85 years ago, on April 24, 1938, Konrad Henlein of the Sudeten German Party voiced a list of demands commonly known as the Carlsbad Programme. They opened the way for Hitler’s Third Reich to annex the Sudetenland and rob Czechoslovakia of its vital border defences.
More than 3 million Germans lived in Czechoslovakia at the time. Only around a third of this number lived on the territories of Bohemia and Moravia. The majority resided in the Czech borderlands which were commonly referred to as the Sudetenland. This area was hit especially hard during the economic crisis of the 1930s and brought much of the local German population into the hands of the pro-Nazi Sudeten German Party which was led by Konrad Henlein at the time.
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