Place:Aš, Cheb, Karlovarský, Czech Republic

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Aš is a town in Cheb District in the Karlovy Vary Region of the Czech Republic. It has about 12,000 inhabitants.

History

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Previously uninhabited hills and swamps, the town of Aš was founded in the early 11th century by German colonists descending from the Bavarian march of the Nordgau in the course of the Ostsiedlung. So far, previous Slavic settlements in the area are not known.^[1]

The first recorded rulers were the Vogt ministeriales from Weida, Thuringia, who gave the entire Vogtland region its name. In 1281, they officially received the estates as an immediate fief at the hands of King Rudolph I of Germany. Emperor Louis IV elevated them to Princes of the Holy Roman Empire in 1329. Nevertheless, two years later, they sold Aš Land to the Luxembourg king John of Bohemia, who since 1322 also held the adjacent Egerland in the south. Together with neighbouring Selb and Elster, Aš was enfeoffed to the Freiherren of Neuberg (Podhradí).^[2] When in 1394 Konrad von Neuburg died without a male heir, by virtue of Hedwig von Neuburg's marriage to Konrad von Zedtwitz, Aš passed into the control of the noble House of Zedtwitz.

In 1557, the Aš region was incorporated into the Lands of the Bohemian Crown by the Habsburg king Ferdinand I. Like the neighbouring Egerland, it remained Protestant until the Thirty Years' War, as the Counter Reformation did not stretch to the West Bohemian borderlands. In the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, the Protestant confession of the citizens was confirmed. In 1774, Empress Maria Theresa officially mediatised Aš as part of the Bohemian crown land within the Habsburg monarchy, against the delaying resistance by the Zedtwitz noble family. Nevertheless, she granted its Protestant citizens freedom of religion, confirmed in the 1781 Patent of Toleration, issued by her son Emperor Joseph II.

From 1806, Aš with Bohemia belonged to the Austrian Empire and Cisleithanian Austria after the Compromise of 1867. Until 1918, the town remained part of Austria-Hungary, head of the Asch district, one of the 94 Bezirkshauptmannschaften in Bohemia. In 1854 a county legal code was granted to the region, ending five centuries of legal control by the Zedtwitz family. Aš was linked to the Eger (Cheb)–Hof railway line in 1864, with a branch-off to Saxon Adorf opened in 1885. It obtained the status of a town in 1872, as the population grew due to a flourishing textile industry. By 1910 the population had risen to 21,880, from 9,405 in 1869.^[3]

Upon the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy at the end of the World War I, a soldiers' council seized power and rejected the demands of separatists from Eger for annexation to the Bavarian lands of the German Weimar Republic, preferring to remain with the Republic of German-Austria, which was however soon denied by the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. During the negotiations of the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye the Americans, like Allen Welsh Dulles, had failed to persuade other powers to make at least the Bohemian peninsulas within Germany, like Aš Land or Rumburk in the Šluknov Hook, legal parts of Weimar Germany. Thus the area became part of newly established state of Czechoslovakia, and received its current Czech name^[4] On 18 November 1920, Czech militia toppled the monument of Emperor Joseph II against local protest, whereby three citizens were shot: 27yo Ferdinand Künzel, 45yo baker Eduard Schindler, 22yo Robert Käßmann^[5] A 1921 Czechoslovak census counted 183 ethnic Czechs, in a population of 40,000 in the district,^[4] a 1930 census 520 Czechs, in a population of 45,000 in the district.^[4]

In 1937, the Sudeten German Party took over in Aš, led by Konrad Henlein, who for several years had worked in the town as a gym teacher. Henlein openly advocated the annexation of the Sudetenland territories to Nazi Germany, while Czech residents, mainly officials, were forced to leave the town. On 22 September 1938, a few days before the Munich Agreement, a Sudeten German Freikorps proclaimed a "Free State of Asch". Upon the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in October, according to the Agreement, Wehrmacht troops officially arrived, unopposed. By 1939 a German census counted a population of 23,130 in the town, almost 100% German Lutherans. From 1938 to 1945, Asch was one of the Municipalities in Sudetenland.

At the end of World War II, the town was occupied by U.S. Army forces on 20 April 1945. Czech officials arrested 64 men on 7 June and took them to Bory Prison in Plzeň, where half of them perished^[6] Due to the Expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia in 1946 by the Beneš decrees, the city's population was reduced, according to the official website, to "half of the pre-war number of inhabitants". A German expellee website states that 30,327 Germans have been expelled from March to November in 27 trains.^[7] In 1949, 3,000 expellees met in far away Rüdesheim am Rhein, to protest, stating that their area never was inhabited by Slavs other than as a tiny minority.^[2]

The population shrank further in 1950 due to the establishment of the Iron Curtain and the Czechoslovak border fortifications during the Cold War by the ruling Communists, as the whole Aš district was included into the border zone which made many people move out.^[3] Because of the lowering number of inhabitants some houses remained uninhabited. There was lack of money for their renovation and it was necessary to demolish them.^[3]

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