Page "Jihlava" Paragraph 6

After World War I the town constituted a German language island ( Sprachinsel ) within Slavic speaking Moravia.

This affected local politics as it remained the centre of the second largest German-speaking enclave in the republic of Czechoslovakia ( after Schönhengst / Hřebečsko ).

After the Czechoslovak Republic was proclaimed on 28 October 1918, the indigenous Germans of Bohemia and Moravia, claiming the right to self-determination according to the 10th of President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, demanded that their homeland areas remain with the new Austrian State.

The Volksdeutsche of Iglau / Jihlava relied on peaceful opposition to the Czech military occupation of their region, a process that started on 31 October 1918 and was completed on 28 January 1919.

Thereafter extremist political figures like Hans Krebs, editor of the Iglauer Volkswehr newspaper, became prominent with the rise of Nazism and the Nazi occupation ( 1939 – 1945 ).