It was run by Adolf Eichmann, a man who was subsequently to become notorious for his role in the wartime extermination of Europe’s Jews. His career, therefore, deserves closer scrutiny at the moment, in 1938, when he first acquired a degree of prominence, not least because the procedures he set up in the Central Agency were to have a far wider application later. Eichmann was originally a Rhinelander. Born in 1906, he had lived in Austria since his family moved to Linz the year before the outbreak of the First World War. Middle-class by background and upbringing, Eichmann did not have a university qualification, but had worked as a sales representative for a petroleum company during the 1920s. As a member of Austria’s small Protestant minority, he identified strongly with pan-German nationalism, joined the independent youth movement and hobnobbed with right-wing nationalists, most notably the Kaltenbrunners, a family of middle-class pan-Germans. He joined the Austrian Nazi Party in 1932 and fell under the influence of Ernst Kaltenbrunner, a 29-year-old law graduate and former student fraternity activist. Kaltenbrunner was an active antisemite who had joined the Austrian SS in 1930, and in 1932 he persuaded Eichmann to become a member of the SS as well. Losing his job in the Depression, Eichmann moved to Germany in August 1933 and underwent intensive physical and ideological training in the SS. Soon he had joined Heydrich’s SS Security Service to compile information about Freemasons in Germany. His diligence and efficiency secured his rapid promotion through the ranks. By 1936 he was working in the Security Service’s Jewish Department, writing briefing papers on Zionism, emigration and similar topics and imbibing the Department’s ethos of radical, ‘rational’ antisemitism. 100
Eichmann arrived in Vienna on 16 March 1938 as part of a special unit, already kitted out with an arrest list of prominent Jews. The Security Service realized that the orderly conduct of forced emigration required the collaboration of Jewish leaders, especially if the poorest Jews, who lacked the means to leave and start a new life elsewhere, were to be included in the plan. Eichmann ordered leading members of the Jewish community up from their cells for interview and selected Josef Löwenherz, a respected lawyer, as the most suitable for his purpose. He sent him back to his cell with orders that he was not to be released until he had produced a plan for the mass emigration of Austria’s Jews. Löwenherz’s request for a streamlined system of processing applications that did away with the chicanery and deliberate delays common up to then met with a ready response. Eichmann instituted an orderly method of processing applications and arranged for the confiscated assets of the Jewish community and its members to be used by the Central Agency for subsidizing the emigration of poor Jews. Prodded by horror stories spread about the maltreatment of the Austrian Jews held in Dachau, by systematic abuse and insults from Agency officials, and by the continuing terror on the streets, Austria’s Jews queued in their thousands to obtain exit visas. Löwenherz and other Jews co-opted into the Agency’s work were repeatedly threatened with deportation to Dachau if they did not fill their quotas. The result, Eichmann later bragged, was that some 100,000 Austrian Jews had emigrated legally by May 1939, and several thousands more had crossed the border illegally, many of them eventually reaching Palestine. Newly promoted as a reward, and revelling in his new power, Eichmann became coarse and brutal in his dealings with individual Jews. His Agency, with its assembly-line processing, its plundering of Jewish assets to subsidize the emigration of the poor, its application of terror and its use of Jewish collaborators, became a model for the SS Security Service in its subsequent dealings with the Jews.101
V
The incorporation of Austria into the Third Reich, with its accompanying anti-Jewish excesses, gave a tremendous boost to antisemitism across the whole of Germany. Apart from anything else, the addition of 200,000 Jews to the population of the Third Reich more than balanced out the numbers of Jews whom the Nazis had succeeded in forcing out of Germany between March 1933 and March 1938.102 It almost made the effort seem in vain. So the Nazis redoubled their determination to speed up the process of forced emigration. Without the Austrian example, and the feelings of triumph and invulnerability it engendered in Nazi Party activists, it is impossible to understand the upsurge of violence towards Jews that swept across Germany in the summer of 1938 and culminated in the pogrom of 9-10 November. The full force of the pogrom was felt in Austria as well. Forty-two synagogues were burned down in Vienna, most of the remaining Jewish-owned shops were destroyed, and nearly 2,000 Jewish families were summarily ejected from their houses and apartments. A detachment of SS men trashed the Jewish community headquarters and the Zionist offices on 10 November. Eichmann complained that the pogrom disrupted the orderly conduct of emigration, but in fact he was well aware that its basic intention was to speed up the whole process through the sudden application of a spectacular degree of mass terror, and this indeed was its affect in Austria as elsewhere.103
Just as striking was the impulse the annexation of Austria and the expropriation of its Jewish community gave to the cultural ambitions of leading Nazis. They confiscated many major art collections, including those of the Rothschilds, which the Reich Finance Ministry eventually began selling off to meet newly imposed tax bills. The Mayor of Nuremberg succeeded in having the crown jewels of the Holy Roman Empire, taken from his city to Vienna in 1794, transferred back in preparation for the 1938 Party Rally. Art dealers began to gather round the looted collections like vultures round a carcass. Hermann Goring vetoed further sales and exports with an eye to acquiring some of the artworks for himself. But it was Hitler who led the plunder. A visit to Rome in May 1938 convinced him that Greater Germany too needed a major artistic capital, and his eye lighted upon Linz, where he had spent his childhood. On 26 June 1939 he ordered the art historian and Dresden museum director Hans Posse to create a collection for a planned art museum in Linz. On 24 July the Austrian administration under Bürckel was informed by Bormann that all confiscated collections were to be made available to Posse or Hitler personally; by October, Posse had managed to get the Rothschild collections included as well. The looting of the cultural heritage of Europe had begun.104
These acts of plunder were not widely known among Germans. Their immediate reactions to the annexation were mixed. The same pattern was evident as on previous occasions, such as the remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936: national pride was mingled with nervousness, even panic, born out of fear of a general war. According to some reports, the latter was the first response to the Austrian crisis, giving way fairly quickly to nationalistic enthusiasm as the passivity of the other European powers made it clear that war would not come, at least not on this occasion. ‘Hitler is a master of politics,’ was one widespread view; ‘yes, he’s truly a great statesman, he’s greater than Napoleon, because he’s conquering the world without war.’ The peaceful nature of the annexation was the key factor here. Workers may have been depressed by the absence of Socialist opposition (‘where was Red Vienna?’), but many were also hugely impressed by Hitler’s bloodless coup: ‘He’s really a good chap,’ remembered one.105
Hitler’s Vienna speech on 15 March 1938 was greeted by what one Social Democratic agent admitted was a massive enthusiasm and joy at this success . . . The jubilation knew almost no bounds any more . . . Even sections of society that had been cool towards Hitler up to this point, or rejected him, were now carried along by the event and admitted that Hitler was after all a great and clever statesman who would lead Germany upwards again to greatness and esteem from the defeat of 1918.106
The annexation of Austria brought Hitler’s popularity to unprecedented heights. Middle-class nationalists were ecstatic, whatever their reservations on other points of the Third Reich’s policies.107 The reunification of Germany and Austria was, wrote Luise Solmitz in her diary, ‘world history, the fulfilment of my old German dream, a truly united Germany, through a man who fears nothing, knows no compromises, hindrances or difficulties’. In mounting excitement she listened to the radio as it broadcast the unfolding events, recordin
g every move, every speech in a spirit of mounting ecstasy despite all the problems from which her family suffered because of their racially mixed status. ‘It’s all like a dream,’ she wrote, ‘one is completely torn away from one’s own world and from oneself . . . One must recall that one is excluded from the people’s community oneself like a criminal or degraded person.’108 Victor Klemperer was in despair: ‘We shall not live to see the end of the Third Reich,’ he wrote on 20 March 1938. He also noted that ‘since yesterday a broad yellow bill with the Star of David has been stuck to every post of our fence: Jew’.109
For Hitler himself, the success of the annexation brought a further increase in self-confidence, the certainty that he had been chosen by Providence, the belief that he could do no wrong. His speeches at this time are full of references to his own, divinely ordained status as the architect of Germany’s rebirth. There was now no one left to restrain him. The army, still in a state of shock and, in parts of the officer corps, disillusion after the Blomberg-Fritsch affair, had no answer to this major success. Even those officers who were now convinced that Hitler would lead them into the abyss in the long run felt unable to take any direct action in the light of the huge popularity the Nazi Leader had now attained. Already, Hitler was looking to Czechoslovakia, egged on by Ribbentrop, who assured him blithely that Britain would not intervene. So feeble had been the reaction of the other European powers to the annexation of Austria that there seemed no reason why the takeover of Czechoslovakia, announced as an intermediate aim by Hitler at the meeting recorded by Colonel Hossbach in 1937, should not go ahead.110
In his speech to the Reichstag on 18 March 1938, Hitler already referred in emotional terms to the ‘brutal violation of countless millions of German racial comrades’ across Europe. On 28 March, in the middle of a campaign of public speeches and rallies for the combined election and plebiscite to be held on 10 April, Hitler held a secret meeting with the leader of the Sudeten German Party, a Nazi-backed organization that claimed to represent the German minority in Czechoslovakia. The Party, Hitler said, had to avoid collaboration with the Czech government and instead embark on a campaign for ‘total freedom for the Sudeten Germans’.111 The subversion of Czechoslovakia was under way. Its ultimate end was the complete destruction of the Czechoslovak state and its absorption into the German Reich in one form or another. Only in this way could the boundaries of Germany be reordered in such a manner as to create a springboard for the invasion of Poland and Russia and the creation of the racially reconstituted ‘living-space’ for the Germans in Eastern Europe that Hitler had long desired. Hitler told his generals and Foreign Ministry officials on 28 May that he was ‘utterly determined that Czechoslovakia should disappear from the map’. Two days later, revised military plans were presented for implementing his ‘unalterable decision to smash Czechoslovakia by military action in the foreseeable future’.112 For the first time, therefore, Hitler was now embarking on a course that could not be represented as the adjustment of unfair and punitive territorial provisions arrived at in the Peace Settlement of 1919. The consequences of this step were to be momentous.
THE RAPE OF CZECHOSLOVAKIA
I
The Republic of Czechoslovakia was one of Europe’s few remaining democracies in 1938. Bolstered by deep-seated liberal traditions, Czech representatives at the peace negotiations in 1919 had succeeded in obtaining independence from the Habsburg monarchy, to which the states of Bohemia and Moravia had formerly belonged. The new state, unlike its Austrian neighbour to the south, began its life with excellent prospects, including a strong industrial base. Like other successor states to the old Habsburg monarchy, however, Czechoslovakia contained substantial national minorities, the largest of which consisted of some 3 million Germans, mostly clustered around the western, north-western and south-western border areas of the country. Although Czech was the official national language, nearly nine out of ten ethnic Germans were able to continue using their mother tongue when dealing with officialdom, German was used in schools in the relevant districts, and the German minority was represented in the Czech parliament. German parties participated in coalition governments, and German-speakers were able to pursue their own careers, although they needed Czech if they were to enter the civil service. Ethnic Germans, increasingly referred to as Sudeten Germans, after the area in which many of them lived, had full individual rights as citizens, in a country where civil freedoms were more respected than in most other parts of Europe. There was no guarantee of collective rights to the German-speaking minority, but the idea of granting it the status of a second ‘state people’ alongside the Czechs was widely discussed in the later 1920s.113
Two factors destroyed the relatively peaceful coexistence between Czechs and Germans at the beginning of the 1930s. The first was the worldwide economic Depression, which affected the German-speaking population particularly badly. Consumer-oriented light industries such as glass and textiles, heavily concentrated in German-speaking areas, collapsed. By 1933, ethnic Germans constituted two-thirds of the Republic’s unemployed. The state’s overburdened social welfare system consigned many of them to poverty and destitution. At this point, the second factor, the Nazi seizure of power in Germany, came into play, causing growing numbers of desperate Sudeten Germans to look to the Third Reich as the German economy began to recover under the impact of rearmament, while its Czech counterpart still languished in the doldrums. In these circumstances, German-speakers rallied to the Sudeten German Party, which demanded economic improvements based on regional autonomy while protesting its loyalty to the Czechoslovak state and maintaining a discreet distance from the Nazis across the border in Germany. The Party’s leader, the schoolteacher Konrad Henlein, came under increasing pressure from ex-members of banned German-nationalist extremist groups who joined his organization early in 1933. By 1937, Hitler’s foreign policy successes had given them the upper hand. In the 1936 elections the Party gained 63 per cent of the ethnic German vote. Early in 1937 the Czech government, realizing the danger, made a series of important economic concessions, admitting German-speakers to the civil service and issuing government contracts to Sudeten German firms. But it was already too late. Funds were now flowing into the Party’s coffers from Berlin, and with this financial leverage, the German government was able to bring Henlein into line behind a policy of detaching the Sudetenland from the rest of the Czechoslovak state.114
Map 20. Ethnic Groups in Czechoslovakia, 1920-37
By the spring of 1938, its impatience sharply increased by the German annexation of Austria, the Sudeten German Party was becoming violent. Mass intimidation of its opponents in local elections helped to increase its vote to 75 per cent.115 As pressure from Berlin mounted, the Czech government conceded the principle of Sudeten German autonomy and offered additional economic relief. But it was all to no avail.116 Henlein was bent on secession, and Hitler was bent on war. But the invasion of Czechoslovakia, where the vast majority of the population was implacably opposed to Hitler, Nazism and the idea of a German takeover, was a vastly different prospect from the invasion of Austria, where the vast majority of the population was in favour of all or most of these things in one degree or another. Czechoslovakia was a bigger, wealthier and more powerful country than Austria, with a major armaments industry, including the Skoda works, one of Europe’s leading arms manufacturers. Unlike the Austrian army, which was small, poorly prepared for action, and deeply divided in its attitudes towards Germany, the Czech army was a substantial, well-disciplined and well-equipped fighting force, united in its determination to resist a German invasion. German generals had already been nervous before the remilitarization of the Rhineland and the annexation of Austria. They were virtually panic-stricken when they learned of Hitler’s intention to destroy Czechoslovakia. Not only were military preparations inadequate and rearmament short of target, but the likelihood of foreign intervention and a general war was far greater than before. Czechoslovakia was formally allied to France, after all; and
the invasion could not really be presented as anything other than an act of aggression against a sovereign state upon which Germany - unlike in the case of Austria - had no claim to suzerainty in the eyes of the world.117
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