In the early hours of September 30, 1938, the leaders of Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Italy sat together at a conference table in Munich. They decided the fate of Czechoslovakia without its participation.
Adolf Hitler, Neville Chamberlain, Édouard Daladier, and Benito Mussolini negotiated under intense pressure. They were driven by fear of another European war and a desire to preserve peace at almost any cost.
No Czechoslovak representative was allowed into the room. The government in Prague waited for news while the borders of its state were redrawn.
The atmosphere was tense and uncertain, shaped by urgency, diplomatic calculation, and the belief that territorial concession could prevent a larger conflict. Yet the moment was not sudden. It was the result of months of escalating crisis, political pressure, and carefully constructed demands that had destabilized the region and isolated Czechoslovakia.
At the center of this process stood one man whose actions helped bring Europe to that point. His name was Konrad Henlein.
Konrad Ernst Eduard Henlein was born on May 6, 1898, in Maffersdorf, today's Czech Vratislavice nad Nisou, a small town near Reichenberg, then part of Austria-Hungary. His father, Konrad, worked as an accounts clerk, and his mother, Hedwiga Dvořáčková, came from a family of partly Czech origin, a fact that would later cause Henlein considerable embarrassment.
According to some sources, years later, when he was pursuing a policy of strict racial separation in the territory he governed under Nazi rule, he was quietly forced to have his still-living mother's surname changed from the Czech Dvořáčková to the more Germanic Dvořáček. This was done so that his own origins would not undermine his authority as the Nazi ruler of the Sudetenland.
Henlein grew up in a region where ethnic tension between the German and Czech communities was a constant feature of daily life. Germans in Reichenberg, today's Czech Liberec, regarded Czechs as cultural inferiors, and the resentments of that world shaped Henlein's sense of identity from an early age.
He attended a business school in Gablonz an der Neisse, today Jablonec nad Nisou, in the northwestern part of the present-day Czech Republic. In 1916 he volunteered for the Austro-Hungarian army to fight in the First World War, which had started in 1914.
He was sent to the Italian front, where he was captured and spent the remainder of the conflict as a prisoner of war. During his imprisonment on the island of Asinara, he developed his earliest ideas about German national identity and the place of Germans in Central Europe.
When the war ended in 1918 and the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed, the Sudetenland became part of the newly created state of Czechoslovakia. For the German community that had long been dominant in the region, this represented a large blow, as they now found themselves to be a minority in a newly established republic.
Unlike its neighbors, however, the Czechoslovak Republic granted members of minority groups the same opportunities as members of the majority population. They could enter politics, form their own associations or parties, and engage in public affairs.
In this atmosphere, Henlein returned from captivity and worked first as a bank clerk, then from 1925 as a gymnastics instructor. During this time he also met the cafe owner's daughter, Emma Louisa Gaier, whom he married in 1926.
Henlein was also very active in the Deutscher Turnverband, a German nationalist athletic organization, and by 1931 he led this gymnastics association, which became more militaristic. Sport became for Henlein what it had been for nationalist movements across Central Europe: a vehicle for building identity, loyalty, and discipline among a community defined by ethnicity rather than citizenship.
In 1933, the same year Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, Henlein founded the Sudeten Deutsche Heimatfront, meaning the Sudeten German Home Front. The timing was not coincidental. Henlein followed the Nazi successes in Germany and hoped to achieve a similar political victory in Czechoslovakia.
During this time the Czechoslovak state was defending itself, and in 1935, under pressure from the Czechoslovak government, Henlein's organization was renamed the Sudeten Deutsche Partei, meaning the Sudeten German Party. In the parliamentary elections of May 1935, with substantial financial backing from Berlin and the Nazi Party that Henlein publicly denied, the Sudeten Deutsche Partei won 15.2 percent of all votes cast in Czechoslovakia and became the strongest single party in the country.
In the elections, Henlein and his party received approximately two-thirds of the German vote in Czechoslovakia, but they remained in the opposition in parliament. In his public speeches during these years, Henlein presented himself as a moderate politician, a man seeking fair treatment for his community within the framework of the Czechoslovak state, not its destruction.
In private, however, he was receiving money and direction from Nazi Germany regarding his politics against Czechoslovakia. Yet Henlein continued to cultivate the image of a reasonable man with legitimate criticisms against the Czechoslovak Republic.
He spoke of a Central European common space, of reconciliation between Germans and Czechs, and of cultural coexistence of these two nations. But behind this language, his party discouraged its followers from buying from Czech or Jewish businesses, used the code phrase "Christian worldview" to signal anti-Semitism, and maintained close organizational ties to the Nazi movement across the Czechoslovak-German border.
At the end of March 1938, following Germany's annexation of Austria a few weeks earlier, Henlein met secretly with Hitler in Berlin. The strategy they agreed upon was simple and ruthless.
The Sudeten German Party would issue demands so extreme, so carefully designed to be unacceptable, that the Czechoslovak government could never satisfy all of them. Nazi propaganda would then be able to portray Czechoslovakia as a hostile state oppressing the German minority.
One goal of this tactic was to increase France's unwillingness to go to war for a state that seemed unlikely to last. A second was to create a crisis that would provide Hitler with a pretext for military intervention against a lonely Czechoslovakia, where Nazi Germany would be ready and Czechoslovakia would be without allies.
On April 24, 1938, Henlein's party published its demands in the form of the so-called Carlsbad Programme, calling, among other things, for full autonomy for the German-speaking regions of Czechoslovakia. When the Czechoslovak government offered significant concessions, Henlein simply raised his demands further. The mechanism was working exactly as intended by Nazi Germany.
Through the summer of 1938, Henlein worked to cultivate sympathy among foreign visitors who came to Czechoslovakia in an effort to resolve the crisis. He proved particularly effective with Lord Runciman, the British mediator sent to investigate conditions in Czechoslovakia in August 1938.
Runciman left deeply sympathetic to the Sudeten German position, having absorbed Henlein's carefully curated account of Czechoslovak oppression, and with it Nazi propaganda. Meanwhile, German military intelligence, the Abwehr, was working with Henlein to plan an uprising in September 1938 in the Sudetenland that would justify German military action against Czechoslovakia. The plan included having Sudeten German Party members dress in police uniforms to stage provocations and assassinations.
When Hitler delivered a threatening speech regarding Czechoslovakia at the annual Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg on September 12, 1938, Henlein's organization launched hundreds of terrorist attacks and two coup attempts across the Sudetenland. Czechoslovak forces suppressed the uprising within days, and Henlein fled to Germany to avoid arrest. From there he organized the Sudetendeutsches Freikorps, a paramilitary force that conducted cross-border raids and further violence into Czechoslovak territory.
The crisis reached its climax at the end of September 1938. On September 30, around 2:30 in the morning, at a conference in Munich attended by Germany, Britain, France, and Italy, Czechoslovakia was told to surrender the territory of the Sudetenland and some other border regions. Czechoslovak representatives waited in a room outside the meeting place while the fate of their country was decided without them.
The agreement gave Hitler everything Henlein had demanded on his behalf and more. On October 1, 1938, German troops entered the Sudetenland, and Henlein followed them, appointed by Hitler as Gauleiter, the regional Nazi Party leader of the newly created Reichsgau Sudetenland. He moved into a villa in Reichenberg, today's Liberec, that he had confiscated from a Jewish businessman, and it became his home until the end of the war.
The mask of the moderate politician was now entirely removed. On the night of November 9, 1938, Henlein organized the Kristallnacht pogrom in the Sudetenland. Jewish homes and businesses were attacked. Synagogues burned to the ground across the region, including in Teplitz, Reichenberg, and Troppau, today the cities of Teplice, Liberec, and Opava in the Czech Republic.
Henlein drove a campaign for the complete removal of Jews from the Sudeten economy and territory, confiscating businesses and properties under the Nazi policy of Aryanization. By the time the Second World War began on September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, 90 percent of the Jews who had lived in the Sudetenland before October 1938 had already fled. Those who remained faced forced labor, deportation to concentration camps, and death.
When the Second World War started, Henlein held both party and administrative authority over the region, but his actual power was increasingly limited. Reinhard Heydrich, one of the main architects of Nazi terror and head of the Reich Security Main Office, regarded Henlein as insufficiently radical and made repeated attempts to remove him from any position of influence.
Henlein survived these challenges only because of his personal relationship with Hitler, who retained a degree of loyalty toward the man who had delivered him the Sudetenland. Within the Nazi hierarchy, Henlein was considered a useful instrument, but not a trusted colleague. In 1943 he was promoted to SS Obergruppenführer, an equivalent to a lieutenant general in the US Army, but he remained a secondary figure until the end of the Nazi regime.
As Germany's military situation collapsed in the spring of 1945 and Soviet and American forces advanced from both directions into Czechoslovakia, the structures Henlein had administered for six years dissolved around him. He was captured by American forces in May 1945 near Pilsen, today's Plzeň, in western Bohemia, as he unsuccessfully attempted to negotiate with the Americans, seeking, among other things, recognition of the Munich Agreement by the United States.
Soon he realized that no one intended to negotiate with him and that he was considered a war criminal. He would face trial for his role in the destruction of Czechoslovakia, for the persecution of its Jewish and Czech population, and for his years of systematic deception in the service of Nazi expansion.
On May 10, 1945, while in American custody, the 47-year-old Henlein took his own life. Konrad Henlein, the man who helped dismantle Czechoslovakia and pave the way for Nazi expansion, was buried anonymously in a small section of the Plzeň Central Cemetery.