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Sudeten Pains. The third and best reason for the President's optimism is his belief that he can patch up his troublesome minority demands, particularly of the Sudetens, and thus spike Hitler's handiest excuse for an invasion. Father Andreas Hlinka, leader of a Slovak ecclesiastical party, has demanded autonomy for his racial group, but his party polled less votes than in previous years in the recent municipal elections. Other minority protests pull even less weight. But one Czechoslovakian minority problem the world will not forget in a hurry is that of the Sudetens.
Five years ago, say the Czechs, nobody was aware of the sad plight of the Sudetens. The Czech contention is that Adolf Hitler has dramatized whatever case the Sudetens have into a vast and phoney political extravaganza. But the Sudeten Germans have caught the harsh and compelling sound of the Nazi bands just over the mountains, have listened to Nazi oratory and fallen under the spell of Adolf Hitler's pan-Germanism. Ninety percent of them voted as a unit for Konrad Hen-lein's Sudetendeutsch Partei in the local elections. Nothing unites a group like a grievance and Henlein's grievous story is as follows:
The Sudetens, next to Poland's Ukrainians, constitute the largest national minority in Europe. The Slavs held the Sudeten region as early as the Sixth Century but in the Twelfth Germans filtered in as monks, townsmen, traders, artisans. They naturally became the manufacturers of the 19th Century Bohemian industrial revolution. Favored by the Habsburg regime, they looked down on their agricultural Czech, Slovak neighbors. In the post-War years, when the Czechs became the top-dogs they turned the national trade to their allies and friends, which dried up Sudeten markets in Austria, Hungary, gradually supplanted German capital with Czech, eased out Sudeten workers, filled Sudeten administrative, police and army posts with Czechs. Although the Sudetens form only 22% of the nation's population, they now make up 50% of its unemployed. Most of those eligible for the dole receive only 35¢ a week.
The Sudetendeutsch Partei has said that it wants the Sudeten region given back to Germany. The Czechs grimly joke that if an anschluss were granted it would not be long until they were anschlussed, too. In point of fact, any dismemberment of Bohemia would be fatal to the Czechoslovakian Republic. Bohemia, seat of some 80% of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire's industries, is the industrial heart of the Republic. Effective and prosperous, it is the one island of conventional, economic well-being now in Central Europe.* Czechoslovakia is turning it over to nobody, and that is one reason why President Benes can confidently tell visitors that if they ask the next man they meet in the street whether he will fight the Nazi invaders, the answer will be yes—and his wife will fight, too.
President Benes hopes to cool the Sudeten crisis with a new minority statute. Last week in Prague, Premier Dr. Milan Hodza was conferring with Sudeten and other minority leaders. In a few weeks a new Czech minority program may be promulgated, offering the minorities more generous political and educational concessions. To remove signs of Czech dominance in the Sudeten areas, last week the bulk of the army reserves sent there five weeks ago were demobilized.