Henlein attempted to place his long-term followers in key positions in his "Reichsgau" and, starting in the spring of 1939, he became locked into a battle over patronage with Reinhard Heydrich. Cornwall described the Henlein-Heydrich struggle as between two men who were "ideologically close", with the principle differences between Henlein's emphasis on Sudeten "particularism" as opposed to Heydrich's "Großdeutschland" nationalism, and the disgust of the "völkisch" fanatic Heydrich at Henlein's attempt to create a "big tent" right-wing party in the 1930s. Heydrich felt that Henlein should have presented the SdP as an unambiguous "völkisch" party, which indicated that Henlein was "soft", one of the gravest insults that the self-proclaimed "hard man" Heydrich could apply. In late 1939, Heydrich struck at Henlein by arresting over 50 leading Sudeten Nazis—all of whom were closely associated with Henlein's mentor Heinz Rutha—on charges of being part of a homosexual group whose used their positions in the SdP in the 1930s to recruit young men for sex. Heydrich chose to let the accused go on trial in early 1940 rather than taking them into "protective custody", when the courts heard lurid stories of how in the 1930s the SdP leaders had engaged in homosexual orgies.