Sudetenland and Moravská Ostrava overprints
Sudetenland and Moravská Ostrava overprints
This short overview of the Sudetenland overprints aims to introduce Czech collectors and researchers to this provisional edition and to encourage them to gather information and complete this article. For my research I used German-language literature, interviews with Gerhard Spath and publicly available sources.
With this article, I wanted to ask other collectors of these provisionals who know more to share their information. I would add this new information to these articles. This site is not to promote anyone or anything. Please contact me on the Contact page.
The term Sudeten German first appeared in 1866 and came to be used to refer to members of the German nation living in the Habsburg Monarchy in the historical territory of the Czech land, distinguishing Germans from Bohemia from Germans from the Alpine countries. After the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and during the period of the First Czechoslovak Republic, Sudeten Germans found themselves in the unwanted role of a national minority, which led to their further uniting. In the 1920s, relations between Czechs and Germans seemed to be more conciliatory, but the Great Depression and Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany in 1933 halted this rapprochement. With its slogan “Heim ins Reich” (Home to the Reich), the new Nazi propaganda signalled to all Germans living outside the territory of interwar Germany to return to the Reich.
In Czechoslovakia, Konrad Henlein became the leader of the national mobilization with his Sudeten German Party. By the end of the 1930s, the Sudetenland and the Sudeten Germans were at the centre of European politics and became an “international problem”, which was seemingly solved elegantly by the Munich Agreement signed at the end of September 1938. These events led to the independence of the Sudetenland and the rise of overprinted Czech stamps.