Sudeten Germans

The term Sudeten Germans has been used since the early 20th century in reference to the Czechoslovak citizens of German ethnicity who inhabited the borderland of today’s Czech Republic, also known as Sudetenland, from Middle Ages to the latter half of the 1940s. The German colonisation of the borderland started under the rule of the House of Přemysl when Germans came upon invitation of Czech governors to cultivate the sparsely inhabited Czech borderland. Czechs lived predominantly in lowlands along rivers and were inexperienced when it comes to living in mountain areas. The peaceful Czech-German coexistence escalated with the advent of nationalism in the 19th century. Nazi Germany took advantage of the protests and resistance of the Sudeten Germans at the end of the 1930s to promote its own policy and territorial expansion. Sudetenland was annexed to the German Reich based on the Munich Agreement, Sudeten Germans became its full-fledged citizens and served in the Wehrmacht during the war. Following the World War 2, almost three million Germans were expulsed on the basis of the Beneš Decrees. According to some sources, at least 700,000 Sudeten Germans had fled or been evicted by August 1945. According to the figures from the report of a joint committee of Czech and German historians, between 19,000 and 30,000 of them died during the process. They fell victims to the locals who took revenge on the innocent for the harms they sustained during the war. Some 3,000 villages, parts of villages and isolated dwellings ceased to exist; 70,000 small businesses and most associations were dissolved by 1947; family farms of up to five hectares ceased to exist (there had been 350,000 of them in the borderland). The up and coming communist regime concentrated primarily heavy industries, mining industry, thermal power plants, military zones and social care institutions in the vacated areas. The appearance and nature of the Sudetenland, which used to work economically very well before, changed irreversibly after those developments. The process of re-settling the borderland took approximately thirty years.

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