Professor W. Lutjeharms, who teaches Church history at Brussels, communicated to me why, in his view, the Protestant Churches did not publicly protest against the persecution of the Jews during the war. Part of the reasons he advances are, in my opinion, also applicable to minority Churches in other lands. <282> 1. The Protestants comprise less than half percent of the total population. 2. The Protestants nowhere formed a sufficiently concentrated group among the population. 3. The Protestants in those days had very few representatives in cultural and political circles. 4. The Protestant voice was not heard outside its own group before 1940; hardly at all over the radio and certainly not through daily newspapers. 5. The Protestant Churches represented a distinctly foreign flavour: many pastors and members were foreigners. 6. An official public protest would neither have impressed the authorities nor the population. The Protestants could only act effectively on the personal level. In this respect pastors as well as lay members time and again risked their lives, to help Jews as much as they could. There remains the question, why the small Protestant Churches in Belgium undertook official and public steps in 1933, and not, for instance, in the years 1935 and 1938. It is possible that such steps were undertaken, but that they were not sufficiently published, and thus forgotten (Cf. above, point 4). At least 25,000 Jews were deported from Belgium. Individual Protestants have rescued Jews [606] but these activities are outside the scope of our subject. c. The Protectorate Czechoslovakia was deprived of Sudetenland in the Munich pact of September 29, 1938. On March 14, 1939, Slovakia declared its independence. On March 15, 1939, German forces occupied Prague; Czechia as the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia became part of the German Reich. <283> An estimated number of 71,000 Jews were deported, and perished. Apparently no Church in Bohemia-Moravia publicly protested. It is true, of course, that there hardly was any address to which they could send a protest, except the Government in Berlin which would probably have paid even less attention than it paid to the protests of the "Confessing Church", the members of which were Germans and not Czechs. However, a public protest, read out from the pulpits, could have stirred up the members of the Czech Churches and would have encouraged them to help the Jews. In a letter to me, dated November 12, 1965, it was stated by Dr. Viktor Hhjek, Chairman of the Synod of the Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren: