1938: Hitler's Gamble

by MacDonogh, Giles

  THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE GUTTERSNIPESvi

  The birth pangs and infancy of the First Austrian Republic had been aggravated by chronic unemployment. While Germany had been able to solve most of its problems, at the time of the Anschluss anything up to 300,000 chiefly young Viennese were out of work.69 They gravitated towards extremist organizations that purported to be able to solve the problem one way or another. One of the promises delivered by the Nazis was the 100 per cent elimination of unemployment.vii As one contemporary put it, ‘Hunger drove millions into the arms of the Nazis.’70 The Jews were, as ever, considered to be the principal enemy: idle and rich, feeding off human misery.

  On 11 March the Hitlerites were already out and about in the largely Jewish Second District, shouting slogans and flailing fists hours before the German army had reached Vienna.71 The sportswriter Maximilian Reich saw the Nazis in the Kärntnerstrasse, Vienna’s chief commercial boulevard: HJviii members aged between ten and sixteen, chanting against Schuschnigg, the Jews and priests.72 Schuschnigg’s resignation was the signal for the revolution to begin. Illegal Nazis donned swastika armbands or SA uniforms and took over key offices. Jews were immediately sacked or sent on extended leave. That same day, Emma Cadbury wrote to Alice Nike in London: ‘The Jews here are very much worried and there has been an increase of antisemitic propaganda, but I hope this may quiet down. . . .’73

  The Morning Chronicle’s man in Vienna, Eric Gedye, recorded disgusting scenes where the Viennese showed the Jews the pent-up hatred seething within them:

  It is the heartless, grinning, soberly dressed crowds on the Graben and the Kärntnerstrasse . . . fluffy Viennese blondes, fighting to get closer to the elevating spectacle of an ashen-faced Jewish surgeon on his hands and knees before half a dozen young hooligans with Swastika armlets and dog-whips that sticks in my mind. His delicate fingers, which must have made the swift and confident incisions that had saved the lives of many Viennese, held a scrubbing brush. A storm trooper was pouring some acid solution over the brush – and his fingers. Another sluiced the pavement from a bucket, taking care to drench the surgeon’s striped trousers as he did so. And the Viennese – not uniformed Nazis or a raging mob, but the Viennese Little Man and his wife – just grinned approval at the glorious fun.74

  The Czechs prudently sealed their borders to prevent an influx of Jews;75 only those with the appropriate entry visas could pass.76 The Vienna–Prague train arrived in the Czech capital that night with no Austrians on board. It left Vienna at the usual time of 11. 15 and was due to reach Czech soil forty minutes later. The numbers on board were progressively whittled down by a succession of brutal searches. The few who made it to the border at Breclav were crushed to learn that the Czechs would not let them in. The Czechs were not unhappy about the Anschluss; they were happier to see the Germans in Vienna than face a Habsburg restoration.77

  Those Jews who had fled on four wheels abandoned ‘a whole car park’ and hid in the woods closest to the frontier. The cabaret artist Jura Soyfer tried to cross the Swiss border on skis but was arrested and taken to Innsbruck. Other Jews boarded trains to Romania but were turned back at the border; even those who had Romanian papers were refused permission to return.78

  Naturally the wisest ones made for the borders as quickly as they could. That was particularly important for anyone on a Nazi black list. Malwine Dollfuss, the widow of the murdered Chancellor, two Habsburgs and Guido Zernatto of the Vaterländische Front were successful, as was the comedian Karl Farkas; but many found no way through. Brno was often the goal. It contained a large German minority even in 1938, and many of Vienna’s Jews had family in southern Moravia. Once in Czechoslovakia, they could catch the ‘flying Moses’ from Prague, the aircraft that flew the children of Israel away from the Nazi peril.79

  Writers whose works had been burned on the Opernplatz in Berlin were advised to go before the Germans took hold of the city. One of them was the German dramatist Carl Zuckmayer, who had been living near Salzburg for years, but happened to be in Vienna at the time of the Anschluss. He was in the theatre all day and oblivious of political developments until he heard Schuschnigg’s resignation broadcast that evening.80

  Zuckmayer had survived a dozen battles on the Western Front, as well as the terrible upheavals of the postwar years; he had been on the streets at the time of the Hitler-Putsch in Munich, and witnessed the Nazi takeover of power in Berlin; but nothing compared to those days in Vienna. ‘It was the witches’ Sabbath of the plebs that laid all human values to rest.’81 That night he was travelling in a taxi when the mob decided that he and his companion were Polish Jews and needed to be beaten up. Zuckmayer only escaped by shouting out something that sounded like ‘Heil Hitler!’ in his best Reich German accent, like a sergeant-major drilling his squad. When the skies blackened with German bombers making their way to the airport at Aspern, a new, equally sinister noise joined the screams of the tortured. After a while you got used to that too. All those new sounds merged into one: ‘The air was filled with the cacophony of Armageddon.’82

  Zuckmayer’s play Bellmann was shortly to open at the Theatre in the Josefstadt, directed by Ernst Lothar. In the middle of rehearsal on Sunday two actors came to Lothar and declared they represented the theatre’s National Socialist cell: Zuckmayer’s play could not be performed because the author was part Jewish. Lothar promptly resigned and went home to his flat on the Beethoven Platz, next to the Imperial Hotel, where Hitler was staying that night. Shortly afterwards, the police arrived to impound his passport. Lothar’s wife, the actress Adrienne Gessner, lost her temper: ‘Go to Mr Gauleiter, or whatever title the idiot uses, the fellow who sent you . . . and tell him that I threw you out.’ Lothar apologized for his wife and gave the policemen his passport. He sensed that he would have considerable problems getting the papers back and promptly negotiated an exit visa from the local police for the vast sum of 25,000 Schillings, then set out for his brother in Switzerland with his daughter in a new, chauffeur-driven car.83

  Everything went well until they approached the border at St Anton in the Vorarlberg, where they were flagged down by the local gendarme. He had been told to look out for the car. He was perfectly polite, and had even read Lothar’s novels, but he had been told to inform the SA. Lothar waited upstairs in the police station while his daughter and the driver stayed by the car. The SA-men rolled up soon after. They were not polite and said the Lothars would have to undergo a strip search. They grabbed the daughter and prepared to tear off her blouse. Lothar was quick on the uptake: they too wanted to be bought off, in this instance with the car. The Nazis were in raptures over their booty. As soon as he had signed an affidavit to say that he had given it them of his own free will, they drove the Lothars to the border in Feldkirch. The SA headed off in the car, leaving the theatre director and his daughter at the station. Fortunately the border official was a fan and had been to several of Lothar’s productions: he waved them off to freedom with a friendly ‘Auf Wiederschauen in Österreich .’84

  Austrian officials weren’t all so friendly. As Lothar discovered, the western borders were being more carefully watched than the east. Schuschnigg’s friend, the Education Minister Hans Pertner, who had suggested that he bring in the socialists, made his way to Czechoslovakia.ix It was not always that easy to settle matters, and the thought of an impoverished exile made people postpone the decision until it was too late. Gina Kaus, a Jewish writer whose books had been burned in Berlin, had an Italian passport by virtue of the fact that her former husband had been born in Trieste. Together with her son Peter and her lover Eduard Frischauer, she managed to board a train on Monday that was full to bursting. They were delayed five hours at the border. An outraged English skier related that she had been ‘gynaecologically investigated’. When they reached the Swiss border she felt like hugging the conductors.85

  As a rule only Jews or Mischlinge (persons of mixed Jewish and Gentile blood) made haste to leave. Exceptions were the Gentile writer Franz Theodor Cso
kor86 and the musicians Erich Kleiber and Ralph Benatzky. The Nazis wrongly thought the latter was a Jew. Those who went, or preferred to remain abroad, make an impressive list: musicians like Robert Stolz, Fritz Kreisler, Arnold Schoenberg, Hanns Eisler, Erich Wolfgang Korngold or Egon Wellesz; conductors such as Bruno Walter and Joseph Krips; singers of the calibre of Lotte Lehmann, Maria Jeritza, Alfred Piccaver and Richard Tauber; men and women of theatre and cinema like Max Reinhardt, Otto Preminger, Fritzi Massary, Elisabeth Bergner, Oskar Homolka and Anton Wohlbrück (later Walbrook).

  In Berlin, Goebbels was hatching plans to ‘de-Jew’ Vienna and located a few collaborators in the process, such as the actor Attila Horberger, who was able to report on his colleague Paula Wessely with her many Jewish friends. Vienna’s music was all ‘Jews and Jew-lovers’. A desire to set some traditional Aryan composers on the pedestals formerly occupied by Brahms and Bruckner led to Franz Schmidt’s commission to write Eine deutsche Auferstehung (A German Resurrection) in 1938. Goebbels wanted the pro-Nazi Karl Böhm for the opera, while Hitler favoured Hans Knappertsbusch. When Goebbels visited Vienna on 30 March he gathered the remaining Austrian artists around him in the Hofburg.87

  Bruno Walter had had the good fortune to be in Holland for the Nazi triumph. He took out French citizenship, and the new powers in the land made off with the contents of his flat. Arnold Rosé, for fifty-seven years leader of the Philharmonic, fled to London, where a new Rosé Quartet was founded. The portraits of Mahler and Walter and an engraving of Rosé disappeared from the historic wall of the offices of the Philharmonic. Mahler’s bust was removed from the foyer at the Opera. The Gustav Mahlerstrasse became the Meistersingerstrasse.88 The wife and children of Hugo von Hoffmannsthal emigrated in March. Hermann Broch spent months in prison before he was able to reach England. Robert Musil left in August, clutching the manuscript of A Man without Qualities.

  Jews were made scapegoats for the last acts of the Corporate State and had to wash the pro-Schuschnigg graffiti off the walls and pavements. At the Café Herrenhaus, the owner and his wife, together with seven customers, were forced to scrub the – presumably unsullied – walls. The chief rabbi, the Zionist Dr Israel Taglich, was philosophical about cleaning the streets, saying, ‘I am washing God’s earth.’ They called themselves Araber (Arabs), because they were ‘a raber’ (reiber) or scrubbers.89 This was not a Nazi invention; it was the Fatherland Front that instituted this form of punishment, and meted it out to illegal Nazis, when they were caught daubing slogans.90

  The plebiscite had been largely funded by Jewish money, something that made the Jews appear particularly culpable. The first acts of bestiality were carried out by the home-grown SA, although they were quickly joined by Himmler’s men, who carried their own hitlists. Before Eichmann’s arrival, the most important body in Vienna was Department II-112, SS-Oberabschnitt Donau. There were two days of ‘wild’ persecution between 11 March and formal annexation on the 13th.91 Franz Rothenberg, president of the Creditanstalt bank, was hurled from a car at top speed but survived. Others were not so lucky. Isidor Pollack, managing director of the Pulverfabrik chemical works, died of the wounds he sustained from his beating. Later the Deutsche Bank would take over the Creditanstalt and I.G. Farben would appropriate the Pulverfabrik.92

  As in Zuckmayer’s case,x it was still possible to impress some Nazis by flashing a medal for bravery. The writer Leo Perutz, for example, escaped a nasty scene on the 13th by pointing to his EK1.xi Later even this would have no effect on the Viennese thugs. The huge amount of booty they accrued was taken to 36 Prinz-Eugenstrasse, the HQ of the SA group Donau-Wien, before being transferred to the Hotel Metropole, which had been seized from its Jewish owners and turned into Gestapo HQ. The Prinz-Eugenstrasse was the city home of the Rothschild family and their vast fortunes naturally concentrated the minds of the Nazi brigands. The young Dudley Forwood, equerry to the Duke of Windsor, knew the Rothschilds well, and had the run of their country house. He was on holiday there on 12 March prior to leaving for Paris the next day. A footman brought him a message: the gnädige Baronin had called. He was not to show surprise if anything strange were to happen on the train. He found the station filled with troops. At Feldkirch the passengers were ordered off. Over the loudspeaker he heard: ‘Alle Leute raus. Juden auf der linke Seite’ (‘Everyone out, Jews on the left’). At that moment he saw the Rothschilds’ English nanny coming towards him with the children. They pretended to be his. He remembered what the servant had told him and went along with the game. He got them out.93

  The mask had fallen. In an officers’ mess in Neudiedl am See, a subaltern suddenly refused to play billiards with another officer because he was a Jew. The latter walked out of the mess. No one attempted to hold him back.94 On 14 March the army was purged of Jews, and officers and men had to swear an oath of loyalty to Hitler. The Jewish General Sommer appeared on the street in full rig with medals. This time the SA showed respect and saluted him. It did not work twice.95

  It was not just violence: ‘confiscations’ were the order of the day – shops were emptied of their wares, garages of their cars. Rich Jews were incarcerated for months until they were convinced to hand their property over to the Gestapo. This was important if there were art works and collections to steal under a dubious cloak of legality. Money disappeared into the pockets of Nazi thugs. The Zionist Leo Lauterbach expressed his astonishment at their ferocity: ‘Nobody who knew the average Viennese until that moment would believe that he could sink to such a level.’96

  When the Austrian authorities sought to atone for the violence after 1945, the Viennese were found to be suffering from collective amnesia. In Erdberg they tracked down the chief perpetrator, Josef Breitschneider. Despite the almost total lack of witnesses for the prosecution, he was sentenced to eighteen months, and released after six. In the Twentieth District, Josef Graf had taken it upon himself to visit the cafés, beat up Jewish customers and make them drink from the spittoons. On the 14th he was leading a squad of Jews towards the North West Station hall to perform physical jerks. A group of SA-men coming in the opposite direction decided he was going too far and liberated the Jews. Graf had earlier forced a Gentile to carry a panel up and down the street after visiting a Jewish café. It read ‘Arisches Schwein geht zum Judencafé rein’ (‘Aryan pig goes into Jewish cafés’).97 The gymnastics were extended to Jewish children, who were assembled and forced to perform until they collapsed. The purpose was to extort money from the parents, who could not bear to watch their offspring being abused in this way. Once the torturers had been paid off, more Viennese appeared and took over where the others had left off.98

  Rich Jews were arrested and prepared for the first transport for Dachau. As the police and the SA had drawn up their own lists, there was a certain rivalry over their prey.99 The Schiffman brothers, department store owners, were seized in the Taborstrasse and their staff dismissed; likewise Gerngross and Herzmansky in the Mariahilferstrasse, the shoe magnate Krupnik, the carpet merchant Schein, the stocking manufacturer Schön with its eighty branches, the industrial baker Anker, the lightbulb producers Kremenzky and Pregan, the jeweller Scherr, the men’s fashion merchant Katz and the clothier Gerstel. The emptying of the Schiffman stores lasted three days.100 Jews with valuable art collections, like various members of the Gerngross family, found their possessions put up for auction.

  At least some of these had made large donations to Schuschnigg’s plebiscite funds. Gerstel’s name was unfortunate: it was the slang word for cash. As the local Nazis put it at the time ‘Darr Jud muss weg und sein Gerschtl bleibt da!’ (The yid must get out, but he has to leave his dough behind’).101 The Nazis took over prominent businesses and arrested the owners, like the Kuffners, proprietors of the famous Ottakringer brewery. Of assets totalling 9 million marks, 2.5 million were confiscated at once, and when the Kuffners sold out, they gave a further 35 per cent to the Nazis.102 Restaurants were obliged to hang up signs banning Jews.103

  One of those who tried t
o cross the Czech border on the 13th was Fritz Grünbaum, but the train was sent back and those on board plundered. The unlucky ones were also arrested, including Grünbaum, who was sent to the new prison in the Karajangasse where he shared a mattress with the later Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky. Grünbaum died in Dachau after a bungled suicide attempt. His wife Lilly was murdered at Maly Trostinec.104 His huge art collection was sold for a song, and the money went into the coffers of the Reich.

  In the provinces the atmosphere was calmer. With the exception of Burgenland, there were few Jews. Graz had the reputation of being the most Nazi city in Austria. The Jewish legal clerk Helmut Bader observed on 13 March that all his judges had donned swastika armbands. He was summoned before the head of personnel and summarily dismissed.105 The physiologist Otto Loewi, who had won a Nobel Prize for medicine in 1936, was arrested. The money he had been awarded was placed in a closed account.106

  A razzia (raid) mopped up Austria’s Jewish journalists on the 17th when Maximilian Reich was arrested. The Black Maria went on to pick up the others. One of them evidently refused to come. Reich heard a shot. When the Gestapo men returned to the car they told the driver, ‘The chap didn’t want to come with us. Now he can stay at home.’107 They laughed. Reich was taken to the Liesl, the police prison on the Elisabeth Promenade, where he found his friend, the amateur boxer Willy Kurtz, the mayor and numerous prominent Viennese.

  The carnage continued unabated: on Tuesday, 15 March, the critic and cultural historian Egon Friedell hurled himself from the fourth floor of his block of flats as the Nazis came to claim their game. He apparently told the Gestapo men to wait, went into his study and shouted down to the people in the street to clear a space. It is possible they had only come in the tradition of good Adabeisxii to enjoy the spectacle of Friedell’s arrest.108 He had refused to flee, feeling that he would cut an absurd figure as an exile. In one account, the Gestapo men had not come for Friedell at all, but to visit a maid with whom one of them was dallying. He had jumped to conclusions and then to his death.109