All events · The World Wars
The Annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland
1938–1939 · Europe & Northern Eurasia
Territory Seized
Displaced
287,000
About 6.7 million Austrians and roughly 3.6 million inhabitants of the Sudeten districts passed under German rule. Some 150,000 to 200,000 Czechs, German-speaking anti-Nazis and Jews left or were driven from the ceded borderlands into rump Czechoslovakia between October 1938 and March 1939, and about 117,000 Jews left Austria by September 1939, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The central figure of about 287,000 is the sum of the mapped flows, 170,000 from the Sudetenland and 117,000 from Austria; the Austrian Jewish emigrants are also counted in the atlas's entry on Nazi persecution and the Jewish refugee exodus of 1933-1939. Population figures come from the Czechoslovak and Austrian censuses; the movement figures from Czechoslovak refugee registration and refugee-organisation records.
Share of the population affected
2.8%
of the combined population of the territories Germany annexed in 1938: Austria and the Czechoslovak borderlands, 1938
Territory
112,000 km²
Austria, about 84,000 square kilometres, was incorporated into the Reich on 13 March 1938 and dissolved into Reichsgaue. The Sudeten borderlands, about 28,000 square kilometres, were ceded by Czechoslovakia under the Munich agreement of 30 September 1938; the remaining Czech lands were occupied on 15 March 1939 as the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, while Slovakia became a nominally independent state and Hungary and Poland took further Czechoslovak districts.
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What happened
German troops entered Austria on 12 March 1938 and the country was annexed the next day, ratified by a plebiscite held under Nazi control. Persecution of Austrian Jews was immediate and more violent than anything yet seen in Germany, with public humiliations in Vienna, mass arrests and the creation of Adolf Eichmann's Central Office for Jewish Emigration, which forced emigration in exchange for expropriation. Six months later, at Munich on 30 September 1938, Britain, France, Germany and Italy agreed the cession of the Czechoslovak borderlands to Germany without Czechoslovak participation; German forces occupied them in the first ten days of October. Between 150,000 and 200,000 Czechs, Jews and German-speaking opponents of Nazism moved into what remained of Czechoslovakia, which Germany then dismembered in March 1939. The two annexations added roughly ten million people and 112,000 square kilometres to the Reich without war, and extended the concentration camp system with the opening of Mauthausen in August 1938.
Parties
Nazi Germany annexed Austria by invasion and plebiscite and the Czechoslovak borderlands by the Munich agreement of the four powers
Disputed
Whether the Anschluss represented annexation of an unwilling country or, as postwar Austrian state doctrine long held, the occupation of a first victim, remains politically contested in Austria; the plebiscite results were produced under conditions that precluded a free vote.
The denominator
The Austrian census of 1934 counted 6,760,233 people, and the Sudeten territory ceded at Munich held about 3.6 million, of whom roughly 2.8-2.9 million were German-speaking and some 700,000-800,000 Czech. Roughly 150,000-250,000 Czechs, Jews and political opponents left the ceded borderlands for rump Czechoslovakia in late 1938, and Austrian Jewish emigration ran to about 117,000 by 1941.
Where the baseline comes from
On the death toll
Neither annexation was resisted militarily and there was no significant battle toll. Deaths arose from persecution rather than from the transfers of territory: several hundred Austrian Jews took their own lives in the weeks after the Anschluss, and thousands of Austrian political opponents were sent to Dachau and the newly opened Mauthausen camp.
Documented forms of violence
Arbitrary DetentionDestruction of PropertyDenationalization
Mass arrests of political opponents and Jews after the Anschluss, the expropriation of Jewish property through Eichmann's emigration office, and the loss of Czechoslovak citizenship in the ceded districts are documented in German and Austrian administrative records summarised by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Formal findings
- International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg (1946) — Found in its judgment that the seizure of Austria and of Czechoslovakia formed part of the Nazi plan of aggressive war, and convicted defendants on the count of crimes against peace — source
Movements mapped
- Sudeten borderlands -> rump Czechoslovakia (Prague and the interior)170,000
- Vienna -> emigration abroad after the Anschluss117,000
Countries touched, on present-day borders
Czechia, Austria, United Kingdom
Related entries
Sources