Hitler in Karlovy Vary, October 1938

Divadelní náměstí · Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic · 1938-10-04

After the Munich Agreement ceded the Sudetenland, Hitler toured the annexed borderlands in early October 1938 and was received in Karlsbad — today's Karlovy Vary — on 4 October, where he spoke at Theaterplatz (Divadelní náměstí) to a crowd giving the Nazi salute. Newsreel crews from British Movietone and Pathé filmed the visit; their footage is embedded below. The town's German-speaking majority cheered; its Czech and Jewish residents were already leaving. Which balcony he appeared from is a detail we ask readers to help pin down.

The record

Coordinates are given at landmark level. A landmark-level coordinate points at the structure; a city-level one points at the settlement, not at a parcel.

Finding photographs

Every one of these is a search, not a guess: the event is documented, so the pictures exist somewhere. Start here.

• Wikimedia Commons — freely licensed images, with the licence stated on every file. This is the only source we republish from.
• The reference article — its own illustrations, and its citations to archives.
• Image search filtered to reusable licences — useful for tracing which institution holds a picture.
• National and municipal archives of Czech Republic, and the picture desks of newspapers published there at the time.

Check the licence before you reuse anything. A photograph being online, or being old, does not make it free; in most countries a 1960s press photograph is still in copyright.

Footage

Films are matched to this event editorially or by search; if one is wrong, tell us and we will replace it.