1938: Hitler's Gamble

by MacDonogh, Giles

  Many of the men and women mentioned in these pages died violent deaths. The Nazis were killed in action, committed suicide or were hanged after the war. Many of those who resisted their power suffered a similar fate in the last stages of the conflict. Those Jews who failed to leave mainland Europe mostly perished.

  Fred Richter’s later history makes sad reading. He appeared before a magistrate at the Landgericht on 20 January 1939. He seems to have successfully retailed the argument that he was only a messenger and had no idea of what he was involved in. He later complained that the magistrate had been rough with him, and recanted everything he said. He had no idea that espionage was involved. On 15 September 1939 he was tried before the notorious Peoples’ Court in Berlin. Tucek was naturally a model witness. Kriminalrat Preiss appeared for the prosecution: he had interrogated Kendrick, and was able to produce his testimony. Preiss informed the court that Richter had tried on several occasions to interest Kendrick in agents. The court concluded that Richter had been lying. Kendrick’s testimony was in keeping with Tucek’s. Richter was therefore convicted of acting as an accomplice to Kendrick. He was sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment and to pay a fine of 1,000 RM for wasting the court’s time. He was released into captivity in Austria. He remained in Stein prison until 15 June 1942. He wrote his last letter to Maud from there in May that year before he was moved to Marburg in present-day Slovenia; in September that year he was translated to Graz. He left Graz in February 1943 for Auschwitz, dying at 8.22 a.m. the day after his arrival, allegedly from heart disease: he had not survived the ramp.4

  Tucek appears to have been working for the Gestapo. A man of that name was active in tracking down and torturing Austrian communists in Paris during the war and the French requested his extradition once he had been spotted on the streets of Vienna. He was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment by a military court in Paris.5

  The pogrom of 9 November had destroyed Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement in Germany. The shock felt by many Britons after the events of the Reichskristallnacht made it untenable. It was now quite clear that Hitler would push for war, and that dangling trifles at him such as the return of the German colonies would not satisfy him in the long run. Although Chamberlain was unaware of it then, Hitler had already given instructions to OKH on 21 October to draw up plans for the invasion both of rump Czechoslovakia and Memelland.

  Foreign boycotts of German goods were slowly strangling the regime. The new enemy was the ‘Jewish State’ – the United States, which for Hitler meant ‘world Jewry’. If the United States was to stop importing German goods, then Germany would institute a policy of expansion to the east: it would mean the conquest of Lebensraum.6 That the die was cast is evident from Hitler’s speech in the Reichstag of 30 January 1939:

  I want today to be a prophet again: if international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will not be the bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.

  In Goebbels’ interpretation, the two-and-a-half-hour speech was a ‘tough polemic against America’.7 Others have seen the ‘prophecy’ as a green light to his hard-line supporters who would begin to implement the ‘final solution’ in the last weeks of 1941.8

  Hitler’s style of despotism had become increasingly oriental. He rose at lunchtime and spent much of the day reading thrillers, watching films and delivering rambling monologues to his secretaries and adjutants. Cabinet meetings had ended in February 1938 and now only the closest members of his clique had the right of access to their Führer. His satraps were there to interpret the All Highest’s will.

  At the end of the year, Hitler’s new Chancellery was well enough advanced for him to invite the press to revel in his glory. It was as if Hitler was now Wotan in the final bars of Das Rheingold inviting his gods into the new Valhalla. The man who had made the dream come true was Albert Speer, who had been appointed General Inspector for the Reich Capital on 30 January 1937. He had been given a mere nine months to build the Führer’s new palace. In November he had summoned the sculptor Breker to the Prussian Academy on the Pariser Platz and told him to make two three-metre-high heroic figures to flank the entrance from the courtyard: The subject is up to you, we’ll meet again in a week.’ The meeting had taken all of five minutes.

  Money was no object: he later commissioned five bronzes and two life-sized reliefs for the circular saloon that was created by the slight bend in the Vossstrasse. The Mosaic [sic] Saloon was decorated with work by Hermann Kaspar.9 As Hitler told one of his adjutants, ‘When these gentlemen [the press] enter the Mosaic Hall they must immediately sense the whole sublime nature of the Greater German Reich. The long corridors will reduce my visitors to humility.’10 Beyond the granite hall with its cupola there stretched a hall of mirrors lined with red marble modelled on that of Louis XIV at Versailles, except that at 146 metres it was a little under twice as long. The goal of the visitor was Hitler’s study. Its proportions were just as generous: 27 metres by 14.5, and nearly 10 metres high. At one end a portrait of Bismarck hung over a massive fireplace, while on the white marble table rode a statue of Frederick the Great on horseback. The whole edifice had cost just under ninety million marks. The wraps came off the new palace on 12 January 1939, Göring’s birthday.

  EPILOGUE

  The history of Central Europe in 1938 is, to some extent, the history of my own family. That year my maternal grandfather’s family scattered to the four winds. The Zirners and the Zwiebacks had come to Vienna from Baja and Bonyhad in Hungary two generations before, when, following defeat in the Austro-Prussian War, the emperor finally allowed Jews to settle in the capital. The cloth merchant Ludwig Zwieback promptly bought the stock exchange building housed in the old Palais Arnstein-Pereira in the Weihburggasse and opened a department store round the corner in the Kärntnerstrasse. His brothers opened a more down-market version in the Mariahilferstrasse. When Ludwig died at his home on the Morzinplatz in 1906, he left each of his three daughters a third share in a fortune of some 2.2 million gold crowns, at a time when a genteel retirement might have been eked out on 3,000 a year.

  The daughters were my great-grandmother Gisela, Ella, who inherited the business, and Malwine, who married the lawyer Josef Kranz. My great-grandmother married Marton Zirner, who had succeeded his father Max as court jeweller. They had four children: Josef, Katharina, Walther and Felix, my grandfather. Josef died an ‘aspirant’ in the K & K dragoons near Warsaw in 1915. In civilian life he had been co-répétiteur in the opera houses in Hamburg and Breslau, having abandoned the law for music. He was hoping to become a conductor.

  On 11 March 1938 great-uncle Josef’s wife, the feminist novelist and later screenwriter Gina Kaus, was the first of my relatives to take the decision to run. She was another sparkling example of old Viennese Jewry, and the half-sister of Princess Stephanie zu Hohenlohe, Hitler’s Jewish spy.i Her books had been burned in Berlin in 1933 and she had made her way home to Vienna. Referring in her autobiography to the flames that engulfed the works of Heine, Thomas Mann and Sigmund Freud, she said, ‘Never have I been in such good company.’1

  After Josef’s death great-aunt Gina married the Trieste-born Gentile Otto Kaus,ii but that marriage ended in separation. She left Vienna in 1938 with her latest lover and third and last husband, Eddy Frischauer, the brother of the journalist and writer Willi, who was already based in Britain. As Kaus’s wife she had an Italian passport. When they were detrained in Feldkirch in the Vorarlberg and asked to show their papers, Frischauer flourished his baptismal certificate, prudently issued to him shortly after his birth by his Catholic, assimilated-Jewish parents. It worked. They found safety in Switzerland. His parents were gassed. Gina eventually started a new career in Hollywood. She wrote no more novels, however: she had lost her language and her audience in Germany. She died in Los Angeles aged ninety-two.

  Great-aunt Kathi died in Darjeelin
g in 1927, shortly after giving birth to a boy called Martin. Martin was bitten by a venomous fly and developed brain damage. Kathi’s husband, the Latvian Jew Dr Rudolf Rapaport, demanded my aunt’s dowry, and my great-grandmother had to sell her last properties – the villa in Hietzing and country house on the Mondsee near Salzburg and the heavily mortgaged shop in the Graben – to pay him off. After escaping the Nazis from the south of France, Rapaport achieved fame as the painter Rudolf Ray in Mexico and the United States. Kathi may have had a second child called Bonifacius, the fruit of a liaison in Paris during her student years. He was secretly lodged in an orphanage in Klosterneuburg. The fate of Bonifacius is unknown.

  My grandfather Felix and great-uncle Walther had started up a small business after the déroute caused by Rudolf Rapaport demanding my great-aunt’s portion.2 They naturally had no future in Vienna after March 1938. Walther was arrested in June, along with all the Viennese jewellers. He was sent to Dachau before being transferred to Buchenwald, but was eventually released. His Protestant Bavarian wife had divorced him. Whether she had bought him out or he was released for Hitler’s fiftieth birthday, no one seems to know now. He died a broken man in 1963 in Central America, where he ran a coffee plantation.

  My grandfather Felix Zirner had married Katharine Bacon. She was an English Catholic, the daughter of the Royal Academician John Henry Bacon. They had a daughter, my mother. The marriage broke up soon after and Katharine Zirner returned to England, where she died of TB in a nursing home in Haselmere, Surrey, in 1938. Felix was refused entry into Britain, where he might have joined his daughter. He left for Argentina from Genoa in September. His admission was presumably engineered by the pressure exerted by Rublee on the backtracking Argentinians. He made his way to Bolivia – ‘the Rolls Royce of emigrations’iii – and established a small firm restoring churches. It is not known how he financed the journey and visa. A member of his wife’s family probably obtained the latter for him in London or Washington. He died of heart failure in 1943 at the age of just thirty-eight.

  Gisela Zirner died in 1930. Her sister Ella was still running the family department store in the Kärntnerstrasse with her son Ludwig as managing director. Ella was one of the most prominent women in Vienna. She led a fabulous life, took many lovers and had an estate across the Jugoslav border where guests were collected from the station by a carriage drawn by a team of white horses. In 1933 the Zirners rented out the former canteen of the department store to three Hungarian noblemen who turned it into the famous restaurant ‘Zu den drei Husaren’. In 1938 the owner, Count Paul Pallfy, decided that he no longer wished to operate a restaurant in a Nazi Vienna and sold the lease to Otto Horcher, the restaurant-tsar of the Third Reich. During the war years its banquettes groaned under the weight of Hermann Göring and other Nazi luminaries.3

  Ella had married my great-grandfather’s brother, Alexander, who sat on the board of the Jewish congregation with my great-grandfather and was not only a pillar of the community but also one of the most prominent ‘industrialists’ in the city. Ella and Alexander went their separate ways before the First World War, and Alexander lived in a suite in the Imperial Hotel. When he died in 1924, several hundred people accompanied his coffin to the Central Cemetery.4

  Ella had three children: Renée, who married the scion of a Hungarian magnate’s family with the sonorous name of Erös von Bethlenfalva, and another, Erich, who fled to Monaco when the Germans attacked France and was still there in the fifties. The third child, Ludwig, however, was not Alexander’s son but the result of a long-standing affair between Ella and the composer Franz Schmidt, the disciple of Bruckner. He had known her since her time at the Academy of Music, where Ella had won first prize for piano. Schmidt had wanted to marry Ella, but my great-great-grandfather felt the impecunious musician lacked prospects. Schmidt dedicated his First Symphony to Ella, and later made a present to her of the score of his opera Notre Dame, which was also inscribed to her. At around the time he was writing Notre Dame, Schmidt was a constant presence in Ella’s flat next to the Bristol Hotel on the Ring. Schmidt and Ella used to play duets together. A form of synthesis was achieved when Ludwig was born in February 1906.iv Ludwig also studied privately and at the Academy under his natural father, but his mother refused to allow him to become a professional musician. The Nazis greatly revered Schmidt and were presumably unaware that he had a Jewish son.

  They commissioned a new work from him: Eine Deutsche Auferstehung (German Resurrection), which he was half-hearted about and failed to finish before he died in February 1939. Shortly before Ludwig left Vienna, a Gestapo-man came to see him and confiscated the score of Notre Dame. He never learned for certain who had informed them that he had it in his possession, but he suspected that it was Schmidt’s pupil, the pianist Friedrich Wührer. Wührer was the first to tell Ludwig that he was Schmidt’s son.v That was in America after the war. His mother had never discussed his paternity.

  On 6 April 1938 Horcher became the owner of the walls of the restaurant as well, when Ella’s property was Aryanized. The Nazis swiped one half of her wealth, her creditors the other: principally the Zentrals-parkasse der Stadt Wien. A large sum was paid into a closed account, of which Ella and her son Ludwig naturally saw nothing.5 After Ella and Ludwig were forced to relinquish their property they made their ways via Cherbourg to New York, Ella on the arm of her new beau, the painter Viktor Krausz.vi Ella died in 1970. She had wanted to return to Vienna and become involved with the department store again, but Ludwig would not hear of it. Having been given a part of her property back in 1951, she sold it again in 1957. When Krausz died she took a younger lover who ran off with all that remained of the family fortune.

  Ludwig was free at last. After serving as a musician in the American army, he cast off the fetters of commerce, sat numerous exams and submitted a doctoral dissertation on American piano music. He finally achieved complete metamorphosis, becoming Professor of Piano at the State University of Illinois. Assisted by his Viennese-born wife Laura, he began the opera courses that were later to distinguish the school of music at Urbana. He also prepared and translated scores and conducted a wide range of operas, and was the life and soul of the famous Tanglewood Music Festival. As Schmidt’s son, he was the heir to the purest Viennese musical tradition.

  At his invitation Stravinsky, Britten, Milhaud, Kubelik, Hindemith and Beecham all visited Urbana. He was so successful that he was invited to take over the opera school at the Academy of Music in Berlin. He eventually realized his dream of building a proper opera house in Urbana, and, although already a very sick man, shortly before his death he put on a performance of Rheingold there, with Wagner’s great-grandson, Wolf Siegfried ‘Wummi’ Wagner, at his side. After he died in 1971, his wife Laura returned to Vienna to join their teenage son August, who was training to be an actor. August is now an Austrian citizen and celebrated for his theatre and cinema performances in the German-speaking world. The Zirners and the Zwiebacks were lucky. They were rich and well connected, and were able to escape from Austria before it was too late. Only one of my close relatives perished: the painter Rudolf Rapaport abandoned his mentally retarded son when he fled to America. ‘Martin Rapp’ was gassed at Hartheim in 1944.

  NOTES

  MANUSCRIPT SOURCES

  FLA Friends Library Archive, London.

  BBD British Board of Deputies Archive, London.

  PRO Public Record Office, London.

  LMA London Metropolitan Archive.

  DGFP Documents in German Foreign Policy.

  INTRODUCTION

  1 Richard Grunberger, A Social History of the Third Reich, London 1974, 269.

  PROLOGUE

  1 Hermann Foertsch, Schuld und Verhängnis: Die Fritsch-Krise im Früehjahr 1938 als Wendepunkt in der Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Zeit, Stuttgart 1951, 75–6.

  2 Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis, London 2001, 47.

  3 Foertsch, Schuld und Verhängnis, 77–9.

  4 Fröhlich, Elke, Di
e Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels I, V, 29.

  5 See Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, London 2006, xxiii–xxiv, 239–43.

  6 Goebbels, Tagebücher I, V, 95, 96.

  7 Andrew Roberts, ‘The Holy Fox’: The Life of Lord Halifax, London 1997, 71.

  8 Michael Bloch, Ribbentrop, revised edition, London 1992, 159–60.

  9 Henrik Eberle and Matthias Uhl, eds, The Hitler Book: The Secret Dossier Prepared for Stalin, trans. Giles MacDonogh, London 2005, 25.

  CHAPTER 1: JANUARY

  1 Walther Nowojski and Hadwig Klemperer, eds, Victor Klemperer, Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten – Tagebücher 1933–1941, Berlin 1995, 391; Goebbels, Tagebücher I, V, 82.

  2 Goebbels, Tagebücher I, V, 97.

  3 Der Stürmer 3, January 1938.

  4 Der Stürmer 1, January 1938.

  5 Klemperer, Tagebücher, 395.

  6 Goebbels, Tagebücher I, V, 96.

  7 David Irving, Göring, London 1989, 194.

  8 Irving, Göring, 196.

  9 R.J. Overy, Goering – The Iron Man, London 1984, 69.

  10 Jochen von Lang, Der Adjutant: Karl Wolff – der Mann zwischen Hitler und Himmler, Munich and Berlin 1985, 80.

  11 Goebbels, Tagebücher I, V, 54.

  12 André Brissaud, Canaris – Le ‘petit amiral’, prince de l’espionage allemand (1887–1945), Paris 1970, 161; Goebbels, Tagebücher I, V, 117.

  13 T.P. Conwell-Evans, None So Blind, Based on the Private Papers of Group Captain M.G. Christie, London 1947, 115.

  14 Foertsch, Schuld und Verhängnis, 86.

  15 Peter Padfield, Himmler – Reichsführer SS, London 1990, 212.