Zur rüstungsökonomischen Bedeutung und groß raumwirtschaftlichen Motivation der Eingliederung der Sudetengebiete und Böhmen-Mährens in das Deutsche Reich [On the armament-economic significance and large-scale economic motivation of the integration of the Sudetenland and Bohemia-Moravia into the German Reich]

Abstract

The problem to be dealt with here is to be removed from the past perspective of the Munich Treaty and placed in a larger context by determining the importance of the territories mentioned in the overall political and economic accounts of the Third Reich before and after Munich. Anyone who wants to determine the driving forces behind the National Socialist course of aggression must not limit themselves to reflecting solely on the power-political and racial-ideological causes of the annexation policy; they must also question its economic aspects. But this is precisely what non-Marxist historiography has neglected for a long time. This applies to the assessment of German occupation policy in general, as well as specifically to the evaluation and interpretation of the inclusion of the so-called Sudetenland and the Protectorate in the Reich referred to as Greater Germany. While the National Socialists were able to legitimize the annexation of the Sudetenland by implementing the right of national self-determination sanctioned by the League of Nations, the breakaway of the Bohemian-Moravian region from the Czechoslovak state and thus its dissolution could no longer be concealed as an overt act of territorial expansion by the elimination of what Hitler called a "monstrous threat to European peace."