Karlovy Vary program

The Karlovy Vary program of the Sudeten German Party was adopted on April 24, 1938 at a congress in Karlovy Vary . It contained demands on the government of the first Czechoslovak Republic for full self-government. During the Sudeten crisis in 1938, President Edvard Beneš gave in to the demands.

background

After the First World War and the end of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy , the democratically constituted state of the Czechoslovak Republic emerged on the territory of today's Czech Republic and Slovakia . The Sudetenland, with a predominantly German-speaking population, was part of the state territory, but represented a minority within the entire state. This German-speaking minority was represented within the republic by parties from almost the entire political spectrum ; a few (e.g. the DSAP or the SdP ) also represented the minority in parliament. The Sudeten German Party (created in 1918 as the German National Socialist Workers' Party, then from 1933 also "Sudeten German Home Front" and only under this name in 1935) represented German national positions that increasingly approximated those of National Socialist Germany.

Adolf Hitler's expansion policy envisaged an expansion of German territory to include the Czechoslovak Republic; with that in mind, he aimed to destabilize them. Going far beyond traditional demands for revision, Hitler strived, as stated in the Hoßbach transcript of a meeting between Hitler and Werner von Fritsch , Konstantin von Neurath and Werner von Blomberg on November 5, 1937, "the smashing of Czechoslovakia" to solve the lack of space " on".

The program

On March 28, 1938, Hitler commissioned the chairman of the SdP, Konrad Henlein , in Berlin to work out demands on the Czechoslovak Republic, which at that time was still an independent state. Henlein then worked out an eight-point program, which he presented on April 24, 1938 in Karlsbad .

Henlein demanded on behalf of the Sudeten German Party u. a. the full equality of the German minority as an ethnic group , the establishment and recognition of a German settlement area within Czechoslovakia , the establishment of a German self-government with exclusively German civil servants, the reparation of the economic damage suffered from 1918 on the German-speaking residents and finally the "full freedom of commitment to German Volkstum and the German Weltanschauung ”.

The consequences

Following the rejection of the program, which had the long-term goal of smashing the ČSR, the "Western guarantee powers" decided at the Munich Conference on September 29, 1938, regardless of the Czechoslovak Republic, to cede Sudeten Germany to Germany immediately. The Czechoslovak government also rejected these demands. The invasion of the Sudetenland began a week after the conference. On March 15, 1939, the day the satellite state of the First Slovak Republic was founded under Hitler's ally Jozef Tiso , German troops invaded the "rest of Czech Republic " (later the " Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia ").

Text output

Mirek Němec (arrangement): Henlein's Karlsbader Program. In: Herder Institute (ed.): Documents and materials on East Central European history. Topic module "First Czechoslovak Republic". Also printed in: Files on German Foreign Policy . Series D (1937-1945), Vol. 2: Germany and Czechoslovakia 1937-1938, p. 192.

Individual evidence

^ ^A ^b Helmut Altrichter, Walter L. Bernecker, 2004: History of Europe in the 20th Century. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart.

↑ Quoted from: Michael Behnen in Gerhard Taddey (Hrsg.): Lexikon der deutschen Geschichte . Events, institutions, people. From the beginning to the surrender in 1945. 3rd, revised edition. Kröner, Stuttgart 1998, ISBN 3-520-81303-3 , p. 652.

^ Herder Institute (Marburg) : Henlein's Karlsbader Program. ( Memento of the original from December 13, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (online document) @1@ 2

[Geschichte_Europas-1] A ^b Helmut Altrichter, Walter L. Bernecker, 2004: History of Europe in the 20th Century. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart.

[2] Quoted from: Michael Behnen in Gerhard Taddey (Hrsg.): Lexikon der deutschen Geschichte . Events, institutions, people. From the beginning to the surrender in 1945. 3rd, revised edition. Kröner, Stuttgart 1998, ISBN 3-520-81303-3 , p. 652.