The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War

by Alexander Waugh

  On the first day of the uprising Paul went shopping in the center of Vienna, unaware of the turmoil that was going on elsewhere in the city, but his twenty-two-year-old nephew, Ji Stonborough, assigned to the charitable Wiener Freiwilligen Rettungsgesellschaft (Viennese Voluntary Rescue Society), spent the day working as an ambulance porter and was very upset by the sight of bleeding agitators on the Floridsdorfer Bridge. He was decorated for his efforts with a medal pinned to his chest by Prince Ernst von Starhemberg in person.

  Starhemberg had joined the Heimwehr as a young man and in the 1920s signed up with Hitler's National Socialist movement, taking part in the failed Beer-Hall Putsch of November 1923. Soon afterward he became disaffected with the Nazis and returned to Austria. In 1930 he became head of the Heimwehr, into which he sank most of his fortune (derived from eighteen landed estates), and was soon bankrupted by it, but with donations from Paul, from Fritz Mandl (arms dealer), Benito Mussolini (Italian dictator) and other Austrian millionaires he continued to control the 20,000-man Heimwehr as though it were his own private army. His was the main political voice against Hitler. "Fascism in Austria is represented by the Heimwehr and no one else," he said. "The Nazi Party in Austria is therefore superfluous."

  In 1933 he allied his forces to those of Dollfuss's so-called Christian Democrat Party to form the Vaterlandische Front (Fatherland Front). His political rallies, his anti-Marxist rhetoric, the Front heil! salute and Kruck-enkreuz symbol in a white circle on a red background have much in common with Hitler's National Socialism. His and Hitler's parties were both fascist and anti-democratic, but the two leaders remained virulently opposed to one another. Hitler called Starhemberg a "traitor," and the prince called Hitler a "liar in charge of a Brown rabble." The anti-Semites who were expelled from Starhemberg's army usually filtered off to join the National Socialists, leaving the Heimwehr with a core support of Austrian patriots (ex-soldiers, war veterans, aristocrats and Catholics) who strove for an independent Austria with dreams of a restored Hapsburg monarchy.

  We have much in common with the German Nazis [Prince von Starhemberg said in a speech]. We are equally enemies of democracy and have many of the same ideas about economic reconstruction, but we in the Heimwehr stand for Austrian independence and support of the Catholic Church. We object to the exaggerated racial theories of the Nazis, as we do to their schemes for a semi-pagan German national religion.

  With the crushing of the main core of Marxist socialist resistance in February 1934, Starhemberg and Dollfuss were able to concentrate their efforts on resisting the threat of Hitler, who had been covertly arming and financing Austrian Nazis in order to destabilize the government. In recent months they had dynamited civic buildings, railway lines and power stations and were held responsible for several assassinations and lynchings. Hermine wrote to Ludwig a few days after the uprising: "Who knows what the future will bring? We've only in fact silenced the one hostile party; the other--the national socialists--are more vicious and more hostile than ever. What shall we do with this one? Is it possible that a fight to the finish can end well?"

  On July 25, Hitler was attending a performance of Wagner's Rheingold at the Bayreuth Festival with his friend Friedelind Wagner, the composer's granddaughter. After the performance one of his aides informed him of the success of the Austrian Nazi plot to assassinate Engelbert Dollfuss. The tiny Austrian chancellor had been shot in the throat at a range of two feet by a rabble of Nazis dressed in Austrian army uniforms who had broken into the Federal Chancellery that evening. There he had been left to bleed slowly to death. According to Friedelind Wagner, Hitler, who was already in an overexcited state because of the opera, "could scarcely wipe the delight from his face" when the news was broken to him.

  But to Hitler's intense irritation the coup plot failed to establish a National Socialist government in Vienna. Government troops quickly regained control of the building, several of the conspirators were hanged and a new chancellor, a monochrome lawyer called Kurt von Schuschnigg, was quickly installed. Hitler's ambitions to unite Austria with Germany were far from over. For four years he continued to play a cat-and-mouse game with Schuschnigg that culminated in the latter's ignominious concessions in the spring of 1938. On February 12, Hitler had invited Schuschnigg to private talks at his mountain retreat, the Berghof, situated above Berchtesgaden, high on the German border, with grand, sweeping views across the Austrian countryside. As Schuschnigg arrived at the frontier he was informed that Hitler had invited several of his military generals to attend the meeting. With hindsight, he should have refused to continue, or at least have insisted that Austrian generals be present too, but he did neither. During the fraught exchange that followed, he was insulted, threatened and humiliated by Hitler, who finally presented him with an agreement to sign that stipulated, among other things, that the Austrian Chancellor sack his Chief of Staff and alter the structure of his cabinet to include several named Nazis in key positions. Hitler specifically demanded that the Austrian Nazi Arthur Seyss-Inquart be appointed minister of the interior in charge of home security.

  Fearing a full-scale invasion, Schuschnigg capitulated. He was now barely in control of his new German puppet government and his position was weakened to such a degree that he had no choice but to turn to the country. A plebiscite was set for March 13, at which the people would vote for or against an independent Austria. Those under twenty-four years old were excluded from participating on the grounds that they were most likely to want Anschluss. Hitler cried foul and dispatched troops to the Austrian border, sending an ultimatum to Schuschnigg that demanded the immediate cancellation of the plebiscite and a complete handover of power to the Austrian National Socialists. Schuschnigg resigned that evening, and in the chaos that followed, a Nazi faction took over the Ministry of the Interior, which controlled the police. The Austrian president Wilhelm Miklas stood out alone against Hitler's demand that Seyss-Inquart be appointed Austrian chancellor. The Germans, impatient for results, published a fake telegram purporting to come from the Austrian government requesting German military assistance, whereupon Hitler-claiming moral responsibility--signed the order for his troops to move in. President Miklas, now convinced that the game was up, begrudgingly signed the order appointing Seyss-Inquart chancellor.

  While all this was going on Gretl Stonborough was bobbing about on the Atlantic Ocean with her maid Elizabeth Faustenhammer aboard the SS Manhattan bound for New York. Things were not altogether well with her. She had been feeling less than rich and desperately needed to sell her art collection. Before leaving for New York she had arranged for the bulk of it to be packed into sealed crates and sent to a depot in Vienna awaiting shipment. The Heritage Office had granted her an export license and her purpose in going to New York was to arrange for the sale of the pictures as soon as they arrived. By the time her ship reached port on March 18 the country of her birth had ceased to exist--no longer Austria but Ost-mark, a province of the German Reich. If rumors of Hitler's Anschluss had not already reached her on board ship she would certainly have read all about it in the newspapers on the day of her arrival. "Reich Troops Pour Through Austria" was the New York Times front-page headline on that day. This was followed by a long article containing excerpts from a speech of Field Marshal Hermann Goring: "The Greater German Reich has risen. Seventy-five million Germans are united under the banner of the swastika cross. The longings of all Germans for a thousand years have been fulfilled."

  What Gretl would not have been able to read in the New York newspapers was the news that her export license had been withdrawn by the new regime and that the sealed crates containing her paintings had been returned to her modern rectangular house on the Kundmanngasse.

  PATRIOT IN TROUBLE

  On March 11, 1938--"Austria's longest day"--troops of the German Eighth Army were lined up along the north side of the Austro-German frontier nervously poised for orders to begin Operation Otto. They had no idea what sort of resistance to expect as they crossed the border into Aust
rian territory but would have been delighted to learn that welcoming swastikas were being unfurled in towns and cities throughout the land in preparation for their arrival. Arthur Seyss-Inquart, not officially chancellor of Austria until the early hours of March 12, was in command of internal affairs and elements of his National Socialist police force, working with Heinrich Himmler's unofficial agents, were given free rein to make sweeping preparations for the German Wehrmacht's imminent mobilization. Any potential threat of resistance had to be neutralized before the German troops advanced. In Vienna the arrest, imprisonment or deportation of all Austrians suspected of the crime of patriotism began in earnest. In the first wave 76,000 men and women were taken in for questioning and 6,000 rumored to have been supporters of Austrian independence or of Schuschnigg's plebiscite, were summarily sacked from their jobs in government, education and other branches of the civil service.

  Prince Ernest von Starhemberg's Heimwehr and the Vaterlandische Front were primary targets as being the most likely to mount a military resistance to the Wehrmacht. Starhemberg slipped over the border into Switzerland with his Jewish wife, the actress Nora Gregor; Emil Fey, the ex-head of the Vienna Heimwehr, was said to have shot himself--though evidence suggests he was murdered--while Paul's friend Prince Franz Windisch-Gratz, Starhemberg's ADC, fled to France. Kurt von Schusch-nigg, ignoring advice to flee the country, was held under house arrest in Vienna. In 1941 he was interned in the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen where it was erroneously reported that he had witnessed his fifteen-year-old son being cudgeled to death by camp guards while employed as a " death-transport commando" burying the bodies of several thousand Russian POWs who had been murdered by Himmler's Schutzstaffel or SS.

  Paul's links to the Heimwehr may or may not have been known to Nazi agents. His funding was supposedly secret, but a paper trail from the Heimwehr headquarters in Vienna or from Starhemberg's castle at Waxenberg near Linz may easily have led them to him. In any case Paul's strong patriotic views were never held back, so any number of informants could have tipped off the police. On March n, the day before the German invasion, Paul was arrested, interrogated by police and sacked from his job as professor of piano at the Conservatoire. No criminal charges were brought against him. He was released under caution and probably kept under surveillance. It is possible that he was forced to swear the Nazi oath, though hard to imagine his having done so with good grace. He was certainly ordered to fly a huge swastika flag from the Wittgenstein Palais. One of his students, Erna Otten, remembers bicycling to her lesson. There was a loud Nazi demonstration going on in the Ringstrasse and she had to take the slip road. When she reached the Palais she saw the swastika flying from the building and remembered Paul's pained and contrite reaction: "As I entered the room, the professor apologised. I can still see him in front of me, how he placed his hand on his heart. He said he had not been able to do otherwise or they would have arrested him immediately."

  On March II, the day of his sacking, Paul secured a letter of recommendation from his boss at the Conservatoire, Josef Reitler, and a week later had it translated into English by the official "sworn interpreter" to the Austrian law courts, Thomas H. Rash:

  Paul Wittgenstein was invited by me to the New Vienna Conservato-rium in 1931 and has up to this day conducted a pianoforte finishing class at this institute with exceptional success, which has repeatedly received public acknowledgment and recognition.

  The prejudice that the one-armed pianist, to whom the greatest living composers have dedicated works written for the left hand alone, had to contend with were, thanks to his eminent artistic and pedagogic qualities in conjunction with his high seriousness, sense of responsibility and great energy, brilliantly overcome by Paul Wittgenstein. As is unavoidable in a conservatorium class he had to test his abilities on pupils of average mediocrity. So much more remarkable are the results of his individualistic method of instruction. In this connection special mention must be made of one of Paul Wittgenstein's special characteristics: an idealism, which has become rare in these days. Both on the concert pla form and in the classroom this beautiful idealism has been his guiding star.

  In this painful hour of parting I but follow the dictates of my heart in testifying to the greatness of the artist and the merit of the man.

  (signed): Professor Josef Reitler

  Shortly before dawn on the morning after Professor Reitler wrote his testimonial, German troops started to move across the border. Hitler had slapped his thigh shouting, "Jetzt geht's los" ("Let's be off now!"), giving the green light to Operation Otto. His soldiers proceeded with caution, fingers poised on their triggers, but were soon relieved to discover that the Austrian frontier guards had deserted their posts and obligingly dismantled their barriers before they left. Not a shot was fired in the whole operation and instead of resistance the German army's entry into Austria was feted with cheers, smiles, salutes, Heil Hitlers! and the unfurling of thousands of swastika banners all the way to Vienna.

  At 3:50 that afternoon Hitler crossed the border at the place of his birth, Braunau-am-Inn. Austria was technically still an independent nation, Seyss-Inquart was chancellor, Wilhelm Miklas president, so the Fuhrer let it be known that he was entering the country, not as a conquering hero, but simply to "visit his mother's grave." His warm welcome, however, particularly from the good people of Linz, emboldened his heart and within two days the description of his actions shifted from the euphemistic-sounding Anschluss (connection) to the more blatant Machtubernahme (assumption of power). Cardinal Innitzer, head of the Austrian Catholic Church, who one week earlier had pronounced, "as Austrian citizens, we stand and we fight for a free and independent Austria," now sent his warmest greetings to Hitler and ordered that all his churches be draped with swastika flags while the bells tolled to welcome the Nazi hero. The next day Hitler's demagoguery at Vienna's Helden-platz was cheered by 200,000 ecstatic Austrian supporters and within a month an official plebiscite (from which Jews, socialists and Austro-fascists were prohibited from taking part) returned a vote of 99.73 percent in favor of the annexation.

  The Fuhrer promised the Austrian people free holidays for their children and cheap "Strength Through Joy" holidays for the workers; he pledged money to buy radio sets so that they could listen to his speeches, and money for fast roads, and money to rid them of unemployment. These were exciting and happy times for most of the Austrian people. Even those who had originally objected to Anschluss were beginning to see the light. News that Hitler had canceled Schuschnigg's plebiscite of March 13 failed to reach the remote village of Tarrenz in time. In ignorance the inhabitants went ahead, voting 100 percent in favor of Austrian independence. Less than one month later 100 percent of the Tarrenz electorate recast their votes in favor of the German Anschluss.

  The joy was not, however, universal. Socialists, Austro-fascists and freemasons all came in for persecution and so did the Jews, who were especially vulnerable to unlicensed mob actions against them. Their shops were smashed, boarded up or daubed with red paint, and their owners pressurized into selling to Aryans. One unruly mob in the Prater forced a group of Jews to eat grass like cows on their hands and knees, others were made to lick the streets or scrub public lavatories with their prayer shawls, while crowds of Austrians gathered round to jeer. On March 17, Reinhard Heydrich, later an important architect of the Holocaust, ordered the arrest of "those National Socialists who in the last few days allowed themselves to launch large-scale assaults in a totally undisciplined way against Jews," but the effect was minimal and official discrimination, which deprived Jews of their rights of citizenship, only served to encourage public acts of violence against them.

  In the first days of Anschluss some 500 Jews are said to have committed suicide. Many more fled the country; but the majority refused to believe that the anti-Semitic legislation enshrined in the 1935 Nuremberg Laws could be made to work in a city with such a large and integrated Jewish population as Vienna. Sooner or later, they thought, the Nazis would drop t
heir rules and concentrate on something more pressing. No one could have predicted the ruthless efficiency of the city's soon-to-be-formed Central Office for Jewish Emigration under the zealous command of SS-Obersturmfuhrer Adolf Eichmann. The first anti-Semitic decrees were enacted in Vienna on March 12 (the actual day of Anschluss) and by May 28 the Nuremberg Laws (retroactive from March 13) were passed into law. Hitler's original scheme--to deprive Jews of voting rights, to stop them holding key jobs in the press, politics, law, the civil service and the arts, to prohibit them from sitting on park benches and so on--was intended to make life in the Reich so disagreeable for the Austrian Jew that he would leave the country of his own volition. But the plan was far more difficult to execute than Hitler or any in his Party had predicted, for not only had Anschluss made the Germans responsible once again for all those Jews who since 1933 had fled from Germany and into Austria, but many resident Jews felt either unable or reluctant to emigrate, while thousands more clung to the hope that the restrictions and persecutions against them would be softened or withdrawn over time. Within six months 45,000 Jews are said to have emigrated from the Ostmark. Himmler's urgent task was to find a way of getting rid of the 150,000 that remained.

  Three years later the emigration of Jews from the Reich was still incomplete and Hitler was desperate with impatience. "The Jew must clear out of Europe," he reminded Himmler and his staff commander Colonel Zeitzler over lunch.