The communist graphic artist John Heartfield was able to leave Prague for Great Britain with his Czechoslovak passport at the last minute in 1938. In the spring of 1933, Heartfield had fled from Germany to exile in Prague, where he worked mainly for the Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (AIZ) and the communist publishing house Malik-Verlag. Even in Prague, the leadership of the Nazi Party had attempted to use the Gestapo and the German Embassy to thwart Heartfield's work. Under the direction of Goebbels, the German press led a campaign of against the magazine AIZ [Workers Pictorial Newspaper, 1921-1938]. Heartfield and his friends were spied on, and one of his exhibitions in Prague was closed under pressure from the German government.

In September of 1934, John Heartfield, his brother Wieland Herzfelde and artists including Heinrich Mann, Alfred Kerr and Erwin Piscator signed an exhortation to the people of the Saarland to vote against the imminent annexation of the territory into the German Reich. The Nazi government subsequently revoked citizenship from all who signed the declaration. In 1938, the Gestapo began intensifying its attempts to have the Czech police arrest Heartfield, who was a fugitive in Germany. Following the passage of the Munich Agreement and the occupation of the Sudetenland, the Nazis came dangerously close to the expatriates living in exile in Prague. Their only chance was to flee yet again.