After the Saaz rally, Henlein was widely viewed as the "man of the hour" and knowing that the Czechoslovak authorities were about to ban the two main "völkisch" parties in the Sudetenland as treasonous, Henlein decided to enter politics to fill the vacuum. On 1 October 1933, Henlein founded the "Sudetendeutsche Heimatfront" ("Sudeten German Home Front", SHF). Although the SHF was originally meant as a successor organisation of the banned anti-Czech German National Socialist Workers' Party and German National Party, it soon became a big tent right-wing movement in order to achieve a status of autonomy for the German minority, rivalling with the German Social Democratic Workers Party. Henlein's association with the Catholic "Kameradschaftsbund" that followed the teachings of the Austrian philosopher Othmar Spann allowed him to argue to the Czechoslovak authorities that his movement was not a continuation of the banned parties. The American historian Gerhard Weinberg described Henlein as "...a thirty-five year-old veteran of the war who had achieved prominence in a racist athletic organization in the Sudeten area. He now rallied around himself a motley assortment of elements that were long involved in internal feuds but were eventually to be uniformly utilized by Berlin to bring disaster upon the Czechoslovak state as well as themselves".