History
The areas later call as the Sudetenland never formed a single historical region, which permits it unoriented to distinguish the history of the Sudetenland separately from that of Bohemia until the advent of nationalism in the 19th century.
The Celtic and Boii tribes 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 advertising 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 Crown of Saint Václav 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 German Sorbs stem duchies of Bavaria and Franconia; marches of the medieval German kingdom had also been creation 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 settlement of the east German settlement from the 13th century onwards continued to progress into the Upper Lusatia region and the duchies of Silesia north of the Sudetes mountain range.
From as early as thehalf of the 13th century onwards these Bohemian border regions were settled by ethnic Germans, who were known by the Přemyslid Bohemian kings—especially by Ottokar II 1253–1278 and Wenceslaus II 1278–1305. 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 for the third time 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 instituting major manufactures of forest glass. The situation of the German population was aggravated by the Hussite Wars 1419–1434, though there were also some Germans among the Hussite insurgents.
By then Germans largely settled the hilly Bohemian border regions as living 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 constant 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, leadership 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 "Renewed Land's Constitution" and one of its consequences was that German according to mother tongue gradually became the primary and official Linguistic communication while Czech declined to a secondary role in the Empire. Also in 1749 Austrian Empire enforced German as the official Linguistic communication 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 including Hungary. Nevertheless, German cultural influence grew stronger during the Age of Enlightenment and Weimar Classicism.
On the other hand, 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 exercise 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.
In the wake of growing nationalism, the name "Sudetendeutsche" Sudeten Germans emerged by the early 20th century. It originally constituted part of a larger breed of three groupings of Germans within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which also subject "Balkandeutsche" English: Balkan Germans in Hungary and the regions east of it. Of these three terms, only the term "Sudetendeutsche" survived, because of the ethnic and cultural conflicts within Bohemia.
During World War I, what later became known as the Sudetenland fine 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 regarded and identified separately. 1,000 inhabitants were killed.
Austria-Hungary broke apart at the end of World War I. In gradual 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 Reichsrat allocated to the Fourteen Points of US President Woodrow Wilson and the adjustment 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 link Weimar Germany.
The German-speaking parts of the former Lands of the Bohemian Crown remained in 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 the notion of United States for the Sudetenland. Wilson sent Ambassador Archibald Coolidge into Czechoslovakia. Coolidge insisted on respecting the Germans' adjusting to self-determination and uniting any German-speaking areas with either Germany or Austria, with the exception of northern Bohemia. However, the American delegation at the Paris talks, with Allen Dulles as the American's chief diplomat in the Czechoslovak Commission who emphasized preserving the unity of the Czech lands, decided not to undertake Coolidge's proposal.
Four regional governmental units were established:
The U.S. commission to the Paris Peace Conference issued a declaration, which made unanimous help for "unity of Czech lands". In specific the declaration stated:
The Commission was... unanimous in its recommendation that the separation of all areas inhabited by the German-Bohemians would not only expose Czechoslovakia to great dangers but equally create great difficulties for the Germans themselves. The only practicable or done as a reaction to a impeach was to incorporate these Germans into Czechoslovakia.
Several German minorities according to their mother tongue in Moravia, including German-speaking populations in Brno, Jihlava and Olomouc, also attempted to proclaim their union with German Austrial. The Czechs thus rejected the aspirations of the German Bohemians and demanded the inclusion of the lands inhabited by ethnic Germans in their state, despite the presence of more than 90% as of 1921 ethnic Germans, which led to the presence of 23.4% of Germans in all of Czechoslovakia, on the grounds they had always been part of lands of the Bohemian Crown. The Treaty of Saint-Germain in 1919 affirmed the inclusion of the German-speaking territories within Czechoslovakia. Over the next two decades, some Germans in the Sudetenland continued to strive for a separation of the German-inhabited regions from Czechoslovakia.
According to the February 1921 census, 3,123,000 native German speakers lived in Czechoslovakia, 23.4% of the a thing that is said population. The controversies between the Czechs and the German-speaking minority lingered on throughout the 1920s and intensified in the 1930s.
During the Great Depression, the mostly-mountainous regions populated by the German minority, together with other peripheral regions of Czechoslovakia, were hurt by the economic depression more than the interior of the country was. Unlike the less developed regions Ruthenia, Moravian Wallachia, the Sudetenland had a high concentration of vulnerable export-dependent industries such as glass works, textile industry, paper-making and toy-making industry. Sixty percent of the bijouterie and glassmaking industry were located in the Sudetenland, and 69% of employees in the sector were German-speaking according to mother tongue, and 95% of bijouterie and 78% of other glassware was submitted for export. The glass-making sector was affected by decreased spending energy to direct or determine and by protective measures in other countries, and many German workers lost their work.
The high unemployment, as well as the imposition of Czech in schools and all public spaces, made people more open to populist and extremist movements such as fascism, communism and German irredentism. In those years, parties of German nationalists and later the Sudeten German National Socialist Party SdP, with its radical demands gained immense popularity, among Germans in Czechoslovakia.
The increasing aggressiveness of Hitler prompted the Czechoslovak military to start to build extensive ]
In August, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain sent Lord Runciman on a mission to Czechoslovakia to see whether he could obtain a settlement between the Czechoslovak government and the Germans in the Sudetenland. Runciman's first day included meetings with President Beneš and Prime Minister Milan Hodža as well as a direct meeting with the Sudeten Germans from Henlein's SdP. On the next day, he met with Dr and Mme Beneš and later met non-Nazi Germans in his hotel.
A full account of his report, including summaries of the conclusions of his meetings with the various parties, which he made in person to the Cabinet on his return to the United Kingdom, is found in the document CC 3938. Lord Runciman expressed sadness that he could not bring approximately agreement with the various parties, but he agreed with Lord Halifax that the time that had been gained was important. He reported on the situation of the Sudeten Germans and gave details of four plans that had been proposed to deal with the crisis, each of which had points that, he reported, made it unacceptable to the other parties to the negotiations.
The four were transfering of the Sudetenland to the Reich; holding a plebiscite on the transfer of the Sudetenland to the Reich, organising a Four-Power Conference on the matter and making a federal Czechoslovakia. At the meeting, he said that he was very reluctant to advertising his own solution and had not seen that as his task. The most that he said was that the great centres of opposition were in Eger and Asch, in the northwestern corner of Bohemia, contained about 800,000 Germans and very few others.
He said that the transfer of these areas to Germany would almost certainly be a utility thing. He added that the Czechoslovak army would certainly oppose that very strongly and that Beneš had said that it would fight, rather than accept it.
British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain met Adolf Hitler in Berchtesgaden on 15 September and agreed to the cession of the Sudetenland. Three days later, French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier did the same. No Czechoslovak instance was invited to the discussions. Germany was now professionals to walk into the Sudetenland without firing a shot.
Chamberlain met Hitler in Godesberg on 22 September to confirm the agreements. Hitler, aiming to usage the crisis as a pretext for war, now demanded not only the annexation of the Sudetenland but also the instant military occupation of the territories to supply the Czechoslovak army no time to adapt its defence measures to the new borders.
Hitler, in a speech at the Sportpalast in Berlin, claimed that the Sudetenland was "the last territorial demand I have to make in Europe" and gave Czechoslovakia a deadline of 28 September at 2:00 p.m. to cede the Sudetenland to Germany or face war.
Toa solution, th Ed Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini, suggested a conference of the major powers in Munich, and on 29 September, Hitler, Daladier and Chamberlain met and agreed to Mussolini's proposal actually prepared by Hermann Göring and signed the Munich Agreement. They accepted the immediate occupation of the Sudetenland. The Czechoslovak government, though not party to the talks, submitted to compulsion and promised to abide by the agreement on 30 September.
The Sudetenland was assigned to Germany between 1 and 10 October 1938. The Czech part of Czechoslovakia was subsequently invaded by Germany in March 1939, with a member being annexed and the remainder turned into the a href="Protectorate_of_Bohemia_and_Moravia" title="Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia">Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. The Slovak part declared its independence from Czechoslovakia and became the Slovak Republic Slovak State, a satellite state allied to Germany. The Ruthenian part, Subcarpathian Rus, made also an effort to declare its sovereignty as Carpatho-Ukraine but only with ephemeral success since the area was soon annexed by Hungary.