Draft:Massacre in Kadaň

• Comment: The Youtube source is a 2.5-hour documentary which might be a reliable source – I'm not familiar with the publisher or the series. Provided it is reliable (see this info), it needs to be cited properly with {{cite AV media}}, including time stamps showing where the specific pieces of information are found. See WP:REFBEGIN for more information on citing sources in Wikipedia articles. bonadea contributions talk 10:09, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

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The Massacre in Kadaň took place on 4 March 1919. Following the end of World War One, Kadaň had become a town in the new Czechoslovakian state. However, there was still a German minority that felt alienated and wanted to become part of the German-speaking state of Austria. - and there were still tensions between ethnic germans and Czechs.

On March the 4th 1919 demonstrators raised the German flag over the central square of Kadaň and sang German nationalist songs. Czech soldiers shot at the crowd and This altercation triggered two minutes of sustained and indiscriminate gunfire upon the crowd of nearly 10,000, who found themselves trapped by Czechoslovak machine gun nests at opposing ends of the market square.

Sources vary somewhat on the number of killed and injured - some say it was around 22 killed and 90 injured others say it was only 80 injured but 24 killed in the event - including Timeline´s Documentary" called "The Crippling Long Term Effects Of The First World War" (episode: Us and them)

In the 1930s, when Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, he wanted to return Sudetenland to German control. A claim he was supported in by the Sudeten German National Socialist Party, apolitical party of Germans living in the Czechoslovak borderland. For them, the Kadaň incident immediately became a symbol of "Czechoslovak oppression" and the horrors that the Sudeten Germans had to face in Czechoslovakia.

Hitler played on the Massacre in Kadaň and used it as the basis for the annexation of the Sudetenland (borderlands) by the German Third Reich under the pretext of defending ethnic Germans. In 1938, Czechoslovakia was forced to do so under pressure from the UK and France on the basis of the Munich Agreement concluded between them, Germany and Italy. A year later, Germany invaded the rest of the country and occupied it until the end of the war in 1945.