Areas along the northern, southern, and western borders of Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia inhabited by German speakers known as “Sudeten Germans.” The Sudetenland belonged to Austria-Hungary until 1918 when, following the First World War, the Austro-Hungarian state was dissolved and these territories were ceded to the new Czechoslovakian state. Hitler demanded the return of the Sudetenland to the German Reich under threats of war. Following negotiations with Great Britain, France and Italy in September 1938 (Munich Agreement), Germany annexed the Sudetenland in exchange for a pledge to keep the peace.
One of three killing centers established under Operation “Reinhard.” Sobibor operated from April 1942 – October 1943 in the Lublin District of the Generalgouvernement. During that time, an estimated 167,000 people were murdered there in gas chambers using carbon monoxide gas from diesel engines.
The principle concentration camp for the Berlin area, Sachsenhausen was established in July 1936 near the town of Oranienburg (where the early concentration camp Oranienburg had been closed in 1934). In the early days of its operation, Sachsenhausen prisoners were primarily political opponents of the Nazi regime, although other groups were detained there as well, including Jews, Roma and Sinti, homosexuals, Jehova’s Witnesses, and so-called “asocials.” During the Kristallnacht pogroms of November 1938, the SS arrested some 30,000 Jews and held them in concentration camps at Sachsenhausen (c. 6,000), Dachau and Buchenwald.
Site of the Rosenstrasse Demonstration, February - March 1943
An influential German state throughout the 18th and 19th century and instrumental in the formation of the German Empire (1871-1918), Prussia historically extended from the Brandenburg region around Berlin to Danzig (Gdansk) in the east. Following World War I, Germany was forced to relinquish a corridor of land to Poland, thus separating East Prussia from West Prussia and the rest of Germany. A so-called “Free State” during the Weimar Republic, Prussia was absorbed into the German Reich in 1932.
