Editing Sudetes (section)

=== Sudetes and "Sudetenland" ===
[[File:Osowka 0005.jpg|thumb|[[Project Riese]], [[Owl Mountains]]]]
After [[World War I]], the name ''[[Sudetenland]]'' came into use to describe areas of the [[First Czechoslovak Republic]] with large [[Ethnic Germans|ethnic German]] populations. In 1918, the short-lived rump state of [[Republic of German-Austria|German-Austria]] proclaimed a [[Province of the Sudetenland]] in northern [[Moravia]] and [[Austrian Silesia]] around the city of [[Opava]] (''Troppau'').

The term was used in a wider sense when on 1 October 1933 [[Konrad Henlein]] founded the [[Sudeten German Party]] and in [[Nazi Germany|Nazi German]] parlance ''Sudetendeutsche'' ([[Sudeten Germans]]) referred to all autochthonous ethnic [[Germans in Czechoslovakia (1918–1938)|Germans in Czechoslovakia]]. They were heavily clustered in the entire mountainous periphery of Czechoslovakia—not only in the former Moravian ''Provinz Sudetenland'' but also along the northwestern Bohemian borderlands with German [[Lower Silesia]], [[Saxony]] and [[Bavaria]], in an area formerly called [[Province of German Bohemia|German Bohemia]]. In total, the German minority population of interwar Czechoslovakia numbered around 20% of the total national population.

Sparking the [[Sudeten Crisis]], [[Adolf Hitler]] got his future enemies Britain and France to concede the ''Sudetenland'' with most of the [[Czechoslovak border fortifications]] in the 1938 [[Munich Agreement]], leaving the remainder of Czechoslovakia shorn of its natural borders and buffer zone, finally [[German occupation of Czechoslovakia|occupied]] by Germany in March 1939. After being annexed by Nazi Germany, much of the region was redesignated as the ''[[Reichsgau Sudetenland]]''.

After [[World War II]], most of the previous population of the Sudetes was forcibly [[Expulsion of Germans after World War II|expelled]] on the basis of the [[Potsdam Agreement]] and the [[Beneš decrees]], and the region was resettled by new Polish and Czechoslovak citizens. A considerable proportion of the Czechoslovak populace thereafter strongly objected to the use of the term ''Sudety''. In the Czech Republic the designation ''Krkonošsko-jesenická subprovincie'' is used in academic context and usually only the discrete Czech names for the individual mountain ranges (e.g. Giant Mountains) appear, as under [[#Subdivisions|Subdivisions]] above.