The Sudetenland was never a single region until nationalists named it
Hitler's 1938 demand made the Sudetenland famous, yet the word itself was barely a generation old. It borrowed the name of a mountain range and stretched it over every German-speaking border district of Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia, lands where German settlers had lived beside Czechs since the Middle Ages.
Geographers used Sudetenland as early as 1866, but only for the mountain chain itself, which stretches between the Zittau Basin and the Moravian Gate. Then, in 1902, the politician Franz Jesser applied it to all parts of Bohemia, Moravia and Austrian Silesia where German speakers were the majority, far beyond the peaks. The label Sudeten Germans spread in the early twentieth century, and it came to prominence after World War I, when these people suddenly found themselves citizens of the new Czechoslovakia.
The deeper past was layered. Celtic Boii lived here, the region appears on Ptolemy's map in the 2nd century AD, and Germanic Marcomanni and later Slavs followed. From the second half of the 13th century, Bohemia's Přemyslid kings, notably Ottokar II and Wenceslaus II, invited German colonists into the thinly populated uplands, where they built forest-glass workshops. German communities stayed dominant in the borderlands through the Hussite Wars of 1419 to 1434. The Thirty Years' War hit Czechs and Germans alike; Bohemia lost 70% of its population.
Nineteenth-century nationalism pulled the two communities apart. Czech leaders such as František Palacký promoted Austroslavism while German activists pushed Pan-Germanism, and their clash surfaced in the 1848 revolutions. World War I struck the area hard: 34 of every 1,000 inhabitants died, a rate exceeded among German-speaking Austro-Hungarian regions only by German South Moravia and Carinthia.
When Czechoslovakia was proclaimed in late October 1918, German deputies invoked Woodrow Wilson's principle of self-determination and declared four provinces meant to join German-Austria, including German Bohemia with its capital at Reichenberg, now Liberec. The American delegation at the Paris Peace Conference backed keeping the Czech lands united instead. That unresolved grievance became the lever Nazi Germany pulled in the Sudeten crisis of 1938. Parts of today's Czech regions of Liberec, Karlovy Vary, Ústí nad Labem and South Moravia lie within the old Sudetenland.
Source: Sudetenland
