Konrad Henlein - Party Leader

Party Leader

On 1 October 1933, Henlein founded the Sudetendeutsche Heimatfront ("Sudeten German Home Front", SHF). Although the SHF was originally meant as a successor organisation of the banned anti-Czech German National Socialist Workers' Party and German National Party, it soon became a big tent right-wing movement in order to achieve a status of autonomy for the German minority, rivalling with the German Social Democratic Workers Party. On 19 April 1935 the SHF was renamed Sudeten German Party (Sudetendeutsche Partei, SdP) under pressure from the Czechoslovak government.

In the first half of the 1930s, Czech President Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, a follower of the Austrofascist doctrine by Othmar Spann, held a pro-Czechoslovak, overtly anti-Nazi view in his public views and speeches. In the parliamentary election of May 1935, the SdP with massive support by the Nazi Party gained 15.2% of the votes cast, becoming the strongest of all Czechoslovak parties, and had won about 68% of the German votes. Masaryk, resigned from office in December 1935. Even with the new found power of the SdP, gained with the help of the Nazis, Henlein did not become a declared follower of Adolf Hitler until 1937; after the pro-German camp within the SdP represented by Karl Hermann Frank emerged victorious. Newer research shows his position within the SdP became very difficult, when in 1937 Heinz Rutha, one of his closest allies, was tipped off to the Czechoslovak authorities (possibly by German secret service) and imprisoned for alleged homosexuality. Henlein then swiftly aligned himself with the slogan Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer! ("One People, One Country, One Leader!"), thus calling for the predominantly (typically more than 80%) German-speaking Sudetenland to be a part of Germany.

Henlein's political party's dominance of the Sudetenland in the 1930s contributed to the Munich Agreement on 30 September 1938, which was due in part to his influence with the British delegate Lord Runciman during the latter's visit of Czechoslovakia. Henlein presented his party's policy as striving to fulfill the "justified claims" of the then largely nazified German minority. Henlein, often under direct orders from Berlin, deliberately had worked to help create a sense of crisis that was useful to Hitler's diplomatic and military efforts; as he once stated, "We must make demands that cannot be satisfied". From 12 September 1938, forward, he helped organise hundreds of terrorist attacks and two coup attempts by the Sudetendeutsches Freikorps paramilitary organisation affiliated with the SS-Totenkopfverbände, immediately after Hitler's frenetic and threatening speech in Nuremberg at the Nazi Party's annual rally. The attempted uprising was quickly suppressed by Czechoslovak forces, whereafter Henlein fled to Germany only to start numerous intrusions into Czechoslovak territory around Asch as a commander of Sudeten German guerilla bands.