So, Hitler’s big speech — summarised in the Manchester Guardian (p. 11), above — turned out to contain no new demands or proposals, nothing at any rate that was not implicit in Henlein’s Carlsbad speech. But it’s not so much the content as the tone which is worrying: his rhetoric was angry, violent and menacing. […]
I’m cheating slightly today; the above headlines — from the Daily Mail (p. 7) — aren’t, strictly speaking, about Czechoslovakia, but refer to speeches made by Nazi leaders at the Nuremberg rally on the weekend. But of course they were always going to be interpreted in the light of the continuing Sudeten crisis. Hermann Goering
Good news, bad news in these headlines from The Times (p. 10) … On the positive side, the Sudeten leaders have agreed to resume negotiations with the Czechoslovakian government. This may be related to a report into the Mährisch-Ostrau incident by a British observer, Major Sutton-Pratt, who concluded that it had been blown out of
The headlines from the Manchester Guardian (p. 11) indicate that the situation is the same as yesterday, or a bit worse. The Sudeten leadership is still refusing to negotiate with the Czechoslovakian government, ostensibly because of the latter’s inability to maintain order in the country. This is despite a meeting between the Sudetens and the
These headlines from the Manchester Guardian (p. 9) could be summarised: Yeah, but no, but yeah … The Sudeten leadership agreed to accept the Czech autonomy proposals (as revealed yesterday) as the basis for negotiations. Which sounds very promising! But at that point, news was received of an incident at Mährisch-Ostrau, where two Sudeten deputies
At last, after all the endless reports of meetings to seemingly no end: actual details! As the above — from the Manchester Guardian (p. 9) — shows, the Czech autonomy proposals (first reported yesterday) were pretty generous. The Sudetens (and presumably other minorities) would get self-government, language equality, their own civil servants and police. I’m
Apologies for the fairly ordinary quality of the above (it’s a scan of a photocopy of a microfilm of the original …) but it illustrates a problem with relying on headlines for information, as I’m sure some people did back then as they do today. It’s from the Daily Mail, p. 9, and you can
So, we’re into the second week of the crisis (or rather, the second week for which I have newspaper sources), and as these headlines from The Times indicate (p. 12), the public still doesn’t have much idea as to what’s going on. Just that there have been lots of meetings over the weekend. The leading
More good news, or at least that’s how it is presented. The dailies today all have pretty similar headlines to those from The Times, above (p. 10), but their stories differ in detail. Henlein has met with Hitler and it would seem that they agreed that the Sudetens should negotiate with the Czechs on the
As these headlines from The Times (p. 12) report, it’s ‘a crucial day’, because Henlein is meeting with Hitler at Berchtesgaden to discuss the Czechoslovakian autonomy proposals; and everyone assumes that Hitler will have final say over whether the Sudetens will accept or reject them, as noted in the Manchester Guardian yesterday. Otherwise, there’s not
