Goebbels found Hitler studying the map. ‘First comes Czecho. We are going to split it with the Hungarians and the Poles. And we are going to exploit the next opportunity should Warsaw come to blows with Kovno to pop Memel in the bag. Good, but not yet: we are a boa constrictor digesting its prey. Then the rest of the Baltic [and] a piece of Alsace-Lorraine . . .’169
In Vienna, the Austrian bishops were being subjected to all the bullying Bürckel could muster. They met on the 18th and were given a draft document urging all Austrians ‘as Germans to recognize the German Reich’.170 Innitzer objected to an article in the text that had them agree to assimilate the Church’s youth organizations. The document passed to and fro, until all six bishops gave in. Innitzer even added ‘and Heil Hitler’ in his own hand at Bürckel’s insistence. The message was doubtless put out to try to ease the situation and to create a modus vivendi. After four years of ‘clerical fascism’ the clergy had a great many enemies, and Austrian priests had already suffered physical violence.171 Bürckel passed as a man sympathetic to Catholics. Waitz wrote of his astonishment that the bishops had submitted, however, and the bishops were not proud of their pusillanimity: only two published the text in their diocesan organs, and Gföllner had boycotted the session.172
Eichmann arrived in Vienna on 16 March to take up the job of directing Department II-112. Two days later he took part in the razzia at the IKG building in the Seitenstettengasse, seizing documents relating to Jewish support for Schuschnigg. Friedmann, his two assistants, the architect Robert Stricker and Jakob Ehrlich, and the office director Löwenherz were arrested together with the president of the Zionist National Union, Oskar Grünbaum. Eichmann slapped Löwenherz, telling him that he had been to Palestine, and that he had been born in the old Templar colony of Sarona.173 This was evidently a fantasy: he came from Solingen near Düsseldorf, but had been brought up in Linz. Others taken into custody were the presidents of the Jewish freemasonic lodges and sixteen high-ranking Jewish masons.
The Duke of Windsor was supposed to have intervened in an attempt to save Louis von Rothschild and the ear specialist Professor Heinrich von Neumann. The Duke was told that Rothschild would be released when he had compensated the state for the losses that occurred with the collapse of the Creditanstalt bank, although Rothschild had resigned a year before the crash. There was a rumour too that Freud had been taken into custody, but that proved unfounded.
Other prominent Jews to be locked up were the eighty-two-year-old Professor Salomon Frankfurter, the seventy-five-year-old Professor Ferdinand Blumenthal, Dr Armand Kaminka, Dr Karl Lothberger, Professor Viktor Frankel, the former minister Arnold Eissler, the editor of Der Morgen, Maximilian Schreier, the former editor of the Neue Wiener Tagblatt, Dr Loebel, the journalist Erwin Honig, the playwright Louis Hirschfeld, the actors Fritz Grünbaum and Ludwig Stoessl and the cabaret artist Hermann Leopoldi.174 They also mopped up the head of the Jewish old soldiers’ league, Friedmann. The IKG was asked to raise a contribution of 500,000 RM, more than half of what they had paid out to the former Chancellor’s fundraisers.175
The university was purged on 17 March, the same day that the formal machinery of the Corporate State was wound up. Out went the professors of physics (Leo Ehrenhaft), ethnology (Wilhelm Koppers) and Romance languages (Alfred Kurzbach). They also expelled Stefan Meyer and Karl Przibaum together with Ernst Zerner, the professor of organic chemistry and an old front-line soldier, and the chemist Fritz Feigl.
Eichmann was a relatively lowly Nazi then, a significant cog in a larger wheel. The formal machinery of terror was established with the Gestapo office, responsible to Himmler and Heydrich. The chief was the Bavarian Franz Josef Huber, assisted by the jurist Humbert Pifrader. Huber was a favourite of Heydrich’s and a personal friend of Heinrich ‘Gestapo’ Müller, the big man in Berlin. He had run the Austrian branch of the Gestapo since 1934, and had probably been involved in the planning of the putsch against Dollfuss. He was also one of the three greatest enthusiasts for the extermination of the Jews, together with the future Gauleiter, Schirach, and Huber’s later assistant Karl Ebner.176 Heydrich and Himmler were probably quite keen to move Huber out of Berlin, as he had inadvertently rumbled them during the Fritsch Scandal.
The Gestapo operated from the piano nobile of the former Metropole. The secret policemen were mostly young, educated people, many of them lawyers with doctorates. Half of Prussia’s 4,000 articled lawyers had been out of work in 1932, and the number of Austrian advocates who were désoeuvré in 1938 must have been similar. The Gestapo provided work of sorts.177 Othmar Trencker was head of the SD, and Dr Viktor Siegl of department II/E was appointed to the task of making sure the Jews left all their valuable possessions behind them. This was a serious position. The Gestapo had an office that dealt with the location of hidden assets, and they stopped at nothing. They didn’t wear kid gloves: the writer Erich Fried’s father had his stomach kicked in by the Gestapo man Göttler from Düsseldorf because he wouldn’t tell him where his money was concealed.178
At the Gestapo’s department II/D, Rux and Heger had responsibility for the imprisonment of Jews, while department III dealt with illegal emigration. Eichmann took the portfolio of legal emigration, the interpretation of the Nuremberg Law and the issue of passports and passes, helped by Emil Komers of the Emigration Office. The Vienna Gestapo grew to become the largest in the Reich, with 850 of the 2,000 men active in Austria. As many as a third of them were German, as Austrians were often dismissed as ‘soft and spineless’.179 Every day between 450 and 500 people were examined in the Metropole. The Gestapo could avail themselves of a network of between 600 and 800 police spies. The Café Viktoria was often used to lure the unfortunate victims to their fates, as it was close to the Gestapo headquarters. The Gestapo’s work was massively assisted by the Viennese propensity to denounce all and sundry. There was a mythical Viennese saint called ‘Sancta Denunziata’.180 After the war it was reckoned that a quarter of all investigations came from information provided by private persons. They even sneaked on the assistant Gestapo chief for allowing his Russian maid to go out without the statutory ‘Easterner’s Badge’.181
GÖRING
The stars of the Nazi scene now came to visit their new province and its capital, Vienna. Göring loved Austria and was popular there. After visiting the former home of his Jewish godfather, Epenstein, he arrived by boat from Linz and spoke in the decommissioned North West Station on the 26th. He claimed 300,000 Jews had caused the impoverishment of Vienna. In a radio broadcast he mentioned the increasing numbers of Jews who were taking their own lives. He said he could not put a policeman behind every Jew to stop them. If they were unhappy they had only to go to Palestine. Everyone knew of a good Jew, but that would not solve the Jewish problem.
The real message behind Göring’s speech was that he was expecting to be able to fund German arms production by making off with the coffers of the state and fleecing Vienna’s Jews. On the other hand, he was keen to avoid anything that would disrupt trade, particularly the export trade, and left instructions with Bürckel to preserve it at all costs.182
He had come wearing his Four Year Plan hat, which was formally introduced on 19 March. On 23 March Austria’s economy was brought into line with that of the Altreich. The federal reserves would provide a brief respite for the German economy and allow the country to run its highest trade deficit since 1929.183 Jewish businesses were to be Aryanized without further ado.184 The Four Year Plan had been acquiring chunks of Germany’s most important industrial concerns. Göring, it seemed, had only to ask, and a part of the empire was made over to him. In the case of Jewish factories, he was not content with a slice of the action: he wanted the whole lot.
There were three huge Jewish concerns that had eluded him to date. These were the empires of the Rothschild, Petschek and Weinmann families. Their acquisition was made all the more difficult by their international ramifications. Shortly before he left, Göring had had a letter from Queen Mary of Great Brit
ain asking him to intercede in favour of Louis Rothschild.185 Her appeal would fall on deaf ears, for Göring was especially interested in getting his hands on Rothschild’s money. The Rothschilds owned businesses in Austria, France and Czechoslovakia and the assets were divided up among branches of the family in Vienna, Prague and Paris. Sensing danger, they had transferred ownership of their Witkowitz steelworks to London in 1937, together with its Swedish subsidiary. The company was now British, and Baron Louis was being held as a hostage in the Hotel Metropole until a means could be found of giving it to Göring.186 Göring was not even going to get close until German troops occupied rump Czechoslovakia a year later, and only then by paying around a third of the asking price of £10 million. The Rothschilds agreed to the deal chiefly to liberate Louis, and also because the Czech works were now effectively imprisoned too. The deal was still not tied up when war broke out, leaving the Germans with no claim to the Swedish subsidiary and in illegal possession of the Czech works.
Keppler’s time was taken up with the appropriation of Jewish big business. He had cut his teeth on the holdings of coal baron Ignaz Petschek. Old Ignaz had died in 1934 and the firm was in the hands of the founder’s heirs. Several non-Jewish firms were interested but were prepared to pay only a percentage of the company’s worth. In July Göring ordered the Aryanization of 200,000,000 RM of Petschek property in Germany. The Petschek empire owed some 30,000,000 RM in taxes, which proved the lever for the appropriation of the whole business. When Germany walked into the Sudetenland, the Nazis grabbed the firm’s headquarters in Aussig. The Foreign Minister of the rump Czech state promised his help in tracking down the money. The business was eventually split between Göring and Flick.187
In Austria, Keppler Aryanized the Hirtenberg weapons factory and the mammoth Bunzl & Biach paper concern. Göring’s problem was that he had come two weeks too late to catch the smaller fry. Many valuable Jewish possessions had already disappeared into other people’s pockets. The Viennese wanted the money for themselves, and were even refusing to pay their debts to Jewish businesses, which led to a further shortfall in Göring’s expectations. It was important that the state itself should receive the Jewish businesses at the lowest price and then have the ability to sell them to respectable interested parties at a profit.188
In the event, the new Vermögensverkehrsstelle (Office for the Traffic of Assets) was helpless in the face of the Viennese desire to plunder their Jews. When they sought to find out what had happened to the fortunes of their victims they discovered that the money had disappeared during the ‘wild’ time, and there was no hope of relocating it. From now on the Nazi authorities had to make sure that they got there first.189 This made Göring’s plans conflict with those of Eichmann, who wanted the Jews out as quickly as possible and was prepared to use the money from the rich to finance the departure of the poor. Göring desired that money for himself. The result was a push-me, pull-me situation whereby the Jews were being held back from emigration until they could be proved to have turned over their assets. Their passports were therefore impounded until they had paid their dues to the conquerors. Such conflicts were rife in Nazi leadership where Hitler delighted in the principle of divide and rule.
The Jews were feeling the heat from the new masters. This is borne out by the figures: in January that year there had been eighty-eight suicides, of whom five were Jews; in February sixty-two and four Jews; in March 213, of whom seventy-nine were Jews; in April sixty-two, of the 138 were Jews.190 Suicide among Viennese Gentiles was also a daily occurrence. An anti-Nazi Colonel Deloge had been offered the editorship of a pro-Nazi organ. He was found dead with a revolver in his hand and a note beside him that read, ‘I cannot serve the Godless.’ A senior judge called Meyer poisoned himself and his wife and four children. Before he died he put up a sign in his window saying, ‘I cannot take responsibility for bringing up my family in the spirit of atheism and crime. God forgive me!’191
Another package of measures introduced by Göring’s ministry was meant to cure the unemployment problem in Austria. Jobs were to be created on the German model: new fast roads, dams and motorways were to be built; the mines were to be developed; there was to be a reform of agriculture with improvements to the soil; new cooperative dairies were to be created; new housing was to made available.192 This was meant to lure the old socialists over to the Nazi side: giving them work would make them the new brooms and superior to the ‘Blacks’ (supporters of the Corporate State) whom they had replaced.193
*
On the same day that Göring spoke at the North West Station, the 26th, the Gestapo appeared at Schuschnigg’s home to interrogate him for the first time. The reasons for the visit were given in Goebbels’ diary. It had been decided that Schuschnigg was to be subjected to a show trial on charges of breaking the constitution, abuse of power and murder. He was to be sentenced to death and then suffer the ignominy of the Führer’s pardon.194
Four men in SS uniforms sat round around the table. I noticed the new style of things, for instance that these officials kept their hats on during the interview. The speaker was an Austrian who . . . had been in the police department of Salzburg until 1932. After offering my cigarettes around and telling me that I was also allowed to smoke, he began the hearing.
Schuschnigg was asked about his possessions and his bank accounts (‘My truthful answers were met with complete incredulity’) and his attitude to the monarchy. He was also asked if he were a freemason, an extraordinary question to put to such a pious Catholic. They wanted to know what his relations were with Baron Rothschild and the Cardinal. Then they began to search the house.195
Göring’s visit was followed by those of a handful of Nazi bigwigs keen to reassure the Austrians of their goodwill: Goebbels, the women’s leader Gertrude Scholz-Klink, Hans Frank, Funk, the labour leader Ley, Rosenberg and Hess. Goebbels spoke for three hours at the Station three days later. In his own account, he was received with ‘storms of excitement’.196 Many stressed the fact that the Nazis had nothing against the Church: they had their business, the Church had its.
SUDETENLAND
With Austria in the bag, and no blood spilled on the German side at least, Hitler proceeded to the next territorial objective mentioned to the service chiefs on 5 November: Czechoslovakia. That other creation of Versailles, Czechoslovakia had begun life in the rosy light of the idealistic conception of its founder, Tomás Masaryk. As in Jugoslavia, the Allies had bundled a number of incohesive peoples together. In Jugoslavia there was an overwhelming Slavic majority in all its constituent parts (although they didn’t necessarily get on with one another), but in Czechoslovakia the non-Slavic element was more than a third. For a while there was a small degree of accommodation, but matters changed after Masaryk’s retirement in 1935 when Edvard Beneš took over as head of state. Beneš was opposed to any accommodation with Germany over its non-Slavic minorities.197
The Czechs and the Slovaks were both Slavs, but they had no previous history of cooperation. Prague had been ruled from Vienna; Bratislava (formerly Pressburg) was a Hungarian city, ruled from Budapest. In practice the Czechs looked down on their rustic cousins to the east. The two minorities that rocked the boat the most were the Germans in the Czech lands and the Magyars who had been stranded in the Slovak provinces. There were 3.5 million Germans in western Czechoslovakia, living mostly in northern Bohemia (the so-called Sudetenland) and southern Moravia. There was also a small but prominent minority in Prague and Brno (Brünn) and a number of islands deep in the Czech-speaking core, such as Iglau, south of Prague.
The Hungarians were mostly to be found in southern Slovakia, disgruntled at being estranged from their motherland, and at the fact that Versailles had awarded Pressburg – the coronation capital of Hungary – to Czechoslovakia, henceforth to be known by its Slovak name of Bratislava. Ragbag it might have been, but Czechoslovakia had acquired considerable strength since 1919: the French had guaranteed its borders in 1925, and the Soviet Union ten years later –
although the Soviets required the French to act first. The Czech flirtation with the Soviet Union, however, sealed its fate in the eyes of some Western conservatives, who would rather have seen the Germans occupy the country than bolshevism establish an outpost in Central Europe. Even without the promised Soviet aid, however, Czechoslovakia also had a powerful army, an exemplary chain of border defences (all of them in the German-speaking regions in the north, and none facing Austria in the south) and a thriving arms industry.
The pretext for Hitler’s intervention was the treatment of the German-speaking minority in the Sudetenland. Goebbels had been let in on his plans, but most of Hitler’s entourage did not learn of them until the end of May. Hitler, however, had already taken the trouble to square the Jugoslav minister Stojadinovitsh on 17 January: he did not want the Jugoslavs walking into Hungary if the latter came to his aid in Czechoslovakia.198 From Halifax he had learned that the British had already looked at the problem, and decided – realistically enough – that military intervention on their part was practically meaningless. The most they could do was starve the Germans out with a naval blockade, which would require two to three years to take effect.199
With Hitler’s men in Vienna Goebbels thought the time was ripe to evict the large Czech element of the city’s population. He thought Göring had been wrong to reassure Mastny on 11 March. Two and a half weeks later, on 28 March, Ribbentrop, Lorenz and Hess, together with an impressive bevy of diplomats, had a meeting with the Sudeten German leader Konrad Henlein, whom Germany had been subsidizing since 1935. The Czech ‘Führer’ was a school PE master, scoffed at in SS circles for suspected homosexuality.200 He was not the tough man: by all reports that title went to his second-in-command, Karl Hermann Frank.201 Hitler had told Henlein to refuse all blandishments from Prague, and the Czechs were now becoming aware that what had previously been an annoying domestic matter had more serious implications. The Anschluss had also raised the Sudetenländers’ hopes of becoming part of Greater Germany, and there had been Nazi demonstrations in some of the smaller German-speaking towns. The Nazis hoped for post hoc verbal protests of the sort delivered after 12 March.202 On 29 March Goebbels flew to Vienna. From the aircraft the Gauleiter of Berlin could make out a large chunk of Czechoslovakia. ‘Just wait!’203
1938: Hitler's Gamble Page 10
