It was a personal exoneration for General von Fritsch but it did not restore him to his command, nor the Army to its former position of some independence in the Third Reich. Since the trial was held in camera, the public knew nothing of it or of the issues involved. On March 25 Hitler sent a telegram to Fritsch congratulating him on his “recovery of health.” That was all.
The deposed General, who had declined to point an accusing finger at Himmler in court, now made a final futile gesture. He challenged the Gestapo chief to a duel. The challenge, drawn up in strict accordance with the old military code of honor by General Beck himself, was given to General von Rundstedt, as the senior ranking Army officer, to deliver to the head of the S.S. But Rundstedt got cold feet, carried it around in his pocket for weeks and in the end forgot it.
General von Fritsch, and all he stood for, soon faded out of German life. But what did he stand for in the end? In December he was writing his friend Baroness Margot von Schutzbar a letter which indicated the pathetic confusion into which he, like so many of the other generals, had fallen.
It is really strange that so many people should regard the future with increasing fears, in spite of the Fuehrer’s indisputable successes during the past years …
Soon after the war I came to the conclusion that we should have to be victorious in three battles if Germany were to become powerful again:
The battle against the working class—Hitler has won this.
Against the Catholic Church, perhaps better expressed against Ultramontanism, and
Against the Jews.
We are in the midst of these battles and the one against the Jews is the most difficult. I hope everyone realizes the intricacies of this campaign.43
On August 7, 1939, as the war clouds darkened, he wrote the Baroness: “For me there is, neither in peace nor in war, any part in Herr Hitler’s Germany. I shall accompany my regiment only as a target, because I cannot stay at home.”
That is what he did. On August 11, 1938, he had been named colonel in chief of his old regiment, the 12th Artillery Regiment, a purely honorary title. On September 22, 1939, he was the target of a Polish machine gunner before beleaguered Warsaw, and four days later he was buried with full military honors in Berlin on a cold, rainy, dark morning, one of the dreariest days, according to my diary, I ever lived through in the capital.
With Fritsch’s discharge as Commander in Chief of the German Army twenty months before, Hitler had won, as we have seen, a complete victory over the last citadel of possible opposition in Germany, the old, traditional Army officer caste. Now, in the spring of 1938, by his clever coup in Austria, he had further established his hold on the Army, demonstrating his bold leadership and emphasizing that he alone would make the decisions in foreign policy and that it was the Army’s role merely to supply the force, or the threat of force. Moreover, he had given the Army, without the sacrifice of a man, a strategic position which rendered Czechoslovakia militarily indefensible. There was no time to lose in taking advantage of it.
On April 21, eleven days after the Nazi plebiscite on Austria, Hitler called in General Keitel, Chief of the High Command of the Armed Forces, to discuss Case Green.
* Which happened to be the fourth anniversary of the slaughter of the Austrian Social Democrats by the Dollfuss government, of which Schuschnigg was a member. On February 12, 1934, seventeen thousand government troops and fascist militia had turned artillery on the workers’ flats in Vienna, killing a thousand men, women and children and wounding three or four thousand more. Democratic political freedom was stamped out and Austria thereafter was ruled first by Dollfuss and then by Schuschnigg as a clerical-fascist dictatorship. It was certainly milder than the Nazi variety, as those of us who worked in both Berlin and Vienna in those days can testify. Nevertheless it deprived the Austrian people of their political freedom and subjected them to more repression than they had known under the Hapsburgs in the last decades of the monarchy. The author has discussed this more fully in Midcentury Journey.
* Later Dr. Schuschnigg wrote down from memory an account of what he calls the “significant passages” of the one-sided conversation, and though it is therefore not a verbatim record it rings true to anyone who has heard and studied Hitler’s countless utterances and its substance is verified not only by all that happened subsequently but by others who were present at the Berghof that day, notably Papen, Jodl and Guido Schmidt. I have followed Schuschnigg’s account given in his book Austrian Requiem and in his Nuremberg affidavit on the meeting.4
† It is evident that Hitler’s warped version of Austro–German history, which, as we have seen in earlier chapters, was picked up in his youth at Linz and Vienna, remained unchanged.
* Papen’s version (see his Memoirs, p. 420) is somewhat different, but that of Schuschnigg rings more true.
* Wilhelm Canaris was head of the Intelligence Bureau (Abwehr) of OKW.
* According to the testimony of President Miklas during a trial of an Austrian Nazi in Vienna after the war, the plebiscite was suggested to Schuschnigg by France. Papen in his memoirs suggests that the French minister in Vienna, M. Puaux, a close personal friend of the Chancellor, was the “father of the plebiscite idea.” He concedes, however, that Schuschnigg certainly adopted it on his own responsibility.18
* The stricken passages were found after the war in the archives of the Italian Foreign Ministry.
* Drawing the frontier at the Brenner was a sop to Mussolini. It meant that Hitler would not be asking for the return of the southern Tyrol, which was taken from Austria and awarded to Italy at Versailles.
† In all fairness, it should be pointed out that Schuschnigg’s plebiscite was scarcely more free or democratic than those perpetrated by Hitler in Germany. Since there had been no free elections in Austria since 1933, there were no up-to-date polling lists. Only those persons above twenty-four were eligible to vote. Only four days’ notice of the plebiscite had been given to the public, so there was no time for campaigning even if the opposition groups, the Nazis and the Social Democrats, had been free to do so. The Social Democrats undoubtedly would have voted Ja, since they regarded Schuschnigg as a lesser evil than Hitler and moreover had been promised the restoration of political freedom. There is no question that their vote would have given Schuschnigg a victory.
* In his postwar testimony already referred to, Miklas denied that he asked Schuschnigg to say any such thing or that he even agreed that the broadcast should be made. Contrary to what the retiring Chancellor said, the President was not yet ready to yield to force. “Things have not gone so far that we must capitulate,” he says he told Schuschnigg. He had just turned down the second German ultimatum. He was standing firm. But Schuschnigg’s broadcast did help to undermine his position and force his hand. As we shall see, the obstinate old President held out for several hours more before capitulating. On March 13, he refused to sign the Anschluss law snuffing out Austria’s independent existence which Seyss-Inquart, at Hitler’s insistence, promulgated. Though he surrendered the functions of his office to the Nazi Chancellor for as long as he was prevented from carrying them out, he maintained that he never formally resigned as President. “It would have been too cowardly,” he later explained to a Vienna court. This did not prevent Seyss-Inquart from announcing officially on March 13 that “the President, upon request of the Chancellor,” had “resigned from his office” and that his “affairs” were transferred to the Chancellor.28
* Marked “Top Secret” and identified as Directive No. 2 of Operation Otto, it read in part: “The demands of the German ultimatum to the Austrian government have not been fulfilled … To avoid further bloodshed in Austrian cities, the entry of the German armed forces into Austria will commence, according to Directive No. 1, at daybreak of March 12. I expect the set objectives to be reached by exerting all forces to the full as quickly as possible. (Signed) Adolf Hitler.”29
† Actually, Seyss-Inquart tried until long after midnight to get Hitler to call off the Ger
man invasion. A German Foreign Office memorandum reveals that at 2:10 A.M. on March 12 General Muff telephoned Berlin and stated that on the instructions of Chancellor Seyss-Inquart he was requesting that “the alerted troops should remain on, but not cross, the border.” Keppler also came on the telephone to support the request. General Muff, a decent man and an officer of the old school, seems to have been embarrassed by his role in Vienna. When he was informed by Berlin that Hitler declined to halt his troops he replied that he “regretted this message.”30
* In his testimony at Nuremberg Guido Schmidt swore that both he and Schuschnigg informed the envoys of the “Big Powers” of Hitler’s ultimatum “in detail.”32 Moreover, the Vienna correspondents of the Times and the Daily Telegraph of London, to my knowledge, also telephoned their respective newspapers a full and accurate report.
* Churchill has given an amusing description of this luncheon in The Gathering Storm (pp. 271–72).
† The lies were repeated in a circular telegram dispatched by Baron von Weizsaecker of the Foreign Office March 12 to German envoys abroad for “information and orientation of your conversations.” Weizsaecker stated that Schuschnigg’s declaration concerning a German ultimatum “was sheer fabrication” and went on to inform his diplomats abroad: “The truth was that the question of sending military forces … was first raised in the well-known telegram of the newly formed Austrian government. In view of the imminent danger of civil war, the Reich government decided to comply with this appeal.”37 Thus the German Foreign Office lied not only to foreign diplomats but to its own. In a long and ineffectual book written after the war Weizsaecker, like so many other Germans who served Hitler, maintained that he was anti-Nazi all along.
‡ In his testimony at Nuremberg on August 9, 1946, Field Marshal von Manstein emphasized that “at the time when Hitler gave us the orders for Austria his chief worry was not so much that there might be interference on the part of the Western Powers, but his only worry was as to how Italy would behave, because it appeared that Italy always sided with Austria and the Hapsburgs.”38
* Yet underneath the ecstasy, and unnoticed by the shallow Papen, there may have burned in Hitler a feeling of revenge for a city and a people which had not appreciated him as a young man and which at heart he despised. This in part may have accounted for his brief stay. Though a few weeks later he would publicly say to the burgomaster of Vienna, “Be assured that this city is in my eyes a pearl—I will bring it into a setting which is worthy of it,” this was probably more electioneering propaganda than an expression of his inner feelings. These feelings were revealed to Baldur von Schirach, the Nazi Governor and Gauleiter of Vienna during the war, at a heated meeting at the Berghof in 1943. Describing it during his testimony at Nuremberg, Schirach said:
Then the Fuehrer began with, I might say, incredible and unlimited hatred to speak against the people of Vienna…. At four o’clock in the morning Hitler suddenly said something which I should now like to repeat for historical reasons. He said: “Vienna should never have been admitted into the Union of the Greater Germany.” Hitler never loved Vienna. He hated its people.41
Papen’s own festive spirits on March 14 were spoiled that same day when he learned that Wilhelm von Ketteler, his close friend and aide at the German Legation, had disappeared under circumstances which indicated foul play by the Gestapo. Three years before, another friend and collaborator at the legation, Baron Tschirschky, had fled to England to escape certain death from the S.S. At the end of April Ketteler’s body was fished out of the Danube, where Gestapo thugs in Vienna had thrown it after murdering him.
* A few months later, on October 8, the cardinal’s palace opposite St. Stephen’s Cathedral was sacked by Nazi hooligans. Too late Innitzer had learned what National Socialism was, and had spoken out in a sermon against the Nazi persecution of his Church.
* Austrian Requiem.
† At this time Schuschnigg was a widower.
* See previous chapter.
12
THE ROAD TO MUNICH
CASE GREEN WAS THE CODE NAME of the plan for a surprise attack on Czechoslovakia. It had first been drawn up, as we have seen, on June 24, 1937, by Field Marshal von Blomberg, and Hitler had elaborated on it in his lecture to the generals on November 5, admonishing them that “the descent upon the Czechs” would have to be “carried out with lightning speed” and that it might take place “as early as 1938.”*
Obviously, the easy conquest of Austria now made Case Green a matter of some urgency; the plan must be brought up to date and preparations for carrying it out begun. It was for this purpose that Hitler summoned Keitel on April 21, 1938. On the following day, Major Rudolf Schmundt, the Fuehrer’s new military aide, prepared a summary of the discussion, which was divided into three parts: “political aspects,” “military conclusions” and “propaganda.”1
Hitler rejected the “idea of strategic attack out of the blue without cause or possibility of justification” because of “hostile world opinion which might lead to a critical situation.” He thought a second alternative, “action after a period of diplomatic discussions which gradually lead to a crisis and to war,” was “undesirable because Czech (Green) security measures will have been taken.” The Fuehrer preferred, at the moment at least, a third alternative: “Lightning action based on an incident (for example, the murder of the German minister in the course of an anti-German demonstration).”† Such an “incident,” it will be remembered, was at one time planned to justify a German invasion of Austria, when Papen was to have been the victim. In Hitler’s gangster world German envoys abroad were certainly expendable.
The German warlord, as he now was—since he had taken over personal command of the armed forces—emphasized to General Keitel the necessity of speed in the operations.
The first four days of military action are, politically speaking, decisive. In the absence of outstanding military successes, a European crisis is certain to rise. Faits accomplis must convince foreign powers of the hopelessness of military intervention.
As for the propaganda side of the war, it was not yet time to call in Dr. Goebbels. Hitler merely discussed leaflets “for the conduct of the Germans in Czechoslovakia” and those which would contain “threats to intimidate the Czechs.”
The Republic of Czechoslovakia, which Hitler was now determined to destroy, was the creation of the peace treaties, so hateful to the Germans, after the First World War. It was also the handiwork of two remarkable Czech intellectuals, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, a self-educated son of a coachman, who became a noted savant and the country’s first President; and Eduard Beneš, son of a peasant, who worked his way through the University of Prague and three French institutions of higher learning, and who after serving almost continually as Foreign Minister became the second President on the retirement of Masaryk in 1935. Carved out of the Hapsburg Empire, which in the sixteenth century had acquired the ancient Kingdom of Bohemia, Czechoslovakia developed during the years that followed its founding in 1918 into the most democratic, progressive, enlightened and prosperous state in Central Europe.
But by its very make-up of several different nationalities it was gripped from the beginning by a domestic problem which over twenty years it had not been able entirely to solve. This was the question of its minorities. Within the country lived one million Hungarians, half a million Ruthenians and three and a quarter million Sudeten Germans. These peoples looked longingly toward their “mother” countries, Hungary, Russia, and Germany respectively, though the Sudeteners had never belonged to the German Reich (except as a part of the loosely formed Holy Roman Empire) but only to Austria. At the least, these minorities desired more autonomy than they had been given.
Even the Slovaks, who formed a quarter of the ten million Czechoslovaks, wanted some measure of autonomy. Although racially and linguistically closely related to the Czechs, the Slovaks had developed differently—historically, culturally and economically—largely due to their centuries-old domination by Hu
ngary. An agreement between Czech and Slovak émigrés in America signed in Pittsburgh on May 30, 1918, had provided for the Slovaks’ having their own government, parliament and courts. But the government in Prague had not felt bound by this agreement and had not kept it.
To be sure, compared to minorities in most other countries even in the West, even in America, those in Czechoslovakia were not badly off. They enjoyed not only full democratic and civil rights—including the right to vote—but to a certain extent were given their own schools and allowed to maintain their own cultural institutions. Leaders of the minority political parties often served as ministers in the central government. Nevertheless, the Czechs, not fully recovered from the effects of centuries of oppression by the Austrians, left a great deal to be desired in solving the minorities problem. They were often chauvinistic and frequently tactless. I recall from my own earlier visits to the country the deep resentment in Slovakia against the imprisonment of Dr. Vojtech Tuka, at that time a respected professor, who had been sentenced to fifteen years’ confinement “for treason,” though it was doubtful that he was guilty of more than working for Slovak autonomy. Above all, the minority groups felt that the Czechoslovak government had not honored the promises made by Masaryk and Beneš to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 to establish a cantonal system similar to that of Switzerland.
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich Page 57
