Province of German Bohemia

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   Province of German Bohemia: 14,496 km², 2.23 million inhabitants. In 1919, 2.07 million of the population declared themselves Germans and 116,275 Czechs.

The province of German Bohemia was founded on October 29, 1918 by German members of the Austrian Reichsrat from the region at a meeting in the Lower Austrian country house as an autonomous province of the state of German Austria and was one of several Bohemian areas within the state .

The first governor was Raphael Pacher , who handed over his office to Rudolf Lodgman von Auen on November 5, 1918 , because he joined the Renner I state government appointed on October 30, 1918 as State Secretary for Education, practically the first education and instruction minister of the Republic of Austria has been. With the establishment of the province, the Reichsrat deputies wanted to prevent the incorporation of the 2.2 million German Bohemians into the Czechoslovak Republic , which was proclaimed in Prague on October 28, 1918, which they largely rejected . This invoked the unity of the countries of the Bohemian Crown .

The German Reichsrat deputies from the province also participated in the Provisional National Assembly in Vienna, which on October 30, 1918 founded the state of German Austria for all German settlement areas in Cisleithania , which according to a resolution of November 12, 1918 wanted to join the German Reich as a whole . A provisional state assembly met in Reichenberg on November 16. Both projects failed at the peace treaty of St. Germain , which came into force on July 16, 1920. The German settlement areas also claimed by German Austria were occupied by the Czechoslovak military from November 13, 1918.

The state government of German Bohemia turned to US President Woodrow Wilson in a cable dispatch sent by the Swedish Embassy . She asked that the peoples' right to self-determination be guaranteed . She also protested against "rape, which our national territory is exposed to by troops of the Czecho-Slovak state." The Austrian State Chancellor Karl Renner regretted the occupation and declared: "We admit it openly, we have no power to defend ourselves; the Republic of German-Austria has nothing but clear rights."

The German-Bohemian state government fled via Dresden to Vienna on December 14, 1918 and continued to serve in the parliament building there.

See also

literature

  • Emil Franzel : Sudeten German history. Adam Kraft Verlag, Augsburg 1958, p. 330 f.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Klaus Berchtold: 1918–1933. Fifteen Years of Constitutional Struggle (=  Constitutional History of the Republic of Austria , Vol. 1), Springer, Vienna 1998, ISBN 3-211-83188-6 , p. 103.
  2. ↑ Documented in the "Sudetenpost" (volume 12 of December 12, 2013, page 4): http://www.sudetenpost.eu/index.php?option=com_content&view=section&layout=blog&id=10&Itemid=105 . See also the Wiener Zeitung of December 10, 1918, No. 285, p. 6 (under "Telegrams> Reichenberg, December 9") http://anno.onb.ac.at/cgi-content/anno?aid= wrz & datum = 19181210 & page = 6 & zoom = 33 . These and other newspapers with contemporary historical articles from the post-war period (1918) are available at http://anno.onb.ac.at/cgi-content/anno?date=19181213&zoom=33
  3. ↑ See the article Bohemian regions of German Austria