There certainly were tensions between Czechs and Germans in the early days of Czechoslovakia, and these would indeed play a key part in the months preceding the Second World War and the occupation of Czechoslovakia, as well as after the war, reaching some sort of a resolution only via the highly controversial Beneš Decrees which remain a contentious issue to this day. Having said that, it was not the Czechoslovaks who would commit atrocities towards in the Sudetenland, prompting German intervention. On the contrary, it was the radical parties of Sudeten Germans with the support of German Nazis who escalated the situation in the Sudetenland into actual violence.

The two peoples have lived alongside since the earliest days of a Czech state, colonizing parts of it from about the 10th century onwards during what we now call the Ostsiedlung - settling of the east. This was a result of chiefly two things, a population growth in German lands, and local rulers inviting the Germans to settle the sparsely populated border regions of Bohemia, and the Germans' numbers only multiplied over the centuries.

According to the 1921 census, there were 8 759 701 Czechoslovaks (roughly two million of which were Slovaks) and 3 123 305 Germans in Czechoslovakia, with other sizeable minorities such as Hungarians. This was a direct result of the newly independent country keeping its historical borders which, however, also included the regions with a sizeable German population – these would later come to be known as the Sudetenland.

Following the collapse of Austria-Hungary and the establishment of an independent Czechoslovakia, the Germans had actually called for some sort of exclusion from this arrangement or self-determination, such as becoming a part of Austria – indeed, exactly in the spirit of Wilson's Fourteen Points and the general post war atmosphere that allowed various peoples to declare their independence – but the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye ended their hopes as the lands of the Bohemian Crown were preserved in their historical shape.

In the two decades that followed the end of the Great War, the relations between Czechoslovaks and Germans have further deteriorated, albeit rather slowly at first. German was preserved as an official language in areas with a considerable German population, and Germans were represented in the chamber of deputies, with the Sudetendeutsche Partei (SdP) securing 44 seats in the 1935 elections, only bested by the Agrarian party with 45, and 23 seats in the senate, tied with the Agrarian party.

On the other hand, many Czechoslovak policies were aimed at securing the country as a state built on what was largely a relatively new, basically artificial – albeit highly compatible in the case of Czechs and Slovaks – joint Czechoslovak identity. There was a clear preference for Czech officials in local politics, government policies focused on Czech and Slovak matters, and there were instances of gerrymandering to weaken the political potential of Germans and Hungarians in regions where they constituted a large part of the population. Furthermore, Sudeten Germans were hit harder by the depression of the thirties due to their close ties with Germany.

An important point that I feel has to be made is that although this was a time when the Nazis were on the rise in Germany, Germans in Sudetenland were not yet particularly strong sympathizers of the new regime. Konrad Henlein's Sudetendeutsche Partei only came under Hitler's major influence from 1937 onwards, two years after their large gains in the parliament. German foreign policies did prove to be a good fit to the SdP separationist agenda, however.

In an attempt to wrestle control of Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia, Germany portrayed the situation in the border region as extremely untenable. Following the SdP alignment with the Nazis, Hitler made no secret of his ties to Henlein's party, and the Sudetendeutsche leader in turn exterted internal pressure on Czechoslovakia, presenting mostly unacceptable demands including autonomy. Besides overt political action, Germany also prepared for a military conflict if their demands were met.

Leading up to 1938, the situation had been escalating from unrest to outright violence in areas with a German majority. Germans organized rallies in support of Hitler and his policies, hounded out Czechs, Jews and even German socialists, and engaged in acts of physical violence. This culminated in what has been called an uprising or even a coup attempt on September 12, after Hitler had given a speech aimed against Czechoslovakia in Nürnberg at a NSDAP rally.

The resulting wave of attacks on post offices, police stations, schools, town halls and the like was ultimately unsuccesful, and the SdP leadership fled to Germany, with the party being disbanded by the government in Prague and arrest warrants issued for Heinlein and K. H. Frank, his deputy. This, however, did not mean an end to the hostilities.

On the contrary, further escalation came with the establishment of the Sudetendeutsches Freikorps on September 17, a paramilitary organization of roughly forty thousand Sudeten Germans supplied with arms from Germany whose goal was further internal destabilization of Czechoslovakia. They ramped up the violence, including attacks against Czechoslovak military targets, and their actions prompted the government in Prague to declare martial law in several of the hardest hit regions and to mobilize the border guard units of the Czechoslovak army. Just in the last week of September, a hundred Czechoslovaks were killed in clashes with the Germans, and some two thousand were captured.

With the situation getting out of hand and facing the possibility of war, France and Britain kept with their policy of appeasement and sided with Germany, with the Munich Agreement beign signed as a result on September 30, Czechoslovakia not having a real say in the matter, ruling that Sudetenland would become a part of Germany.

In the end the Germans in Sudetenland were a minority with many of the problems this presents for those labelled this way, as well as for those who would form the majority. Centuries of tension did not help either, nor did the fact that they were not afforded the same treatment as other nationalities when it came to the collapse of the monarchy. However, Austria-Hungary was on the losing side of the war, the Czechs had only kept their historical borders, and although their relationship was often problematic, they did not subject Germans to harsh treatment minorities sometimes suffer.

That everything played out the way it did was a result of the build up to the Second World War by Germany rather than historical relations and ethnic tension between Germans and Czechs in a single country.

Okay, so it's not quite a pleasant subject discussed historically as it makes everyone look bad during the inter-war period...

But yes, there is some validity to the idea of "oppression". Atrocities, not so much. During the interwar period it wasn't just Germany that was becoming more nationalist, for example, Poland which had finally re-emerged after a few hundred years, began to enforce the use of the Polish language in its educational system and government documents, as well as formally registering people's ethnic nationalities. In Czechoslovakia, it was much the same. Native languages were used exclusively in heavily German populated areas, and even in heavily German areas theaters that normally performed in German had to perform is Czech once a week! There was heavy economic disparity as the German regions relied on foreign trade and when the Depression hit unemployment was substantially higher in areas like the Sudetenland. German companies in order to receive loans were required to have a non-German hiring quota. Land reform acts broke up large estates controlled by Germans and handed them over to Czech "peasants" who were landless.

These were not intended to so much as be "oppressive" and erase the German population in the Sudetenland, but to merge them into the Czech and Slovak culture and national identity. It was meant to integrate the Germans who were a minority in that country into the larger of the whole and draw them away from thinking of themselves as Germans and instead Czechoslovakians. The Czech constitution actually had provisions meant to protect ethic minorities cultures and differences, and the Germans were part of the Government, including having leaders such as Ludwig Czech (hows that for irony?), who served as a health minister. However, due to the economic disparities during the Depression where employment suffered more in the more industrialized German regions than the agricultural regions, tensions began to brew. As the ethnic Germans saw Nazi Germany break free of the Depression (that's a whole different issue), they felt that they were being exploited by the Czechs and desired to break away or at least become autonomous.

This actually was common place in the inter-war period in the areas that were taken from Germany after the war as well as the former Austro-Hungarian empire. During that era, Europe was far more ethnically diverse than it is now. After WWII something in the order of 20 million Europeans were left in a migrant and stateless existence as countries expelled ethnic minorities, not just German, that they felt were troublesome and problematic.

There was nothing unique or unusual about what the Czechs were doing, nor was it really oppressive or atrocious as Hitler and the Nazis claimed. It was an attempt to sort out ethnic divisions in countries that had never existed and attempt to replace ethnic identity with national identity. Unfortunately, ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Lithiuania, and other areas often bore the brunt of this. However, and remember this...Romania, Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Italy, and France, all had issues with ethnic tensions during the inter-war period. The former Ottoman Empire also suffered extensively from ethnic tensions and actual widespread violence after WWI.

What separates Nazi Germany from the others, is the militarization of their ethnic identity and use of force to establish an ethnic nationalism that led to the war. These other states while having similar issues never weaponized it to the extent the Germans did. This is one of those uncomfortable issues in history that is difficult to recognize and accept for many countries, especially after WWII, where they suffered from German occupation and ethnic cleansing.

sourced largely from Hitler's Europe by Mark Mazower.