User:2x2leax/Sudeten crisis

Languages spoken in Czechoslovakia, 1930

The Sudeten Crisis (German: Sudetenkrise) was an international conflict provoked and escalated by Nazi Germany in 1938 with the aim of destroying the state of Czechoslovakia and incorporating the territories of Bohemia and Moravia into the German Reich. Konrad Henlein and his Sudeten German Party, as representatives of the local German minority acted in conjunction with the Nazi leadership. The Munich Agreement of October of 1938 forced the government of Czechoslovakia to yield of the Sudetes to the German Reich. While France and Britain avoided a military confrontation through their policy of appeasement, the Nazi regime went into World War II with a policy of increasingly offensive expansion. After the secession of Slovakia from the Czechoslovak Republic, Hitler demolished the Czech trunk state in March 1939 and established the protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

Background

The peace following the First World War, while focusing on national self-determination, did not grant the same determination to many German-speaking minorities, including the German minority in the Sudetenland, a part of the newly-formed country of Czechoslovakia. This minority numbered 3.5 million, and originated from the German settlement of the Sudetenland in the 13th century.

The Sudetenland's processing industries were greatly affected by the Great Depression, which led to a radicalization of politics in the region. The far-right German National Socialist Worker's Party, or DNSAP, founded originally in 1904, found itself winning 8 seats in the 1929 general election in Prague. When in 1933, a ban was coming down on the DNSAP, the group disbanded and reformed on 1 October as the Sudeten German Home Front (later renamed in 1935 to the Sudeten German Party). Led by Konrad Henlein, the party advocated for, at first, Sudeten German autonomy within Czechoslovakia. The Sudeten German Party won 44 seats in the May 1935 elections, and using their influence proposed German autonomy.

Hitler, Henlein, and the escalation to the crisis

In the autumn of 1937, the leader of the Sudeten German Party (SGP), Konrad Henlein, finally swung into line with the radicals within his party. With the replacement of Hans Steinacher as head of the Volksbund for Deutschtum abroad on October 19, 1937 Henlein had lost the last moderate supporters in the German Reich. His close confidant and important adviser to the SGP's autonomist leadership, Heinz Rutha, was arrested by the Czech police on 4 October on charges of homosexuality and died on 5 November. After all, the Teplitz-Schönau incident worsened the relationship with the Czechoslovak government. On October 17, 1937, after a meeting of the SGP, at which Henlein had given a speech, violent clashes had taken place with the Czech police. Karl Hermann Frank, who had beaten police officers, was beaten with a rubber truncheon and arrested. Henlein and the German press used this incident to launch a campaign against Czechoslovakia. After the Czechoslovak Prime Minister Milan Hodža Henlein had signaled on September 16, 1937 still accommodating, the government now reacted to a ban on assembly and postponed the local elections. To save his own position and the unity of his party, Henlein turned to Hitler on 19 November 1937 and offered him the SGP as a "fifth column". The SGP must "disguise its commitment to National Socialism as a worldview, as a political principle". While he "inwardly desired nothing more than the incorporation of the Sudeten German territory, indeed of the entire Bohemian-Moravian-Silesian region into the Reich," the party must, however, enter the outside world for the preservation of Czechoslovakia. For the American historian Ronald Smelser here is the beginning of the activity of the radicals in the SGP, which should make. the Sudeten problem a Sudeten crisis. According to the German historian Ralf Gebel, Henlein abandoned any approach of independent politics. The following events are "from Sudeten German perspective already an epilogue to the history of the way to Munich. The further course of the Sudeten crisis lay entirely in the hands of Hitler and his opponents on the international stage". According to the German historian Ralf Gebel, Henlein abandoned any approach of independent politics. The following events are "from Sudeten German perspective already an epilogue to the history of the way to Munich. The further course of the Sudeten crisis lay entirely in the hands of Hitler and his opponents on the international stage".

On 5 November 1937, at a conference with the leaders of the Wehrmacht and the Foreign Ministry, transmitted by the Hossbach Memorandum, German leader Adolf Hitler unfolded his long-term plan for a violent expansion of Germany in Europe. Among the first goals he declared Austria and Czechoslovakia, which he wanted to incorporate the German Reich. Hitler's annexation of Austria gave him the confidence to look to Czechoslovakia for his next move. His foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, was egging him on, seeing as foreign great powers did not do much about Austria. On 28 March 1938, Hitler met with Henlein and urged him not to cooperate with the Czechoslovak government and to instead advocate for full freedom for the Sudeten Germans. In 28 May, Hitler told his generals that he wanted Czechoslovakia to "disappear from the map". By the 30th, military plans for an invasion of Czechoslovakia had been drawn up.

May crisis (May 1938)

On May 18, 1938, Czechoslovak intelligence received reports of Wehrmacht troop movements in Saxony and Bavaria that seemed to indicate an imminent attack; allegedly, nine to twelve divisions had been moved to the border. In response, the government of Prime Minister Milan Hodža decided on partial mobilization on May 20: 199,000 men were called up, bringing the Czechoslovak army to 383,000. This decision triggered frantic activity from various quarters on May 20 and 21, which went down in history as the "May crisis" or "Weekend crisis". American Ambassador to Paris William C. Bullitt appealed to President Franklin D. Roosevelt to bring the Sudeten crisis before the International Court of Justice to prevent a Soviet expansion of power, which he feared would occur in the event of a possible war between Germany and Czechoslovakia. The German envoy in Prague, Ernst Eisenlohr, denied the reports of German troop concentrations in a sharp tone ("gross nonsense") to Foreign Minister Kamil Krofta, and the Czechoslovak envoy in Berlin, Vojtěch Mastný, had to listen to something similar in Wilhelmstraße.

The SGP apparently instructed its subdivisions to refrain from any provocation, not to wear uniforms and badges for the time being and to refrain from the “German salute”. The funeral of two SGP members who had been shot dead by a guard on the night of the mobilization, whose signal they had ignored, was used by the SGP for rallies on May 25th. The dead were declared "Blutzeuge of the National Socialist idea" by SGP functionaries, and Henlein gave a seditious speech. The British ambassador in Berlin, Nevile Henderson, issued several threatening demarches to warned of moderation - unnecessarily, because the whole crisis was based on a false report. There had been no concentration of German troops at all.

It has not yet been possible to determine who the false report that triggered the May crisis came from. The Czech-American historian Igor Lukes sees this as professionally made disinformation by a secret service that could have been interested in the outbreak of a German-Czechoslovak war, for example the Soviet Union. The Czech historian Stanislav Kokoška, on the other hand, ruled out that Soviet or German secret services were involved. In his opinion, the decisive report came from a German Social Democrat with informants in Reich territory who had worked for the Czechoslovak intelligence service.

References

Bibliography

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• Gebel, Ralf (2000). „Heim ins Reich!“: Konrad Henlein und der Reichsgau Sudetenland (1938–1945). Veröffentlichungen des Collegium Carolinum (in German). Vol. 83 (2nd ed.). Munich: Oldenbourg.
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• Lukes, Igor (October 1996). "The Czechoslovak Partial Mobilization in May 1938: A Mystery (almost) Solved". Journal of Contemporary History. 34 (4). Sage Publications, Inc.: 699–720.
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• Radspieler, Tony (1955). The Ethnic German Refugee in Austria, 1945 to 1954. M. Nijhoff.
• Smelser, Ronald (1980). Das Sudetenproblem und das Dritte Reich 1933–1938. Von der Volkstumspolitik zur nationalsozialistischen Außenpolitik. Veröffentlichungen des Collegium Carolinum (in German). Vol. 36. Munich: Oldenbourg.
• Winkler, Heinrich August (28 September 2015). The Age of Catastrophe: A History of the West 1914–1945. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-21309-6.