Schuschnigg was able to redeem himself before the Austrian people to some degree with his speech to the diet on the 24th – a holy day in Germany as the anniversary of the Party’s foundation. He declared ‘Rotweissrot bis in den Tot’,vii and thereafter, in his patriotic announcements in various Austrian cities, he whipped up a last-ditch enthusiasm for the independent Austrian cause. Schuschnigg had moved too late, however, to unite the country. He needed to bring the socialists and the trade unions back within the pale of the constitution and they told him that they could not fight the country’s enemies with their hands tied. Even the former Emperor’s son Otto urged him to bring in some socialists.
In Berlin, Goebbels noted renewed activity among the legitimists behind Otto.60 When the crunch came, however, there was no serious attempt by the left or the right to move against the Nazi menace, which might have been brought down by a general strike, after the model of the 1920 Kapp Putsch in Germany. Schuschnigg’s assertion of Austrian independence incensed Hitler and his circle. Goebbels thought him ‘a little pig’. Schuschnigg’s resistance, however puny, forced the Nazis to abandon the evolutionary method: ‘In the end we are really going to have to use force.’61
Some read the signals correctly. On 17 February the temperamental Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini cabled the Austrian government to inform it that he would not be conducting at Salzburg, or anywhere else in Austria. He had flirted with Mussolini, but enough was enough. The musical director of the Vienna Philharmonic, Bruno Walter, urged him to reconsider.62 On Sunday, 27 February, Walter conducted the Vienna Philharmonic for the last time. The music-loving Chancellor Schuschnigg was in his box. He was at the height of his popularity and was cheered wherever he went. In Berlin, Goebbels was playing cat and mouse with the conductor Furtwängler again. Goebbels had not foreseen that Austria would fall to Germany so quickly: ‘I will let him get up again, otherwise he’ll leave for Vienna or Salzburg.’63
As the Reich’s cultural supremo, Goebbels was concerned about painting as well as music. The ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition that pilloried avant-garde German painting was opening in the partly ruinous Reichstag building in Berlin, and he was in close contact with the curator, the painter Adolf Ziegler. On Sunday the 27th he went along to have a look. There were new elements to the show, which had opened in Munich the year before. ‘What rubbish!’ noted the former collector of progressive modern artists such as Emil Nolde and Ernst Barlach. Still, he did not feel that the message struck hard enough, and ordered that the paintings be rehung.64
In the second week of February, Goebbels was angry that the courts still failed to grasp the fact that they were meant to act according to the wishes of the government. Some homosexual members of the Party had been arraigned in Stuttgart: ‘I hope there will be the most draconian sentences.’ Another case was refusing to go as planned. Pastor Martin Niemöller of the Confessing Church was in the dock for subversion. He had managed, however, to make use of the courtroom and freely air his criticisms of the regime. ‘Just wait until I get hold of that pig Niemöller. The lawyers are incompetent twits.’ Goebbels was particularly livid that the pastor had spoken for seven hours about his ‘heroic life’.65 Goebbels succeeded in having the case heard in camera, and Niemöller was transferred from Moabit Prison in Berlin to Sachsenshausen on 2 March after being sentenced to seven months’ ‘fortress detention’.
With Niemöller out of the way, the Opposition lost one of its most important early leaders, but others arose to take his place. At the very end of the month Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg returned from his skiing holiday in Bergen, and Helldorf put him in the picture about Fritsch. That very day, Monday the 28th, Helldorf informed General von Stülpnagel of the activities of the Opposition to date. Fritsch’s agony had not ceased: a few days later he was interrogated in a Wannsee villa. The theme was no longer his purported homosexuality, but also his political reliability. Fritsch protested that these sessions were a disgrace to him and the army.66
3
MARCH
On 1 March – Shrove Tuesday – Hermann Göring received his new field marshal’s baton from his Führer. The portly former air ace had failed in his bid to yet further expand his portfolio of offices. The carnage lay all around him in the form of the shattered careers of Blomberg and Fritsch. He had been fobbed off with a bauble. Klemperer noted bitterly, ‘They have no sense of how ridiculous they are.’1
The Austrian plum was ripening, but Seyss-Inquart was warning Berlin that Schuschnigg was not intending to play straight. There was still a nagging fear that Mussolini would come to Austria’s aid, as he had done four years before, when the Nazis murdered Chancellor Dollfuss. Meanwhile Hitler’s underlings were as disunited as ever, with Goebbels increasingly critical of Himmler’s methods. Berlin’s Gauleiter thought making Germany into a police state bred ‘cowardice, fear and hypocrisy’.2
Goebbels was also annoyed about the proceedings against Fritsch, which he thought ‘no longer decent. There is hardly a shred of evidence. In any case, they should never have drawn the Führer into the business.’3 Hitler had continued to agonize right up to the moment he dismissed his army chief. At much the same time, Fritsch’s defence lawyer Rüdiger Graf von der Goltz at last learned that the evidence the Gestapo was using against Fritsch was actually from the Rittmeister von Frisch dossier. The following day Helldorf took that file to Oster at the Abwehr. On Sunday, 6 March, Schulenburg appeared at Goltz’s house to warn the lawyer that he might be being watched by the Gestapo. Were his servants reliable? He also checked the telephone for listening devices.4
The court of honour was to sit in judgement on Fritsch at the Preussenhaus, or old House of Lords, on the 10th. The judges were Göring, Raeder and Brauchitsch. Goltz, who had been able to offer Fritsch some solace at the end of February, now possessed the proof that the case was as leaky as a sieve: ‘Colonel-General,’ said Goltz, ‘you may now celebrate your victory.’ The lawyer brought the general a bunch of red roses.
A few days before, Schulenburg paid a call on General von Witzleben to assess the possibility of an armed revolt. Witzleben had been ill in January but was now open to representations of this sort. He told Schulenburg that Colonel Paul von Hase was prepared to march on Berlin with his regiment, and that he himself had already talked to Hase about this very subject. Witzleben was still smarting from the murders of the former Chancellor Schleicher and General von Bredow during the Night of the Long Knives. An old-fashioned Prussian officer who wore his heart on his sleeve, in 1937 he had sounded out several generals on the need to prevent Hitler from taking Germany to war. As he was fond of saying: ‘I know nothing about politics but I certainly don’t need to in order to know what I have to do.’ He almost certainly made contact as well with Oster, who was able to put him in touch with Schulenburg and Ulrich Wilhelm Graf von Schwerin-Schwanenfeld.5
On 10 March, the president of the court of honour, Göring, was preoccupied with Austria, and the Fritsch case was adjourned until the 17th. Initially Schmidt continued to stick to his story, but when it was proved to have been a case of mistaken identity he finally broke down. On the 18th he admitted, ‘Jawohl, ich ha’ jelogen’ (‘Yes, I was lying’).6 Some of the leading Nazis begrudgingly admitted that the case against Fritsch was null and void. On 1 April, Hitler even went so far as to send Fritsch a goodwill message congratulating him from recovering from an illness. Goebbels rightly called it ‘cold comfort’ for the loss of his entire world.7
THE ANSCHLUSS
On 5 March, two Nazis, Seyss-Inquart and Glaise-Horstenau, were admitted to the Austrian Cabinet. The Deutsche Grüss, or raised-arm salute, was permitted in private circles. Yet Chancellor Schuschnigg had evidently decided that he could go no farther down the road designated at Berchtesgaden and felt he needed to summon his parliament. The agreement framed in 1936 was as far as it went. ‘Austria can and will live. It will never voluntarily give up its national existence.’8 Austria was German, Schuschnigg was convinced of that,
but he was not prepared to become part of a National Socialist or ‘Prussian’-dominated Germany. The mention of Prussia was yet more evidence that Schuschnigg was trying to manipulate his people: there was nothing Prussian about Hitler or his regime, but after the victories of Frederick the Great in the eighteenth century and the Austrian defeat at Königgrätz in 1866, the Prussians were loathed in Austria.
Austria was falling apart. There was a demonstration in Schuschnigg’s favour in Vienna, but Nazis ran up a swastika flag at Graz town hall. Ciano heard that Seyss would soon become Chancellor: ‘The Duce is now strongly critical.’9 Otto von Habsburg implored Schuschnigg to appoint him instead. The writer and director Ernst Lothar went to see Schuschnigg on Sunday, 6 March, in the little house he lived in at Upper Belvedere. Lothar voiced the fears of Austria’s Jews in the light of Schuschnigg’s appointing Nazis to his cabinet. He suggested that Schuschnigg should make Bruno Walter director of the National Opera. The Chancellor agreed and asked Lothar to talk him round. They then lapsed into a pleasant conversation about Walter’s interpretation of Bruckner.10
Lothar saw Schuschnigg again two days later, on Tuesday the 8th, at the Ball of the Vaterländische Front. He and his ministers were dressed in the black uniforms of the Ostmärkische Sturmscharen.i Lothar thought they looked like SS-men and said so. The party secretary, the poet Guido Zernatto, merely shrugged his shoulders.11 Schuschnigg’s policy was to remove the attractions of Nazism by offering his people an imitative home-grown version. He had decided on a radical course of action, possibly encouraged by the French, who wanted evidence that there was no majority for unification with Germany: Schuschnigg was going to hold a plebiscite instead. He went to Innsbruck on 9 March for a meeting of the Front and made the announcement from the balcony of the royal palace. The poll was to be held on 13 March ‘for a free and independent, German and Christian Austria’.
Schuschnigg was becoming brave, encouraged by the international response to his defiant speech of 24 February.12 For most people, his decision to call a plebiscite came as a bolt from the blue. He had sounded out Mussolini on Monday the 7th, but the latter had given him no leave to hope: ‘C’è un errore,’ the Duce told the Austrian envoy Colonel Liebitzky. Mussolini had been pleased to hear of Schuschnigg’s resistance, but he was aware that Italy was in no position to fight Germany to maintain Austrian independence. Now there was a risk of losing everything.13 Halifax thought much the same: ‘foolish and provocative’, he dubbed it.14 Hitler was not expecting it at all and was initially at a loss to know how to respond. He had sent Ribbentrop to London, so now he would pretend that the RAM was seeking British agreement to the Anschluss.15 Goebbels was also caught unawares: Schuschnigg, he thought, was a nasty peasant who was trying to catch them out. Once he had recovered, Hitler realized that it was just the provocation he was looking for.16 The Anschluss would be accelerated.
When the news broke in the Berlin Chancellery, Spitzy likened the mood among its denizens to an angry swarm of hornets. His master Ribbentrop was away in London, saying his adieus, and Schuschnigg was very probably aware of this. He ran into Hitler’s adjutants Julius Schaub and Wilhelm Brückner, who were rude: ‘No one is interested in you diplomats,’ said Schaub – ‘and not in the slightest bit in your boss’, added Brückner. They were wrong: Hitler wanted to see Spitzy and vent his fury about the plebiscite: ‘Listen to me. This Schoschnik [sic], he wants to betray me . . . and by the foulest tricks like public polls, the exclusion of younger voters, an embargo on propaganda from the opposition and so on. That is an outrage, and I shall not tolerate it.’17
Jodl noted in his diary that the plebiscite would bring in a ‘strong majority for the monarchists’ who were backing Otto Habsburg.18 That would have added to Hitler’s fear of a restoration, and not just Hitler’s: the Czechs too were petrified by the idea of the return of the monarchy. The Austrian Chancellor sent out feelers to European capitals to see if there was support for military action against Germany. Ciano thought it bad news: ‘The Nazis are rising against the Plebiscite . . . Schuschnigg has made a fatal mistake . . . The Plebiscite bomb is fated to explode in his hands.’19 The subject was brought up in the French Chamber, where there was a desire to take ‘positive’ steps to preserve Austrian independence.20 The British Foreign Office were still resigned to what they perceived as Austria’s inevitable fate.21
Schuschnigg and his men threw all the energy of the Corporate State into the poll. Huge numbers of flysheets were printed and distributed by its various organizations, the Jungvolk (the Corporate State’s version of the Hitler Youth) in particular. Some were scattered by aircraft in Austria’s most remote and snowbound corners, where many voters would have been Nazis. Lorries trundled about, transmitting the message of Austrian independence by loudspeaker. Planes trailing banners carried the word ‘Ja’ over the cities. A flysheet showed Schuschnigg and the Austrian Kruckenkreuz, the Corporate State’s version of the swastika.ii Another displayed a group of three men, partly wearing Austrian folk costume, again with the Kruckenkreuz. Everywhere the German theme was pushed home: to be a good Austrian was to be a good German; to be German was to be free. Austrians were better Germans than the Nazis.22
The plebiscite almost certainly accelerated the end of Austria,23 which raises the question: was there an element of provocation? The age qualification was raised to twenty-four to make it impossible for young Nazi thugs to register their views. The electoral roll was not up to date anyway and there was no possibility of revising it in so short a time. Voters simply had to produce identification to register. Moreover, the ballot slip was printed with the word ‘Ja’. Anyone who did not want to keep an independent Christian Austria had to cut out a piece of paper himself and write the word ‘Nein’. ‘Devious and shabby’ was how one contemporary described it.24 Göring gleefully pointed out at his trial that there were plenty of opportunities to rig the ballot – it was not in any way fair.25
On 10 March, German Heroes’ Remembrance Day, Goebbels arrived at the Chancellery in Berlin to find Hitler bent over maps of Austria. The leader of the Austrian Legion, Reschny, was worried that the Austrian army would fight if Schuschnigg told them to.26 Lothar went to Linz and noted that Schuschnigg’s popularity was running high: a boy who shouted ‘Heil Hitler!’ was all but lynched.27 Schuschnigg returned to Vienna that day and a furious Hitler ordered his military chiefs to prepare for an invasion on the 12th. Göring postponed the Fritsch trial sine die and rushed off to join Hitler. He was delighted that he could control German foreign policy during Ribbentrop’s absence.
The humiliated RAM was stuck in London with instructions from Hitler not to move. He was to represent the German government in the course of the crisis. Like many of his contemporaries, Chamberlain had a low opinion of Ribbentrop’s intelligence. It was not just with Britain that Ribbentrop was prone to putting his foot in it. In his passion for signing a German-Japanese alliance, he destroyed a profitable Sino-German trading relationship that provided Germany with wolfram, among other things.28 The RAM learned of the Anschluss from Chamberlain, Halifax and Cadogan in the course of lunch at Downing Street, and followed its progress on the BBC.29 To add insult to injury, his predecessor Neurath was temporarily brought back to the Wilhelmstrasse to deal with the flak from abroad. Many other important members of the gang were missing too. Brauchitsch was on leave and Reichenau in Cairo. Keitel was asked to produce the Case Otto file and Beck to move two army corps to the frontier. Hitler still wanted a pretext for going in. Göring thought that was eyewash: they should go in anyway.
Schuschnigg issued the news to government and ministers as late as he could. The headquarters of the government party, the Fatherland Front, also had a visit from Dr Desider Friedmann of the Jewish Congregation or IKG (Israelitische Kultus Gemeinde), who brought a cheque for 500,000 Schillings. The following day he brought them another for 300,000.30 It was a reflection of the degree of anxiety that was going through the community. As the writer Gina Kaus put it, they ho
ped to win, ‘but we were worried for all that’.31 They were conscious that if Austria fell they would suffer a terrible fate. For Hitler, the affirmation of an independent Austria would amount to a humiliation.
On 11 March Hitler performed the first ever invasion by telephone. The Chief of Police, Dr Skubl, rang Schuschnigg at 5.30 a.m. to tell him that the border had been closed at Salzburg. The pious Austrian Chancellor’s first reaction was to take himself off to Mass at the cathedral. When he reached the Chancellery he discovered that German forces had been mobilized in Bavaria and that Seyss-Inquart had disappeared. As it transpired, the German mobilization had been chaotic: the General Staff possessed no proper plans. Later many units actually broke down on the road between Linz and Vienna. It was a godsend that the Austrians offered no resistance.
No one had had much sleep in Berlin. Goebbels had been scribbling propaganda for most of the night, preparing to drop thirteen million leaflets on Austria in response to Schuschnigg. Papen arrived from Vienna to find Neurath, Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick, Himmler, Brauchitsch, Keitel and their retinue. He was kept in the dark in an antechamber of the Chancellery while the others took decisions. Around midday Hitler sent word to Mussolini, through Prince Philip of Hesse, that Case Otto would go ahead whatever the Duce said. He took the trouble to sugar the pill: his letter contained ‘a precise declaration about the recognition of the Brenner as the frontier of Italy’.32
1938: Hitler's Gamble Page 5
