The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  On the morning of 9 March 1938, in response to this increasingly desperate situation, Schuschnigg suddenly announced that a referendum was to be held on 13 March to ask Austrian voters whether they were in favour of ‘a free and German, independent and social, Christian and united Austria; for freedom and work, and for the equality of all who declare for people and fatherland’. To ensure that this heavily loaded question got a resounding ‘yes’ from the Austrian electorate, voting was restricted to people over twenty-four years of age, thus disenfranchising a large part of the Nazi movement, whose supporters were predominantly young. Moreover, under the repressive conditions of Schuschnigg’s clerico-fascist dictatorship, there was no guarantee that voting would be free or secret, nor did the Chancellor provide any assurances that it would be; the lack of a proper electoral register opened the way to potentially massive electoral fraud. Hitler was outraged at what he saw as a betrayal of the Berchtesgaden agreement. Summoning Goring and Goebbels, he began feverish discussions on what could be done to stop the vote. While the army was hastily organizing invasion plans based only on a study prepared earlier for the eventuality of a Habsburg restoration, Hitler sent an ultimatum to Schuschnigg at ten in the morning on 11 March 1938: the referendum had to be postponed for a fortnight and the wording changed to one similar to that of the Saar plebiscite, in other words, implicitly asking people to approve union rather than oppose it. Schuschnigg had to resign and be replaced by Seyss-Inquart. Schuschnigg agreed to postpone the vote but refused to resign. Seizing the initiative, Goring telephoned the nervous and reluctant Seyss-Inquart and told him to inform the Austrian Head of State, Wilhelm Miklas, that if he did not appoint him Chancellor ‘then an invasion by the troops already mobilized on the border will follow tonight and that will be the end of Austria’. And, he added, ‘you must let the National Socialists loose throughout the whole country. They are now to be allowed to go on the streets everywhere.’83

  By the evening of 11 March, Austrian Nazis were demonstrating all over the country, while an SS contingent occupied the headquarters of the Tyrolese provincial government. The Nazi Regional Leader of Upper Austria announced to an ecstatic crowd of 20,000 on the main square in Linz that Schuschnigg had resigned, as indeed he had at 3.30 in the afternoon under the impact of Göring’s second ultimatum. The plebiscite was summarily cancelled. In Vienna by chance, William L. Shirer was ‘swept along in a shouting, hysterical Nazi mob’. The police, he reported, were ‘looking on, grinning’. Some were already wearing swastika arm-bands. ‘Young toughs were heaving paving blocks into the windows of the Jewish shops. The crowds roared with delight.’ As the demonstrations spread, Goring told Seyss-Inquart to send a formal request for German troops to restore order. Not yet appointed Chancellor, he hesitated; the request had to be sent by Wilhelm Keppeler, the head of the Nazi Party’s Austrian bureau, who was now in Vienna, instead. It went off at ten past nine on the evening of 11 March 1938. Meanwhile, Hitler had sent Prince Philip of Hesse to Mussolini to secure his neutrality. At 10.45 p.m., the prince telephoned Hitler personally to say that everything was all right. ‘Please tell Mussolini I will never forget him for this,’ Hitler said. ‘Never, never, never, whatever happens.’ The British signalled their neutrality. At midnight, the Austrian President finally yielded and appointed Seyss-Inquart Chancellor. It was all too late anyway; spurred on by Goring, who told him that he would seem weak if he did not act, whether or not the Austrians accepted the ultimatum Hitler had given Keitel the invasion order already, at a quarter to nine. Earlier in the evening, Schuschnigg had made an emotional broadcast to the Austrian people, outlining the terms of the ultimatum and denying that there was any disorder. ‘We are not prepared even in this terrible situation to shed blood,’ he said. At 5.30 in the morning of 12 March 1938, German troops, mustered in Bavaria over the previous two days, crossed the Austrian border. They met with no resistance.84

  IV

  As they drove and marched slowly towards Austria’s main towns in the course of the morning, the German troops were greeted by ecstatic crowds shouting ‘Hail’ and throwing flowers at their feet. Everywhere, clandestine members of the banned Austrian Nazi Party were openly revealing their allegiance, ostentatiously turning over the swastika buttons they had hitherto kept hidden behind their lapels.85 Assured by army commanders that he would be safe, Hitler flew to Munich and was driven towards the border in an open-topped car, accompanied by a motorized column of his SS bodyguard. Arriving at 3.50 in the afternoon at his birthplace, Braunau am Inn, he was greeted by jubilant crowds, who cheered him on his way. Later in the evening, after a four-hour journey by road, constantly slowed down by the enthusiastic crowds that lined the streets, he reached Linz, where he joined a group of leading Nazis including Himmler and Seyss-Inquart. As the church bells rang out, Hitler addressed a huge crowd from the balcony of the town hall, repeatedly interrupted by shouts of ‘hail!’ and chants of ‘one people, one Reich, one Leader’. ‘Any further attempt to tear this people asunder’, he warned, ‘will be in vain.’86 After laying flowers on his parents’ grave at Leonding, and visiting his old home, Hitler returned to his hotel to consider how the formal union of Austria with Germany could best be achieved. Initially he had thought merely of becoming President of Austria himself and holding a plebiscite on union, which would keep most of Austria’s existing institutions intact. But the rapturous reception he had received now convinced him that a full incorporation of Austria into the Reich could be achieved immediately without any serious opposition. ‘These people here are Germans,’ he told a British journalist.87

  By the evening of 13 March 1938 a Law providing for the annexation of Austria, drafted by a senior Interior Ministry official flown in from Berlin, had been approved by the reconstituted Austrian cabinet and signed by Hitler. The union of the two countries created ‘Greater Germany’ (Grossdeutschland). Initially, Austria as a whole became a province by itself, headed by Seyss-Inquart; but Hitler was now determined to erase Austrian identity and downgrade Vienna, the capital, which he had always disliked, in favour of the regions. By April 1939, the Rhenish Nazi Party Regional Leader Josef Bürckel, flown in to become Reich Commissioner for the Reunification of Austria with the Reich, had abolished the regional assemblies and merged regional with Party administration, though retaining, with some modifications, the identity of the regions themselves. Austria became the Eastern March (Ostmark); its identity was to be obliterated conclusively in 1942 when it was divided into the Reich Regions of the Alps and Danube.88 This was not what many Austrians, and especially Viennese, had expected; even the leaders of the Austrian Nazi Party were bitterly disappointed at being sidelined in favour of administrators imported from Germany. Yet initially at least their enthusiasm was overwhelming. On 14 March 1938, Hitler’s motor cavalcade drove from Linz to Vienna, again slowed down by cheering crowds; he was obliged to address them from his hotel balcony after his arrival, since they would not quieten down until they had heard him speak. The delay in his arrival had given the Viennese Nazis time to prepare: schools and workplaces were closed for the occasion, and Nazis and Hitler Youth members has been bussed in from the countryside. On 15 March, Hitler addressed a vast, delirious crowd of perhaps a quarter of a million people in Vienna, announcing that Austria’s new historic mission was to provide a bulwark against the threat from the East.89

  Austrians’ acceptance of the reunification was assured not merely by the long-term disillusion of the country’s citizens with their tiny, barely viable state, but also by careful preparation on the part of the Nazis. The Socialists had long been in favour of reunification, allowing doubts to creep in only because of the form the German government took from 1933, not because of any matter of broader national principle. The party had in any case been crushed by Dollfuss in the brief civil conflict of February 1934. Its leaders were mostly in exile, in prison, in the underground opposition, such as it was, or politically quiescent. The Nazis carefully wooed the moderate wing of the party, persua
ding its leading figure Karl Renner to declare openly on 3 April that he would vote yes in the forthcoming plebiscite. And in a meeting brokered by the indefatigable Franz von Papen, Cardinal Innitzer, leader of Austria’s Catholics, accepted Hitler’s personal assurances that the Church and its institutions, including schools, would not be affected. Already inclined to see in Nazism the best defence against the threat of Bolshevism, Innitzer recruited other leading prelates to issue a joint declaration in favour of the reunion on 18 March, affixing a personal ‘Hail, Hitler!’ to the foot of the page. 90 Organized by Josef Bürckel, who had masterminded the Saar vote, the plebiscite was coupled with an election in which voters were presented with the Leader’s list of candidates for the Greater German Reichstag. It was held on 10 April amidst massive manipulation and intimidation. A predictable 99.75 per cent of Austrian voters supported the annexation, although probably, to judge at least from some Gestapo reports, only a quarter to a third of Viennese voters were genuinely committed to the idea of union.91

  Map 19. The Annexation of Austria, 1938

  Austrians soon found out what being incorporated into the Third Reich meant in practical terms. The postal service, the railways, the banking system, the currency and all other economic institutions were obliterated by their German equivalents; the taxation systems were merged with effect from January 1940. Within two days of the takeover, the Austrian economy had been subsumed into the Four-Year Plan. German firms moved in to take over Austrian businesses, which the Plan’s economic managers considered slow and inefficient. Parts of Austrian business were already German-owned, of course, but the takeover spurred a new wave of purchases. A huge new Hermann-GoringWorks was set up in Linz to take advantage of Austria’s large iron ore deposits. Petroleum and iron production increased substantially as a result of the takeover. Austria’s very considerable gold and foreign currency reserves also accrued to the Reich, giving a temporary boost to Germany’s reserves. The extension of the German border to the south-east made trade with the Balkans easier. Austria also supplied manpower to the Four-Year Plan. Absorption into the already overheated German economy brought many benefits for Austrians; unemployment fell rapidly, and the influx of German soldiers and administrators into Austria increased local demand. But Austria’s economic problems did not disappear overnight, and higher wages in Germany proved insufficient as an incentive to bring unemployed skilled industrial workers in from the Austrian provinces. To relieve the manpower shortage in Germany and help reduce Austrian unemployment statistics, therefore, Goring decided to draft workers by force. A decree to this effect was issued on 22 June 1938 and by the following year, 100,000 Austrian workers had been compulsorily taken off to work in what was now known as the ‘Old Reich’, including 10,000 skilled engineering workers. Their removal, the provision of new jobs in Austria itself, and the enrolment of all Austrian workers into the German Labour Front and the Strength Through Joy organization, had a further dampening effect on workers’ opposition.92

  But the Nazis were not taking any chances. Among the earliest arrivals in Vienna were Himmler and Heydrich, who brought in a team of Gestapo officers to eliminate the opposition. While many leading men in the former regime fled into exile, ex-Chancellor Schuschnigg refused to leave and was arrested; he spent the rest of the Third Reich in custody. Papen’s secretary, Wilhelm von Ketteler, was picked up by the Gestapo; shortly afterwards his lifeless body was found in a canal. The former leader of the Home Defence Brigades, Major Fey, who had played a leading role in putting down the Nazi uprising in 1934, killed himself with his entire family; 2,555 officers were compulsorily retired from the Austrian army, and an even larger number were transferred to administrative duties. These measures affected over 40 per cent of the officer corps. The rest of the troops were dispersed throughout the German army, obliterating the military identity of Austrians altogether. The State Secretary for Security, in overall charge of the police, was replaced by the head of the Austrian SS, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, while the new Vienna chief of police was Otto Steinhäusl, who had played a significant role in the abortive 1934 putsch. Six thousand ordinary German policemen were drafted in as reinforcements, along with a substantial number of Gestapo agents. But in general the Austrian police needed no thorough purge. Many of them were secret Nazis. They willingly made over the elaborate and extensive lists of oppositional elements compiled under Dollfuss and Schuschnigg. The Gestapo moved swiftly into action, arresting everyone thought to pose a threat to Nazi rule - 21,000 in all - in the night of 12-13 March. Special new facilities were made available in the Dachau concentration camp to accommodate them. Most of those imprisoned were released later in the year; only 1,500 were left by the end of 1938. There was to be no significant resistance in Austria until near the end of the war. Meanwhile, Himmler set up an entirely new camp, at Mauthausen, close to Linz, where prisoners from across the Reich would quarry stone for use in Speer’s building projects. It was to prove the harshest of all the camps within the territory of Greater Germany before the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. The Vienna City Council made the land available on condition that some of the stone was used for cobbling the city’s streets.93

  The harshest repression of all fell on Austria’s Jews, the overwhelming majority of whom - 170,000 out of nearly 200,000 - lived in Vienna. After living for years in the frustration of illegality, Austria’s Nazis had accumulated a degree of pent-up aggression that now outstripped anything seen so far in the Old Reich. Hard-line Nazis were jubilant at what one called ‘the liberation of Vienna and the East March from alien Jewish rule’ and proclaimed a ‘general cleansing of jewified Austria’.94 All the various stages of antisemitic policy and action that had been developing over the years in Germany now happened in Austria at the same time, telescoped into a single outburst of rabid hatred and violence. The country’s new Nazi rulers rapidly introduced all the Old Reich’s antisemitic legislation, including the Aryan Paragraph and (in May 1938) the Nuremberg Laws. Jews were summarily ousted from the civil service and the professions. An elaborate bureaucracy - the Property Transfer Office, with a staff of 500 - was set up to manage the Aryanization of Jewish-owned businesses. A great deal of Jewish assets and property found its way into the hands of old Austrian Nazis, who demanded it as compensation for the years of repression they had suffered under Schuschnigg (and for which the Jews were in no sense to blame).95 By May 1938, 7,000 out of 33,000 Jewish-owned businesses in Vienna had already been closed down; by August 1938, 23,000 more had gone. The remaining ones were Aryanized. Official action had in many cases been preceded by unofficial violence. Shortly after the takeover, a gang of stormtroopers threw Franz Rothenberg, chairman of the board of the Kreditanstalt, the most important Austrian bank, into a car and pushed him out at top speed, killing him instantly. Isidor Pollack, director-general of a dynamite factory, was beaten so badly by brownshirts in April that he died of his injuries; his firm was taken over by I. G. Farben, while the Kreditanstalt fell into the hands of the Deutsche Bank.96

  Meanwhile, Austrian Nazis were breaking into Jewish premises, houses and apartments, looting the contents, and driving the inhabitants out onto the streets, where they were mustered under a hail of curses and blows and taken away to clean anti-Nazi graffiti off the city’s buildings. Soon a new version of this sport was discovered: the Jews were made to kneel on the streets and clean away Austrian crosses and other signs painted or chalked on them by patriots amidst the derisive comments and applause of the onlookers. Frequently they were doused with cold water, pushed over, or kicked as they carried out their humiliating task. ‘Day after day’, wrote George Gedye, the Vienna correspondent of the London Daily Telegraph,Nazi storm-troopers, surrounded by jostling, jeering and laughing mobs of ‘golden Viennese hearts’, dragged Jews from shops, offices and homes, men and women, put scrubbing-brushes in their hands, splashed them well with acid, and made them go down on their knees and scrub away for hours at the hopeless task of removing Schuschnigg propaganda. All this
I could watch from my office window overlooking the Graben. (Where there was none available, I have seen Nazis painting it for the Jews to remove.) . . . Every morning in the Habsburgergasse the S. S. squads were told how many Jews to round up that day for menial tasks . . . The favourite task was that of cleaning the bowls of the w.c.s in the S. S. barracks, which the Jews were forced to do simply with their naked hands.97

  Other Jews, going about their daily business on the streets, were assaulted with impunity, their wallets robbed and their fur coats taken before they were beaten up.98

  By 17 March 1938 even Heydrich was proposing to get the Gestapo to arrest those Nazis who were responsible for such acts. It was not until 29 April, however, when stormtrooper leaders were threatened with dismissal if they allowed these outrages to continue, that the tide of violent incidents began to subside. Meanwhile, the Nazis had begun officially to confiscate Jewish-owned apartments in Vienna: 44,000 out of 70,000 had been Aryanized by the end of 1938. They also initiated the forced expulsion of Jewish populations in a manner far more direct than had so far occurred in the Old Reich. In the small eastern region of the Burgenland, bordering on Hungary, the new Nazi rulers confiscated the property of the 3,800 members of the old-established Jewish community there, closed down all Jewish businesses, arrested community leaders, then used the creation of a security zone on the border as an excuse to expel the entire Jewish population. Many Jews were hauled off to police stations, and beaten until they signed documents surrendering all their assets. The police took them to the border and forced them across. However, since neighbouring countries often refused to accept them, many Jews were left stranded in no-man’s land. Fifty-one of them were dumped unceremoniously on a barren, sandy islet on the Danube, in an incident that aroused worldwide press condemnation. The majority fled to friends and relatives in Vienna. By the end of 1938 there were no Jews left in the Burgenland. Partly in response to this mass flight, the Gestapo in Vienna arrested 1,900 Jews who were known to have criminal convictions, however trivial, between 25 and 27 May 1938 and sent them to Dachau, where they were segregated and particularly brutally mistreated. The police also arrested and expelled all foreign Jews and even German Jews living in Vienna. Altogether, 5,000 Jews had been deported from Austria by November 1938. By this time, too, Jews who lived outside the capital were being forcibly removed to Vienna. All these events created a panic amongst Austria’s Jewish population. Many hundreds committed suicide in despair. Thousands of others sought to leave the country by every means they could. In order to speed up this process, the Nazi authorities established a Central Agency for Jewish Emigration on 20 August 1938.99