HISTORY OF THE SUDETENLAND     

The Sudetenland encompasses an area of 27,000 sq. kilometers
(10,400 sq. miles) in Bohemia, Moravia and Sudeten Silesia (the
latter, being part of Silesia which in 1763, after the Seven Years War
between Maria Theresia of Austria and Frederick the Great of Prussia,
had remained part of Austria.)

Sudeten refers to a mountain range some 200 miles long and
approximately 20 - 40 miles wide, covering north of Bohemia and
Moravia as well as part of Sudeten Silesia. The term "Sudeten Germans"
has been in use since the beginning of the century to describe the
3-1/2 million Germans in the three provinces which used to be known as
the lands of the Bohemian Crown. The Sudeten Germans are ethnically
related to the Bavarians, Franconians, Saxons and Silesians, thus
containing elements of the major German tribes.

Before the Czechs, a Slav tribe, invaded the central regions of
Bohemia and Moravia, these lands had been inhabited by Celtic Germanic
tribes called The Boii, the Marcomanni and the Quadi. In the 12th and
13th centuries Bohemian dukes invited German farmers, miners,
craftsmen, merchants and artists to settle in these lands in order to
develop them, particularly the mountainous frontier regions.

For more than 700 years Germans and Czechs lived together
peacefully. It is true that from time to time there were tensions and
conflicts, e.g., the Hussite wars in the 15th century, but they were
fought for religious and social reasons, rather than on racial
grounds. It should be mentioned, however, that some regions within the
Sudetenland were inhabited exclusively by German-speaking folks who
had no contact whatsoever with Czechs, such as the southern part of
Moravia; they were indistinguishable in every respect from the
neighboring Austrians.

Bohemia and Moravia had for centuries been part of the "Holy Roman
Empire of the German Nation", and Emporers such as Charles IV and
Rudolf II had their seat in Prague, the capital of Bohemia.
Charles IV founded the first German university in Prague in 1348.
In 1526 the lands of the Bohemian Crown, including the regions in
which the Sudeten Germans lived, came under the rule of the Habsburgs.
They thus became part of the "Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation"
until 1806, and of the German Confederation from 1815 to 1866. In 1848
the Sudeten Germans were among those who elected members of the first
German parliament which met in the Church of St. Paul in Frankfurt.
Until 1918 the Sudeten Germans were part of the Austro-Hungarian
Monarchy. The end of WW I in 1918 resulted in the breakup of the
Austro-Hungarian multi-national empire. The 6.7 million Czechs
demanded a state of their own in which the highly industrialized
Sudetenland was to be incorporated.

Even before the proclamation of the CSR on October 18, 1918, the
Sudeten Germans invoked the right of self-determination and demanded
that their homeland be united with Austria, which in turn expressed
the wish to be united with the German Reich.

On March 4, 1919, Czech soldiers fired on Sudeten Germans who were
demonstrating peacefully for their right to self-determination. The 54
people killed were the first martyrs of the Sudeten German fight for
self-determination. The world remained silent.

The peace conference at St. Germain in 1919 ruled against the
union of the Sudeten German region with Austria as well as the union
of Austria with Germany.

Thus, against their wishes, the Sudeten Germans were forced into
Czechoslovakia, a country which they rejected and in whose foundation
and constitution they played virtually no part, a country which
disregarded their rights as a people and which discriminated against
them as individual citizens. The population of the CSR in 1921
consisted of:

• 6.7 million Czechs;    0.5 million Ruthenians;
• 3.1 million Germans;  0.3 million Jews;
• 2 million Slovaks;        0.1 million Poles.
• 0.7 million Hungarians;

The Czechs broke their promise to make their newly-established
country multinational, modelled after Switzerland. Instead, they set
out on a policy of Czechization, conducted as follows:
 

1.Against the German language and culture by closing down Germanschools and by declaring Czech the only official language
to be used in all communications with the authorities;

2. by ousting Germans from civil service jobs and in enterprises owned and controlled by the government;

3. by curbing the German economy and taking over German firms into Czech ownership;

and
4. by restricting the powers oflocal government in the German-speaking towns and districts.

    As a result of this policy, one out of every three Sudeten Germans
was unemployed during the depression, and they had to live on the
extremely meager social welfare benefits.

The policies on finance and exchange control, in particular on
borrowing on customs tariffs, on investment, transport,
nationalization of enterprises, on the promotion of cultural
institutions and on student grants, were all designed to further the
aims of Czechization, thus creating a unitary Czech nation which was
in fact a multinational country.

The anti-German policy of the CSR government increased the tensions between the Sudeten Germans and the state in which they had been  annexed against their will to a point where the situation became
unbearable. This, combined with the pressure exerted by Hitler and the German Reich, led to the Sudeten crises which reached its climax in the
fall of 1938 when Britain and France proposed that the Sudeten region should be ceded to German in accordance with the recommendations
made by Lord Runciman, the arbitrator in the Czech-German conflict. Czechoslovakia accepted this proposal on September 21, 1938.
The subsequent Munich Agreement, signed a week later, merely
spelled out the details of the annexation of the Sudetenland to
Germany. To the Sudeten Germans this meant the realization of their
demands made in 1918/19.