Arijský boj

Arijský boj ("Aryan Struggle") was a pro-Nazi Czech-language weekly tabloid newspaper published between May 1940 and May 1945 in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

Antisemitism and fascism, as represented in the newspaper, were the fringe of opinion among Czechs, but gained in popularity after the 1938 Munich Agreement forced Czechoslovakia to cede the Sudetenland to Nazi Germany.

[2][3] The paper's antecedent was another newspaper Štít národa (Shield of the Nation), which started to publish soon after the German occupation of the Czech rump state in March 1939, which established the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

[4][7] In a letter to Emanuel Moravec, editor-in-chief Rudolf Novák stated: "Our paper spreads throughout the Czech countryside an antidote against Benešite whispered propaganda...

[8] Rudolf Novák [sv] (1890–1947), who had been imprisoned in Austria-Hungary for his activism in the Czech National Social Party and served in the Czechoslovak Legion, was the editor-in-chief of the newspaper from early 1941.

In practice, this was two sides of the same coin because Arijský boj claimed that the democratic Czechoslovak government had been nothing more than "little Palestine" and had been preceded by "Jew-Habsburg Austria".

The government-in-exile was supposedly dominated by Jews, such as Jaroslav Stránský [cs], the minister of justice, whose grandfather had converted to Christianity.

Arijský boj attacked celebrities and organizations which it felt were insufficiently enthusiastic about the German occupation, accusing other newspapers of keeping "two irons in the fire".

[7][8] In December 1942, following the Joint Declaration by Members of the United Nations against Nazi Germany's ongoing extermination of European Jews, Arijský boj claimed in an article title that "The Jewish Mischling [half-breed] Masaryk, Jr., threatens from London".

"[11] Most correspondents had specific complaints, such as the fact that the synagogue at Moravské Budějovice, though it had been shuttered, still had Hebrew signage; or that Jews had not yet been banned "from going to the market in the morning".

In his editing, Píš had focused on attacking specific Czech "Jew-lovers" rather than political writing on the Reich or the exile government.

[13] In 2012, former Prime Minister Miloš Zeman claimed that the campaign in the Czech Republic against restitution to churches for communist confiscations resembles Arijský boj.