Sudetenland

• 1. Introduction

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  The Sudetenland sits at the heart of one of modern Europe's most consequential territorial disputes. In September 1938, Adolf Hitler stood before a crowd at the Sportpalast in Berlin and declared that the Sudetenland was "the last territorial demand I have to make in Europe." He gave Czechoslovakia a deadline of the 28th of September 1938 at 2:00 p.m. to hand over the region or face war. What followed changed the map of Europe and set the stage for the Second World War.

  The Sudetenland was not a single, ancient province with clear borders. It was a German compound word, joining "Sudeten" from the Sudeten Mountains and "Land," meaning country. The term did not even exist until the early 20th century. Yet within a few decades, this invented name became the flashpoint for a crisis that would pull the world's great powers into a fateful conference in Munich. Who were the Sudeten Germans, and how did they come to be caught between competing national projects? What did the Munich Agreement actually settle, and what did it leave burning?

• 2. Centuries of Settlement

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  From as early as the second half of the 13th century, Bohemia's border regions were settled by ethnic Germans, invited by the Přemyslid Bohemian kings, especially Ottokar II, who ruled from 1253 to 1278, and Wenceslaus II, who ruled from 1278 to 1305. These settlers were not conquerors; they were craftsmen, farmers, and manufacturers drawn to the underpopulated mountain borders.

  The glass industry became their signature. German settlers in the hilly Bohemian border regions established major manufactures of forest glass, and that tradition ran deep for centuries. Even at the peak of the Sudeten Crisis in the 1930s, sixty percent of Czechoslovakia's bijouterie and glassmaking industry was located in the Sudetenland. Some 69% of workers in that sector were German-speaking by mother tongue.

  The Hussite Wars of 1419 to 1434 brought hardship to everyone in the region, Germans included, but the German population remained dominant in the border areas through and beyond that conflict. By the time the House of Habsburg took control of Bohemia in 1526, German speakers had long defined the culture and commerce of these mountain districts. The city of Prague itself had a German-speaking majority from the last third of the 17th century until 1860. After 1910, that proportion had fallen sharply to just 6.7% of the population.

  Rule over the Bohemian Kingdom passed from the Habsburgs through several dynasties, and both Czech and German Bohemians suffered enormously in the Thirty Years' War. Bohemia lost 70% of its population during that conflict. In the aftermath, less populated areas were resettled with Catholic Germans from the Austrian lands, and from 1627 the Habsburgs enforced the Verneuerte Landesordnung, the Renewed Land's Constitution, which made German the primary and official language while Czech declined to a secondary role.

• 3. A Term Born from Nationalism

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  The name "Sudetendeutsche," or Sudeten Germans, emerged only in the early 20th century, in the wake of rising nationalist sentiment across Central Europe. It was originally part of a three-part classification of Germans within Austria-Hungary, alongside "Alpine Deutschen" in what became Austria and "Balkandeutsche" in Hungary and the lands east of it. Of those three terms, only "Sudetendeutsche" survived. The reason is specific: the ethnic and cultural conflicts within Bohemia gave the term a weight and urgency that the other two never acquired.

  The Romanticism movement of the 19th century had already set Czech and German nationalists against each other. Czech politicians like Frantisek Palacky developed the ideology of Austroslavism, a vision of Slavic political solidarity within a reformed Austria-Hungary. Pan-Germanist activists pushed in the opposite direction. During the Revolutions of 1848, German-speaking Bohemians wanted to join the building of a German nation-state, while Czech speakers insisted on keeping Bohemia out of those plans.

  World War I broke the stalemate permanently. During the war, what later became the Sudetenland saw a death rate higher than most other German-speaking areas of Austria-Hungary, exceeded only by German South Moravia and Carinthia. Thirty-four of every 1,000 inhabitants were killed. When the war ended and Austria-Hungary collapsed, German deputies from Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia invoked the Fourteen Points of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and demanded their right to self-determination.

• 4. Caught Inside Czechoslovakia

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  When an independent Czechoslovak state was proclaimed in late October 1918, the German-speaking border populations found themselves inside a country they had not chosen. The new state was built on the lands of the Bohemian Kingdom and parts of the former Kingdom of Hungary, designed as a multi-ethnic republic of Czechs, Germans, Slovaks, Hungarians, Poles, and Ruthenians.

  Four provisional German regional governments tried to negotiate their way out. The Province of German Bohemia, centered on Reichenberg (now Liberec), proclaimed itself a constituent state of the new German-Austrian Republic. The Province of the Sudetenland, covering northern Moravia and Austrian Silesia, set up its capital at Troppau (Opava). Two further bodies, the Bohemian Forest Region and German South Moravia, aligned themselves with existing Austrian lands. All four were short-lived. Czech troops moved in and administered the territory.

  On the 20th of September 1918, the Prague government had already asked the United States for its opinion on the Sudetenland. Wilson sent Ambassador Archibald Coolidge, who insisted on respecting the Germans' right to self-determination. But Allen Dulles, the chief American diplomat on the Czechoslovak Commission at the Paris talks, pushed for preserving the unity of the Czech lands. The American delegation did not follow Coolidge's recommendation. The Treaty of Saint-Germain in 1919 confirmed that the German-speaking territories would remain within Czechoslovakia.

  According to historian Elizabeth Wiskemann, the picture was not entirely one of resistance. Sudeten economy and industry depended on the rest of Bohemia, and local industrialists feared competition from Reich Germany if they were handed over. Many Sudeten Germans also opposed joining Austria, arguing that absorption into Austria would turn their lands into economically helpless enclaves. A good deal of cautious middle-class Sudetens found Czechoslovak membership the more practical outcome. According to the February 1921 census, 3,123,000 native German speakers lived in Czechoslovakia, representing 23.4% of the total population.

• 5. Depression, Grievance, and the SdP

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  The Great Depression struck the Sudetenland harder than most of Czechoslovakia's interior. The border regions were mountainous and export-dependent, with high concentrations of glass works, textile mills, paper-making, and toy-making industries. Some 95% of bijouterie and 78% of other glassware produced in the region went abroad. When global spending power collapsed and other countries imposed protective tariffs, the Sudetenland's industries had nowhere to sell.

  High unemployment combined with what many German speakers experienced as cultural pressure: the imposition of Czech in schools and all public spaces made the region fertile ground for populist and extremist movements. Fascism, communism, and German irredentism all gained traction. The Sudeten German Party, known as the SdP, grew into the dominant political force among Czechoslovakia's German speakers.

  On the 24th of April 1938, the SdP proclaimed the Karlsbader Programm, an eight-point demand for complete equality between Sudeten Germans and the Czech people. The Czechoslovak government accepted those claims on the 30th of June 1938. By the summer of that year, Konrad Henlein, the SdP's leader, had become what the source describes as an accessory in Hitler's escalating campaign to annex the Sudetenland. Yet even within Henlein's own party, the picture was divided. According to reports from The Times, a large number of Sudetenlanders actively opposed annexation. Writer Wickham Steed reported that over 50% of Henlein's supporters preferred greater autonomy within Czechoslovakia rather than union with Germany.

• 6. Munich and Its Aftermath

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  British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain sent Lord Runciman to Czechoslovakia in August 1938 to find a settlement. Runciman's first day included meetings with President Benes and Prime Minister Milan Hodza as well as a direct meeting with Sudeten Germans from the SdP. He returned to London unable to broker an agreement, reporting on four proposed solutions: transferring the Sudetenland to Germany outright, holding a plebiscite, convening a Four-Power Conference, or creating a federal Czechoslovakia. None had proven acceptable to all parties.

  Chamberlain met Hitler at Berchtesgaden on the 15th of September 1938 and agreed to the cession. Three days later, French Prime Minister Edouard Daladier did the same. No Czechoslovak representative was invited to either discussion. When Chamberlain returned to meet Hitler at Godesberg on the 22nd of September, Hitler escalated his demands: he now required not just the Sudetenland but the immediate military occupation of Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia, leaving Czechoslovakia no time to reposition its defences.

  On the 29th of September, Hitler, Daladier, and Chamberlain met in Munich and signed the agreement that formalized the handover. Benito Mussolini had proposed the conference; the plan had actually been prepared by Hermann Goring. The Czechoslovak government, excluded from the talks, submitted to compulsion on the 30th of September. The Sudetenland was assigned to Germany between the 1st and the 10th of October 1938.

  With annexation came the full apparatus of Nazi rule. Elections held on the 4th of December 1938 in Reichsgau Sudetenland recorded a 97.32% vote for the NSDAP. Around half a million Sudeten Germans joined the Nazi Party, a participation rate of 17.34% of the total German population in the region. The average NSDAP membership rate across Germany in 1944 was just 7.85%. Konrad Henlein administered the new Reichsgau first as Reichskommissar and then as Reichsstatthalter from the 1st of May 1939 until the 4th of May 1945, with Reichenberg (now Liberec) as its capital.

• 7. Expulsions and Empty Borderlands

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  Shortly after Czechoslovakia's liberation in May 1945, the Czech government banned official use of the term "Sudety" in communications and replaced it with "pohranicni uzemi," meaning border territory. The Berlin Declaration of the 5th of June 1945 legally nullified the German annexation.

  The Potsdam Conference in the summer of 1945 decided that the Sudeten Germans would have to leave. The relevant Czechoslovak legislation had technically provided for Germans who could prove anti-Nazi affiliation to remain, but the hostility that had built up during the occupation was immense. Around 500,000 people were expelled in the early phase of spring and summer 1945. After the Benes decrees, nearly all remaining Germans were expelled beginning in 1946. By 1950, only 159,938 people of German background still lived in what was now the Czech Republic, compared to 3,149,820 in 1930.

  The emptied borderlands were resettled by a mix of populations: Czechs, Slovaks, Greeks arriving in the wake of the Greek Civil War of 1946 to 1949, Carpathian Ruthenians, Romani people, Jews who had survived the Holocaust, and Hungarians. Some areas, including part of Czech Silesian-Moravian borderland, southwestern Bohemia around the Sumava National Park, and western and northern Bohemia, remained deliberately depopulated for reasons of mining, military interest, or environmental protection. Before the Iron Curtain was established between 1952 and 1955, a forbidden zone up to 2 km from the border barred all civilians. A wider border zone up to 12 km from the border excluded anyone considered disloyal or suspect. The entire Ash-Bulge fell within that border zone, a restriction that stayed in place until the Velvet Revolution in 1989.

  By the 2021 census, only 24,632 people in the Czech Republic claimed German ethnicity, with 15,504 of those claiming it in combination with another ethnicity. In 1921, that figure had been 3,123,568. The Bohemian and Moravian German dialects that were spoken across the border districts for centuries have largely vanished; the Germans who remain in the region now use Standard German.