During lunch Hitler appeared to be, Schuschnigg observed somewhat to his surprise, “in excellent spirits.” His monologue dwelt on horses and houses. He was going to build the greatest skyscrapers the world had ever seen. “The Americans will see,” he remarked to Schuschnigg, “that Germany is building bigger and better buildings than the United States.” As for the harried Austrian Chancellor, Papen noted that he appeared “worried and preoccupied.” A chain cigarette smoker, he had not been allowed to smoke in Hitler’s presence. But after coffee in an adjoining room, Hitler excused himself and Schuschnigg was able for the first time to snatch a smoke. He was also able to tell his Foreign Undersecretary, Guido Schmidt, the bad news. It was soon to grow worse.
After cooling their heels for two hours in a small anteroom, the two Austrians were ushered into the presence of Ribbentrop, the new German Foreign Minister, and of Papen. Ribbentrop presented them with a two-page typewritten draft of an “agreement” and remarked that they were Hitler’s final demands and that the Fuehrer would not permit discussion of them. They must be signed forthwith. Schuschnigg says he felt relieved to have at least something definite from Hitler. But as he perused the document his relief evaporated. For here was a German ultimatum calling on him, in effect, to turn the Austrian government over to the Nazis within one week.
The ban against the Austrian Nazi Party was to be lifted, all Nazis in jail were to be amnestied and the pro-Nazi Viennese lawyer Dr. Seyss-Inquart was to be made Minister of the Interior, with authority over the police and security. Another pro-Nazi, Glaise-Horstenau, was to be appointed Minister of War, and the Austrian and German armies were to establish closer relations by a number of measures, including the systematic exchange of one hundred officers. “Preparations will be made,” the final demand read, “for the assimilation of the Austrian into the German economic system. For this purpose Dr. Fischboeck [a pro-Nazi] will be appointed Minister of Finance.”5
Schuschnigg, as he later wrote, realized at once that to accept the ultimatum would mean the end of Austria’s independence.
Ribbentrop advised me to accept the demands at once. I protested, and referred him to my previous agreement with von Papen, made prior to coming to Berchtesgaden, and made clear to Ribbentrop that I was not prepared to be confronted with such unreasonable demands … 6
But was Schuschnigg prepared to accept them? That he was not prepared to be confronted with them was obvious even to a dullard such as Ribbentrop. The question was: Would he sign them? In this difficult and decisive moment the young Austrian Chancellor began to weaken. He inquired lamely, according to his own account, “whether we could count on the good will of Germany, whether the Reich government had at least the intention to keep its side of the bargain.”7 He says he received an answer “in the affirmative.”
Then Papen went to work on him. The slippery ambassador admits to his “amazement” when he read the ultimatum. It was an “unwarrantable interference in Austrian sovereignty.” Schuschnigg says Papen apologized to him and expressed his “complete surprise” at the terms. Nevertheless, he advised the Austrian Chancellor to sign them.
He furthermore informed me that I could be assured that Hitler would take care that, if I signed, and acceded to these demands, from that time on Germany would remain loyal to this agreement and that there would be no further difficulties for Austria.8
Schuschnigg, it would appear from the above statements, the last given in an affidavit at Nuremberg, was not only weakening but letting his naïveté get the best of him.
He had one last chance to make a stand. He was summoned again to Hitler. He found the Fuehrer pacing excitedly up and down in his study.
HITLER: Herr Schuschnigg … here is the draft of the document. There is nothing to be discussed. I will not change one single iota. You will either sign it as it is and fulfill my demands within three days, or I will order the march into Austria.9
Schuschnigg capitulated. He told Hitler he was willing to sign. But he reminded him that under the Austrian constitution only the President of the Republic had the legal power to accept such an agreement and carry it out. Therefore, while he was willing to appeal to the President to accept it, he could give no guarantee.
“You have to guarantee it!” Hitler shouted.
“I could not possibly, Herr Reichskanzler,” Schuschnigg says he replied.10
At this answer [Schuschnigg later recounted] Hitler seemed to lose his self-control. He ran to the doors, opened them, and shouted, “General Keitel!” Then turning back to me, he said, “I shall have you called later.”11
This was pure bluff, but the harassed Austrian Chancellor, who had been made aware of the presence of the generals all day, did not perhaps know it. Papen relates that Keitel told later of how Hitler greeted him with a broad grin when he rushed in and asked for orders. “There are no orders,” Hitler chuckled. “I just wanted to have you here.”
But Schuschnigg and Dr. Schmidt, waiting outside the Fuehrer’s study, were impressed. Schmidt whispered that he would not be surprised if the both of them were arrested within the next five minutes. Thirty minutes later Schuschnigg was again ushered into the presence of Hitler.
I have decided to change my mind—for the first time in my life [Hitler said]. But I warn you this is your very last chance. I have given you three additional days to carry out the agreement.12
That was the extent of the German dictator’s concessions, and though the wording of the final draft was somewhat softened, the changes, as Schuschnigg later testified, were inconsequential. Schuschnigg signed. It was Austria’s death warrant.
The behavior of men under duress differs according to their character and is often puzzling. That Schuschnigg, a veteran despite his comparative youth of the rough and tumble of politics which had seen his predecessor murdered by the Nazis, was a brave man few would doubt. Yet his capitulation to Hitler on February 11, 1938, under the terrible threat of armed attack has left a residue of unresolved doubts among his fellow countrymen and the observers and historians of this fateful period. Was surrender necessary? Was there no alternative? It would be a rash man who would argue that Britain and France, in view of their subsequent behavior in the face of Hitler’s aggressions, might have come to the aid of Austria had Hitler then and there marched in. But up to this moment Hitler had not yet broken across the German borders nor had he prepared his own people and the world for any such act of wanton aggression. The German Army itself was scarcely prepared for a war should France and Britain intervene. In a few weeks Austria, as a result of the Berchtesgaden “agreement,” would be softened up by the local Nazis and German machinations to a point where Hitler could take it with much less risk of foreign intervention than on February 11. Schuschnigg himself, as he later wrote, recognized that acceptance of Hitler’s terms meant “nothing else but the complete end of the independence of the Austrian government.”
Perhaps he was in a daze from his ordeal. After signing away his country’s independence at the point of a gun he indulged in a strange conversation with Hitler which he himself later recorded in his book. “Does the Herr Reichskanzler,” he asked, “believe that the various crises in the world today can be solved in a peaceful manner?” The Fuehrer answered fatuously that they could—“if my advice were followed.” Whereupon Schuschnigg said, apparently with no sign of sarcasm, “At the moment the state of the world looks rather promising, don’t you think?”13
Such an utterance at such a moment seems incredible, but that is what the beaten Austrian Chancellor says he said. Hitler had one more humiliation to administer to him. When Schuschnigg suggested that in the press release of their meeting mention be made that their discussion reaffirmed the July 1936 agreement, Hitler exclaimed, “Oh, no! First you have to fulfill the conditions of our agreement. This is what is going to the press: ‘Today the Fuehrer and Reichskanzler conferred with the Austrian Bundeskanzler at the Berghof.’ That’s all.”
Declining the Fuehrer’s invitation to stay for
dinner, Schuschnigg and Schmidt drove down from the mountains to Salzburg. It was a gray and foggy winter night. The ubiquitous Papen accompanied them as far as the frontier and was somewhat uncomfortable in what he terms the “oppressive silence.” He could not refrain from trying to cheer his Austrian friends up.
“Well, now,” he exclaimed to them, “you have seen what the Fuehrer can be like at times! But the next time I am sure it will be different. You know, the Fuehrer can be absolutely charming.”*
THE FOUR WEEKS’ AGONY: FEBRUARY 12–MARCH 11, 1938
Hitler had given Schuschnigg four days—until Tuesday, February 15—to send him a “binding reply” that he would carry out the ultimatum, and an additional three days—until February 18—to fulfill its specific terms. Schuschnigg returned to Vienna on the morning of February 12 and immediately sought out President Miklas. Wilhelm Miklas was a plodding, mediocre man of whom the Viennese said that his chief accomplishment in life had been to father a large brood of children. But there was in him a certain peasant solidity, and in this crisis at the end of fifty-two years as a state official he was to display more courage than any other Austrian. He was willing to make certain concessions to Hitler such as amnestying the Austrian Nazis, but he balked at putting Seyss-Inquart in charge of the police and the Army. Papen duly reported this to Berlin on the evening of February 14. He said Schuschnigg hoped “to overcome the resistance of the President by tomorrow.”
At 7:30 that same evening Hitler approved orders drawn up by General Keitel to put military pressure on Austria.
Spread false, but quite credible news, which may lead to the conclusion of military preparations against Austria.14
As a matter of fact, Schuschnigg had hardly departed from Berchtesgaden when the Fuehrer began shamming military action in order to see that the Austrian Chancellor did as he was told. Jodl jotted it all down in his diary.
February 13. In the afternoon General K[eitel] asks Admiral C[anaris]* and myself to come to his apartment. He tells us that the Fuehrer’s order is that military pressure by shamming military action should be kept up until the 15th. Proposals for these measures are drafted and submitted to the Fuehrer by telephone for approval.
February 14. The effect is quick and strong. In Austria the impression is created that Germany is undertaking serious military preparations.15
General Jodl was not exaggerating. Before the threat of armed invasion President Miklas gave in and on the last day of grace, February 15, Schuschnigg formally advised Ambassador von Papen that the Berchtesgaden agreement would be carried out before February 18. On February 16 the Austrian government announced a general amnesty for Nazis, including those convicted in the murder of Dollfuss, and made public the reorganized cabinet, in which Arthur Seyss-Inquart was named Minister of Security. The next day this Nazi Minister hurried off to Berlin to see Hitler and receive his orders.
Seyss-Inquart, the first of the quislings, was a pleasant-mannered, intelligent young Viennese lawyer who since 1918 had been possessed with a burning desire to see Austria joined with Germany. This was a popular notion in the first years after the war. Indeed, on November 12, 1918, the day after the armistice, the Provisional National Assembly in Vienna, which had just overthrown the Hapsburg monarchy and proclaimed the Austrian Republic, had tried to effect an Anschluss by affirming that “German Austria is a component part of the German Republic.” The victorious Allies had not allowed it and by the time Hitler came to power in 1933 there was no doubt that the majority of Austrians were against their little country’s joining with Nazi Germany. But to Seyss-Inquart, as he said at his trial in Nuremberg, the Nazis stood unflinchingly for the Anschluss and for this reason he gave them his support. He did not join the party and took no part in its rowdy excesses. He played the role, rather, of a respectable front for the Austrian Nazis, and after the July 1936 agreement, when he was appointed State Councilor, he concentrated his efforts, aided by Papen and other German officials and agents, in burrowing from within. Strangely, both Schuschnigg and Miklas seem to have trusted him almost to the end. Later Miklas, a devout Catholic as was Schuschnigg, confessed that he was favorably impressed by the fact that Seyss was “a diligent churchgoer.” The man’s Catholicism and also the circumstance that he, like Schuschnigg, had served in a Tyrolean Kaiserjaeger regiment during the First World War, in which he was severely wounded, seems to have been the basis of the trust which the Austrian Chancellor had for him. Schuschnigg, unfortunately, had a fatal inability to judge a man on more substantial grounds. Perhaps he thought he could keep his new Nazi Minister in line by simple bribes. He himself tells in his book of the magic effect of $500 on Seyss-Inquart a year before when he threatened to resign as State Councilor and then reconsidered on the receipt of this paltry sum. But Hitler had the bigger prizes to dazzle before the ambitious young lawyer, as Schuschnigg was soon to learn.
On February 20 Hitler made his long-expected speech to the Reichstag, which had been postponed from January 30 because of the Blomberg–Fritsch crisis and his own machinations against Austria. Though he spoke warmly of Schuschnigg’s “understanding” and of his “warmhearted willingness” to bring about a closer understanding between Austria and Germany—a piece of humbug which impressed Prime Minister Chamberlain—the Fuehrer issued a warning which, however much lost on London, did not fall upon deaf ears in Vienna—and in Prague.
Over ten million Germans live in two of the states adjoining our frontiers … There must be no doubt about one thing. Political separation from the Reich may not lead to deprivation of rights—that is, the general rights of self-determination. It is unbearable for a world power to know there are racial comrades at its side who are constantly being afflicted with the severest suffering for their sympathy or unity with the whole nation, its destiny and its Weltanschauung. To the interests of the German Reich belong the protection of those German peoples who are not in a position to secure along our frontiers their political and spiritual freedom by their own efforts.16
That was blunt, public notice that henceforth Hitler regarded the future of the seven million Austrians and the three million Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia as the affair of the Third Reich.
Schuschnigg answered Hitler four days later—on February 24—in a speech to the Austrian Bundestag, whose members, like those of the German Reichstag, were hand-picked by a one-party dictatorial regime. Though conciliatory toward Germany, Schuschnigg emphasized that Austria had gone to the very limit of concessions “where we must call a halt and say: ‘Thus far and no further.’” Austria, he said, would never voluntarily give up its independence, and he ended with a stirring call: “Red-White-Red [the Austrian national colors] until we’re dead!” (The expression also rhymes in German.)
“The twenty-fourth of February,” Schuschnigg wrote after the war, “was for me the crucial date.” He awaited anxiously the Fuehrer’s reaction to his defiant speech. Papen telegraphed to Berlin the next day advising the Foreign Office that the speech should not be taken too seriously. Schuschnigg, he said, had expressed his rather strong nationalist feelings in order to retrieve his domestic position; there were plots in Vienna to overthrow him because of his concessions at Berchtesgaden. In the meantime, Papen informed Berlin, “the work of Seyss-Inquart … is proceeding according to plan.”17 The next day Papen, his long years of devious work in Austria nearing fruition, took formal leave of the Austrian Chancellor and set off for Kitzbuehl to do some skiing.
Hitler’s speech of February 20, which had been broadcast by the Austrian radio network, had set off a series of massive Nazi demonstrations throughout Austria. On February 24, during the broadcast of Schuschnigg’s reply, a wild mob of twenty thousand Nazis in Graz had invaded the town square, torn down the loudspeakers, hauled down the Austrian flag and raised the swastika banner of Germany. With Seyss-Inquart in personal command of the police, no effort was made to curb the Nazi outbreaks. Schuschnigg’s government was breaking down. Not only political but economic chaos was setti
ng in. There were large withdrawals of accounts from the banks both from abroad and by the local people. Cancellation of orders from uneasy foreign firms poured into Vienna. The foreign tourists, one of the main props of the Austrian economy, were being frightened away. Toscanini cabled from New York that he was canceling his appearance at the Salzburg Festival, which drew tens of thousands of tourists each summer, “because of political developments in Austria.” The situation was becoming so desperate that Otto of Hapsburg, the exiled youthful pretender to the throne, sent a letter from his home in Belgium and, as Schuschnigg later revealed, implored him on his old oath of allegiance as a former officer of the Imperial Army to appoint him as Chancellor if he thought such a step might save Austria.
In his desperation Schuschnigg turned to the Austrian workers whose free trade unions and political party, the Social Democrats, he had kept suppressed after Dollfuss had brutally smashed them in 1934. These people had represented 42 per cent of the Austrian electorate, and if at any time during the past four years the Chancellor had been able to see beyond the narrow horizons of his own clerical-fascist dictatorship and had enlisted their support for a moderate, anti-Nazi democratic coalition the Nazis, a relatively small minority, could have been easily handled. But Schuschnigg had lacked the stature to take such a step. A decent, upright man as a human being, he had become possessed, as had certain others in Europe, with a contempt for Western democracy and a passion for authoritarian one-party rule.
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany Page 53
