1938: Hitler's Gamble

by MacDonogh, Giles

  The Gestapo arrived at 19 Berggasse, the home and surgery of Sigmund Freud, and proceeded to search the flat. His daughter Anna was taken away for interrogation a few days later. Freud was powerful enough to be able to take his family and most of his possessions into exile when he left in June. The building Freud lived and worked in for forty years was eventually turned into a Sammelwohnung – a Jewish collection point – from which Jews were deported to their deaths. Freud’s five sisters were all murdered in the east.110

  Zuckmayer finally left on the 15th. Wilhelm von Ketteler at the German embassy had told him that he would be safe, and that the Austrian version of National Socialism would be gentle. Ketteler was almost certainly a decent man, and an opponent of National Socialism who was involved in a plot to kill Hitler. He was murdered by the SS-man Horst Böhme on Heydrich’s orders and fished out of the Danube two weeks later.111 He had been deemed politically unreliable, having removed all Papen’s political files to Switzerland.xiii Stubborn to the last, Zuckmayer was finally talked into flight by his Austrian wife. It was literally the last moment: the Nazis had already occupied the family house near Salzburg and they were to arrive in his Vienna flat the next day, ‘confiscating’ in the process around a thousand books signed and dedicated by the great and good, and for the most part by ‘degenerate’ authors of the time.

  Zuckmayer reckoned his chances at fifty-fifty. Everything went smoothly until he reached Salzburg. He was even able to see his own bathing hut at Henndorf, and thought he could hear his dogs barking. They stopped while a troop train passed. The Austrians lowered the windows and obsequiously shouted ‘Heil Hitler!’ at the conquerors. The soldiers reminded the writer of himself in 1914. They looked embarrassed at this effusiveness and carried on eating their soup.

  Salzburg station resembled an armed camp. The cigarette woman, who had provided for Zuckmayer’s needs for years, was running after the soldiers, squawking ‘Daitsche Brieder’xiv ecstatically and sticking cigarettes in their pockets. It was a repellent vision that made it easier for him to accept the need to quit his adoptive land. There was no passport inspection until the train stopped in Innsbruck, some three hours from the Swiss frontier, at which point a fat man in plain clothes and a swastika armband with a police badge in his lapel came in, accompanied by two Brownshirts with revolvers in their belts.

  All went well until he saw Zuckmayer’s profession: writer. ‘Get off the train and take your luggage.’ Zuckmayer wanted to know why.

  ‘Our Führer does not like the press.’

  ‘I am not from the press.’

  Attempts to argue with the man were of no avail: Zuckmayer and other ‘delinquents’ left the train and were taken to the police station, where they sat and waited. He was angry when his turn came to face his interrogators and barked at them in military German. He threw down his German passport and continued to perform his version of an offended member of the master race. He showed them a telegram from the film director Alexander Korda, indicating the time he was due to be in London, and noted that they were unable to understand the English. The man who had taken him from the train insisted that Zuckmayer was a writer: ‘That is suspicious . . . Our Führer does not like the press.’

  ‘But I am a screenwriter . . . The Führer likes films.’

  The events that followed had a typically Austrian quality. The man at the desk agreed that Hitler was a film fan, and admitted that he knew Zuckmayer’s house and had swum in the lake there. ‘A lovely spot,’ he said. Zuckmayer agreed. ‘What more do you need from me?’

  The official rose from his desk. ‘In times like this errors occur, but we try to do our job. Go quickly, but through the back door. Those people out there,’ he said, gesturing towards the queue outside, ‘they won’t escape so easily. They’re all Yids.’

  He had not got far before he heard one of the Brownshirts coming up behind him. A hand was placed on his shoulder. His body went cold. The Nazi drew a small book from his pocket. Zuckmayer recognized it as the novella he had published the previous year, Ein Sommer in Österreich (A Summer in Austria). ‘I have just read this . . . would you sign it for me?’ Zuckmayer did so with the fountain pen provided. The Brownshirt was standing close and leant over him. ‘There will be no more “Summers in Austria” . . . Goodbye and make sure you don’t come back. Take care at the border.’ With that he clicked his heels and disappeared.

  Zuckmayer got on the next train. It was stuffed with people trying to leave. He was bathed in sweat and, as he opened a carriage door, unbuttoned his coat for the first time. There was a sudden silence. A man of Jewish appearance jumped up and offered him his seat. ‘But that is your seat. Please sit down again,’ said Zuckmayer. The others moved up to create some room. Then Zuckmayer caught on: they were staring at his buttonhole. He had bought a swastika at a newsagent in Vienna. Only Party members wore swastikas in Germany, but in Austria they were on sale everywhere, and people put them on simply to tell the thugs they were not Jews.112 On 11 March they had cost 35 Groschen, but the price had risen since.113 It was a simple device to ensure a modicum of peace, but he had done more: he had also put on his war medals, including his EK1. The combination of Nazi and war hero was not easy for the Jews in the carriage to decipher, but they offered him schnapps and told him of their fears at the approach of the border.

  The closer they came to the frontier the more the carriage panicked. There were constant patrols in the corridor. The doors were opened and they were asked over and over again how much money they had on them. They were allowed ten RM or twenty Austrian Schillings, the precise sum Zuckmayer had brought with him. The playwright studied those around him: there was an Aryan football player with his Jewish fiancée, and a supposed general’s son, the one who had offered him schnapps, who, just before the train reached the border, threw all his money out of the window. A Polish woman recognized Zuckmayer and wanted to ask him about forthcoming theatrical events.

  Then the train arrived in Feldkirch and, when he saw the spotlights, Zuckmayer’s hopes all but vanished. He concentrated his mind on survival.

  ‘Everyone out with their suitcases. The train is to be evacuated.’

  ‘Porter!’

  ‘Carry it yourself . . . there are no porters for the likes of you.’

  The station was teeming with men in black and brown uniforms. There were tables on to which the contents of suitcases were being poured out and pored over, while cases were tested for false bottoms. Everything was examined with a fine-tooth comb. Some of the passengers were being strip-searched. Zuckmayer recalled that his case contained a number of autographs by fellow writers, most of them ‘degenerate’. He feared the worst.

  The official looked at his name for a long time, then tossed his head back as if he had been suddenly struck by lightning. ‘Zuckmayer? . . . the Zuckmayer.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘I mean the notorious.’

  ‘I don’t know if I am notorious, but there is certainly no other writer with my name.’

  ‘Come with me.’

  ‘I must stay with my luggage.’

  ‘You don’t have to do that.’ And he laughed a mocking laugh as if to say: you won’t need any luggage any more where you are going. He was led away to a hut at the end of the platform. Another man was being taken into custody. Behind the desk sat an SS-man with steel-rimmed spectacles. ‘Carl Zuckmayer, ah ha!’

  He examined his passport. It was valid for five years. Jews received theirs for six months. The SS-man was vaguely aware that Zuckmayer was racially Jewish – his mother’s family were converts – but the passport appeared to contradict this. He reached for a printed list, but could not find Zuckmayer’s name on it. ‘Funny . . . I had heard something about you once, but I can’t remember now what it was. So you are not a Jew at all.’

  He laughed and Zuckmayer permitted himself a smile. He did not feel it was incumbent upon him to tell the official that his mother was born Goldschmidt. The Nazi read from the pass
port: ‘Catholic . . . na ja. We are going to deal with those priests too.’ He became chatty, and looked as if he might be going to give him back his passport. They talked about his screenplays. The Nazi had seen his latest film. He asked Zuckmayer if he were a member of the Party. Zuckmayer said no. Then the tone changed: ‘German writer and not in the Party?’ Nor was he a member of the Nazi writers’ organization. Zuckmayer admitted that his works were actually banned in Germany, and then regretted it.

  The SS-man reacted queerly: he reached out his hand and shook Zuckmayer’s. He said he was impressed by Zuckmayer’s honesty: most of the people who came before him lied. He volunteered to smooth his way into the Party. The writer thanked him, but said that would not be necessary. Zuckmayer took the opportunity to snatch his passport back and asked if he might have his luggage now.

  The SS-man offered to come with him, expressing the hope that that there would be no difficulties occasioned by the search. Zuckmayer envisaged problems for all that: the manuscript, the autographs. He decided to open his coat again and pretend he was looking for something in his pocket. It did the trick: the Nazi wanted to know if he had been at the front, if he had held a commission. He stared at the EK1. ‘Then you must be a hero,’ he said, staring wide-eyed at him. Zuckmayer played down his heroism, but told the SS-man that medals could not be bought for tuppence ha’penny on the streets all the same. He was alluding to the price of a swastika in his buttonhole.

  The SS-man was now eating out of his hands. Not only did he understand the reference to the ‘opportunists’, he relished Zuckmayer’s wit. He bellowed out to the SS- and SA-men around him that they were to honour a hero with a rousing cry of ‘Heil Hitler!’ They did just that, ‘as if I were the Führer himself’. Zuckmayer admitted to feeling like Captain von Köpenick from his own play.xv The SS-man told his soldiers to take Zuckmayer’s cases on to the train. They had not even been examined. He countermanded the strip-search as well. Zuckmayer was the only person on his train to be exempted.

  As the SS-man took him to the station buffet to wait for the rest to pass or fail the examination, an acquaintance of Zuckmayer’s wife came up to him and identified himself. His Jewish wife was on the other train waiting in the station; she had a broken leg. Zuckmayer now chanced his luck again. Omitting to tell the SS-man she was a Jewess, he said she was not able to come to the interrogation. ‘If you testify for these people, then it is all right,’ the Nazi said. The couple were placed on the Swiss train.

  There were agonizing moments before it left. Zuckmayer sat in the buffet with the SS-man and they drank their way through the former’s last twenty Schillings. The Nazi told him he wanted to prove himself in the field. Zuckmayer comforted him, saying there would be a new war soon. He did not hate the Nazi; he pitied him. He saw him as he had seen so many, lying ashen-faced in a pool of blood. Every now and then an SA-man interrupted their drinking to report a big haul in marks or valuables. Dawn was breaking when Zuckmayer’s train finally began to move and he was able to quit his sinister companion. Only when Swiss guards entered his carriage did he know for certain that he was not going to Dachau.114

  Not just the Jews, but all the Corporate State’s elite was tainted with the crime of lèse majesté against the Führer. Zuckmayer records that aristocrats were forced to scrub the streets, because they too had stuck up for an independent Austria.115 Both the former Vice-Chancellor and head of the Fatherland Front, Emil Fey, and the Minister of War, General Wilhelm Zehner, apparently ‘committed suicide’. Fey allegedly killed his wife and son first. Their bodies were removed from his flat in sealed tubes and taken to the anatomical institute. His corpse was reported to contain twenty-three bullet holes.116

  Göring saved the Foreign Minister Guido Schmidt by sending his own aircraft to collect him. He was later appointed to the board of the Hermann Göring Works. Around 15 per cent of the judges were dismissed; both the Minister of Justice, Robert Georg Winterstein, and the senior judge, Alois Osio, perished in the camps. Other victims of the new broom were monarchists. Otto von Habsburg was still perceived as a threat. They naturally had no time for the upstart Hitler. Many of them were arrested and despatched to Dachau.117

  BURGENLAND

  There were only tiny pockets of Jews outside Vienna: some 2,000 in Styria; in the Vorarlberg just eighteen.118 There was a significant community in Burgenland, however, where 3,632 Jews inhabited seven acknowledged, protected old communities: Eisenstadt, Matersburg, Kobersdorf, Lackenbach, Deutschkreuz, Frauenkirchen and Kittsee. They amounted to a little more than 1 per cent of the population in Austria’s easternmost state, but had lived there for several centuries, whereas many Austrian Jews had only quit the shtetls of the east a generation before.

  It was one of the Nazis’ pet projects to rid the province of its Jews as quickly as possible. Whole villages were cleared. In one, 300 were driven from their homes. An American Quaker who witnessed the expulsions recorded, ‘We have never seen anything as bad as that in Germany.’ In the monthly meeting of the British Board of Deputies the sentiment was echoed: ‘The situation in Austria is even worse than the situation in the German Reich. What took the Nazis five years to accomplish in the Reich has been done in five weeks in Austria.’119

  Until 1921 the region had been a part of Hungary and the Nazis wanted to assert its ‘Germanity’ before all else. The older expellees were often in possession of Hungarian papers. The violence against the Burgenland Jews began as soon as Schuschnigg announced his resignation. It frequently took the form of rounding them up and driving them over the nearest frontier. The Czechs, Hungarians and Jugoslavs responded by closing the crossings. The leader of the Frauenkirchen Jews, Ahron Ernst Weis, managed to escape on a tourist visa to Palestine. His dentist brother committed suicide. Most of those expelled found refuge in Vienna. Lauterbach and the Christian Zionist Brigadier-General Sir Wyndham Deedes visited three families from the dusty border town of Deutschkreuz who had been expelled ‘with a few trifles’ by the local gendarmerie. In Rechnitz there were brutal murders.120

  The ancient Jewish community rapidly became a cause célèbre. On 3 May 1938 a Czech rabbi, Michael Dov Weissmandl, visited Lambeth Palace to drum up support for the Burgenländer. He had a letter of introduction from Isaiah Porritt, the senior Orthodox rabbi in Vienna, and Samuel Epp, the senior rabbi in Burgenland. They were seeking a safe haven for 3,000 Jews. Lang’s secretary, Alan Don, wrote to Samuel Hoare at the Home Office to ask if a special favour might be granted in this instance.121

  The plight of the Burgenland Jews is the subject of Franz Werfel’s short story Die wahre Geschichte vom wiederhergestellten Kreuz (The True Story of the Remaking of the Cross) of 1942. Werfel conceived it as part of his unfinished novel Cella, which was set in northern Burgenland. The Catholic priest Ottokar Felix relates the martyrdom of the rabbi of Parndorf, Aladar Fürst, on the night of 11 March, and his own role in seeking to protect the Jews in his village and accompany them into exile. Aladar Fürst did not exist, but the other events described in the story took place on 20 April. The local SA, drunk with power – and wine – threw between twenty and thirty Jews out of their homes and took them to the Hungarian border at Mörbisch on the Neusiedlersee. There they spent four nights in no-man’s-land, as the Hungarians were not prepared to accept them. They were eventually allowed to go to Vienna.122

  Another event that was later dramatized was the expulsion of the Jews from Kittsee, which formed the basis of Friedrich Wolf’s play Das Schiff auf der Donau (The Boat on the Danube). In Kittsee the Jews were forced across the border into Czechoslovakia but, as they had no papers, they were made to endure weeks on an island and later a boat before the Czechs would take them in.

  In the state capital, Eisenstadt, an exception was made for Alphons Barb,xvi the director of the state museum. The commissioner for cultural issues in Austria asked for a stay of two or three months in his case as the archaeologist had made an important contribution to knowledge of German prehistory in Burgenland
through his excavation of gravesites, and had proved that the Germans got there first. Barb had been making an unconscious contribution to Ahnenerbe, the research into Germanic roots that was replacing religion for Nazi extremists. He was allowed to continue to live in Vienna until 1939, when the British Museum organized his transfer to London.123

  HIMMLER, HITLER AND EICHMANN ARRIVE IN VIENNA

  Heinrich Himmler was the first Nazi VIP to arrive in Vienna. His two Ju 52 aircraft touched down in Aspern at 5 a.m. on 12 March. On the way down from Berlin he slipped and almost fell out of the aircraft, and his intelligence chief claimed he had saved his master’s life. He was accompanied by the lofty figures of Heydrich, Wolff, Daluege and a large team of SD and Gestapo men dressed in grey uniforms; this was to be the unveiling of the new Waffen-SS kit. They were met on the tarmac by the Austrian police chief Skubl with a police guard of honour. The Germans then went about their task with proverbial efficiency. A willing civil servant was able to provide Himmler with all the state’s police records, above all the criminal records of the banned left. Very few wriggled through the net.124

  Skubl’s attentiveness did no good: he was replaced by Kaltenbrunner, one of the few Austrian Nazis ever to achieve high rank in Berlin. Himmler set up his base in the Hotel Regina. Bürckel moved into the Regina in his wake, before opting for the defunct Parliament building on the Ring. The Gestapo were the first to take up residence in the Hotel Metropole after leaving their offices in Vienna’s ‘noble’ street, the Herrengasse. With Schmitz gone from the town hall, the huge square in front of the building was renamed the Adolf-Hitler-Platz two days before the arrival of its new dedicatee.