In Europe

by Geert Mak

  In addition to all this, Hitler's position was also being threatened from within political circles. The nationalistic and conservative elites began to realise that unknown forces had been unleashed, ungovernable movements they could no longer control. They felt responsible for the fact that ‘this fellow’ had come to power, and wanted him to lose that power again as quickly as possible. The groups around Franz von Papen and the military top brass hoped to use the SA crisis to undermine Hitler's power. President Hindenburg was weakening with age, and they had no intention of seeing his position also fall into Hitler's hands. There was even talk of restoring the monarchy. Anything, in fact, was possible, as long as Hitler did not gain absolute power.

  On 17 June, Papen gave a speech that, coming from him, was quite sensational. He railed against all the ‘egoism, lack of character, insincerity, arrogance and dearth of chivalry’, and even criticised the ‘false cult of personality’. The same day, Hitler struck back: ‘This is the clenched fist of a nation that will strike down all who dare to undertake even the slightest attempt at sabotage.’ So when the Nazi leaders met with Hitler on 29 June, 1934, Goebbels thought the meeting was about a settling of accounts with the chic conservative circles around Papen. To his amazement, however, it turned out to be about the party's ‘own’ SA. Röhm's ‘high treason’ was never actually proven, and nothing points to any serious SA plans for a coup. The ‘evidence’ given for such plans was almost certainly trumped up.

  Foreign observers saw the work of gangsters, openly now, for the first time. The reactions were outraged. Within Germany itself, however, little protest was heard. Even the churches remained silent, although Erich Klausener, chairman of Berlin's Katholische Aktion, was among those murdered. The military hierarchy forbade its officers to attend the funeral of General Kurt von Schleicher and his wife.

  Ian Kershaw rightly notes that, without backing from the army – which could only profit from the dismantling of the SA – the Night of the Long Knives would have been an impossibility. The consequences were dramatic: ‘Through its complicity in the events of 30 June, 1934, the army was, now more than ever, bound to Hitler.’

  In this way, the generals walked into the same trap Papen had been caught in one year earlier. They believed they were using Hitler, but in fact the army itself had become a Nazi tool.

  My room – the nicest corner room, between the warm oak walls of the old hotel – is on the same corridor where it all took place. Snow is coming down by the bucketful. The flakes fall on the black water, on the trees and lawns, on the pier from which Röhm's boys would dive into the lake. Did they sleep here, in this room? Did Hitler come storming in here, foaming at the mouth?

  The true sense of living history will not come. That doesn't trouble me too much. The most industrious of chambermaids, after all, have been scrubbing here for the last sixty years, and scrubbing washes away the evil, snow covers everything, stillness and silence and time do the rest.

  Chapter NINETEEN

  Vienna

  THERE SEEMS NO ESCAPING THIS LONG WINTER. ON MY WAY TO AUSTRIA and Italy it starts snowing again, with a vengeance. The trucks drive slower and slower, they growl and blow great clouds of exhaust fumes into the frozen air. Blue lights flash in the distance, a snow-covered policeman waves us onto a side road, the Brenner Pass is in complete chaos, not even the snowploughs can get through.

  Night falls in Innsbruck. The streets are deathly quiet, the snowflakes keep tumbling down amid the old yellow and pink houses, along the archways, against the windows of the empty Weinstubes – for who would send a dog out on a night like this? Some boys are playing football on the Marktgraben, a child rushes outside to catch snowflakes on his tongue, but otherwise everything is only lonely and a bit sad, this new winter in the spring.

  On my way here I had come across two intractable spirits; both of them at places where, to be honest, I had never expected them.

  The first one I met at the Obersalzberg, where the Alps begin and where Hitler's holiday residence, the Berghof, once stood. Four years ago the Americans opened the site to the public. From 1923, Hitler spent a great deal of time there, first in a little wooden holiday bungalow in the grounds of the Moritz gasthaus, later in a rented villa, and from 1933 in the Berghof. During the 1930s the area was transformed into a complete Nazi mountain, ruled and run by Hitler's secretary and right-hand man Martin Bormann. The whole party leadership moved into villas there. Pension Moritz became a Volkshotel for party members, Hotel Zum Türken was wrested from its owner for a pittance by Bormann himself. When there was nothing left to do above ground, he started on the construction of the enormous Alpenfestung, a system of myriad bunkers and at least five kilometres of tunnel. Most of that fort is still there.

  The Kehlsteinhaus, also known as the Eagle's Nest, is there as well, high atop the rocks. The observation post, grim on the outside but decorated on the inside in ‘steamboat style with a rustic touch’, could be reached only by elevator. Built in 1938 through extreme hardship on the part of hundreds of workers, it was a present for Hitler's fiftieth birthday. A few hundred metres below it lies the pastureland of the Scharitzkehl and the old tourist café run by the Hölzls, a family of woodcutters. In the café's hallway I came across a framed and yellowing eviction notice, addressed to grandfather Simon Hölzl and signed M. Bormann. For security reasons, it seems, the Nazis wanted to have the café torn down, but Hölzl refused. He had no intention of giving up his lively trade in milk, coffee and beer there in that mountain pasture. The first sentence of Bormann's final reminder reads: ‘The only possible reply to your correspondence of 10-2-1940 would be to send you to the concentration camp at Dachau.’

  The Berghof's conversion into a kind of mountain fortress was characteristic of the change in Hitler's lifestyle. After 1936 he began to seek isolation with ever greater frequency. From a popular party leader he had turned into a moody king, creating around his person an increasingly larger court and living like a spider in that self-spun web, tolerating in his immediate surroundings only a few dozen individuals from his chosen coterie. From 1935 he suffered increasingly from hoarseness and intestinal complaints, which led him to seek assistance from the alternative therapist Dr Theodor Morell, who gave him injections of intestinal flora cultivated ‘from a Bulgarian farmer's best strains’. Hitler believed he did not have long to live: ‘My plans must be carried out for as long as I, with my waning health, can still achieve them.’

  In his memoirs, Albert Speer describes a book of paintings of Hitler published in 1937. Each and every image showed a jovial, relaxed, normal man, rowing a boat, lying in a field, visiting artists. ‘It was already obsolete by the time it came out. For even for his closest companions, this Hitler, whom I had known from the early 1930s, had changed into a withdrawn despot, barely in touch with the outside world.’

  As one of the mountain's occasional residents, Speer was obliged to spend many boring afternoons and evenings with Hitler: lunch, walk, tea, nap, dinner, film. Hitler wore out his companions with his monologues, Göring with his sadistic jokes; Bormann was in the habit of molesting the secretaries during the siesta, Eva Braun was silent and miserable. Speer returned home each evening ‘tired from doing nothing’; he referred to it as ‘the mountain sickness’.

  In spring 1999 the view of the Untersberg and Berchtesgaden is as impressive as ever, but that is the sole point of reference. The mountain is awash in a profound silence. The Berghof was bombed flat in 1945, and the ruins were demolished with explosives in 1952. The ‘clear and fresh chalet’ in which Hitler – ‘a true raconteur’ – had posed for the readers of Homes and Gardens in November 1938, the dining room with its hearth, the conference room with the famous glass wall and ‘the most unsullied view in all of Europe’, the terrace where Eva Braun was filmed so often: all that is left are chunks of concrete and a few bunkers, plus one window of the former garage. (That famous conference room, by the way, often reeked horribly of exhaust fumes and gasoline from the garage below,
a design glitch on the part of architect Hitler.) In the woods along the road I came across a strange concrete structure that looked like a sort of patio overgrown with grass and trees. ‘Yes, that was Göring's house,’ says a friendly village woman. ‘You won't find any of the rest of it, though. The only thing left is Speer's studio.’

  The Hölzls survived it all. On that early spring day in 1999, they were still living there. A few dozen walkers were sitting outside, enjoying the sunlight on the pasture of the Scharitzkehl, the snow was melting away in babbling brooks, the birds sang, a chubby little boy was learning to walk.

  The next day I drove down a narrow road into Sankt Radegund, a picturesque border village tucked away amid the Austrian hills. Two cats crossed the street. A candle was flickering in the chapel of the Virgin on the corner. An old woman wearing a brightly coloured headscarf was working in a garden. In a few days’ time the fifty-second pilgrimage of SoldatenHeimkehrer would be coming to town, but that was not the reason for my visit. This was one of those rare places where an individual had offered public resistance. I was looking for his grave.

  In March 1938, all Austria stood cheering along the roads as the Nazi troops rolled into the country. For years, part of the population had been dreaming of a pan-German empire, and those sentiments had only increased after the collapse of the Habsburg Empire. As early as 1919, ninety per cent of the voters in Salzburg and the Tyrol had voted in favour of an Anschluss. When Hitler came to power that desire became even more intense. During the 1932 elections the Austrian Nazis won sixteen per cent of the votes; a year later they won forty per cent in Innsbruck's municipal elections. And they put their other weapons to good use as well: street violence, assaults, intimidation. On 25 July, 1943, the Catholic chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss, was killed during a botched coup.

  The Nazi revolution in Austria took place in three stages. The first was the establishment of a pro-German popular movement. In early 1934, a British correspondent wrote that an outsider driving into Graz would think he had arrived in a German town. The streets were dominated by marching Nazis and fluttering swastika banners, and their number only increased as the years went by.

  Then a seemingly legal change of power was enacted at government level. A vote dealing with the issue of maintaining Austrian independence was announced for Sunday, 13 March, 1938. Hitler considered that far too great a risk. On 11 March, therefore, Göring organised the second stage of the coup from Berlin. In a series of phone calls, he placed huge pressure on the new chancellor, Kurt Schussnigg, who finally let himself be replaced by the Nazi lawyer Arthur Seyss-Inquart. Meanwhile, the Nazis had seized all central points in the major cities. The referendum was cancelled.

  In stage three, the coup was completed by outside force: in the early morning of Saturday, 12 March, Germany's 8th Army rolled through the Austrian border posts, ostensibly to help the new Austrian government ‘restore order’.

  Despite their meticulous planning, however, there was one thing the Nazis had overlooked: the overwhelming enthusiasm of the Austrian people. To their own surprise, the advancing German troops were welcomed with flowers and cheering. German Army reports spoke of ‘song and laughter’ and ‘an unbelievable euphoria’. American and British correspondents in Vienna described how entire crowds sang and danced in the streets, punctuated by cries of ‘Down with the Jews!’ and ‘Sieg Heil!’.

  That afternoon, to the accompaniment of chiming church bells, Hitler himself made a triumphal entry into Linz. From both Catholic and Protestant pulpits, God was thanked for this bloodless revolution. On Monday, Hitler arrived in Vienna. Hundreds of thousands of people came out. It was, according to one eyewitness, ‘the biggest crowd I have ever seen in Vienna’. ‘Stately trees on the pavement were literally bowed down with the weight of numbers trying to get a better view,’ wrote the correspondent for the Manchester Guardian.

  The arrests began that very weekend. Some 20,000 Austrian citizens – communists, journalists, Jewish bankers, workers, aristocrats and anti-Nazis from all walks of life – were rounded up. At the same time there began ‘a medieval pogrom with a modern look’. As soon as the Nazis had seized power, on the evening of Friday, 11 March, tens of thousands of Viennese citizens marched on Leopoldstadt, the city's Jewish quarter along the Danube. Families were attacked in their homes, businessmen were pulled from taxis, hundreds of Jews committed suicide.

  The American newspaper correspondent William Shirer visited the SS headquarters at the Rothschild palace. ‘As we entered we almost collided with some SS officers who were carting up silver and other loot from the basement. One had a gold-framed picture under his arm. One was the commandant. His arms were loaded with silver knives and forks, but he was not embarrassed.’

  Gitta Sereny, fourteen at the time, heard countless voices all over the city shouting ‘Deutschland erwache! Juda verrecke!’ On the Graben, she and a girlfriend stumbled upon a few men in brown uniforms, surrounded by a crowd of laughing Viennese citizens. In the middle of the throng she saw a dozen middle-aged men and women down on their knees. They were scrubbing the paving stones with toothbrushes. She recognised one of the men as Dr Berggrün, the paediatrician who had saved her life when she had had diphtheria at the age of four. ‘I had never forgotten that night; he had wrapped me again and again in cool, wet sheets, and it was his voice I had heard early that dawn saying, “Sie wird leben.” She will live.’

  The doctor saw her walk up to the men in brown, he shook his head, but she screamed ‘How dare you!’ She shouted that a great doctor was being humiliated here, a man who saved lives. ‘Is this what you call our liberation?’ her girlfriend added, tears running down her face. Sereny: ‘It was extraordinary: within two minutes the jeering crowd had dispersed, the brown guards had gone, the “street cleaners” had melted away. “Never do that again,” Dr Berggrün said to us sternly, his small, round wife next to him nodding fervently, her face sagging with despair and exhaustion. “It is very dangerous!”’

  The Berggrüns died in the gas chambers at Sobibor in 1943.

  On Sunday, 10 April, a referendum was held to ratify the Anschluss. Anyone who did not openly vote ‘yes’ immediately became suspect. The turnout was unnaturally huge, and 99.73 per cent of the population voted ‘yes’. In fact, a large majority of Austrians probably were in favour of annexation. As well as being the dream of most German-speaking Austrians, it had the support of the major ecclesiastical and political groups, and Germany was also seen as a model of miraculous economic recovery. In Hitler's birthplace, Branau, 5 of the 3,600 inhabitants voted against it.

  In the little village of Sankt Radegund, thirty-five kilometres down the road, exactly one man voted ‘no’. It was Franz Jägerstätter, one of village's most influential citizens. I saw a picture of him: a handsome, proud man in gleaming leathers, sitting astride a sparkling motorbike, with his parents and a little sister standing rather awkwardly beside him. Jägerstätter was a simple farmer, and at the same time a nonconformist: he read and studied, he was the first person in the village to own a motorbike, he was also the first man in Sankt Radegund to push his child's baby carriage. With his clear, sober view of the world, Jägerstätter realised right away that Nazi doctrine was incompatible with his Catholic faith. He tried to summon support from the church, but on 27 March, 1938 – to quote the pastoral letter read all around the country – that same church recognised ‘with joy what the National Socialist movement has achieved.’

  In 1940 he finally entered military service anyway. After six months he was sent home on special leave. He told everyone who would listen that he was not going back. He considered fighting in Hitler's army to be a personal disgrace and a grave sin. ‘What Catholic could dare speak of this foray, on which Germany has already embarked and which it continues today in a number of countries, as a just and holy war?’ His headstrong stance led to serious quarrels with his own family.

  In early 1943, Jägerstätter, the father of three little children, was summoned to rep
ort back for duty. The local church authorities exerted pressure on him as well, but he refused, knowing full well that this meant his death. His letters from prison bear witness to a great serenity. On 9 August, 1943, Jägerstätter was beheaded in Brandenburg.

  His widow went on running the farm alone with her three daughters. After the war she received no pension at first, because Jägerstätter had ‘abandoned his country’. In the portal of the little white church in Sankt Radegund I saw the announcement of a reading by Martin Bormann Jr, the eldest son: ‘Life in the Face of the Shadow’. In the churchyard the violets were blooming, and Franz Jägerstätter's grave was covered in them.

  It behoves me here to make an aside. Jägerstätter was a Catholic, and his lonely opposition was primarily aimed against Hitler's war of aggression. The fate of the Jews, as far as I can ascertain, did not play much of a role in his stance.

  In Vienna three months earlier, I had seen another monument, a commemorative monument to the Holocaust. It depicted a Jew scrubbing the street with a toothbrush. The monument's designers undoubtedly had the best of intentions, but they erred grossly. This seemed more like a monument to the people of Vienna, rather than to the Jews. It was a monument to all those who had been forced to look the other way, who were deeply ashamed, who still have nightmares about this. But what about the rest? Were there not also countless older citizens of Vienna for whom this image summoned up only cheerful memories? Viennese who loved it, those days when the Jews scrubbed the streets, who stood watching and roaring with laughter?