Where and what was the Sudetenland?

The Sudetenland was a collective name for the regions of the Czech lands that had a majority German population when Czechoslovakia was formed in 1918.

The Sudetenland mostly consisted of Czech border regions, where German settlers and their descendants had lived since the 1300’s when they were invited by King Přemysl Otakar II to farm, mine and guard the wild mountainous edges of his kingdom.

The German settlers and their descendants flourished while dynasties of Bohemian kings came and went. In the 1600’s the Czech lands were absorbed into Austria and ruled by Habspurg emperors from Vienna. Under the Austrians, German was the language of government, education and culture, and Czech was gradually reduced to a spoken rural argot, in danger of dying out altogether until its revival in the 19th century.

At the end of World War One, when defeated Austria was carved into several countries (according to the principles of self determination) Germans and Czechs within the newly created Czechoslovakia found their roles suddenly reversed. The Germans became an ethnic minority and the Czechs were suddenly the power-wielding, law-making majority.

Many of the ethnic Germans were displeased with their new situation, and felt discriminated against. Through the 1920s and the difficult years of the Great Depression the idea of seceding from Czechoslovakia and joining neighbouring Germany and Austria became increasingly popular among Sudeten Germans and their political leaders.

Once Austria had been annexed to Germany in 1938, German leader Adolf Hitler began to enthusiastically support and encourage Sudeten German ideas of joining his Third Reich to escape perceived oppression by the ruling Czech majority. Support turned to demands; armed uprisings and invasions threatened, and in 1938 a meeting was called between Western European leaders to discuss “the Sudeten Question”.

In Munich, the leaders of England and France agreed that they would offer no military opposition to the Sudeten regions seceding and joining Germany. If Czechoslovakia wanted to resist Sudeten secession and German expansion, it would have to do so alone, despite a current military alliance with France.

In October 1938, the Sudetenland was annexed by Hitler’s Germany and the British and French leaders returned home as triumphant peacemakers. No Czechoslovak representative was invited to the meeting and not surprisingly it’s usually referred to by Czechs as the Munich Betrayal.

Hitler had promised at Munich that once the Sudeten question was solved, he had no further territorial ambitions in Europe. Six months later his troops occupied the remainder of Czechoslovakia, and six months after that they marched into Poland and World War Two began.



In 1945, with the Czech lands liberated by Soviet forces from the east and Allied forces from the west, the Potsdam conference decreed that the German population of Czechoslovakia would be transferred to Germany or Austria, leaving the Czech lands to be occupied almost solely by Czechs.

This population transfer (or expulsion, depending on translation of the Czech word “Odsun”) remains a highly controversial subject and influences Czech-German political relations even to the present time. Its direct effect on the Sudeten regions was to leave them notably underpopulated, with many towns and villages completely deserted.

After the expulsion, the Sudeten areas were resettled by Czechoslovak citizens of other ethnicities, Czechs, Moravians, Slovaks, Gypsies (Roma), and Ruthenians (from the far eastern tip of Czechoslovakia that was ceded to the Soviet Union). Many villages and areas were never properly resettled and fell quickly into neglect, especially along the southern and western borders where the ‘Iron Curtain’ was descending. Away from prosperous tourist magnets like Český Krumlov and Karlovy Vary, attentive travellers will sense a difference between the former Sudeten regions and the rest of the country even today.

One last thing about the words Sudeten and Sudetenland, is to be careful using them, especially around anybody who might be old enough to remember the brutal Nazi occupation. In 1942, Czechoslovak president-in-exile Beneš wrote “the words Sudeten, Sudetenland and Sudete will forever in our Czech lands be connected with Nazi brutality toward we Czechs and toward democratic Germans before and after the fateful crisis of 1938”.

When in doubt, use “former” as a preface, or follow the example of Brigadier General George Taylor; signing a surrender agreement he crossed out the “Elbogen, Sudetenland” of his German counterpart, noted “does not exist” and replaced it with the town's pre-war name “Loket, Czechoslovakia” avoiding the S-word altogether.

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Schindler’s Svitavy
All the famous Czechs were Germans
The Fateful Eights