Konrad Ernst Eduard Henlein (6 May 1898 – 10 May 1945) was a Sudeten German politician in Czechoslovakia, before World War II. After Nazi Germany invaded and occupied Czechoslovakia, he became the Gauleiter and Reichsstatthalter of Reichsgau Sudetenland.
Born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1898, Henlein served in the Austro-Hungarian Army in World War I. The Austrian Empire collapsed after that, and the Sudetenland, where Henlein lived, became part of newly created Czechoslovakia.
He became active in the Deutscher Turnverband movement, a German nationalist and Völkisch athletic organization. In 1933, after the Machtergreifung of Hitler and his regime, he founded the Sudeten German Party of Czechoslovakia. It merged into the Nazi Party in 1939.
Henlein actively lobbied for Germany to annex the Sudetenland and led the Sudetendeutsches Freikorps in the Sudeten German uprising in September 1938 that led to the Munich Agreement and the German occupation of the Sudetenland. After the occupation in October 1938, he formally joined the Nazi Party and the Schutzstaffel (SS) and was appointed Gauleiter of Reichsgau Sudetenland. He became Reichsstatthalter of Reichsgau Sudetenland when it was formed on 1 May 1939, and was responsible for mass deportations to extermination camps. He died on 10 May 1945 in American custody by suicide.
Henlein was born in Maffersdorf in Bohemia, Austria-Hungary (now Vratislavice nad Nisou, part of Liberec in the Czech Republic). His father, Konrad Henlein Sr., worked as an accounts clerk. His mother, Hedvika Anna Augusta Dworatschek (Dvořáčková), came from a Czech family of German Bohemian origin.
Henlein attended business school in Gablonz (Jablonec nad Nisou) and in World War I entered the Austro-Hungarian Army as a military volunteer (Kriegsfreiwilliger), assigned to the k.u.k. Tiroler Kaiser-Jäger-Regiment # 3. In May 1916 he attended officer candidate school, then was assigned to k.u.k. Infanterie-Regiment Nr. 27, based in Graz. He saw Italian Front service in the Dolomites at Monte Forno, Mont Sief, and Monte Maletta between May 1916 and 17 November 1917.
He was severely wounded, then captured by Italian soldiers, and spent the rest of the war as a POW on Asinara Island, where he studied the history of the German Turner (gymnastics) movement of Friedrich Ludwig Jahn. His experiences as a Frontkämpfer (front-line fighter), gassed on the Italian front played an important role in shaping his politics. His self-image as a fighter for the Sudeten community was crucial to his subsequent career.
Henlein embraced the Völkisch movement and joined the Deutscher Turnverband (gymnastics association). By 1923, he was promoting völkisch ideology in his local turner club. Henlein became an increasingly well known figure in the Sudetenland after club wins in a 1926 gymnastics competition in Prague. Henlein's mentor Heinz Rutha, founder of the Turnerbund movement, proposed a youthful männerbund (male elite) of Führern (leaders) commanding unconditional loyalty, a that which greatly influenced Henlein's politics.
Politics in the Sudetenland were divided between loyalists who wanted Sudeten Germans to take part in Czechoslovak elections, and separatist "negativists" who did not, Henlein among them. By 1928 the Turnerbund began to emerge as a proto-political party opposed to "activist" parties in the coalition governments in Prague. In an article published in December 1930 in the Turnerzeitung, Henlein called on Sudeten Germans to embrace völkisch ideology and condemned liberalism and democracy as "un-German".
In May 1931, Henlein was elected president of the supposedly apolitical Turnerbund, and it became more overtly völkisch and militaristic. The purpose of the Turnerbund became to
indoctrinate its members into the völkisch movement.
Knowing that the Czechoslovak authorities were about to ban the two main völkisch parties in the Sudetenland for treason, on 1 October 1933, Henlein founded the Sudetendeutsche Heimatfront ("Sudeten German Home Front", SHF). Although originally meant as a successor to the banned anti-Czech German National Socialist Workers' Party and German National Party, it soon became a big tent right-wing movement for autonomy for the German minority, rivalling the German Social Democratic Workers Party. Henlein's association with the Catholic Kameradschaftsbund, which followed the teachings of Austrian philosopher Othmar Spann, allowed him to argue that his movement was not a continuation of the banned parties.
American historian Gerhard Weinberg described Henlein as "...a thirty-five year-old veteran of the war who had achieved prominence in a racist athletic organization in the Sudeten area. He now rallied around himself a motley assortment of elements that were long involved in internal feuds".
British historian Mark Cornwall wrote that he was "attractive to the Sudeten population precisely because of his ordinariness... an Everyman who represented the average Sudeten German's grievances". Ethnic Germans of the Sudetenland had been favored under the Austrian Empire and suddenly now were outsiders in the new Czechoslovak republic. Henlein saw himself as the founder of a volksgemeinschaft ("people's community") for all Sudeten Germans. Henlein presented the Sudeten Germans as a special and unique German community. This Sudeten "particularism" later caused Henlein much trouble under the Third Reich when grossdeutschland nationalists like Reinhard Heydrich took exception to these speeches. Cornwall wrote that "...there slowly developed a chasm between Henlein's self-perception as a Sudeten Führer and the reality of a man who lacked both charisma and political acumen."
In the early 1930s, Henlein took a pro-Czechoslovak and overtly anti-Nazi stance in his speeches, but as early as 15 May 1934, Czechoslovak Foreign Minister Edvard Beneš told President Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk that Henlein's Heimfront received financial support from Berlin. Beneš was correct. From April 1934 onward, it was subsidized by not only the Auswärtiges Amt, but also the Verband für das Deutschtum im Ausland ("Society for Germandom Abroad").
Henlein advocated Sudetenland autonomy, but was vague about what form this would take. To avoid having his party banned, Henlein presented the party's ideas as pro-democracy rather than anti-Czech. He spoke of Sudeten Germans living in a Central European "common space" with an identity that transcended loyalty to Czechoslovakia, part of a wider Germanic "common space" that embraced all of Central Europe. He advocated "reconciliation" between Germans and Czechs, provided that the Czechs recognised that they and the Sudetenlanders belonged to the Central European "common space". Despite his claims of loyalty to Czechoslovakia and its mosaic of peoples, Henlein portrayed life in Germany as far superior to Czechoslovakia, and encouraged his followers to boycott businesses owned by Czechs and Jews. He described the SdP as having a "Christian worldview", a code-word for anti-Semitism.
On 19 April 1935 the SHF was renamed Sudeten German Party (Sudetendeutsche Partei, SdP) under pressure from the Czechoslovak government. In the parliamentary election of May 1935, the SdP, with massive support from the Nazi Party, received 15.2% of the votes cast and become the strongest Czechoslovak party with about 68% of the ethnic German vote. Henlein capitalized on resentment over the unemployment rate in the Sudetenland, twice that in Bohemia and Moravia.
The SdP was being secretly subsidised by the Auswärtiges Amt and received 15,000 Reichsmark in 1935 alone from the German legation in Prague. In 1933 the subsidies greatly increased, and the SdP became the main recipient of German money in the spring of 1935. In part, the victory of the SdP in the 1935 elections was due to generous financial support from Germany; SdP ran a slick, polished campaign that overshadowed rival ethnic German parties.