Německá osídlovací společnost Karlovy Vary

The Deutsche Ansiedlungsgesellschaft Berlin (German Settlement Society Berlin), acting as the executive body of the Reichskommissar für die Festigung deutschen Volkstums (Reich Commissioner for the consolidation of Germanness), established one of its branches in Karlovy Vary, i.e. on the territory of the Reich County Sudetenland, as early as the beginning of 1939. Its task was to prepare farmsteads and other properties confiscated from the Czech and Jewish population in the Sudetenland for new German settlers. This was similar to what the Czech-Moravian Agricultural Society in Prague later did in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. The head of the Karlovy Vary branch of the settlement company was Dr. Friedrich Eugen Wirth until the end of the war. The branch was divided into more than ten departments, including purchasing, agricultural, settlement, credit, legal, statistical, construction and accounting departments. It took over the administration of about 1,600 farms covering an area of 50,000 ha. The Karlovy Vary Settlement Company ceased its activity in May 1945. Subsequently, a national administration was appointed to liquidate its assets. In September 1948, a joint national administration of all former German settlement companies in Czechoslovakia functioned as a body of the National Reconstruction Fund. The Karlovy Vary branch of the German Settlement Society in Berlin was crucial to the completion of the Germanization of the seceded Czechoslovak borderlands. Its files show the forcible seizure of agricultural properties belonging to the Czech and Jewish population and their handover to German immigrants. The confiscated properties were the original property of the persecuted Czechs, but especially of the local Jews.