Hitler and the Forgotten Nazis (10 page)

On 1 November a tumultuous meeting took place involving the Vaterlandische
Schutzbund of
Vienna and the party leadership. After an angry debate, a
majority
of those present (who were not necessarily representative of
all
party
members
in Vienna or the rest of Austria) agreed with the aims of Muller and his colleagues.
³⁷

Nevertheless,
a final split was avoided and the party’s unity was patched
_U
p during an extraordinary Parteitag held in Linz in February of 1926. All attempts to sow discord were blamed on “Jewish Bolshevik newspapers.”
Schulz
was reelected chairman, and the conference tried to distract attention from the party’s internal squabbles by denouncing Italy’s brutal treatment of the South Tyrol. Protest demonstrations and boycotts were ordered.
³⁸

All this show of unity and resolution, however, proved to be only so much bravado. In May the
Ortsgruppen
of the middle-class Vienna districts of Josefstadt, Hemals, and Wahring were dissolved when they refused to recognize the federal leadership. Several conspirators were expelled from the party at the same time because of their “detrimental activities.”
³⁹

Among the ringleaders were Ernst Graber and Richard Suchenwirth. Originally from the partly Slavic province of Carinthia, Suchenwirth (who had Germanized his name from the Slavic “Suchanek”) was now a Viennese middle-school teacher and a polished speaker with consistently radical ideas. As early as 28 January 1926, he had denounced Schulz as a “Dummkopf ’" and other members as “people who had been thrown out of other parties.”
⁴⁰
Another conspirator was Josef Leopold, the head of the Lower Austrian SA, who in later years (1935-38) gained notoriety as the FCihrer of the entire (by then) illegal Austrian Nazi party.

Suchenwirth and his conspirators, along with two hundred of their followers, responded to their expulsion from the party by founding the NSDAP (Hitlerverein) on 4 May, and subordinating themselves directly to Hitler. The group’s statutes were identical with those of the Munich party, and its program consisted of Hitler’s “Twenty-five Theses.” Soon other
Gaue
were founded in Styria, Lower Austria, Carinthia, and still later in the other federal states.

Another man who was instrumental in engineering the split and guiding the Vaterlandische Schutzbund into the Hitler movement was Hermann Reschny. The twenty-eight-year-old Reschny was rewarded for his service when Hitler confirmed him as leader of the Austrian Sturmabteilung (as the paramilitary formation was now called) in June 1926. Reschny then extracted two promises from Hitler (both later utterly ignored): (1) that an Anschluss between Germany and Austria could take place only after a free, secret, and uninfluenced vote; and (2) that after such a union the Austrian state, party, and industry could not be staffed by Reich Germans.
⁴¹

44 - Hitler and the Forgotten Nazis

*

Hitler and the Party Schism

Efforts by Karl Schulz to head off a confrontation and work out some sort of modus vivendi with Hitler gained him nothing but insults. A meeting between the two Nazi leaders in Munich in the summer of 1925 was strikingly similar to Hitler’s famous showdown with Chancellor Schuschnigg at Berchtesgaden in 1938. Schulz wrote several years later that Hitler

allowed no exchange of ideas, but instead did all the talking. Even the slightest objection
[Einwurf\
was answered by him with a speech. I always had the feeling that Hitler was speaking not to me, but a large assembly. His voice cracked, his face became rigid, spittle flowed from his lips, and he spoke in such an ecstasy that he hit his chest and forehead with his hand so hard it smacked. After a two-hour interview I still had not a single opportunity to find out in concrete terms what Hitler expected of the Austrian movement and what he did not like.

When two other Austrian moderates met Hitler about this same time (1925), they received a similar treatment. He spoke in the rudest terms not only about the Austrian movement but also about Austria in general (again reminiscent of Schuschnigg's Berchtesgaden interview). He was particularly displeased with the Austrian Nazi policy toward Italy and the South Tyrol question.
⁴²

The South Tyrol issue was, in fact, almost certainly one of the major reasons for the split in the Austrian Nazi party. Contrary to popular belief, Hitler had not always favored the renunciation of the South Tyrol. In 1920 he had demanded both the Anschluss of Austria to Germany and the reunification of North and South Tyrol. In a speech at the Munich Hofbrauhaus in April 1922, he denounced the Italian administration in the South Tyrol. But his mind began to change in the fall of 1922 with Benito Mussolini’s rise to power. One of the major reasons for Hitler’s change of heart may have been a bribe by Mussolini. According to Konstantin von Neurath, the German ambassador to Italy from 1921 to 1930, and later the German foreign minister, the Duce gave Hitler money for his Putsch in exchange for Hitler’s abandoning claims to the South Tyrol.
⁴³

Hitier alone was responsible for the new Nazi policy. In favoring the Italian alliance at the expense of the South Tyrol he broke with every other nationalist in both Germany and Austria. Here was an example of how Hitler was

capable of formulating a policy on the basis of ice-cold logic, free from any

sentiment
or national prejudice.

As early as November 1922 Hitler referred to the South Tyroleans as “well
treated” and
said that “we must openly and honestly declare to Italy that for us the South Tyrol question does not exist.” He blamed the loss of
the region
not on Italy, but on those responsible for Germany’s defeat. Disbelieving Austrian Nazi newspapers called this “alleged renunciation” a “Jewish lie.”
⁴⁴

Hitler made his policy toward the lost province even clearer in
Mein Kampf
(for anyone who took the trouble to read it) where he wrote: “I do not hesitate to declare that, now that the dice have fallen, I regard a reconquest of the
South
Tyrol by war as impossible. ... If this blood were someday staked, it would be a crime to stake it for two hundred thousand Germans while next door more than seven millions languished under foreign domination.”
⁴⁵
Hitler’s South Tyrol policy served to separate the fanatical Hitler loyalists from the more moderate Austrian Nazis. If an Austrian could swallow this policy, he could accept anything Hitler might demand.

By 1926 the membership of the German NSDAP was back to approximately the same level as before the Munich Putsch (about fifty-five thousand). The party’s renewed strength was celebrated at a congress in Weimar in early July when several volkisch groups, awed by the display of unity and power, merged their organizations with the Nazis. The Parteitag ended with a resolution refusing to take a position on splits in the volkisch movement. It welcomed “all German
Volksgenossen
who recognized the statutes [Twenty-five Points of the Munich Nazis] and who announced their intention to fight for a national socialist state under the leadership of Adolf Hitler.” The resolution furthermore gave Hitler the “right and duty to organize his followers in the whole party in the manner he felt to be most suitable.” The resolution ended by calling on the Austrian Nazis to fulfill the above program and to annex themselves to the organization, which was valid for the entire German-language area. Such a step would “help to create a movement united in program and leadership.”
⁴⁶
Obviously it would also mean the death of the Schulz group and the end of Austrian Nazi autonomy. It was therefore rejected by the Austrians.

The matter did not end there, however. Schulz made one last attempt to avoid a schism when he met with Hitler in Passau (on the German side of the Inn River) on 12 August, Schulz argued that conditions in Austria and Czechoslovakia required different tactics from those used in the Reich. In Germany there were a dozen political parties including three Marxist ones
(sic,
two after 1922); in Austria there were only two major parties, one of them the powerful and united Social Democratic party. Ip dealing with these problems the great and guiding Nazi principles were -supposed to be established in common as Hitler himself had agreed in 1920.
⁴⁷

As usual, however, Hitler permitted no real discussion. He accused the Austrians of not helping the Reich party after the Beer Hall Putsch; he refused to call another international Nazi congress, and he claimed for himself the right to break earlier agreements because he now had the power to do so. He would, he said in a revealing statement, do the same thing with the French. Schulz replied that the Austrian party had entirely different policies toward the South Tyrol, the use of the fascist salute (which was borrowed from Italy and was now fashionable with the German Nazis), and the trade-union workers whom he wished to educate in national and socialist ideas. Hitler brushed these objections aside, saying there was not enough time for education. He demanded “unconditional loyalty” from the “Schulz party.” Austria, he said contemptuously, was nothing more than a German Gau to which he would send a Reichskommissar and later name a leader.
⁴⁸
Here aeain was an ominous preview of what was in store for Austria as a whole in 1938.

When Schulz returned to Vienna he reported to an assembly of Viennese and Lower Austrian subleaders [
Vertrauensmdnner]
that he had come to the shocking conclusion in Passau that although the German NSDAP was well organized militarily, it was indistinguishable from such paramilitary (and conservative) formations as the Austrian Front Fighters and the German Stahlhelm. The assembly backed Schulz in his refusal to dissolve the Austrian NSDAP, a move that was also fully supported by the Sudeten Nazi party.
⁴⁹

From his own standpoint, Hitler’s policy at Weimar and Passau was both correct and consistent. To have permitted autonomy for the Austrian and Sudeten parties would have contradicted and undermined all those moves toward the centralization of authority in his own hands that he had made since virtually the day he had joined the party. Autonomy for some would have been followed by demands for the equal treatment of other groups, especially those in northern Germany. In fact, the existence of autonomous leaders in Austria and Czechoslovakia would likely have undermined the whole structure of the party. Far more than in Marxist parties, charismatic leadership, not ideology, provided the real cement holding the party together. Hitler later censured the Schulz group for “having too much Marxism in itself.”
⁵⁰
But this reference to ideology served only as a pretext for the break. “Ideological heterogeneity was a characteristic of the Nazi movement from its inception; it was no concern of Hitler. There was no orthodoxy in Nazi ideology; the only orthodoxy was the totalitarian principle of absolute obedience to an absolute leader. ... By definition, the leader and the idea were the same in Nazism”
⁵¹
Therefore, by challenging the legitimizing idea of the movement, Schulz was in effect placing himself outside the party.

At virtually the same time that Schulz was confronting Hitler, the Fiihrer (as Hitler was now being called by his supporters) was meeting secretly with
several
of his Austrian loyalists, including Richard Suchenwirth and Alfred Proksch, the Gauleiter of Upper Austria. All of them pledged their unconditional fealty to the German leader. Schulz’s response was to have them expelled from their offices. But this was a futile gesture that could not prevent Hitler’s official recognition a few days later (28 August 1926) in Munich of the so-called NSDAP (Hitler Bewegung).
⁵²

*

Civil War or Reunification?

Although there were two attempts to reunite the Austrian Nazis (one in 1927 and the second in 1929), they remained divided until the dissolution of the Schulz group in 1935. In the interval, however, they fought like mortal enemies until the Hitler Bewegung (HB) gained the upper hand following Hitler’s startling electoral success in Germany in September 1930. Although each side claimed to be by far the stronger, it is more likely that they were about equally weak. In the national elections of April 1927, for example, the Hitler Movement, which campaigned independently, garnered only a pathetic 27,000 votes and won no parliamentary mandates.
⁵³
The Schulz group joined the anti-Marxist “Unity List” of Chancellor Seipel, so its votes were not counted separately; but it is unlikely that it did any better than the Hit-lerians. A year and a half later (November 1928) the Schulz people had only 6,274 dues-paying members organized into 50
Ortsgruppen,
whereas the Hitler Movement had 4,466 members in 130 local groups.
⁵⁴
Membership in the HB in the three western states of Vorarlberg, Tyrol, and Salzburg was so small that between 1928 and 1932 they were combined into a single “Westgau.”
⁵⁵
The Hitlerian Nazis used “physical assault, property damage, and character defamation” against the Schulz followers. The Gauleiter of Styria, Heinrich K. Schmidt, accused Schulz and Gattermayer of having connections with Hitler’s left-wing Nazi rivals in the Reich, men such as Anton Drexler, Count Ernst zu Reventlow, and Albrecht von Graefe.
⁵
® This group had recently declared that Hitler ought not be permitted to regain his former position of power after his release from prison. The Schulz Nazis, on the other hand,