Final Crisis in 1938
Konrad Henlein met with Hitler in Berlin on 28 March 1938 and was instructed to raise demands unacceptable to the Czechoslovak government. In the Carlsbad Decrees, issued on 24 April, the SdP demanded complete autonomy for the Sudetenland and freedom to profess Nazi ideology. If Henlein's demands had been granted, the Sudetenland would have been in a position to align itself with Nazi Germany.
As the political situation worsened, the security in Sudetenland deteriorated. The region became the site of small-scale clashes between young SdP followers (equipped with arms smuggled from Germany) and police and border forces. In some places the regular army was called in to pacify the situation. Nazi German Propaganda accused the Czech government and Czechs of atrocities on innocent Germans. The Czech public started to prepare for an inevitable war (for example, training with gas masks).
On 20 May, Czechoslovakia initiated a so-called "partial mobilization" (literally "special military precaution") in response to rumours of German troop movements. The army moved into position on the border. Western powers tried to calm down the situation and forced the government of Czechoslovakia to comply with most of the Carlsbad Decrees. However the SdP, instructed to push towards war, escalated the situation with more protests and violence.
With the help of special Nazi forces, the Sudetendeutsche Freikorps (paramilitary groups trained in Germany by SS-instructors) took over some border areas and committed many crimes: they killed more than 110 Czechs (mostly soldiers and policemen) and kidnapped over 2,020 Czechoslovak citizens (including German anti-fascists), taking them to Nazi Germany.
In August, UK Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain sent Lord Runciman, a faithful appeaser, to Czechoslovakia to see if he could obtain a settlement between the Czechoslovak government and the Germans in the Sudetenland. His mission failed because the Sudeten German Party refused all conciliating proposals (on Hitler's command).
Runciman reported the following to the British government regarding Czech policy towards the German minority in the preceding decades.:
| “ | Czech officials and Czech police, speaking little or no German, were appointed in large numbers to purely German districts; Czech agricultural colonists were encouraged to settle on land confiscated under the Land Reform in the middle of German populations; for the children of these Czech invaders Czech schools were built on a large scale; there is a very general belief that Czech firms were favoured as against German firms in the allocation of State contracts and that the State provided work and relief for Czechs more readily than for Germans. I believe these complaints to be in the main justified. Even as late as the time of my Mission, I could find no readiness on the part of the Czechoslovak Government to remedy them on anything like an adequate scale... the feeling among the Sudeten Germans until about three or four years ago was one of hopelessness. But the rise of Nazi Germany gave them new hope. I regard their turning for help towards their kinsmen and their eventual desire to join the Reich as a natural development in the circumstances. | ” |
Britain and France then forced the Czechoslovak government to cede the Sudetenland to Germany on 21 September. The Munich Agreement (signed September 29 by Britain, France, Germany and Italy and negotiated without Czechoslovak participation) only confirmed the decision and the negotiated details. Under pressure from its Western allies, the Czechoslovak government was forced to accept Munich Agreement ceding a German-defined maximalist extension of Sudetenland to Germany including among other things the Škoda works near Pilsen, Czechoslovakia’s primary armaments factory.
As a result, Bohemia and Moravia lost about 38 percent of their combined area, as well as about 3.25 million Germans and approximately 250,000 Czechs to Germany.
Read more about this topic: Sudeten Germans
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