Where is the Sudetenland located? The Sudetenland is a narrow, irregular strip of land, about 180 miles long contiguous to Germany, in what in 1918 became the multinational state of Czechoslovakia. It comprised an area of a little less than 11,000 square miles, comparable in size to Belgium or to the state of Maryland. It had a German-speaking population of about 3 million, which compared to 3,123,883 (1945) for Norway, and
2,980,000 (1947) for Eire.
The Czechoslovakia of 1918 had an area of 87,299 square miles and a population of 6,500,000 Czechs, 3,100,000 Germans, 2,000,000 Slovaks, 700,000 Hungarians, and 600,000 Ukrainians (Ruthenians). Because in this artificial state carved out of the pre-1918 Austria-Hungary, the Czechs did not constitute a majority, the Czech leaders Benes and Masaryk had to assure Wilson and the other St. Germain peace dictators that the Czechs would federate the various nationalities on the Prague a hundred years ago: A Czech mob whips Germans through the streets of the city, a violent expression of trying to make it Czech. In 1848 Prague had 66,000 Germans and only 33,000 Czechs. By 1880, the city had 126,000 Czechs and only 2,000 Germans. Then, in 1945, the last Germans there were murdered or driven out.
The Sudeten-Germans were the second largest ethnic group, skilled in the arts and sciences, and living in an area contiguous to Germany and Austria, with whom they requested unification in line with the principle of self-determination. At the peace conference the Czech delegation minimized the German population by a million and represented them as immigrants and colonists. They succeeded in getting the peace conference to substitute for Wilson's self-determi nation the old principle of historic boundaries.