Ministerstvo práce a sociální péče – repatriace, Praha

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has a microfilm copy of selected records from the fonds (http://collections.ushmm.org/findingaids/RG-48.011M.pdf). Following the signing of the Munich Agreement, the Czechoslovak government issued Decree No. 292 on 11 November 1938 establishing the Institute for the Care of Refugees at the Ministry of Social Welfare in Prague. The Institute concentrated all temporary care for refugees (migrants) from the border areas of Czechoslovakia ceded to Nazi Germany and later from Slovakia. Jewish refugees were also supported by the Social Institute of the Jewish Religious Communities of Greater Prague and other Jewish auxiliary organizations. During the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, the institute came under the name of the Institute for the Care of Resettlers under the Ministry of the Interior and was used, among other things, for the resettlement of people from areas and towns that had been selected by the Nazi authorities for various purposes, e.g. for the construction of military training grounds or the establishment of a Jewish ghetto in Terezín. After the war, the Institute, together with the newly established Repatriation Department of the Ministry of Labour Protection and Social Welfare (MOPSP), took care of returning emigrants, refugees and survivors of the concentration camps (most of whom were Jewish). In 1949, the Institute's activities were discontinued and its responsibilities were transferred to the Repatriation Department of the MOPSP. In 1950, the Czechoslovak government declared post-war re-migration and repatriation to be over and the department was gradually abolished. The fonds contains essential documents relating to refugee, resettlement and emigration issues and repatriation and re-emigration between 1938 and 1951. The materials come from the various sections of the Institute for the Care of Refugees (1938) and the Institute for the Care of Remigrants (operating since 1940). These include applications for emigration permit, financial and maintenance support, certificates of death (or disappearance) in concentration camps, and registration records for individual re-migrants and repatriates. Valuable is, among other things, documentation relating to the so-called Stopford Action - British financial aid to twelve thousand refugees from the former Czechoslovakia who emigrated to Palestine, the USA and Great Britain.