In 1935, the Sudeten German Party (SdP), originally founded as
Sudeten German Heimatfront (SHF) just 20 months before, gained more than 63 percent of the German voters and became suddenly the most important voice of the German minority in the Czechoslovak Republic. The victory was the first step on the way to the secession of the German inhabited areas of Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany by the Munich agreement in 1938. The article
analyses the election campaign of the party in 1935 on the basis of archival documents from the Czech national archives. It aims to find out how it was possible for a completely new movement to gather so much support in such a short time. The examination of the constitution of the party and strategies used to mobilize voters has proved that the idea of the Volksgemeinschaft (“people’s community”) played the most important role for the political
success of the SHF/SdP. However, the meaning of the term Volksgemeinschaft, used also by the Nazi movement in Germany, was adjusted by SHF/SdP leaders to the specific Czechoslovak political and social reality. Besides that, an excursion into the
finances of the party has revealed the suspicion that SHF/SdP was financed from the Nazi Germany to be only partly true. and Článek zahrnuje poznámkový aparát pod čarou