Faced with that threat, Henlein went to Berlin to meet Heydrich and capitulated. Henlein agreed to fire the deputy "Gauleiter", Fritz Köllner, and replaced him with Heydrich's nominee Richard Donnevert. Hitler tended to side with his "Gauleiters" in their disputes with other Nazis, and made clear that he was behind Henlein in his dispute with Heydrich. So removing Henlein was not practical for Heydrich, which is why he wanted to neutralize him by removing his followers from the local NSDAP leadership corps. In March 1940, at a party rally in Hoheneble (modern Vrchlabí, Czech Republic), Henlein completed his surrender by formally denouncing Rutha—the best man at his wedding in 1926—as a homosexual "pervert" whom history would not remember, and embraced Heydrich's "Großdeutschland" nationalism by denying there was any Suteden "particularism", asserting that Sudeten Germans were not different from the "Reichdeutsch".