1938: Hitler's Gamble
Page 6
Hitler was a furious bundle of nerves, unable to issue coherent orders, and it was Göring who directed the Anschluss. At 9.30 a.m., Seyss-Inquart and his fellow Nazi minister Glaise-Horstenau arrived at the Austrian Chancellery in the Ballhausplatz. Göring issued an ultimatum at around 10 a.m.: he wanted the plebiscite postponed within the hour and another one announced, to be carried out under the system established by the Germans in the Saar.iii When Schuschnigg made inquiries in Graz he learned that the postponement had already taken place and that he had apparently resigned. When the Chancellor asked if he could rely on the police to defend Vienna he was told that, since the amnesty, the Nazis had been reinstated, and that their loyalty to the Austrian Republic was doubtful. Schuschnigg was sure that the army was reliable, but he was convinced that Austria should not go to war with Germany – there was to be no repeat of 1866. He decided at 2.45 p.m. to postpone the plebiscite, and called the loyal members of his cabinet to inform them. The scene in Vienna must have been rendered all the more absurd by the ubiquity of loudspeakers blaring out the national hymn O Du mein Österreich. Within a few weeks most of his ministers and senior bureaucrats would be breaking stones in Dachau.
Seyss-Inquart went to report the decision to Göring, who was closeted with Hitler. Communication was not helped by a faulty telephone connection between the two countries. As there was insufficient power to take the calls to his private apartments, Hitler and Göring had to wait for news at the Berlin Chancellery switchboard. Göring’s prodigious girth meant there was scarcely room for anyone else in the small room. Hitler was standing with one knee on a sofa nervously twisting the curtain cord with his hand when Seyss finally came on the line. In his excitement he managed to pull down the curtain. ‘Yes, he should act!’ Hitler shouted.33
At 5.30 Seyss returned to Schuschnigg with a notebook containing the Reichsmarschall’s prescription: ‘The situation can only be saved if the Austrian Chancellor resigns immediately and if Dr Seyss-Inquart is appointed Chancellor within two hours. If these conditions are not fulfilled, German armies will move on Austria.’34 In Berlin it was still not certain whether the army would go in.35 Other conditions in the ultimatum had to be carried out by 7.30 and Seyss grumbled that he was being treated like a receptionist. German forces were already mustered at the border. In Austria, public Tannoys told men born in 1915 to report to the colours: a partial mobilization.36 Troops were positioned here and there and morale was good, but nothing more came of it. A unit moving up to the border from the Neusiedlersee was greeted with mild enthusiasm in some places, and at others – like the small towns of Melk and Amstetten – by a population that had already gone over to Hitler. The general inspector of the Austrian army, Sigismund Schilhawsky, described military resistance as ‘pointless’ because Austria could not hope for any immediate support from outside. By 6 p.m. the troops were sent back to their barracks.37
Lothar experienced this at first hand in Amstetten. There was a Nazi parade in the town and the firemen’s band was playing the Horst-Wessel-Lied. At that moment the Austrian army arrived, making for the Austrian-German frontier. Lothar talked to the captain, who told him, ‘We left Vienna to avoid bloodshed. From tomorrow we will be no more than a unit in the German armed forces.’38 At that stage Hitler had not fully decided on his course. The idea was to make him Federal President and the rest could come gradually.39 State Secretary Hornborstl madly telephoned potential saviours. The Italians had already washed their hands of Austria.40 No one was prepared to guarantee the state. Halifax replied that he could offer nothing. In the circumstances Schuschnigg meekly did what was required of him and went, but he insisted on the correct form and tendered his resignation. In his memoirs Schuschnigg allowed himself a reflection: ‘That day meant not only the end of Austrian independence, it also meant the end of international morals.’ It is a wonder it took him so long to realize the gravity of the situation.
While the Austrian Chancellor slowly divested himself of his offices, Seyss-Inquart and Glaise-Horstenau sat in a corner of the Chancellery and received messengers with close-cropped or shaven heads, ‘most of them with heavy sabre scars across their faces’.41 The Nazis had moved in. One was Gauleiter Joseph Bürckel from the Saar, who was meant to take over Papen’s job.42 Keppler had landed at Aspern in his private aeroplane. Hess came by train.43 The new brooms snatched telephones from the hands of loyal officials and slammed them down. After tendering his resignation, Schuschnigg returned to the Ballhausplatz to clear his desk. He was observed by the images on the wall: the death mask of Dollfuss, murdered in the office next door, and the Empress Maria Theresa. He rehearsed the golden moments of Austrian history, prompted by the same pictures of the great and good, and the hall that in 1814 and 1815 had witnessed the glory days of the Congress of Vienna.
A retainer entered to tell him that the Germans were broadcasting reports of a communist uprising in Austria. The government was said to be helpless, and there were hundreds of casualties. The announcement of his resignation was broadcast at around 7 p.m. Miklas was still fierce in his reluctance to appoint Seyss-Inquart Chancellor, but he ultimately gave in half an hour later. Schuschnigg’s departure was the signal to the Nazi thugs to take over: the violence began as local bosses were ousted from their offices and the barracks of the Fatherland Front were taken over. Avoiding bloodshed did not enter into the Nazi agenda.
At the cabaret Simplicissimus, the German comedian Fritz Grünbaum made his last appearance before he and his partner Karl Farkas were banned. The lights had already been switched off. ‘I can’t see a thing, nothing at all. I must have stumbled on to the Nazi cultural stage.’44
In the Jewish-owned Café Herrenhof, the German exile Walter Mehring was sitting with his agent when Seyss-Inquart and Glaise-Horstenau came in to confer. It was Seyss-Inquart’s Stammlokal.iv The waiter told Mehring, ‘Seyss ordered only soup. Now it’s getting serious.’45
Schuschnigg made his last broadcast at 8.15 that evening. He had postponed the plebiscite as he had been determined to avoid bloodshed at all cost. Gina Kaus lived above the Jockey Club. She listened to the speech and went to the window and looked down on to the Lobkowitzplatz, where she saw a policeman put away his red, white, red armband and put on a swastika: evidence that the police played a crucial role in the death of Austria’s First Republic. Her lover Eduard Frischauer, a baptized Jew whose uncle owned a Sunday newspaper, said, ‘We leave tomorrow.’46
Austrian army units received orders to withdraw towards the east – they were not to open fire. Hitler was also cheered by the news from Austria: now that he knew the army had been muzzled, he gave the order for his troops to march at 8.45 p.m.47 At 10.30, he received the information he had been waiting for: Mussolini gave him the go-ahead. Hitler was delighted. He told Göring’s friend Prince Philip that he would never forget Mussolini’s gesture, and he never did.
Hitler’s Austrian agent, Keppler, had already moved into his office. The initial arrests were going ahead, and Mayor Schmitz was the first to be taken into custody. He had refused to fly a swastika from the town hall and had armed the municipal militia. The Nazis also captured and consumed 166 brace of sausages they found in the Rathauskeller.48 Miklas finally summoned Seyss shortly before midnight. The President was now in no position to object, having been confined to his villa by the SS-man Otto Skorzeny, the discovery and protégé of the Austrian SS chief Ernst Kaltenbrunner. It was Skorzeny’s first appearance as Nazi Germany’s chief daredevil. His career would include liberating Mussolini from Il Grand Sasso in 1943, and leading the storming of the Bendlerstrasse after the plot of 20 July 1944.
Seyss appointed a Cabinet of conservative Nazis. Göring insisted on the inclusion of Dr Franz Ulrich Hüber as Minister of Justice. He was the husband of Göring’s sister Paula. Seyss’s reign as an independent Austrian Chancellor proved to be short-lived. When the German military attaché, General Muff, rang Berlin at Seyss’s request to inform Göring that everything had been carried out according
to his wishes, and he could now recall his forces, Göring told Muff that, on the contrary, he was to demand the assistance of German troops to re-establish law and order. Göring had been enjoying his sport. That evening he was the host at a Winter Ball at the Air Ministry in Berlin. He arrived fashionably late after his exertions on the telephone. He found an opportunity to talk to Sir Nevile Henderson, who delivered a predictable protest, and the Czech minister, Mastny, who, despite Göring’s anxieties, gave him the assurance he wanted: Czechoslovakia would not mobilize to save Austria.
When, around midnight, Göring heard that Miklas had given in, he collected Goebbels from his table and together they drove to Hitler to listen to the first broadcast of the Horst-Wessel-Lied from Vienna. Only one thing marred his enjoyment of the evening: the news that Himmler was already on his way to Vienna. Göring called Seyss to say that he did not want the wire-tapping services to fall into the hands of his rival.49 He alone held the bugging monopoly for the Reich. Expatriates and German Jews were also tuning into Austrian wireless to learn of the country’s fate. Schuschnigg’s broadcast had ended with the Austrian national anthem followed by some Austrian classical music. When they heard the Horst-Wessel-Lied they realized ‘Austrian freedom was dead’.50 Goebbels naturally thought otherwise: ‘The bells of freedom have struck for this land too.’ In Nuremberg, Julius Streicher’s Stürmer exulted in the emergence of ‘Greater Germany’ and the end of ‘Jewish rule’.51
In the luxurious ‘Zu den drei Husaren’ in the Weihburggasse that evening, the atmosphere was jubilant. A Mr and Mrs Friedrich Frankau of Montreal, Canada, signed the restaurant’s golden book: ‘We are both very happy to have been in Vienna the very day Austria became a part of the greatest country in the world. God be forever with the Austrians.’ Over the next few weeks others would make their way to Vienna’s best (and still Jewish-owned) restaurant. On the 15th Edmund Veesenmayer, who achieved fame later for his role in deporting Hungary’s Jews to Auschwitz, praised the day when ‘our Führer’s homeland returned to our great, ethnic-German Reich. After a hard struggle the finest day of my life and at the same time the day of commitment towards our Sudeten-German brothers.’ A table full of German railway officials decorated the book with a swastika. They had witnessed the parade of the German and Austrian forces in the capital. Göring’s friend Udet was there on the 27th, Viktor Lutze of the SA on 3 April and two days later General Kesselring.52
AUSTRIA’S JEWS
On 12 March an excited Göring called his friend Prince Philip of Hesse in Rome. He wanted to ascertain if Mussolini was happy or was going to rock the boat. Prince Philip told him that a swastika was already flying from the Austrian Consulate. The King of Italy (Philip’s father-in-law) had informed him that Colonel Jozef Beck, the Polish Foreign Minister, had relayed the news that 25,000 Viennese Jews had asked for passports. ‘The view is here that it’s best to open the frontiers for a while so that the whole scum gets out . . . !’
Göring made no secret of what he wanted in his reply: ‘All right, but not with any foreign currency. The Jews can go, but they will kindly leave behind their money, which they have only stolen.’53
The Anschluss not only scattered the political elite of the Corporate State, it struck terror in the hearts of the Jews. Up until 1938, Austria’s Jews could be broadly divided into Zionists and assimilators. After Hitler’s arrival, however, assimilation was to prove a dead letter, while for Zionists the dream of a Palestinian homeland became a possibility. The assimilated Jews realized that their Gentile manners availed them nothing. The Nazis hated them even more than they despised the Zionists. Some Jewish communists headed for the Soviet Union, joining those who had left for fear of imprisonment by the Corporate State in 1934. This was risky, however, as there was every chance that they might end up in the gulag.54
A.R. Penn, the Secretary of the Church Mission to the Jews, arrived in Vienna from Romania and Poland on 11 March to find the city in a state of overexcitement about Sunday’s plebiscite. When he woke the next morning Schuschnigg had resigned and the SA had occupied the political vacuum. The air rang with cries of ‘Heil Hitler!’ On 12 March, while he sat talking to Hugh Grimes, the British embassy chaplain, Penn heard Hitler proclaim the Anschluss. Before he left, a Jewish friend took him up to the hills that overlook the city. She told him, ‘I feel as if I were looking at my beloved Vienna for the last time.’55
As of 11 March 1938, there were 185,028 Jews in Austria of whom 176,034 lived in Vienna: just under 10 per cent of the city’s population or 2.8 per cent of Austrians. Vienna had a hefty Jewish infrastructure with ninety-four synagogues and 120 welfare organizations under the umbrella of the IKG, an organization dominated by Zionists since the twenties; both the president, Friedmann, and the vice-president, Dr Löwenherz, were Zionists. Another significant Jewish body was the 8,000-strong Bund Jüdischer Frontsoldaten or Jewish Old Soldiers’ League, founded in 1932 and led by Captain Siegfried Edler von Friedmann.56 In addition there were those who no longer admitted to Judaism, and many who were racially Jewish yet who had converted to Christianity or were simply agnostic or atheist.
Hitler’s antisemitic policies were bound to find favour in Austria, for they had been developed there in the first place. Young Adolf had come up from Linz and been appalled by the sight of Vienna’s Jews: the city was the most Jewish in the German-speaking world. The party behind the Corporate State – the Christlichsozialen or Christian Socials – had been founded by the same Mayor Karl Lueger who coined the phrase ‘I decide who’s a Jew.’ He meant that in a few cases Jews could aspire to social acceptability.
When Austria became a republic, Vienna’s Jewish population filled the social and political vacuum created by degradation of the imperial nobility. There was a large influx of so-called Ostjuden from Poland and Russia – strange apparitions with beards and kaftans whose lives had been wrecked by pogroms and war and who had headed west to seek their fortunes. They were greatly resented in Germany and Austria, not only by the Gentiles but by the more assimilated Jews, who found them primitive, and felt they held up a grubby mirror to their more refined selves.57
In 1921 there was a three-day meeting of antisemites in Vienna and in 1923 between 50,000 and 100,000 marched around the Ringstrasse protesting against the Jewish ‘dictatorship’.58 When the Corporate State arrived some Jews were already able to see the writing on the wall. Stefan Zweig’s house on the Kapuzinerberg near Salzburg was searched for weapons in 1934. The writer was so scandalized that he turned his back on Austria and went to live in England.
A year later, on 16 September 1935, Austria introduced racial law under the Blutschutzgesetz.v It was no longer permitted to enter the description konfessionslos (nondenominational) on a birth certificate. Any Jews who had lost their religion without gaining another were obliged to list themselves as Jewish. The law was more in keeping with Catholic thinking than with Nuremberg, but undoubtedly prompted by the latter.59
Although the Corporate State was not officially antipathetic to Jews, there was a cold persecution as they were squeezed out of public life. There were now very few Jewish members of the National Council, as the legislative body was called. Contracts in Viennese hospitals were not renewed when the doctor was Jewish; publishing houses refused to print books by Jews and newspapers were increasingly reluctant to employ Jewish journalists. The Neue Freie Presse had been purged of Jewish staff by 1937. Film production companies did not employ Jewish actors and actresses, as they needed to be able to sell their films across the border in Germany; and Jewish sportsmen could not compete if there were Germans about. It was believed that Schuschnigg intended to reduce the percentage of Jews in the professions to reflect their share of the population.60
Many of Vienna’s assimilated Jews were virtually indistinguishable from the German elite: they read their Goethe, Schiller and Nestroy, and went to concerts to listen to Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms and Franz Schmidt. Believing themselves to be good ‘Germans’ (people spoke sel
dom of being ‘Austrian’ then), they had no desire to leave. The Ostjuden, lately come from the shtetls, were more likely to be attracted to the idea of Zionism and the establishment of a Jewish state, preferably in Palestine.61
After the Anschluss, it was calculated that 20 per cent of potential refugees were non-Aryan Christians: ethnic Jews who had been baptized.62 The Quaker Emma Cadbury, who was based in Vienna, estimated their numbers at 60,000 Catholics and 10,000 Protestants, although the official figure was a comparatively modest 24,000.63 The philosopher Karl Popper, for example, had been baptized a Protestant in infancy.64 Conversion was gaining popularity among Jews. Between 1928 and 1934 there had been 447 baptisms. The arrival of Hitler in power across the border in Germany seems to have provided a further spur: there were forty-two baptisms in 1932 and 102 in 1933, but in the first half of 1934 there were 152.65
Baptism was a way round the various kinds of numerus clausus that limited Jewish entry into branches of public life. With the Taufschein or baptismal certificate, the Jewish Taufjude could become a judge, a professor or a high-ranking civil servant with far greater ease.66 A measure of how many members of the Jewish elite were Christians is the fact that a third of the Jews in Dachau were baptized, and not only for political reasons: many of them had a Christian grandparent or two.67 The British chaplain Grimes reported at the beginning of 1937 on the success of the Swedish pastor Tarrel, who carried out thirty to forty conversions every year. ‘He [Tarrel] thinks there would be many more if it were not for the pressure exercised by the Jews themselves who will not employ Christian Jews.’ Tarrel had converted a hundred Jews in 1934, possibly because of the creation of the rigidly Catholic Corporate State.68