Sudetenland (province)

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    The province of Sudetenland in the Republic of German Austria

The province of Sudetenland was founded on October 29, 1918 by German-speaking members of the Austrian Imperial Council from the region as an independent country in the crumbling Austro-Hungarian monarchy . Governor was the Reichsrat member Robert Freißler .

With the founding of the province , the German Moravians and Silesians of Old Austria wanted to prevent them from being incorporated into the Czechoslovak Republic , which was proclaimed in Prague on October 28, 1918 and which invoked the unity of the countries of the Bohemian Crown . The German-speaking Reichsrat deputies from the province of Sudetenland 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 Old Austria . According to the resolution of November 12, 1918, this should join the German Reich as a whole . Both projects failed.

expansion

The province should cover an area of ​​6,534 km² excluding Eastern Silesia and with this 8,816 km².

The planned new province should include the following areas:

  • Silesia : 4,580 km²
    • West Silesia (also Sudeten Silesia or Austrian Lower Silesia ): 2,298 km²
    • East Silesia (also Teschener Silesia or Austrian Upper Silesia ): 2,282 km²
  • North Moravia : 3,294 km²
  • Northeast Bohemia : 942 km²

history

On November 22, 1918, the government of the Sudetenland province, which constituted itself just one day after the proclamation of the Czechoslovak Republic like the government of the German Bohemia Province from its regional representatives in the Viennese parliament, declared the Sudetenland to join German Austria and also made claims to it Cieszyn East Silesia . The latter area should politically belong to German Austria and be administered jointly with Poland and Czechoslovakia .

The term Sudetenland was previously unused and, according to Johann Wolfgang Brügel, a "solution to the problem". There was initially no connection to the term Sudeten Germans that was already in circulation - the province of Sudetenland was supposed to occupy only a small part of the areas populated by German Bohemians and German Moravians . The authorship of the name Sudetenland took the writer Ernst Leibl lay claim. The governor Freißler had instead suggested the name " Altvaterland ", which is more rooted in regional traditions .

The province of Sudetenland was occupied by Czechoslovak associations at the turn of 1918/19 and finally assigned to Czechoslovakia by the Treaty of Saint-Germain signed on September 10, 1919 , while Eastern Silesia after the Polish-Czechoslovak border war along the Olsa between Poland (1,009 km²) and Czechoslovakia (1,273 km²) was divided.

In 1919 there were 646,800 German and 25,000 Czech residents in the Sudetenland province .

Immediately after the Munich Agreement was signed , the Sudetenland was occupied by the German Reich from October 1 to October 10, 1938 ; as a result, most of the Sudeten German areas were declared Reichsgau Sudetenland .

1945 were Sudeten Germans largely from their territory marketed , which, as in the mutual agreement of the Allies even long before the Potsdam Conference was decided, should be part of the reborn Czechoslovak state.

literature

  • Adrian von Arburg: The definition of the state border between Czechoslovakia and Germany according to the Munich Agreement 1938. Grin Verlag, 2008.
  • Emil Franzel: Sudeten German history. Mannheim 1978, ISBN 3-8083-1141-X .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Bernd Rill: Bohemia and Moravia - History in the Heart of Central Europe . 2 volumes, Katz, Gernsbach 2006, ISBN 3-938047-17-8 , p. 784.
  2. ↑ Tobias Weger : “Volkstumskampf” without end? Sudeten German Organizations, 1945–1955. P. 46. ( limited preview with Google Book Search ).
  3. ↑ Wolfgang Benz : The 101 Most Important Questions - The Third Reich (Beck'sche Reihe 1701), CH Beck, 2nd edition 2008, p. 134 .

See also