Dr.Jur. Konrad Ernst Eduard Henlein (May 6, 1898 - May 10, 1945) was the most important ethnic German pro-Nazi politician in Czechoslovakia and leader of Sudeten German separatists.
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Born in Maffersdorf (Vratislavice nad Nisou) - now a borough of Liberec (German: Reichenberg), Czech Republic (then Austria-Hungary). In light of his being a leader of the Sudeten German movement, Henlein's origin was not without problems. His mother, Hedvika Anna Augusta Dvořáček, was daughter of a German-speaking mother but her father was Czech. As Henlein pursued a policy against mixed marriages after 1938, he was forced to change his still-living mother's name from Dvořáček to the more German spelling of Dworatschek, which would be thus more comfortable for Henlein's career as a high Nazi official.
He attended a business school in Jablonec nad Nisou. After serving in the Austrian army in the First World War, during which he spent time in Italian captivity, and the subsequent breakup of Austria-Hungary, he worked as a bank clerk in Czechoslovakia while taking an active part in Sudeten German communal life.
In the first half of the 1930s, Henlein held a pro-Czechoslovak and overtly anti-Nazi view in his public speeches and did not become a follower of Adolf Hitler until 1937, when the pro-German camp within the Sudeten German Party (SdP) represented by Karl Hermann Frank emerged victorious. He then swiftly aligned himself with the slogan "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer!" (One People, One Country, One leader), thus calling for the predominantly (typically more than 80%) German-speaking Sudetenland to be a part of Germany. Henlein's political party's dominance of the Sudetenland in the 1930s ultimately led to the Munich Agreement on September 30, 1938, which he helped to accomplish by influencing the British delegate Lord Runciman during the latter's visit of Czechoslovakia. Henlein presented his party's policy as striving to fulfill the "justified claims" of the then largely nazified German minority in Czechoslovakia. He said "We must make demands that cannot be satisfied". In September 1938, he helped organize hundreds of terrorist attacks and two coup attempts in the Sudetenland and instigated Hitler's frenetic speech in Nuremberg. Since the attempted uprising was quickly suppressed by Czechoslovak forces, Henlein fled to Germany and made numerous intrusions into Czechoslovak territory as a commander of Sudeten German guerilla bands of Freikorps. After the final secession of the Sudetenland, Henlein's party merged with Hitler's NSDAP on November 5, 1938. Henlein then became Gruppenführer (later Obergruppenführer) SS and a Reichstag deputy. In March and April 1939 he served as the head of civil service in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia but soon most of the power went to the hands of another Sudeten German politician, Karl Hermann Frank. On May 1, 1939 he was named Gauleiter of the Sudetenland, a position he held until the end of the war.
In May 1945, while in American captivity in the barracks of Plzeň, he committed suicide[1] by cutting his veins with his broken glasses. He was buried anonymously in the Pilsen Central Cemetery.
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