book is full of anti-Semitic allusions, defamation, and slurs against the Jewish nation. In it, Jews are described as devising everything evil in society and as being behind all intrigues, murders, rapes and thefts. Vrba says the Jews are “vermin” who own the majority of banks, political and governing offices, the press, etc. He writes about Jews in a very vulgar manner, including remarks about Jews’ “animalistic lasciviousness” and “Jewish pests”.

It is clear from the book that Vrba had fallen victim to the paranoid fiction that Jews were governing everything in the world around him, from London to Paris, Berlin to Moscow. In one chapter the author even came to the opinion that the Czechoslovak government was in the hands of Jews.

“The Adulteration of the Slavs” (“Zkáza Slovanů”) is one of the most anti-Semitic Czech books of the 20th century. This 1924 work by leading anti-Semite Rudolf Vrba was first published just one year prior to the 1925 debut of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf”.