English Translation

4-13 21 V. THE INTRODUCTION OF THE GAUES SDETENLAND IN THE PARTY ORGANIZATION Already above (p. 14) it was pointed out that it is a mark of the immediate Reichsgaue, that territorially the state administrative district coincides with the Partygau, that although it is not almost constitutionally necessary, but that the whole constitutional order leads to uniting the office of the Reichsstatthalter and the Gauleiter in one hand. In agreement with these general considerations, it is true that in the Gau Sudetenland the leader of the sudeten-German party, Konrad Henlein, was appointed as Reichsstatthalter and Gauleiter. After all, there are some peculiarities or at least peculiarities that need to be mentioned. First of all, for the organization of the party, the historical prerequisites in the party development of the Sudeten countries were of considerable importance. If we compare them with the situation in Gdańsk on the one hand, and in the Ostmarkgauen on the other hand, one of the two different types is clearly evident. In Gdansk, the NSDAP was. Even before reunification, the "Free City of Gdansk" had become the only party by means of national measures and had approximately the same opinion as the NSDAP in the Old Kingdom. In Austria, on the other hand, only one of the points of view of the illegal Dollfuss constitution itself consisted of "illegal" NSDAP., which was pointed out to fight in secret, and whose membership was difficult to establish. In the southern German territories, the NSDAP, which had played an important role in the history of National Socialism, had already been dissolved in 1933, but the Sudeten German Party (SDP.) under Henlein had not only the majority of members of the dissolved party, but by means of formal democratic electoral law and parliamentary struggle, to which it was referred by the state constitution and by the given political power position, seized the overwhelming majority of the German population. The ban on their activities by the Czechoslovak government in September 1938, i.e. just before the Munich agreement, was a temporary and therefore meaningless rule. The membership of the SDP. Although it did not coincide with the number of its voters, in this extreme struggle for the preservation of the threatened Germanism at all, there was a much greater part of it than it corresponds to the sense of a political leadership elite, the Germans also included members of the SDP.