In the early hours of September 30, 1938, the leaders of Germany, Britain, France, and Italy sat together in Munich while the borders of a sovereign state were redrawn without a single representative of that state in the room. Adolf Hitler, Neville Chamberlain, Édouard Daladier, and Benito Mussolini negotiated under the weight of an unbearable choice: another European war, or peace purchased with Czechoslovak territory. The government in Prague waited for news it could not influence, knowing that its fate was being decided by men who saw it as an obstacle to stability. This moment, however, was not sudden.
It had been prepared for months, step by step, by a campaign of carefully constructed demands and escalating pressure that had isolated Czechoslovakia and brought Europe to the edge of conflict. At the center of that campaign stood a man who had once presented himself as a moderate voice for his community: Konrad Henlein. Konrad Ernst Eduard Henlein was born on May 6, 1898, in Maffersdorf, a small town near Reichenberg in the part of Austria-Hungary that would later become the Czech lands. Today the town is called Vratislavice nad Nisou within the Czech city of Liberec.
His father, also named Konrad, worked as an accounts clerk. His mother, Hedwiga Dvořáčková, came from a family of partly Czech origin—a fact that would later cause Henlein considerable embarrassment. Years afterward, when he governed the Sudetenland under Nazi rule and pursued a strict policy of racial separation, he was quietly forced to have his still-living mother’s surname changed from the Czech Dvořáčková to the more Germanic Dvořáček. His own origins could not be allowed to undermine his authority as the Nazi ruler of the region.
Henlein grew up in a world where ethnic tension between Germans and Czechs was woven into daily life. In Reichenberg, today’s Liberec, Germans regarded Czechs as cultural inferiors, and the resentments of that world shaped his sense of identity from an early age. He attended business school in Gablonz an der Neisse, today’s Jablonec nad Nisou, in the northwestern part of the present-day Czech Republic. In 1916, with the First World War already two years old, he volunteered for the Austro-Hungarian army.
He was sent to the Italian front, where he was captured and spent the rest 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 was a heavy blow: they now found themselves a minority in a republic dominated by Czechs.
Yet Czechoslovakia did not treat its minorities as the empires had. The new republic granted members of minority groups the same opportunities as the majority population. Germans could enter politics, form their own associations and 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 met Emma Louisa Gaier, the daughter of a cafe owner, and married her in 1926. Henlein was deeply active in the Deutscher Turnverband, a German nationalist athletic organization, and by 1931 he led the gymnastics association, which under his leadership became more militaristic. For Henlein, sport served the same purpose it had served 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 Sudetendeutsche Heimatfront, the Sudeten German Home Front.
The timing was not coincidental. Henlein followed the Nazi successes in Germany closely and hoped to achieve a similar political victory in Czechoslovakia. The Czechoslovak state defended itself through legal pressure. In 1935, under government pressure, Henlein’s organization was renamed the Sudeten Deutsche Partei, the Sudeten German Party.
That same year, in the parliamentary elections of May, the party won 15. 2 percent of all votes cast in Czechoslovakia, becoming the strongest single party in the country. Henlein and his party received roughly two-thirds of the German vote, but they remained in the opposition in parliament. The party had substantial financial backing from Berlin and the Nazi Party, backing Henlein publicly denied.
In his public speeches during those 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 for his political work against Czechoslovakia. He cultivated the image of a reasonable man with legitimate criticisms of the republic. He spoke of a Central European common space, of reconciliation between Germans and Czechs, of cultural coexistence.
But behind that 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, a few weeks after Germany annexed Austria, 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 portray Czechoslovakia as a hostile state oppressing its German minority. The tactic had two goals. First, it would increase France’s unwillingness to go to war for a state that seemed unlikely to last. Second, it would create a crisis that would give Hitler a pretext for military intervention against a Czechoslovakia left without allies.
On April 24, 1938, Henlein’s party published its demands in the form of the Carlsbad Program. Among other things, it called 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 Nazi Germany intended.
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, along with Nazi propaganda embedded in it. Meanwhile, the German military intelligence service, the Abwehr, worked with Henlein on a plan for an uprising in September 1938 in the Sudetenland.
An uprising would justify German military action against Czechoslovakia. The plan included having Sudeten German party members dress in police uniforms to stage provocations and assassinations. On September 12, 1938, Hitler delivered a threatening speech about Czechoslovakia at the annual Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg. Henlein’s organization responded by launching 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 the 30th, around 2:30 in the morning, at the Munich conference attended by Germany, Britain, France, and Italy, Czechoslovakia was told to surrender 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. 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. 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’s 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, with Germany’s invasion of Poland, ninety 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. By the start of the war, 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, the main Nazi intelligence organization, 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, a rank equivalent to lieutenant general in the United States 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.
He 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. He was considered a war criminal and would face trial for his role in the destruction of Czechoslovakia, for the persecution of its Jewish and Czech population, and for years of systematic deception in the service of Nazi expansion. On May 10, 1945, while in American custody, the forty-seven-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.
