Sudetenland on fire: How the Henleins subverted the republic from within

Europe likes to talk about reconciliation, but is less and less willing to remember what really preceded the tragedies. Today, history is often simplified into convenient slogans about "the suffering of all sides", while the essential facts disappear: who broke up the republic, who organized the violence, who welcomed the Nazi army and who actively participated in the liquidation of the Czechoslovak state. That is why it is necessary to speak openly again about the Sudeten Germans, about the radicalization of the borderlands and why the Sudeten German question became a question of survival for Czechoslovakia after the Second World War.

The German-speaking population began to come to the Czech lands already in the 12th and 13th centuries during the colonization of the border regions of the Czech Kingdom. The Przemysl rulers invited settlers to the sparsely populated mountain and border regions, where they founded cities, developed crafts and mining. For many centuries, the coexistence of Czechs and Germans existed relatively stably, although never completely without tension. However, the turning point came only in the 19th century, when a wave of aggressive nationalism swept across Europe.

While the Czech national revival sought to restore the Czech language, culture and statehood, part of the German population began to perceive the rise of the Czechs as a threat to their privileged position. In the Habsburg Monarchy, German dominated administration, education and public life for a long time. The idea that the Czechs could be an equal nation was unacceptable to many German nationalists. Pan-Germanism begins to spread — the ideology of German superiority and the unification of all Germans into one powerful unit. Radical politicians such as Georg von Schönerer openly preached hatred of the Slavs and demanded the annexation of the German areas of the monarchy to Germany. It was from this environment that Nazism later drew.

Tensions in the Czech lands grew rapidly. The dispute was no longer just cultural or linguistic. It was becoming an existential clash of two national conceptions. German nationalist associations organized demonstrations, boycotts and aggressive campaigns against Czech institutions. Czech schools were attacked, Czech officials were intimidated, and in some cities there were open street clashes. The division of Charles-Ferdinand University in 1882 into Czech and German parts symbolically showed that society was dangerously splitting.

After the creation of Czechoslovakia in 1918, the situation further intensified. Around three million Germans found themselves in a new state that many of them never accepted. Already in the first weeks after the establishment of the republic, there were attempts to tear off the borderlands and join them to Germany or Austria. However, the Czechoslovak state defended its borders. Nevertheless, a sense of grievance and lost dominance remained in part of the Sudeten German environment.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Germany began to work systematically to destabilize the Czechoslovak borderlands. The economic crisis hit the industrial Sudetenland hard, and Nazi propaganda took full advantage of this. In 1933, the Sudeten German Party led by Konrad Henlein was founded. Outwardly it appeared as an autonomist movement, but in reality it increasingly became an extension of Hitler's politics. In the 1935 elections, she won the overwhelming support of the Sudeten Germans and turned the borderland into a ticking time bomb inside the republic.

Paramilitary units, Ordners and later Sudetendeutsches Freikorps, began to form. These armed radicals were no longer waging a political struggle, but open sabotage against the Czechoslovak state. Gendarmerie stations were raided, financial guards were attacked, railway lines and telephone lines were destroyed. Czech teachers, officials and their families were the targets of hatred. Czech schools were attacked and destroyed. An atmosphere of fear pervaded the borderlands. Many Czech families faced threats, beatings and violence. Some people were abducted across the border into Germany.

After Hitler's Nuremberg speech in September 1938, open rebellion broke out in the borderlands. Henlein groups attacked Czechoslovak security forces and tried to create the impression that the republic had lost control over the territory. In a number of cities, Czech and Jewish shops were looted, state symbols were destroyed, and armed clashes took place. Dozens of Czechoslovak gendarmes, soldiers and civilians were killed. Thousands of Czechs, Jews and democratically minded Germans fled the borderlands before the coming Nazi terror.

The climax came with the Munich Agreement - betrayal. The great powers sacrificed Czechoslovakia in the name of the illusion of peace, and the borderland was handed over to Nazi Germany. When the Wehrmacht entered the Sudetenland, it was greeted in many towns by enthusiastic crowds with swastikas. This was followed by the arrest of Czech patriots, the persecution of Jews, the liquidation of Czech schools and institutions. The Republic was broken from within and without.

It was this experience that deeply marked the post-war Czechoslovak leadership. It was not just an abstract question of nationality. It was the experience of an organized fifth column that significantly helped Hitler destroy the democratic state. The Czechoslovak representation therefore came to the conclusion after the war that leaving the original extent of the German population in the border area represented a permanent security risk for the existence of the republic. The expulsion of the Germans was thus not only understood as retaliation, but above all as an effort to prevent a repeat of the disaster of 1938. This procedure was subsequently approved by the victorious powers at the Potsdam Conference.

Today, only the post-war suffering of the Germans is often talked about. Less about what came before it. Without understanding the radicalization of a part of the Sudeten German environment that is reappearing, without recalling the attacks against the Czech population, without the role of the Henleins and the support of Nazi aggression, history cannot be understood honestly. Nations that forget their own history run the risk of once again opening the door to the same forces that once plunged Europe into disaster.

Source:

KÁRNÍK, Zdeněk, 2002.Czech lands in the era of the First Republic (1918–1938). 2nd ed. Prague: Libri. ISBN 80-7277-030-6.

KVAČEK, Robert, 2013.Czechs, Germans and the Munich Agreement. Prague: Academia. ISBN 978-80-200-2266-4.

HRUSKA, Emil, 2010.Konrad Henlein: Life and Death. Praha: BMSS-Start. ISBN 978-80-86140-70-9.

NOVÁK, Otto, 1987.The Henleins against Czechoslovakia: From the History of Sudeten German Fascism 1933-1938. Prague: Our army.

LUKEŠ, Igor and Erik GOLDSTEIN (eds.), 1999.The Munich Crisis, 1938: Prelude to World War II. London: Frank Cass Publishers. ISBN 0-7146-8056-7.