Qualla: Sudetenland

Sudetenland: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. The word is younger than most of the buildings it describes. Sudetenland is a compound - Sudeten, the mountain chain along the northern Czech border, plus Land, country - and it came into general use only in the early 20th century, after 1918. No territory of that name had ever existed as a unit of anything. The German-speaking districts it was meant to cover were not one region but three separate rims of Bohemia, Moravia and Czech Silesia, running north, west and south, most of them nowhere near the Sudeten mountains. The term did work no map could do: it made a scatter of valleys into a place. A place can be claimed.

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Sudetenland: Seven Centuries of Being There

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. German-speaking settlers came into the thinly populated Bohemian border country from the 13th century, invited by the Přemyslid kings - Ottokar II and Wenceslaus II above all. They cleared hillsides and built glassworks in the forests, which is why this frontier still makes glass...

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Image: Unknown | CC BY-SA 3.0 de

Sudetenland: Nineteen Eighteen

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jar.ciurus, CC BY-SA 3.0 pl. When Austria-Hungary fell apart, both peoples reached for the same American argument. Czechoslovakia was proclaimed in late October 1918; within days the German deputies of Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia invoked Wilson's Fourteen Points and declared four units of their own - the Pr...

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Image: Jar.ciurus | CC BY-SA 3.0 pl

Sudetenland: The Glassworks and the Party

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. The Depression hit these districts harder than the interior, because of what they made. Sixty percent of Czechoslovakia's glass and costume-jewellery industry sat in the border regions, sixty-nine percent of its workers spoke German as a first language, and ninety-five percent of...

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Sudetenland: Munich, and the Gau

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. Chamberlain met Hitler at Berchtesgaden on 15 September 1938 and conceded the cession; Daladier followed three days later. No Czechoslovak representative was invited to any of it. At Godesberg on 22 September he raised his price; at the Sportpalast he called the Sudetenland "the ...

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Sudetenland: Emptied

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lovecz 05:59, 13 July 2006 (UTC), Public domain. What that produced fell first on other people. Synagogues burned in November 1938 and Jewish community leaders were sent to concentration camps. Czechs were driven from the annexed districts; German socialists, communists and pacifists were hunted too. Then 1945 reversed everythi...

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Image: Lovecz 05:59, 13 July 2006 (UTC) | Public domain