Sudetenland

Based on Wikipedia: Sudetenland

The Region That Didn't Exist Until It Nearly Started a World War

Here's a curious fact about one of the most consequential places in twentieth-century history: the Sudetenland didn't really exist until people needed it to. The name was invented in the early 1900s, gained traction only after World War One, and within two decades had become the flashpoint that many historians argue made the Second World War inevitable.

The word itself is straightforward German: Sudeten, referring to a mountain range along the northern Czech border, plus Land, meaning country. But the territory it described sprawled far beyond those mountains, encompassing a crescent of borderlands wrapping around what was then Czechoslovakia—north, south, and west. What unified this scattered geography wasn't topography. It was language. Specifically, German.

A Thousand Years of Complicated Neighbors

To understand the Sudetenland, you need to understand that borders in Central Europe have always been more like suggestions than boundaries. People moved. Languages mixed. Empires rose and fell and rose again.

The region's recorded history stretches back to the second century, when the Greek-Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy first marked it on a map. The Celtic Boii tribe gave Bohemia its name. Then came the Marcomanni, a Germanic tribe that dominated the area for centuries before the great migrations reshuffled Europe's ethnic deck.

By the seventh century, Slavic peoples had moved in and established control. For a while, a ruler named Samo united them into something resembling a state—one of the earliest Slavic political entities in history. But the mountains remained sparsely populated. Too cold, too difficult to farm. They sat mostly empty, waiting.

Then, in the thirteenth century, the Bohemian kings decided to do something about those empty borderlands. They invited German settlers to move in.

This wasn't unusual for medieval Europe. Kings throughout the continent recruited settlers to populate underdeveloped territories, clear forests, build towns, and generate tax revenue. The Germans who answered the call came from Bavaria, Franconia, Saxony—wherever there were people willing to trade familiarity for opportunity. They established glass manufactures in the hills, founded cities, and put down roots that would grow for seven centuries.

The Language Question

For most of those seven centuries, nobody cared very much whether you spoke German or Czech. The Bohemian Crown—part of the Holy Roman Empire, then the Habsburg domains—contained both populations, and the relevant question wasn't which language you spoke at home but which lord you owed allegiance to and which church you attended.

The Hussite Wars of the early fifteenth century complicated things somewhat. This Czech religious uprising—a proto-Protestant movement that anticipated Luther by a hundred years—had ethnic undertones. German speakers in the borderlands suffered during the conflict. But they remained, and they remained dominant in the mountainous regions.

The Thirty Years' War proved even more devastating. Bohemia lost an almost incomprehensible seventy percent of its population to war, disease, and flight. In the aftermath, the victorious Habsburgs resettled emptied areas with Catholic Germans from their Austrian territories and gradually elevated German to the primary language of administration and culture. By 1749, German was the official language of the empire. Czech became the language of peasants and nostalgia.

Then came nationalism.

When Language Became Identity

The nineteenth century transformed how Europeans thought about themselves. Previously, identity had been local, religious, dynastic. You were a subject of a particular lord, a member of a particular church, an inhabitant of a particular valley. The revolutionary idea that swept Europe after 1800 was that your deepest identity came from your language and culture—that German speakers constituted a German nation, French speakers a French nation, and so on, regardless of which king or emperor nominally ruled them.

This idea was romantic and powerful and, in regions where multiple languages coexisted, explosive.

In Bohemia, Czech intellectuals like František Palacký developed what they called Austroslavism—the idea that Slavic peoples within the Austrian Empire deserved recognition and autonomy. Meanwhile, Pan-Germanist activists argued that German speakers everywhere should unite in a single nation-state.

The Revolutions of 1848 brought these tensions to the surface. German speakers in Bohemia and Moravia wanted to join the nascent German unification movement. Czech speakers wanted nothing of the sort—they insisted Bohemia must remain outside any German nation-state. The revolution failed, the Habsburgs restored order, and the question was deferred. But it wasn't resolved.

Birth of a Name

It was in this atmosphere that the term "Sudeten Germans" emerged in the early twentieth century. The name was part of a broader classification scheme: Alpine Germans in what would become Austria, Balkan Germans in Hungary and points east, and Sudeten Germans in the Bohemian lands. Of these three labels, only Sudeten Germans stuck, precisely because the ethnic tensions in Bohemia were most acute.

World War One shattered the Austro-Hungarian Empire. When the shooting stopped in November 1918, German speakers in Bohemia suddenly found themselves in a new country called Czechoslovakia—a nation created by and for Slavic peoples in which they were now a minority.

They didn't accept this quietly.

The Failed Breakaway

In late October 1918, even before the war officially ended, German-speaking leaders in Bohemia invoked the Fourteen Points of American President Woodrow Wilson—specifically his emphasis on national self-determination—and attempted to negotiate their regions' union with the new Republic of German Austria. They created four provisional governments:

• The Province of German Bohemia in the north and west, with Liberec as its capital
• The Province of the Sudetenland in northern Moravia and Silesia, based in Opava
• The Bohemian Forest Region in the south, which tried to join Upper Austria
• German South Moravia, which attempted to merge with Lower Austria

Note the confusion: what would later be called "the Sudetenland" was just one of four provisional regions, and its boundaries didn't match the territory that would eventually bear its name. The word hadn't yet settled into its final meaning.

The United States sent Ambassador Archibald Coolidge to investigate. He recommended respecting German self-determination and allowing most German-speaking areas to join Germany or Austria. The American delegation at the Paris peace talks ignored him. Allen Dulles—later famous as the director of the Central Intelligence Agency during the Cold War, but then a young diplomat—emphasized preserving Czechoslovakia's territorial integrity.

The Treaty of Saint-Germain in 1919 made it official: the German-speaking borderlands belonged to Czechoslovakia. In some districts, more than ninety percent of the population was ethnic German. Across the new country as a whole, Germans constituted nearly a quarter of the population—3.1 million people who had not been consulted about their new nationality.

The Reluctant Citizens

The standard narrative portrays the Sudeten Germans as uniformly opposed to Czechoslovak rule, straining toward reunion with their German brothers. The reality was more complicated.

The Sudeten economy was deeply integrated with the rest of Bohemia. Local industrialists feared German competition and worried that joining the larger German market would destroy their businesses. Many Sudeten Germans also opposed union with Austria, arguing it would transform their region into economically helpless enclaves. For cautious middle-class Germans, Czechoslovak citizenship was actually the preferable option.

Silesian Germans were particularly pro-Czechoslovak. Their alternative wasn't Germany or Austria but Poland, and they vastly preferred Prague's rule to Warsaw's.

The controversy simmered through the 1920s. Then came the Depression.

Economic Catastrophe in the Mountains

The Sudetenland's geography had created a particular kind of economy. The mountainous terrain wasn't suited for agriculture, so the German-speaking regions had developed specialized export industries: glass works, textiles, paper mills, and toymaking. Sixty percent of Czechoslovakia's jewelry and glassmaking industry was concentrated in the Sudetenland. Ninety-five percent of the country's costume jewelry was made for export.

When the global economy collapsed after 1929, these export-dependent industries were devastated. Other countries raised tariffs and slashed spending. The glass factories had no one to sell to. Workers lost their jobs in enormous numbers.

The mountainous Sudetenland was hit harder than the Czechoslovak interior. Unemployment bred resentment. The Czech government's insistence on Czech-language education and public administration—reasonable from Prague's perspective, grating from the perspective of German speakers who had been the dominant culture for centuries—added linguistic grievance to economic desperation.

People in such circumstances often turn to politicians promising radical solutions. The Sudeten Germans were no exception.

Enter Hitler

The Sudeten German Party, led by a gymnastics instructor named Konrad Henlein, surged in popularity through the 1930s. Its demands escalated in tandem with Hitler's growing power across the border. By 1938, the party functioned essentially as an extension of Nazi Germany, making ever more radical demands designed to be impossible for Prague to accept.

In March 1938, Germany annexed Austria in the Anschluss. Hitler immediately proclaimed himself the champion of ethnic Germans everywhere, turning his attention to Czechoslovakia. The Sudeten Crisis had begun.

Czechoslovakia was not defenseless. Its military had spent two years building extensive fortifications along the German border, specifically to defend the Sudetenland. The terrain was mountainous and favorable to defense. The Czech army was well-equipped. France was treaty-bound to come to Czechoslovakia's aid. The Soviet Union had offered support.

But Britain wanted peace at almost any price. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flew to Germany three times in September 1938 to negotiate directly with Hitler. The result was the Munich Agreement, in which Britain and France agreed to let Germany annex the Sudetenland in exchange for Hitler's promise that this was his last territorial demand in Europe.

Czechoslovakia was not invited to the negotiations that dismembered it.

The Aftermath

Germany occupied the Sudetenland in October 1938. Poland seized the opportunity to grab a piece of Czechoslovak territory as well. Within six months, Hitler would violate his promise and occupy the rest of Czechoslovakia, creating a German puppet state in Slovakia and absorbing Bohemia and Moravia as a "protectorate."

The word "Munich" became synonymous with appeasement, the catastrophic policy of making concessions to aggressive dictators in hopes they will become satisfied. It remains the most damaging insult one statesman can level at another: to accuse them of pursuing a Munich-style policy.

When World War Two ended in 1945 and Czechoslovakia was reconstituted, the new government expelled virtually the entire German-speaking population. Approximately three million people were forced from homes their families had occupied for seven centuries. The Sudetenland, having not existed as a concept before 1918, ceased to exist as a German-speaking region by 1947.

Today, the territory is inhabited almost exclusively by Czech speakers. The German place names survive on old maps. The glass factories, those that still operate, employ Czech workers. The mountains remain, but the Sudetenland—that contested idea, that fatal geography—exists only in history books and in the memories of descendants scattered across Germany and Austria, still gathering occasionally in cultural associations devoted to a homeland they never knew.

Why It Still Matters

The Sudetenland offers uncomfortable lessons about nationalism, minority rights, and the dangers of borders that divide ethnic groups.

Woodrow Wilson's principle of national self-determination—that peoples should govern themselves—sounds noble in the abstract. But what happens when populations are intermingled? When economic geography doesn't match ethnic geography? When granting self-determination to one group means denying it to another?

The Czechoslovak state had genuinely difficult choices to make. Allowing the German-speaking borderlands to secede would have stripped the country of its defensive terrain, its industrial base, and its economic viability. Keeping them meant ruling over millions of people who hadn't consented to that rule. Neither option was just.

Hitler exploited this genuine grievance for monstrous purposes. The existence of real discrimination against Sudeten Germans didn't make Nazi expansionism legitimate. But the discrimination was real, and it made Hitler's propaganda easier to sell.

The ethnic cleansing that followed World War Two—the expulsion of nearly all Germans from Czechoslovakia, Poland, and other Eastern European countries—was a brutal attempt to solve the problem permanently by eliminating the minorities entirely. It worked, in a horrible way. There are no more Sudeten Germans demanding self-determination because there are no more Sudeten Germans in the Sudetenland.

The questions the Sudetenland raised haven't disappeared. They resurface wherever ethnic minorities straddle borders, wherever economic desperation meets nationalist politics, wherever leaders promise simple solutions to complicated problems. The mountains still stand along the Czech border. The region they gave their name to endures as a warning.