are the czechs eastern or western?

well, it's the sudetenland. obviously.

sarcasm aside, hitler was actually making sort of a valid point - while the area may have been cut out of the austro-hungarian empire, it really was a historically german region called bohemia within the second reich, named after a celtic tribe called the boii, like bavaria. while it was just over the danube, and technically outside of the general boundaries of the first empire, it was also a border region that was deeply dependent on roman hegemony, like the regions around the black sea, or the regions up and down the red sea; these people were barbarians, but only just barely, and they formed a core of the people that crossed the river, at the last end of history.

one could make the same argument about germany, of course - it was technically outside of the empire. but, it was the centre of charlemagne's reich, and the new focal point of western culture in the middle ages. the right argument is that germany became roman, and what i want to do is absorb bohemia along with them (this isn't necessary for the austrians, who were south of the danube, and in the empire the whole time), which is easy to do because they are in the second reich.

in fact, the same argument applies to the slovenians, who i maybe should have included, but didn't because i didn't want to open a can of worms. but, slovenia has a small enough population that you can throw it in there without messing around with it very much - it's 2 million people, and you're looking at another 632 cases and another 9 deaths.

the reason the czechs are considered eastern europe is that they were behind the iron curtain in czechoslavakia, but so were the east germans and nobody considers brandenburg or saxony to be part of a panslavic state. nowadays, the area is primarily slavic speaking, but it's also dominantly r1b, which throws kind of a wrench into it. but, if your argument is that it must be eastern because of the cold war, that's not taking a long enough view of history.

but, i'll acknowledge some ambiguity.

you might disagree. and that's ok.