Notes on Sudetenland - Why did Hitler want it?

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E. Fry 5V

Notes on Sudetenland – Why did Hitler want it?

Hitler had four main Foreign policy aims after he came to power.

  1. Overturn Versailles: establish Germany’s right to re-arm and to recover the lands lost in 1919, especially the right to re-militarise the Rhineland, to recover Danzig, and the Polish Corridor.
  2. Gross Deutschland policy. To extend Germany’s frontiers, to include all people of the German race, especially Austria and the Sudeten area of Czechoslovakia. Again this appears moderate and reasonable. Gave GB and Fr reason to believe they really did not need to go to war with Hitler over the Sudeten issue in 1938.
  3. The racial policy. To make the Germans the dominant race in Europe at the at the expense of the racially inferior races to the east. The Aryans were to rule the Slavs and the Jews were to be eliminated. Hitler has been described as a Malthusian, fearing that Germany would not be able to feed her growing population and therefore she was entitled to take the lands to the east to colonise.
  4. The policy of LEBENSRAUM or living space at the expense of the Poles and Russians.
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Hitler chose to make an issue of the 3 million Sudeten Germans there who had been part of the Austro Hungarian Empire, but denied self-determination and given to Czechoslovakia at Versailles.

Hitler approached the case in the same way as the Anschluss: a Versailles grievance concerning self-determination while he encouraged Nazi influence among the Sudetens led by Konrad Henlein. The latter demanded independence for the Sudetens as a prelude to incorporation in the Third Reich. The issue was complicated by the fact that by 1938 the Sudetenland was an integral part of Czechoslovakia, which manifestly did not want to ...

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