Meanwhile in some parts of the country Nazi activists had taken to the streets, and trucks, with loudspeakers blaring, had been announcing that Schuschnigg’s plebiscite had been canceled. Göring upped the ante. Schuschnigg must resign immediately and Seyss-Inquart be appointed chancellor within two hours. If those conditions were not fulfilled, German troops would cross the frontier into Austria. Almost immediately Göring sent Seyss-Inquart yet another wire, ordering him to dispatch a telegram to Berlin asking for German help to deal with widespread Bolshevik rioting. There was, of course, no rioting by leftists; the only troublemakers in the streets were Nazis. When Seyss-Inquart hesitated, Göring was back on the phone. Don’t bother sending Berlin such a message, he said. The troops were already moving. Seyss-Inquart need only claim that he had sent such a telegram. Lie compounded by lie, underwritten by threats and blatant gangsterism, was now the modus operandi of Nazi diplomacy.
Hitler did seek to reassure the British and French, who had lodged stern protests, but he expected little serious trouble from either. He had correctly anticipated the reactions of both London and Paris. Neither was willing to go to war over Austria, a country that in 1919 had chosen to be joined with Germany only to have its desire vetoed by the victorious powers. Austria could expect no help from the outside. Meanwhile Nazi agitation in the streets gathered steam. In accordance with Hitler’s demands, Nazi prisoners were freed from Austrian jails and returned to their former posts—many within the police, further undermining the authority of the Austrian state. Schuschnigg tried to resign, but Miklas would not accept his resignation. That night the chancellor took to the radio to address the Austrian people.
Schuschnigg explained to his national audience how the situation had developed and called on the international community to bear witness to the fact that Austria had fulfilled the terms of agreement it had signed with Hitler. The Austrian government “protested the threatened violation of our country’s sovereignty, which was as uncalled for as it was unjustifiable.” Austria, he made clear, was now yielding to force. He was determined at all costs to avoid bloodshed in a fratricidal war. As a consequence an order had been issued to the army not to oppose the invading German forces. He closed his speech with a word of farewell. He had spoken for ten minutes.
President Miklas yielded to the Nazis, but refused to appoint Seyss-Inquart as chancellor, an act of defiance that the Nazis simply brushed aside. On March 12 German motorized units rolled into Austria unopposed. Far from a display of military might, their progress was glacial. One panzer division had no maps and was forced to rely on a Baedeker’s guide. Low on fuel, some stopped at gas stations along the way. Many of the tanks and other vehicles broke down. Their armored carcasses littered the roads, blocking traffic in some places. While traffic to the south was snarled, Hess, Himmler, and Heydrich flew into the Vienna aerodrome before dawn. The vanguard of the Gestapo and SD was rushing to the city.
The next day, March 13, Hitler crossed the frontier, standing despite the icy cold in an open car. He had planned to stop briefly at Braunau, his birthplace, before motoring on to Linz, where he spent his boyhood. But in Braunau a large, frenetic crowd of well-wishers had gathered in the town square, and Hitler, deeply moved, responded with a heartfelt speech. In Braunau and all along the road, crowds pressed forward to get a glimpse of the Führer. They cheered; they wept with joy; they brandished Nazi flags and tossed flowers. So thick were the exuberant throngs that Hitler’s motorcade could only struggle forward, not reaching Linz until well after nightfall.
There Hitler was greeted by Seyss-Inquart and other leading Nazis as well as another near-hysterical crowd of some 100,000 that had gathered in the town square. He spoke from the balcony of the city hall, his address repeatedly interrupted by chants of “Sieg Heil” and “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer” (One people, one Reich, one leader). Overwhelmed by his reception, tears ran down Hitler’s cheeks. “If Providence once called me forth from this town to be the leader of the Reich,” he shouted, his voice brimming with genuine emotion, “it must in so doing have charged me with a mission, and that mission could only be to restore my dear homeland to the German Reich. I have believed in this mission, I have lived and fought for it, and I believe I have now fulfilled it.”
Hitler had planned to carry on to Vienna the next day, but Himmler phoned during the night to suggest that he delay his entry until the SS had completed security arrangements. Hitler spent the following day visiting the old family home and laid flowers on the graves of his parents at Leonding. He quickly toured his old school, where former classmates had gathered to greet him. Everywhere he went, he was showered with adulation. At this point, he still had not decided what was to be the fate of Austria, but his reception in Linz and all along the roadway crystallized his thoughts. Seyss-Inquart and other Nazi leaders who met him in Linz believed that the country would become a National Socialist state, a satellite, but would retain its sovereign status. This had been Hitler’s rather vague idea as well. Certainly no formal plans had been made. But Linz changed all that. By the time he reached Vienna late the next day, he had made his decision. Austria would be absorbed by the German Reich.
Hitler’s caravan did not reach the Austrian capital until well after dark and stopped at the elegant Hotel Imperial, a favorite of Viennese high society. As a struggling young homeless nobody, he would never have dared enter; now he was shown to the royal suite. Crowds were already gathering outside the hotel, chanting deep into the night for Hitler to appear. Again and again he stepped out onto the balcony and acknowledged them. It had been an overwhelming forty-eight hours. He had come a long way from the soup kitchens and warming rooms and the Home for Men in the Meldemannstrasse.
Next day the scene was even more madly tumultuous than in Linz. The Ringstrasse, whose grand imperial buildings he had so admired as a would-be art student, was lined with delirious supporters, and the gigantic Heldenplatz before the Hofburg, seat of the Austrian government, was a sea of 200,000 flag-waving, jubilant, ecstatic people. When Hitler alighted from his Mercedes and at last reached the balcony of the Hofburg to address the frenzied multitude, he sprang his surprise. “I now proclaim for this land its new mission,” he said, his voice ringing through the loudspeakers. “The oldest eastern province of the German people shall be from now on the youngest bulwark of the German nation. I can in this hour report before history the conclusion of the greatest aim in my life: the entry of my homeland into the German Reich.” Austria, he shouted, had come home; it would become an integral part of the Reich. The once grand Habsburg state, ruler of a global empire, had been annexed.
Almost overnight sixty thousand people were arrested. Schuschnigg was among them. He was destined to spend the next seven years in German concentration camps, his liberation by American troops coming in April 1945. Himmler ordered the construction of a concentration camp at Mauthausen, twelve miles from Linz, which began receiving prisoners later in the year. Like the other camps operating in the old Reich, it was intended to hold political prisoners, though some Jews were imprisoned there as well. Thousands would be worked to death in its infamous stone quarry, extracting gigantic granite slabs for Speer’s colossal building projects in Berlin and Nuremberg.
At the same time Hitler’s entry into the city triggered an avalanche of terror against the Jews even more extreme, more hateful than anything yet seen in Germany. Jews were forced to clean toilets in the SS barracks and, on their hands and knees, scrub pro-Schuschnigg slogans from the sidewalks, while taunting crowds gathered around to spit on them and jeer. The violence of the rampaging Nazi radicals reached new depths of cruelty and hate; a tidal wave of beatings, vandalism, and looting swept over the country. Nazi mobs dragged Jews from their homes and businesses and dispatched the men to concentration camps. Some Jews hastily fled, leaving behind virtually all their possessions. Some who had boarded trains bound for Prague and elsewhere were torn from the train at the border and returned to Vienna before landing in concentrat
ion camps in Bavaria. So savage and so public were the excesses of the Austrian Nazis that in late April Heydrich had to threaten those responsible with arrest by the Gestapo or expulsion from the SA in order to curb the violence. Like other similar orders, its effect was minimal.
Just as 1938 brought a new phase of Nazi anti-Jewish policy, the more brazen moves in Hitler’s foreign policy marked a dramatic turning point. Until the Anschluss, Hitler’s policy aimed at a revision of the loathsome Versailles Treaty. The withdrawal from the League of Nations in 1934, rearmament in 1935, and remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936 were all moves that could be seen as revising an unfair treaty and could be supported by the traditional right. But the Anschluss and later in the year the Czech crisis moved beyond revision into a new realm of National Socialist ideological politics.
A plebiscite was conducted with the usual Nazi intimidation on April 10, and its results were foreordained: just over 99 percent of the Austrian voters registered their support for their homeland’s incorporation in the Greater German Reich, as Hitler now called it. What the result might have been had Schuschnigg’s plebiscite been allowed to proceed is impossible to say. In late 1937 the Nazis were entangled in a bitter conflict with the Christian churches, and the pope’s encyclical “With Burning Concern” should have been a warning to Catholic Austria. Yet, on Hitler’s triumphal arrival in Vienna, Cardinal Theodor Innitzer, Archbishop of Vienna, ordered the bells of all Catholic churches to ring, and swastika banners fluttered from steeple after steeple. There can be no denying that a substantial part of the Austrian public, perhaps a majority, embraced, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, Anschluss with Germany, both for nationalist reasons and in the hope that it might bring an improvement to an Austrian economy still mired in the Depression.
In Germany, the Anschluss propelled Hitler’s popularity to new heights. After the pervasive “war psychosis” that had infected the public throughout the crisis, its triumphal conclusion prompted a tremendous burst of adulation for the Führer. No small amount of that sentiment was due to the fact that a great triumph had been achieved and war had been averted. “A powerful surge of enthusiasm and joy, a jubilation that knew almost no bounds” engulfed the country “when it became clear that the whole Austrian affair would go successfully, and that it would not come to war.” It was “difficult,” the Sopade concluded, “to judge how much of this general public euphoria sprang from the certainty that there would be no war because of Austria.”
* * *
Throughout the Austrian crisis, Hitler and his military commanders had worried about Czech intervention. Its territory protruded into central Germany, and with its highly developed armaments industry, sizable, well-equipped army, and formidable border fortifications, Czechoslovakia presented a serious obstacle to Germany’s eastward expansion. And, unlike Austria, Czechoslovakia was hardly isolated diplomatically; it had treaties with Germany’s two most implacable enemies, France and the Soviet Union. For months before the unanticipated Austrian crisis, Goebbels’s propaganda machine had churned out story after story of alleged Czech persecution of the German minority in the mountainous Sudeten border area. Equally intolerable, Hitler charged, Czechoslovakia and its Soviet ally were inserting Bolshevism into the very heart of Europe. Hitler loathed the Czech state: everything about it was, according to the German idiom, “a thorn in the Führer’s eye.” It was an illegitimate creation of the Versailles settlement; it was a parliamentary democracy; and its very existence was an impediment to Hitler’s expansionist aims.
The opportunity for intervention in Austria had fallen more or less into Hitler’s lap, but settling with Czechoslovakia, not Austria, had been Hitler’s top priority. It was then hardly a surprise that no sooner was the Anschluss a reality than Hitler turned his full attention once more to the Czech problem. The Sudetenland, a ragged mountainous region that rimmed western Czechoslovakia bordering the Reich, had a largely German population. With the rise of Hitler, the Sudeten German Party led by Konrad Henlein had begun to agitate against the Prague government. Hitler’s call for all ethnic Germans to come “home to the Reich” found considerable resonance among the three million Germans in the Sudetenland, especially after the Anschluss had brought ten million German Austrians into the Reich.
For years Berlin had covertly subsidized Henlein’s party, encouraging it to ratchet up the ongoing agitation against “Czech oppression.” Henlein was brought to Berlin and ordered to manufacture incidents that would whip up outrage among the German minority and provoke the Czech government to react with undue force. If a Sudeten German was shot, so much the better. Outrage piled upon outrage was Goebbels’s relentless propaganda drumbeat, each providing added justification for German intervention to protect the oppressed Sudeten Germans.
During the week of May 20–22, events seemed to push Europe to the brink of war. On Thursday, May 19, intelligence reports reaching Prague, Paris, and London claimed that German troop movements were under way near the Czech border. The intelligence was persuasive. Czech president Eduard Benes placed his military on high alert and ordered mobilization of the reserves, calling some 180,000 men to the colors. Exacerbating the mounting tension that weekend, Czech police shot and killed two Sudeten Germans. The threat of war seemed very real. On May 21, Lord Halifax, the British foreign secretary, who had only recently been quite amenable to German claims on Austria, informed Ribbentrop that the French were bound by treaty to intervene if Czechoslovakia were invaded, and Germany should not assume that Britain would simply stand aside.
Confronted by this apparently united front, Hitler retreated. He had been caught off guard, all the more so since there were no German maneuvers on the Czech frontier and no plans for an immediate invasion. After all the warlike bombast of the previous weeks, he was not prepared for this. While an almost audible sigh of relief rose from the capitals of Europe, Hitler’s fury was incandescent. Benes had humiliated him, and this he could not tolerate. A week later, on May 28, he summoned Keitel to prepare a revised Case Green. Originally drawn up in late 1937, Case Green was a contingency plan for an invasion of Czechoslovakia. Hitler now ordered Keitel to begin planning for a military strike against Czechoslovakia in the near future. It was not a plan to liberate the Sudeten Germans; it was a plan to destroy the Czech state. “It is my unshakable will to wipe Czechoslovakia off the map,” he told a special conference of his military commanders on May 28. They must understand that the destruction of Czechoslovakia was but a step in a much larger strategy to secure Lebensraum for the German people. But Germany could not proceed in the East if the hostile Czech state lurked to its rear. The time to strike was now. Britain and France did not want war; the Soviets were unprepared; Italy would be supportive or at the very least neutral. October 1 was set as the target date for invasion. In the meantime Germany would wage an intense propaganda campaign against the Czechs—its purpose “to intimidate the Czechs by means of threats and wear down their power of resistance.”
These plans alarmed General Ludwig Beck, chief of staff of the army. He had no qualms about moving against the Czechs at some point in the future, but he believed the German army was not yet ready for a war that would almost certainly involve Britain and France. He was not convinced by Hitler’s glib assurances that there would be no intervention by the Western powers. Just two days after Hitler’s conference with military leaders, Beck composed a memorandum that laid out his objections to Hitler’s plan. Some were technical and strategic, but his most scathing criticism was directed at Hitler’s political assumptions. An attack on Czechoslovakia was sheer madness and would almost certainly plunge Germany into catastrophe. He passed the memo along to General Brauchitsch, who agreed with its substance but chose to omit Beck’s damning preamble before presenting it to Hitler. Hitler, of course, scorned Beck’s memorandum, dismissing it as unworthy of discussion. He would brook no resistance; he was determined to smash Czechoslovakia.
After the weekend crisis in May, Europe enjoyed a brief
respite, but it was but a fleeting moment in a summer that bristled with high-voltage tension. Stung by his retreat in May, Hitler missed no opportunity to lash out at Czechoslovakia. His hatred of the Czechs and especially Benes knew no bounds, and his speeches grew more intemperate, his warlike rhetoric more incendiary. Hardly anyone in the West could believe that Hitler was seriously contemplating a war with the Czechs that would inevitably escalate into a major European conflict. But Hitler was unpredictable, his moods mercurial. Some, even in the diplomatic community, thought that he might be mad. Among the Nazi elite, Ribbentrop alone lent enthusiastic support to Hitler’s dangerous plans, concurring with his Führer’s evaluation of Britain and France. As the summer days passed and tensions mounted, Göring, who only months before had led the charge against Austria, grew more and more concerned about the international implications of an attack on Czechoslovakia.
Hitler was also encountering reservations from the military. Over the summer months Beck wrote a series of memoranda dilating on the dangers inherent in Hitler’s plans and circulated his objections to other leading military figures. He finally convinced Brauchitsch to call a meeting of senior army commanders in early August to discuss the issues. Many of the generals found much to agree with in Beck’s position; they, too, were deeply concerned about British and French intervention that would turn a limited war with Czechoslovakia into a European, perhaps world, war. None, however, was prepared to mount a direct challenge to the Führer. Brauchitsch approached Hitler on the matter, but after a severe tongue-lashing by the Führer, his courage deserted him. Beck’s hope of confronting Hitler with an ultimatum from a united front of his military commanders found little to no support. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of military intelligence (Abwehr), shared many of Beck’s concerns and indicated a willingness to take action, as did a number of other generals—Erwin von Witzleben, Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord, and Franz Halder—who were considering a plan to arrest Hitler as soon as the go-order for Case Green was given. But they were at this point an isolated minority.
The Third Reich Page 51
