‘A Leap into Ice-Cold Water’: The Manoeuvres of the Henlein Movement in Czechoslovakia, 1933–1938

The democratic bastion of Czechoslovakia, which was accused of treating its minorities much better than other east European states, was allegedly destroyed in the 1930s through the machinations of the Nazi Henlein movement the Sudetendeutsche Partei (SdP) — which acted from the start as a ‘Trojan horse’ for Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. If we turn to consider the Henlein movement of the 1930s, we can start by challenging one widespread myth in much of the historiography: that the movement would not have arisen but for the economic crisis and Hitler's accession to power in Germany. This chapter...

The democratic bastion of Czechoslovakia, which was accused of treating its minorities much better than other east European states, was allegedly destroyed in the 1930s through the machinations of the Nazi Henlein movement the Sudetendeutsche Partei (SdP) — which acted from the start as a ‘Trojan horse’ for Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. If we turn to consider the Henlein movement of the 1930s, we can start by challenging one widespread myth in much of the historiography: that the movement would not have arisen but for the economic crisis and Hitler's accession to power in Germany. This chapter examines the divergent views of whether Konrad Henlein and his SdP genuinely sought concessions from the government which might have kept them loyal to Czechoslovakia, or else from the beginning in the pocket of the Nazis across the border in the Reich. In its struggle at home and abroad for some breakthrough after 1935, the Henlein leadership was never aiming at minority rights of a kind envisaged by the Czech authorities.