Czech Germans and the Sudetenland: seven centuries of a shared homeland

Drive through the northern or western border regions of Czechia, around Liberec, Ústí nad Labem, Cheb or the Šumava foothills, and you will see signs of a society that is not the one you expect. A village church too large for the houses around it. A cemetery with German names on weathered stones. A town hall with a Germanic gable. Large parts of the borderlands were once German-speaking, and the people who lived there belonged to the Czech lands for roughly seven hundred years.

The subject is sensitive and often reduced to one event, the expulsion of 1945. The longer history is more useful, and more interesting. It is also the background to the Munich Agreement and the occupation and to the legal arguments in the Beneš decrees explained.

Settlers, towns and a mixed kingdom

The German presence in Bohemia and Moravia began with invitation, not conquest. From the thirteenth century the Přemyslid kings invited German settlers to clear forests, found towns and mine silver, a policy described in the Přemyslids and the medieval Czech state. German law and German-speaking townspeople became part of the social fabric. Mining towns like Kutná Hora and Jihlava, and the Old Town of Prague itself, had large German-speaking populations.

Medieval and early modern Bohemia was a multilingual society. Nobles, clergy and townspeople used Czech, German and Latin as needed, and the line between the languages was not a national boundary. There were conflicts, notably during the Hussite wars, but nations as political units were a later idea. The Habsburg centuries made German the language of the state, which is covered in the Habsburg era in the Czech lands.

A word that was invented

The term Sudeten Germans (Sudetendeutsche) is a product of the early twentieth century. The Sudetes are a mountain range along the northern border of Bohemia and Moravia, and the word was extended to cover all German speakers of the Czech lands, from the Šumava in the south-west to Silesia in the north-east. It was a political label that gave one identity to communities with no single history. Germans in Prague, in Brno, in the mining valleys of the Ore Mountains and in rural South Moravia had different experiences and often different loyalties.

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries

In the nineteenth century, rising Czech and German nationalism turned the shared kingdom into a contest. Disputes over language in schools, offices and the university (see the Czech National Revival) bred resentment on both sides. The industrial areas of northern Bohemia, with textiles, glass and coal, were largely German-speaking, and the economic and social divisions overlapped with the national ones.

In 1918, as Austria-Hungary collapsed, representatives of German-speaking regions declared them parts of a new German-Austrian state. The Czechoslovak army took control of the regions in late 1918 and 1919, and the Treaty of Saint-Germain left them inside Czechoslovakia. Demonstrations against the arrangement in March 1919 ended in shootings in which dozens of civilians died. Nationalists later exploited the memory.

The First Republic gave the German minority rights, schools and a university, and from 1926 German parties joined the government. Even so, many Germans felt like second-class citizens. The depression of the 1930s hit the German-speaking industrial regions hard, and the movement founded by Konrad Henlein in 1933 grew in that soil, backed by Nazi Germany. In 1935 it won most of the German vote. See interwar Czechoslovakia: the First Republic.

Not all German speakers supported Henlein. Social Democrats, Communists, Catholics, Jewish citizens and liberal Germans opposed the movement, and many were persecuted or fled after 1938. Their stories are often lost between the two national narratives.

Munich, occupation and expulsion

The Munich Agreement, signed in September 1938, handed the Sudetenland to Germany, and many Czechs left the area. After the occupation of the rest of the Czech lands in March 1939, Germans living in the Protectorate had a privileged status under the Nazi administration while Czechs faced repression.

In 1945 the roles were reversed. The postwar Czechoslovak state, with the agreement of the Allied powers, expelled most of its German population on the legal basis of the Beneš decrees. Violence marked the summer of 1945, and organised transfers to the American and Soviet zones of occupied Germany followed. Most Germans of the Czech lands were removed within about two years, though some stayed, among them antifascists, mixed families and workers in key industries. Historians put the number removed at more than two million. Estimates of deaths vary; a joint Czech-German commission of historians arrived at figures in the tens of thousands.

Resettling the borderlands

The emptied borderlands were resettled with Czechs, Slovaks, Roma, returning emigrants and others, often from the interior of the country. The newcomers inherited houses, shops and farms but not the local community. Villages that did not find enough settlers were abandoned. Under communism many of them were demolished, and border areas close to the Iron Curtain were closed. The mix of recent settlement, depopulation and industrial decline is one reason why parts of the northern borderlands still show social and economic difficulties.

Since 1989 many locals have set out to rediscover the German past of their regions. Volunteer groups restore churches and cemeteries, local museums tell the German history of their towns, and former residents and their descendants return for visits and joint projects. The Czech-German Declaration of 1997 and the Czech-German Future Fund helped to formalise contacts.

The minority today

A German minority remains in the Czech Republic. It is small, in the low tens of thousands at most by census results, and is one of the national minorities recognised under the 2001 law on the rights of national minorities (as of 2026; check the official source). Its organisations run cultural activities, publications and language programmes. The Sudeten German organisations in Germany and Austria, which represent expellees and their descendants, are a separate group whose relations with Czech authorities have varied over time.

The legacy is visible in daily life: German tourists visit the border regions, and Prague's cultural heritage includes Kafka, Rilke and Mahler, all of whom came from German-speaking families in the Czech lands.

Frequently asked questions

Who were the Sudeten Germans?

German speakers of the Czech lands, a term coined in the early twentieth century and applied to communities with different histories, mostly living in the border regions.

How many Germans lived in Czechoslovakia?

About 3.2 million declared German nationality in the 1930 census, more than a fifth of the population.

Are there still Germans in Czechia?

Yes, a small recognised national minority with its own cultural organisations.

What is the Czech-German Declaration?

A 1997 declaration in which both states expressed regret for suffering inflicted on each other and agreed to set up a Future Fund.