Konrad Henlein united us! The leader freed us! Poster of Adolf Hitler and Konrad Henlein shaking hands after the annexation of the Sudetenland

Konrad Henlein was born on May 6, 1898, in Maffersdorf district of Reichenberg, Austria-Hungary (now Liberec, Czech Republic). He attended a German trader academy and served in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I. He fought on the Italian front, where he was captured and was held as a prisoner of war until the war’s end. Afterward, he worked as a bank clerk and a gymnastics instructor. In 1933, he founded the Sudeten German Home Front, later renamed the Sudeten German Party (SDP), whose goal was to join the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia, and its majority ethnic German population, with Germany. On March 28, 1938 Henlein and Hitler secretly met. They decided on a strategy to bring about the Sudeten Crisis by using the Sudeten German Freikorps, a paramilitary group trained by the Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA), to incite violence in the region and have the SDP demand concessions that the Czechoslovak government could not grant. On September 30, through the Munich agreement, Czechoslovakia was forced to cede the Sudetenland to Germany and Henlein was named Gauleiter and Reichsstatthalter by Hitler. In 1943 he was promoted to Obergruppenfuhrer (senior group leader) of the Schutzstaffel (SS). After the German surrender, Heinlen was captured by American forces. On May 10, 1945 he committed suicide while in American custody in Plzeň, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic).

Friedrich Josef Rehse was born on March 23, 1870, in Münster, Germany. He worked as a photographer until the outbreak of World War I, when he began collecting printed materials such as pamphlets, maps, stamps, postcards, letters, photographs and posters. Rehse continued to add to his collection throughout the 1920’s, becoming friendly with Adolf Hitler and other National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nazi Party or NSDAP) leadership and acquiring many pieces of their early propaganda work. In 1929, the NSDAP, which up to that point had saved little of their early works, purchased the entire collection from Rehse for 80,000 Reichsmarks and appointed him archivist of the collection. The collection was kept in the office of the NSDAP in the Munich Schellingstrasse, and in 1932 was named the "FJM Rehse Archive for Contemporary History and Journalism Munich.” In 1935, the collection was moved to the north wing of the Munich Residence, which was turned into a museum and renamed the “FJM Rehse Archive and Museum of Contemporary History Munich." The collection continued to grow both through legitimate acquisitions and through Nazi plunder until the end of the war when Munich was liberated by American troops in 1945. The collection was confiscated, and the unlawfully acquired pieces were returned to their rightful owners. The remainder of the collection, along with the files of the NSDAP main archive, were taken to the Library of Congress in Washington DC. Friedrich Rehse, aged 81, died on January 14, 1952 in Munich, Germany. Much of the confiscated collection was returned to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1963 as part of a "book repatriation" by the United States.

The poster was acquired by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1990.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection