Czechoslovakia's Germans It is well to estimate at its obviously
accurate value the outcry in the German Press about the election-meeting fracas at Teplitz-Schoenau in Bohemia on Sunday between the Sudetendeutsch supporters of Herr Henlein and the Czech police. The affair itself was clearly of trivial importance —in no way comparable, for example, with the disorders caused by the recent Fascist march through South London— but it gained some significance from the fact that Herr Henlein's supporters (who represent not the whole, but only about two-thirds, of the German-speaking population formerly part of Austria and now part of Czechoslovakia) chose this occasion for appearing in uniform for the first time. The hostility of the Henlein faction to the Government is due partly to certain genuine grievances, which the Government has undertaken to rectify, and might be rectifying rather more rapidly, but much more to the perpetual instigations from Berlin, to whose interest it is to keep any kind of unrest alive in Czechoslovakia and Austria. If Herr Henlein and his friends were a minority in Germany they would be holding no election meetings because there would be no elections. In Czechoslovakia, where certain local elections take place next month, the suffrage is universal, free and secret.
Previous page
