In a speech to Austrian National Socialists on 26 February, Hitler was far more frank. The Berchtesgaden agreement went so far, he declared, that “the Austria issue would automatically be resolved if it were fully implemented.” As Hitler’s Austria expert Wilhelm Keppler recorded his words: “If it can at all be avoided, he did not wish there to be a violent solution since the dangers posed from abroad were decreasing year by year, as our military might is increasing more and more.”134 Thus the dictator does not seem to have regarded the amalgamation of Austria as imminent. But then everything happened more quickly than expected. On 9 March, Schuschnigg announced that he was calling a popular referendum in four days, under the slogan of “For a free, German, independent, social, Christian and unified Austria!”135 This surprising move was intended to beat Hitler at his own game, since the German dictator had publicly stated on 12 February that a majority of Austrians would be on his side if a plebiscite were held.136 But Schuschnigg had made a fatal mistake by scheduling the vote at such short notice, which fed suspicions of electoral manipulation. Moreover, the announcement that only voters over the age of 24 would be eligible to cast ballots directly challenged Hitler, since Austrian National Socialism drew its strongest support from younger generations. Schuschnigg’s decision thus unintentionally hastened what he was trying to prevent. “The bomb of a popular referendum was bound to explode in his hand,” Count Ciano quipped.137
The Nazi leadership in Berlin was dumbfounded by the news from Vienna, and Hitler was initially unsure how to respond. He ordered Wilhelm Keppler to travel to the Austrian capital to check out the situation for himself. On the evening of 9 March, Goebbels, who was hosting a reception for the editors-in-chief of German newspapers, was summoned to Hitler’s side at the Chancellery. Göring, who had for months been playing a leading role in the Anschluss question, was already there. “Schuschnigg is trying a dirty trick,” the propaganda minister was told. “He’s trying to make fools of us.” But Hitler and his advisers were uncertain which of two strategies to pursue. Either they could call upon Austrian Nazis to boycott the poll, which would have made it a farce, or they could declare that Schuschnigg had violated the Berchtesgaden agreement, which would be effective propaganda, and intervene militarily. During the night of 9–10 March, those assembled leaned towards military intervention. Goebbels recorded the dramatic process by which a decision was reached:
Consulted with the Führer until 5 a.m. He thinks the hour is at hand. He just wants to sleep on it for a night. Italy and England won’t do anything. France maybe but probably not. The risk is not as great as with the reoccupation of the Rhineland…We’re drawing up detailed plans for the operation. If it comes to pass, it will be short and drastic. The Führer is in full swing. A wonderful battle mood.138
After the remilitarisation of the Rhineland in April 1936, Count Harry Kessler had characterised the secret of Hitler’s success as his “intuitive, lightning-quick understanding of situations from which he equally quickly and suddenly draws conclusions.”139 This was precisely how the Anschluss of Austria now proceeded. After some initial hesitation, Hitler recognised that Schuschnigg had given him a unique opportunity he could not afford to miss. On 10 March he issued the orders for Operation Otto, declaring that “if other means failed to achieve the desired ends, the intention is to move into Austria with armed forces.” It was crucial, however, that “the entire operation proceeds without violence in the form of a peaceful incursion welcomed by the people.”140 That morning Goebbels found Hitler hunched over maps: “He was brooding. March is a heady month. But it’s also always been the Führer’s lucky one.” Around noon, the propaganda minister was once more summoned to the Chancellery: “The die has been cast. We’re going in on Saturday (12 March). Immediately proceed on all the way to Vienna…The Führer himself will travel to Austria. Göring and I are to remain in Berlin. In eight days, Austria will be ours.”141
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The Chancellery was a hive of activity on the morning of 11 March as, one after another, the political and military leaders of the Third Reich and their entourages arrived. Unusually early for him, at 8 a.m., Hitler conferred with Goebbels. Together they dictated the text for the flyers that would be dropped by plane over Austria. “Heated, incendiary language,” Goebbels remarked. “But it was fun.”142 After that was done, Hitler tried to make preparations to present the operation diplomatically. Prince Philipp of Hesse, the son-in-law of the Italian king, was dispatched to Rome with a personal message from Hitler to Mussolini justifying intervention in Austria as an “act of national self-defence.” “You, too, Your Excellency, would not act any differently, if the destiny of the Italians were at stake,” Hitler had written.143 Ribbentrop was in London at the time and one of his underlings, Reinhard Spitzy, was flown immediately across the Channel to get the German foreign minister’s assessment of the probable British reaction.144 Around 10 a.m., an ultimatum was issued to the Austrian government. It was given until 5 p.m. to postpone the popular referendum, and Schuschnigg was to resign and name Arthur Seyss-Inquart his successor. In the early afternoon, around 2:45 p.m., Schuschnigg agreed to postpone the plebiscite but refused to resign.145
In this critical phase, Göring seized the initiative. Even in front of the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, he still boasted, not without reason, that it had been less the Führer than he himself who had “set the tempo.” Indeed, Göring added, he had “even overlooked reservations by the Führer and forced things along.”146 He spent the day constantly on the phone, issuing instructions to Seyss-Inquart, Keppler and the representatives of Germany’s embassy in Vienna. “Most of these telephone calls,” recalled an amazed Nicolaus von Below later, “took place in the presence of a larger audience.”147 At 3:45 p.m. Seyss-Inquart reported that Schuschnigg had set off to submit his resignation to the Austrian president, Wilhelm Miklas, whereupon Berlin issued a new ultimatum: by 7:30 there had to be a new cabinet under Seyss-Inquart. But Miklas still refused to appoint the Austrian Nazi, and he stuck by that refusal even after the military attaché to the German embassy, Lieutenant General Wolfgang Muff, acting on Göring’s orders, threatened that German troops massing on the border would enter Austria if Miklas did not relent.
Around 8 p.m., Schuschnigg addressed the Austrian people over the radio to explain the reasons for his resignation. He was yielding to violence, he said, and the army had been instructed to withdraw without resistance when the Wehrmacht marched in. A short time later, Seyss-Inquart took over the microphone to say that he was still in office as interior minister and would maintain security. Although Austrian National Socialists were preparing to take power all around the country, at 8:45 p.m. Hitler still issued an order to the Wehrmacht to enter Austria the following day. A short time later, Göring dictated to Keppler the text of a telegram that Seyss-Inquart was to send to Berlin. It contained a request by the “provisional Austrian government” to the German government to support it in its attempt to “restore calm and order in Austria” and to send troops “as soon as possible” to this end. But Seyss-Inquart hesitated, so Keppler saw to it himself that the fake cry for help was delivered to Berlin. “With that we have authorisation,” Goebbels commented.148 Late that evening Prince Philipp of Hesse passed on the reassuring news from Rome that Mussolini had “reacted quite calmly to the whole affair.” A visibly relieved Hitler responded: “Please tell Mussolini that I will never forget this…Never, never, never, come what may.”149 Moreover, Ribbentrop’s report, which Spitzy brought with him from London, left little doubt that Britain would remain inactive as well.150 By around midnight, when Miklas relented and named Seyss-Inquart Austrian chancellor, his action no longer had any influence on the course of events.
At 5:30 a.m. on 12 March, German troops marched into Austria. Nowhere did they encounter resistance. On the contrary, the soldiers were welcomed. At noon, Goebbels read out over the radio a proclamation of the Führer that justified the intervention as a response to an alleged violation of the Be
rchtesgaden agreement: “Summoned by the new National Socialist government in Vienna, [the Wehrmacht] will guarantee that within a short span of time the Austrian people will be given the opportunity in a genuine popular referendum to determine its future and shape its destiny.”151 Hitler had flown to Munich that morning, where a motorcade of Mercedes was already waiting at Oberwiesenfeld Airport. Around 4 p.m., they crossed into Austria near Braunau, Hitler’s birthplace. The 120-kilometre drive to Linz took four hours, since the cars had trouble passing through the crowds of cheering onlookers. It was already dark when Hitler arrived in the city. Among the few people who had mixed feelings on this occasion was the 66-year-old doctor Eduard Bloch. “The weak boy whom I had treated so often and had not seen for thirty years stood in a car,” Bloch said in an interview in 1941, by which time he was in exile in New York. “He smiled, waved and gave the Nazi salute to the people who crowded the street. Then for a moment he glanced up at my window. I doubt that he saw me but he must have had a moment of reflection. Here was the home of the noble Jew who had diagnosed his mother’s fatal cancer…It was a brief moment.”152
From the balcony of the town hall, Hitler made a brief speech that was repeatedly interrupted by applause. In it, he invoked the Providence that had taken him “from this city to the leadership of the Reich” and charged him with “restoring his precious homeland to the German Reich.”153 Following that, he and his entourage decamped to the Weinzinger Hotel by the Danube, where people congregated in front of the building until early in the morning. Hitler repeatedly greeted these admirers until his security guards finally asked him to go to bed and get some rest.154 Originally Hitler had no plans to immediately complete the amalgamation of Austria. But in the night of 12–13 March, overwhelmed by his triumphal journey, he decided that he would not settle for any “half-measures.” State Secretary Wilhelm Stuckart was summoned to Linz to draw up the requisite legal ordinances. While the lawyers ironed out the details, Hitler travelled to Leonding and laid flowers upon his parents’ graves. That evening, he signed the Law on the Reunification of Austria with the German Reich. The first article declared unequivocally: “Austria is a territory of the German Reich.” Its second article set 10 April as the date for a “free and secret referendum open to all Austrian men and women of the age of twenty or older.”155
On the morning of 14 March, Hitler travelled on to Vienna, the city he had left twenty-five years earlier as a completely unknown “art painter” who despaired of his future. In the Austrian capital, too, an ecstatic reception awaited him. The city’s church bells rang when he entered Vienna from the direction of Schönbrunn. During his entire stay in the capital, Hitler “glowed,” to use Fritz Wiedemann’s phrase,156 and it is easy to imagine how satisfied he must have felt. The same scenes of hysterical enthusiasm as had taken place in Linz now played themselves out in front of the Hotel Imperial where he stayed.157 The next morning, hundreds of thousands of people converged on Heldenplatz in front of the Hofburg Palace for a “liberation celebration.” From the palace balcony, Hitler made what he described as the “greatest announcement of triumph” in his life: “As the Führer and chancellor of the German nation and empire, I announce to posterity the entry of my homeland into the German Reich.”158 The euphoria at the unification of Austria with Germany almost obscured the hatred and violence simultaneously being visited upon Vienna’s Jewish citizens. This was the dark side of the Anschluss, and it cast a shadow upon everything to come.
That afternoon, Hitler visited the grave of his niece Geli Raubal in Vienna’s central cemetery. He went alone ahead of his entourage and spent a long time at the grave, Nicolaus von Below reported.159 After the parade, Hitler received the Archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Theodor Innitzer, in the Hotel Imperial. The dictator bowed deeply—a calculated gesture that said nothing about his true religious disposition—and the cardinal offered a Nazi salute and assured the Führer that Austrian Catholics would work vigorously for “the project of German reconstruction.”160 Around 5 p.m., Hitler flew back to Munich, and when he returned to the German capital the following day, the people of Berlin treated him to a triumphant reception that, in the words of Goebbels, who was never at a loss for superlatives, “overshadowed everything previous.” The propaganda minister gushed: “[Hitler passed] through an immeasurable human guard of honour…The cries of celebration nearly burst your eardrums. You had it ringing in your ears for hours afterwards. It was a singing, jubilant city.”161
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This new foreign-policy triumph took Hitler to the peak of his popularity. People of all walks of life now admired him. The Wagner family was particularly enthusiastic. “How unique and unparalleled is this deed of our Führer,” gasped Winifred Wagner’s assistant Lieselotte Schmidt, adding: “He is more than a statesman…he is an executor of a higher will, a genius before whom everyone ultimately will have to bow.”162 Ernst von Weizsäcker, the state secretary designate in the Foreign Ministry, who travelled to Vienna with Ribbentrop on 14 March, saw that date “as the most significant since 18 January 1871”—the day on which the Wilhelmine Empire had been founded. He was especially impressed by Hitler’s ability “to seize an opportunity by the scruff of the neck.”163 The reaction of the conservative historian Gerhard Ritter was much the same, although he otherwise had a detached relationship to the Nazi regime. “I completely admire the mastery of the actor who knows how to stage everything,” Ritter wrote in a letter to his brother in April 1938. “It is the first time that my admiration is without reservation!”164
For the Hamburg teacher Luise Solmitz, the Anschluss was the fulfilment of “my old German dream,” made possible by “a man who fears nothing, knows no compromises, hindrances or difficulties.” She wrote this in her diary despite the fact that she was stigmatised by the regime for having married a Jewish husband. “One must recall that one is excluded from the people’s community oneself like a criminal or degraded person,” she wrote.165 Willy Cohn in Breslau, who personally suffered the many indignities inflicted upon Jews in Germany, likewise had ambiguous feelings. “It is hard to resist the sense of momentous events,” he wrote on 13 March, adding the next day: “You have to admire the energy with which all this has been carried out…We Jews in Germany are not supposed to share the exuberance of this national uprising, but we do nonetheless.”166 By contrast, Victor Klemperer in Dresden did not get caught up in the jubilations. “The monstrous act of violence represented by the annexation of Austria,” he noted, “the monstrous increase in power both domestically and abroad, the trembling defenceless fear of England and France. We won’t live to see the end of the Third Reich.”167 Thomas Mann, in March 1938 on a reading tour of the United States, also remained deaf to the patriotic hullaballoo. “The monster is speaking today in Vienna,” he wrote. “He won’t do that without ‘adeptness,’ and he will try to calm things.” But Mann was mistaken about the reaction of the Western powers: “At least apathy in Europe is not as hopeless as it seems. The consequences of this disgusting coup are unforeseeable. The shock is deep, and the lesson learned effective.”168 In fact, the British and French governments offered nothing more than verbal protests.
Reports by SPD-in-exile observers initially talked about widespread fears among the German population that a new war might be at hand. On the morning of 12 March, citizens of Munich panicked and began stockpiling goods. “There were queues in front of shops,” one observer wrote. “Bakeries were completely sold out and had to close early.”169 As it became clear that the Western powers were not going to intervene, and special radio reports relayed news of the enthusiastic receptions for Hitler in Linz and Vienna, the mood swung round: “At that point, you suddenly noticed a massive enthusiasm and joy over this triumph,” another observer reported from Saxony. “The jubilations no longer knew any bounds. Even sectors that had been reserved towards Hitler or rejected him got carried away and conceded that he was a fine and clever statesman who would restore Germany’s greatness and reputation after the d
efeat of 1918.”170 Among old and committed Social Democrats who remained immune to Nazi propaganda there was hopelessness and resignation. “Hitler succeeds at everything,” an observer from the Rhineland Palatinate wrote. “He can do what he wants because everyone gives in to him. His domestic deceptions have also proven effective abroad. Here, too, Hitler has found his Hugenbergs.”171
Hitler remained in a state of euphoria for days after his most impressive coup to date. On the evening of 18 March, he gave a speech in the Kroll Opera House detailing the events that had led up to the Reich swallowing Austria. At the end, he declared the Reichstag dissolved and announced the election on 10 April of “new representatives for Greater Germany” in conjunction with the referendum in Austria.172 A few days later he paid a private visit to Bayreuth. “From two to six I had him all to myself, and everything was calm—it was all too nice since he could touch on very personal things with me that had moved his heart in Braunau and Linz,” Winifred Wagner wrote in a letter to a friend. Hitler gave Wagner a detailed account of how everything had come so “suddenly” and “unexpectedly,” and she happily noted “how fresh and well he looked,” adding “that it makes you glad about this triumph.”173
On 25 March, Hitler hit the campaign trail in Königsberg. He could hardly have suspected that the poll would be his last. Once again, he put himself through a demanding schedule. After Königsberg, he spoke in Leipzig, Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne, Frankfurt am Main, Stuttgart and Munich. From 3 to 9 April, he continued on to Graz, Klagenfurt, Innsbruck, Salzburg, Linz and Vienna in Austria. In the end he was exhausted, and his voice was completely hoarse and required treatment by his personal physician Morell.174 Hitler only anticipated getting 80 per cent of the Austrian vote, so he was surprised when 99.75 per cent voted for amalgamation into Germany—a better result than in the old parts of the Reich (99.08 per cent). “A great celebration for the nation,” Goebbels commented. “Germany has conquered an entire country by the ballot box.”175 Of course not everyone who voted yes was a committed Hitler supporter. Many Austrians cast their ballots opportunistically or out of fear. “No one believes that these were secret elections, and everyone is trembling,” wrote Klemperer.176 At the same time, the dictator’s prestige was bolstered even further. Never was the consensus about Hitler’s regime greater than in the spring of 1938.
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