Sudetenland
The Sudetenland is a German term used by Nazi propaganda to address areas of the former Czechoslovakia with a majority of German speaking population. The reason behind the invention of this term was to ideologically establish a specific territory in order to set grounds for subsequent secession claims, as the area in question consisted of different regions which had always been an integral part of historical Bohemia - in particular its northern, southern, and western border areas. Therefore, the Sudetenland is an ideological term rather than a geographical one, as no such territory existed as a unit of any sort prior to 1938. Similarly, the term Sudeten Germans was established in order to create a standalone ethnical identity for German speaking nationals of Czechoslovakia, most of whom had lived in the border areas of Bohemia, Moravia, and Czech Silesia since the Middle Ages.
The word Sudetenland is a German compound of Sudeten, the name of the Sudeten Mountains, which run along the northern Czech border and Lower Silesia, and Land, meaning "country". The border areas inhabitated by the German speaking population encompassed territory well beyond those mountains, however.
The word "Sudetenland" did not come into being until the early part of the 20th century and did not come to prominence until almost two decades into the century, after World War I, when Austria-Hungary disintegrated and the Sudeten Germans found themselves living in the new country of Czechoslovakia. The Sudeten crisis of 1938 was provoked by the Pan-Germanist demands of Nazi Germany that the Sudetenland be annexed to them, which happened after the later Munich Agreement. Part of the borderland was invaded and annexed by Poland. Afterwards, the formerly unrecognized Sudetenland became an administrative division of Germany. When Czechoslovakia was reconstituted after World War II, the Sudeten Germans were expelled and the region today is inhabited almost exclusively by Czech speakers.
History
The areas called the Sudetenland never formed a single historical region, which makes it difficult to distinguish the history of the Sudetenland separately from that of Bohemia until the advent of nationalism in the 19th century.Early origins
The Celtic Boii settled there and the region was first mentioned on the map of Ptolemaios in the 2nd century AD. The Germanic tribe of the Marcomanni dominated the entire core of the region in later centuries. Those tribes already built cities like Brno, but moved west during the Migration Period. In the 7th century AD Slavic people moved in and were united under Samo's realm. Later in the High Middle Ages Germans settled into the less populated border region.In the Middle Ages the regions situated on the mountainous border of the Duchy and the Kingdom of Bohemia had since the Migration Period been settled mainly by western Slavic Czechs. Along the Bohemian Forest in the west, the Czech lands bordered on the German Slavic tribes stem duchies of Bavaria and Franconia; marches of the medieval German kingdom had also been established in the adjacent Austrian lands south of the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands and the northern Meissen region beyond the Ore Mountains. In the course of the Ostsiedlung, German settlement from the 13th century onwards continued to move into the Upper Lusatia region and the duchies of Silesia north of the Sudetes mountain range.
From as early as the second half of the 13th century onwards these Bohemian border regions were settled by ethnic Germans, who were invited by the Přemyslid Bohemian kings—especially by Ottokar II and Wenceslaus II. After the extinction of the Přemyslid dynasty in 1306, the Bohemian nobility backed John of Luxembourg as king against his rival Duke Henry of Carinthia. In 1322, King John of Bohemia acquired the formerly Imperial Egerland region in the west and vassalized most of the Piast Silesian duchies, as acknowledged by King Casimir III of Poland by the 1335 Treaty of Trentschin. His son, Bohemian King Charles IV, was elected King of the Romans in 1346 and crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 1355. He added the Lusatias to the Lands of the Bohemian Crown, which then comprised large territories with a significant German population.
In the hilly border regions German settlers established major manufactures of forest glass. The situation of the German population was aggravated by the Hussite Wars, though there were also some Germans among the Hussite insurgents. Despite the hardships of the Hussite Wars, the German population remained dominant in the border regions.
By then Germans largely settled the hilly Bohemian border regions as well as the cities of the lowlands; mainly people of Bavarian descent in the South Bohemian and South Moravian Region, in Brno, Jihlava, České Budějovice and the West Bohemian Plzeň Region; Franconian people in Žatec; Upper Saxons in adjacent North Bohemia, where the border with the Saxon Electorate was fixed by the 1459 Peace of Eger; Germanic Silesians in the adjacent Sudetes region with the County of Kladsko, in the Moravian–Silesian Region, in Svitavy and Olomouc. The city of Prague had a German-speaking majority from the last third of the 17th century until 1860, but after 1910 the proportion of German speakers had decreased to 6.7% of the population.
From the Luxembourgs, rule over Bohemia passed through George of Podiebrad to the Jagiellon dynasty and finally to the House of Habsburg in 1526. Both Czech and German Bohemians suffered heavily in the Thirty Years' War. Bohemia lost 70% of its population. From the defeat of the Bohemian Revolt that collapsed at the 1620 Battle of White Mountain, the Habsburgs gradually integrated the Kingdom of Bohemia into their monarchy. During the subsequent Counter-Reformation, less populated areas were resettled with Catholic Germans from the Austrian lands. From 1627, the Habsburgs enforced the so-called Verneuerte Landesordnung, and one of its consequences was that German, according to mother tongue, gradually became the primary and official language, while Czech declined to a secondary role in the Empire. In 1749, the Austrian Empire enforced German as the official language again. Emperor Joseph II in 1780 renounced the coronation ceremony as Bohemian king and unsuccessfully tried to push German through as sole official language in all Habsburg lands. Nevertheless, German cultural influence grew stronger during the Age of Enlightenment and Weimar Classicism.
Contrastingly, in the course of the Romanticism movement national tensions arose, both in the form of the Austroslavism ideology developed by Czech politicians like František Palacký and Pan-Germanist activist raising the German question. Conflicts between Czech and German nationalists emerged in the 19th century, for instance in the Revolutions of 1848: while the German-speaking population of Bohemia and Moravia wanted to participate in the building of a German nation state, the Czech-speaking population insisted on keeping Bohemia out of such plans. The Bohemian Kingdom remained a part of the Austrian Empire and Austria-Hungary until its dismemberment after the World War I.
Emergence of the term
In the wake of growing nationalism, the name "Sudetendeutsche emerged by the early 20th century. It originally constituted part of a larger classification of three groupings of Germans within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which also included "Alpine Deutschen in what later became the Republic of Austria and "Balkandeutsche in Hungary and the regions east of it. Of these three terms, only the term "Sudetendeutsche survived, because of secession ambitions of Czech Germans.World War I and aftermath
During World War I, what later became known as the Sudetenland experienced a rate of war deaths that was higher than most other German-speaking areas of Austria-Hungary and exceeded only by German South Moravia and Carinthia. Thirty-four of each 1,000 inhabitants were killed.Austria-Hungary broke apart at the end of World War I. In late October 1918, an independent Czechoslovak state, consisting of the lands of the Bohemian kingdom and areas belonging to the Kingdom of Hungary, was proclaimed. The German deputies of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia in the Imperial Council referred to the Fourteen Points of US President Woodrow Wilson and the right proposed therein to self-determination and attempted to negotiate the union of the German-speaking territories with the new Republic of German Austria, which itself aimed at joining Weimar Germany.
The German-speaking parts of the former Lands of the Bohemian Crown were to be part of a newly created Czechoslovakia, a multi-ethnic state of several nations: Czechs, Germans, Slovaks, Hungarians, Poles and Ruthenians. On 20 September 1918, the Prague government asked for the opinion of the United States on the border areas. Wilson sent Ambassador Archibald Coolidge into Czechoslovakia. Coolidge insisted on respecting the Germans' right to self-determination and uniting all German-speaking areas with either Germany or Austria, with the exception of northern Bohemia. However, the American delegation at the Paris talks decided not to follow Coolidge's proposal. Allen Dulles was the American's chief diplomat in the Czechoslovak Commission and emphasized preserving the unity of the Czech lands.
Four regional governmental units were established:
- Province of German Bohemia, the regions of northern and western Bohemia; proclaimed a constitutive state of the German-Austrian Republic with Reichenberg as capital, administered by a Landeshauptmann, consecutively: Rafael Pacher, 29 October6 November 1918, and Rudolf Ritter von Lodgman von Auen, 6 November16 December 1918.
- Province of the Sudetenland, the regions of northern Moravia and Austrian Silesia; proclaimed a constituent state of the German-Austrian Republic with Troppau as capital, governed by a Landeshauptmann: Robert Freissler, 30 October – 18 December 1918. This province's boundaries do not correspond to what would later be called the Sudetenland, which contained all the German-speaking parts of the Czech lands.
- Bohemian Forest Region, the region of Bohemian Forest/South Bohemia; proclaimed a district of the existing Austrian Land of Upper Austria; administered by Kreishauptmann : Friedrich Wichtl from 30 October 1918.
- German South Moravia, proclaimed a District of the existing Austrian land Lower Austria, administered by a Kreishauptmann: Oskar Teufel from 30 October 1918.
Several German minorities according to their first language in Moravia, including German-speaking populations in Brno, Jihlava and Olomouc, also attempted to proclaim their union with German Austria.
In sum, the Czechs rejected the aspirations of the Czech Germans and demanded the inclusion of the areas inhabited by ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia, on the grounds that they had always been part of the lands of the Bohemian Crown. These areas were in some instances more than 90% ethnically German, which made the whole of Czechoslovakia 23.4% German.
The Treaty of Saint-Germain in 1919 affirmed the inclusion of the German-speaking territories within Czechoslovakia. Over the next two decades, some local Germans continued to strive for a separation of the regions from Czechoslovakia.
According to Elizabeth Wiskemann, despite the initial resistance to the Czechoslovak rule, the Czech German population was not entirely opposed to the establishment of Czechoslovakia. Economy and industry of the border areas relied on the rest of Bohemia, and local industrialists were afraid of "Reich German competition and therefore of the talk of handing them over". Many Czech Germans also opposed joining Austria, arguing that being incorporated into Austria would turn the border areas into "economically helpless Austrian enclaves". Because of this, the border areas becoming part of Czechoslovakia was the preferable choice of "a good deal of cautious middle-class" amongst Czech Germans. Silesian Germans were particularly pro-Czechoslovak, as they strongly preferred Czechoslovak rule to the prospect of becoming a part of Poland.