British Columbia's Anti-Nazi Germans: The Tupper Creek Refugees

Abstract

I believe it is peace in our were the words Neville Chamberlain used to predict the effects of the political settlement he and the French leader Daladier out with Hitler at Munich in the final days of September 1938. That agreement, which transferred the so-called Sudetenland portion of the Czechoslovak Republic to Hitler's Germany did not, of course, ensure peace. Among the first to comprehend the real meaning of Munich were the anti-Nazi Germans living in the Sudetenland. Many of these people chose to flee their homeland to avoid certain suffering at the hands of the occupying Nazi forces and their local supporters. In the next few months a number of these last free Germans from the heart of Europe made their way to Canada. Nearly half of the refugees settled in British Columbia. These refugees came from many different districts of the Czechoslovakian Sudetenland; they fled from both the small towns and larger cities in the predominantly German portions of Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia. Most did not know each other before 1939. What bound them together was a common fear of Nazi persecution for their past association with the Sudeten German Social Democratic Party (the DSAP). Indeed, nearly all of the adult refugees, both men and women, had been prominent figures in the DSAP. Following Hitler's take-over of Austria in March 1938, the Sudeten German pro-Nazi forces stepped up their campaign of agitation in the Sudetenland. From this time the situation of the German socialists in Czechoslovakia worsened dramatically. The Sudeten German Socialist Party represented the most successful of the democratic parties which had worked for a solution of the German problem within the framework of the Czechoslovak constitution. The Nazis considered this DSAP willing-