Sudeten (region)

Sudeten (region), general name for a frontier region of the Czech Republic, comprising the western and part of the northern and southern boundary areas, and including those districts centred around the Sudeten Range on the north, the Krušné Hory (German, Erzgebirge) Range on the north-west, and the Bohemian Forest in the south-west. Before 1945 more than 3 million Sudeten Germans inhabited the region. The manoeuvering, during the 1930s, of the Sudeten Germans who supported Adolf Hitler brought about an international crisis in 1938, when the Sudeten region was ceded to Germany in the Munich Pact. The region was not restored until it was liberated by the Allies at the end of World War II, after which the German population was expelled to Germany.