The German government, as planned, provided the following complaints on the situation in the Sudetenland to the League of Nations in mid-September, 1935. The German Foreign Ministry emphasizes that the issues are claims and accusations that it is not in a position to confirm or deny, that is for the League to determine whether the Czech government has broken the Treaty on Minorities that it signed or not. [Note: the list of complaints is taken directly from history, with some improvements to the unemployment situation to account for the lack of a world-wide Great Depression. Czech trade would be hurt, however, by the PETA agreements since that would lower their competitor's costs within Europe, a primary market for those goods.]
History
On 4 March 1919, almost the entire Sudeten German population peacefully demonstrated for their right of self-determination. These demonstrations were accompanied by a one-day general strike on the part of the Germans. The Sudeten German Social Democrat Party, which was the largest party at the time, was responsible for the initiative of carrying out these demonstrations, but it was supported by the bourgeois German parties. These mass demonstrations were put down by the Czech military, involving 54 deaths and well over one hundred injuries.
The Treaty of St. Germain of 10.9.1919 assigned the Sudetenland to Czechoslovakia. The new Czechoslovak state regarded them as a minority. Nevertheless, some 90 percent of them lived in territories in which they themselves represented 90 percent or more of the population.
In 1921, the population of multi-ethnic Czechoslovakia comprised 6.6 million Czechs, 3.2 million Germans, two million Slovaks, 0.7 million Hungarians, half a million Ruthenians (Rusyns), 300,000 Jews, 100,000 Poles as well as Gypsies, Croats and other groups. The Germans thus represented one third of the population of the Czech Lands, and about 23.4 percent of the population of the republic (13.6 million).
The Sudetenland possessed huge chemical works and lignite mines, as well as textile, china, and glass factories. To the west, a solid German triangle surrounding the town Cheb (Eger in German) was most active in pan-German nationalism. The Bohemian Forest extended along the Bavarian frontier to the poor agricultural areas of southern Bohemia.
Moravia contained patches of German settlement to the north and south. More characteristic were the German "language islands" - towns inhabited by German minorities and surrounded by Czechs. Extreme German nationalism was never typical of this area. The German nationalism of the coal-mining region of southern Silesia, 40.5 percent German, was restrained by fear of competition from industry in Germany.
Not all ethnic Germans lived in isolated and well defined areas - because of historical development Czechs and Germans were mixed in many places and at least partial knowledge of second language was quite common.
Since the second half of the 19th century, Czechs and Germans created separate cultural, educational, political and economical institutions which were kept (by both sides) isolated from each other.
Policies affecting Sudeten Germans
Early policies of the Czechoslovak government, intended to correct social injustice and effect a moderate redistribution of wealth, had fallen more heavily on the German population than on other citizens. In 1919 the government confiscated one-fifth of each individual's holdings in paper currency. Those Germans constituting the wealthiest element in the Czech lands were most affected. The Land Control Act brought the expropriation of vast estates, many belonging to German nobility or large estate owners. Land was allotted primarily to Czech peasants, often landless, who constituted the majority of the agricultural population. Only 4.25 percent of all land allotted by January 1935 was received by Sudeten Germans, whose protests were expressed in countless petitions.
According to the 1920 constitution, German minority rights were to be protected; their educational and cultural institutions were to be preserved in proportion to the population. Local hostilities were engendered, however, by policies intended to protect the security of the Czechoslovak state: border forestland, considered the most ancient Sudeten German national territory, was expropriated for security reasons, and Czech soldiers, policemen and bureaucrats were stationed in areas inhabited only by Germans.
Minority laws were most often applied to create new Czech schools in German districts. Sudeten Germans, in possession of a large number of subsidized local theaters, were required to put these at the disposal of the Czech minority one night a week.
Sudeten German industry, highly dependent on foreign trade and having close financial links with Germany, suffered badly beginning in the early 1920s, particularly when banks in Germany failed in 1921-24 and again as Czech exports fell as tariff barriers within Europe but outside Czechoslovakia came down due to the signing of the PETA agreements. Czechs, whose industry was concentrated on the production of essential domestic items, suffered less. By the mid-1930s, unemployment in the Sudetenland was at about 3 times the level as that in the Czech lands [historically, this was about 5 times]. Tensions between the two groups resulted. Relations between Czechs and Germans were further envenomed when Sudeten Germans were forced to turn to the Czechoslovak government and the small loans bank (´ivnostenská banka) for assistance and these authorities often made the hiring of Czechs in proportion to their numbers in the population a condition for aid. Czech workmen, dispatched by the government to engage in public works projects and border fortification in Sudeten German territories, were also resented.