The Sudetenland
Uploaded by Admin on Jan 22, 1999
On January 30, 1933, the Nazis acquired mastery of Germany when Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor. That evening Hitler stood triumphantly in the window of the Reich Chancellery waving to thousands of storm troopers who staged parades throughout the streets of Berlin. The Nazis proclaimed that their Third Reich would be the greatest civilization in history and would last for thousands of years. But the meteoric rise of Hitler and national socialism was followed by an almost equally rapid defeat; the Third Reich survived for a mere twelve years. But one of the main causes of World War II was Hitler's public justification for the dismemberment of the Czech state through either war or diplomacy was the plight of the 3.5 million ethnic Germans the Treaty of Versailles had left inside Czechoslovakia. The main land that Hitler wanted to annex to Germany was that of the Sudetenland, where most of the people living there were of German origin. The land also bordered Germany to the South East, and Germany was prepared to conquer this land at all cost.
"And now before us stands the last problem that must be solved and will be solved It (the Sudetenland) is the last territorial claim which I have to make in Europe, but it is the claim from which I will not recede..." - Adolf Hitler, in a speech in Berlin, September 26 1938, just prior to the Munich conference.
Most of the German minorities live in Sudetenland, an economically valuable and strategically important area along the Czech border with Germany and Austria. The grievances of the Sudeten Germans against the Czech state had led to the rise of a strong German nationalist movement in the Sudetenland. By the mid -1930's, this movement had the support of almost 70 percent of the Sudeten German population. Their leader, the pro-Nazi Konrad Heinlen, began demanding autonomy for this region Both the real and contrived problems of the Sudeten Germans added credibility to Hitler's charge that they were denied the right of self-determination and lived as an oppressed minority, which he was obligated to defend In the spring of 1938, Heinlein was directed by Hitler to make demands that the Czechs could not accept, thereby giving Germany a reason to intervene. The Czech situation soon turned into an international crisis that dominated the European scene for the rest of that current year.
The weekend which began on Friday,...