Hitler and the Forgotten Nazis (12 page)

votes) was a result of no one knowing what to do.
⁷
Even though the mediocre
accomplishments
of Jankovic may have had something to do with
his
premature demise as federal leader, intraparty intrigue was thef immediate cause.

Instead of replacing Jankovic with a new state leader< the Fuhrer placed the six Austrian
Gaue
directly under the Reichsleitung in Munich and named Gregor Strasser as his plenipotentiary to reorganize the Austrian party. The Gauleiter of Styria, Heinrich Schmidt, was given the thankless job of enrolling new members throughout the country but few other responsibilities. Schmidt’s highest qualification was possibly that he had avoided making enemies through the simple tactic of expressing no opinions!
⁸

Schmidt, in turn, was relieved of his job in October 1928 when Hitler appointed a full-fledged Landesleiter, Hans Krebs. But the new leader was never very popular with the
Gauleiter
because of his willingness to compromise with the Schulz group.
⁹
Although Krebs was the founder of the
Deutsche Arbeiter-Presse
and had led the party from Vienna in the six years preceding the World War, he had moved to Aussig in northern Bohemia at the war’s end. His absentee leadership did nothing to enhance his prestige in Austria.
¹⁰
Worst of all, Krebs, as he himself admitted, simply did not have enough time for Austrian politics.
¹¹
As leader of the Sudeten Nazi party and a member of the Czechoslovak Parliament, he could never regard the Austrian party as more than a minor event. He did move the offices of the Landesleitung from Vienna to the more centrally located and less “Marxist” city of Linz, and under his authority the party made some modest progress. But Krebs’s administration lasted only until March 1930, causing one leading Nazi to remark that “no other party in Austria has had so large a turnover of leaders as ours.”
¹⁸

Because the Austrian
Gauleiter
could not agree on a new federal leader, Strasser ordered them to form a leadership council among themselves and appointed Alfred Proksch, the Gauleiter of Upper Austria, to be a mere administrative (
geschdftsfuhrenden
) Landesleiter. But this post carried with it (at least technically) no authority in political questions. The arrangement lasted until the middle of 1931, and does not appear to have pacified any of the provincial Austrian leaders. Proksch, who held various offices, including those of press leader, organization leader, publications leader, city councilman, and trade-union functionary,
¹³
had just enough power to arouse the envy of other
Gauleiter,
but not enough to stamp out opposition.

Proksch was bom in Morischau, Silesia, in 1891 of Sudeten German ancestry. One of his enemies in Linz accused him of being a German-Slavic “mixbreed.” However, Proksch boasted that he had no Slavic ancestors and

Fascists without a Fuhrer • 55

Kfljld speak no
Slavic languages. Like so many other Austrian Nazi leaders, lie
_w
as
a
railway employee and joined the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei in 1912.
After serving
in the World War, he was forced to flee from his home in the
ieWly created
state of Czechoslovakia, owing to his political activities. Fol
lowing
the example of twenty-two thousand other Sudeten Germans, he emi-gnited to Linz and founded the first Nazi Ortsgruppe there in 1919. In 1926 he
was
one of the ringleaders in the establishment of the Hitler Bewegung.
¹⁴
, First as an
agent of Hans Krebs in 1929 and then as the administrative
Landesleiter,
Proksch made many enemies through his willingness to form
electoral
coalitions with non-Nazi parties (the same policy that cost Walter Riehl his job in 1923).
¹⁸
In 1930 he tried unsuccessfully to form a coalition with the Heimwehr. By the middle of the same year Proksch had acquired the
reputation
, deserved or not, for operating behind people’s backs and playing off his rivals against each other.
¹⁶
But with Gregor Strasser apparently still too busy to intervene, the Austrian party continued to drift in its leaderless
condition
until the middle of 1931.

*

The Party Hierarchy

Fortunately for the Austrian Nazis, local success did not entirely depend on a strong central leadership. As in Germany there was an elaborate party hierarchy, which gave local leaders, especially
Gauleiter,
considerable powers.

At the bottom of the leadership structure were the
Ortsgruppenleiter
or local group leaders, who were responsible for judging the qualifications of prospective party members and for collecting dues. They were supposed to hold regular membership meetings and to distribute orders that came to them from higher up. They were also expected to carry out minor propaganda activities, such as passing out leaflets and posting displays. Elections brought new responsibilities, including assessing the strength of opponents.
¹⁷

The
Ortsgruppenleiter
were subordinate to the
Kreisleiter
(district leaders) who, until 1938, were relatively weak. Most of the local organizations of the many Nazi subsidiaries, such as the teachers’ and doctors’ leagues, were also under their control. This power did not apply, however, to the Hitler Jugend, the SA, or the SS.
¹⁸

The
Ortsgruppenleiter
were appointed by a Gauleiter upon the suggestion or recommendation of the
Kreisleiter.
District leaders were appointed

by Hitler himself, or the party cabinet, upon the recommendation of the Gauleiter. In sharp contrast to the “Schulz party,” no Na?i leaders were elected by the men they commanded.
¹⁹

A key role in the party hierarchy was played by the
Gauleiter.
Hitler himself had made that role clear in
Mein Kampf,
especially in the second volume, where he stated that the
Gauleiter
were to be appointed directly by the Fuhrer and were responsible to him alone, not to the members of their own Gau. In the words of one Nazi handbook, “The Gauleiter lays down for the area of his Gau the tactics of political activity, the line to be taken, the holding of meetings in the individual Kreise districts and branches and the construction of the organization.”
²⁰
   *'

Given the intensity of some of the rivalries within the lower echelons of the party, Hitler was most reluctant to allow the overthrow of a Gauleiter, because that would create disorder and undermine discipline. He would tolerate corruption and even incompetence, but never disloyalty or the kind of anarchy that threatened to create a public scandal.
²¹
Those who rebelled against their Gauleiter found little sympathy among the party’s hierarchy,
²²
at least as long as the Gauleiter still enjoyed the Fiihrer’s confidence. In a system that deliberately encouraged cutthroat competition, utter loyalty to Hitler was one’s only security.

Although as late as 1928 the position of Gauleiter was still not fully clarified, Hitler had at least transformed the Gaue from neighborhood clubs into propaganda-distribution centers. Because propaganda was so crucial to the party’s progress, this function alone gave the Gau leaders substantial power. An ambitious man, especially if he were a good public speaker and a tolerable writer, could make a real difference to the success of the party in his region.

In theory, the six
Gauleiter
of Austria (seven after 1932) were subordinate to the Austrian Landesleitung, which in turn was subordinate to the Reichslei-tung in Munich. But because there was sometimes no regular Landesleiter at all in Austria, and never a strong one before 1931, “every Gauleiter [acted] like a princeling of the prewar Reich.”
²³

Two of the Austrian
Gauleiter
were particularly effective in the otherwise dismal years between 1928 and the end of 1930: Walter Oberhaidacher of Styria and Alfred E. Frauenfeld of Vienna. It was probably no mere coincidence that Oberhaidacher, like so many Austrian pan-Germans inside and outside the Nazi party, was born (1896) in what later became an Austrian
terra irredenta,
the South Tyrol. Before the war Oberhaidacher attended the Technical Institute (
Hochschule
) for Mechanical Engineering in Graz. During the war he fought on the Italian front where he won several decorations. He
joined the
Nazi party in 1924 and was one of the charter members of the Hitler
Movement
in 1926. In May 1928 he was made deputy Gauleiter and propaganda leader and was promoted to Gauleiter in November of the same year.
Although
privately anxious to attain that coveted post, he had been careful to avoid appearing overeager.

Oberhaidacher
enjoyed a number of political advantages. His Nazi superiors in Austria credited him with good political judgment
and
speaking and debating skills. Perhaps only his relative youth stood in the way of his
becoming
the Austrian Landesleiter. Oberhaidacher’s vocation as superin
tendent
of his father-in-law’s featherbed factory gave him an independence and financial freedom unusual in a fascist leader. Although
he
later had his
detractors,
there can be little question that the Styrian Gau could not have attained its status in 1930 as having the largest per capita Nazi membership and soundest finances in Austria had it not been for Walter Oberhaidacher.
²⁴

Even more important to the eventual success of the Austrian Nazi party was Hitler’s confirmation of Alfred Frauenfeld as provisional Gauleiter of Vienna on 27 January 1930. Coming from a family of artists and architects, Frauenfeld was somewhat unusual in having been bom (1898) in the same city where he later pursued his career as a Nazi. He resembled Oberhaidacher and a good many other Nazi leaders in having attended a technical institute
²⁵
rather than acquiring a humanistic education. On the other hand, he departed once again from the Nazi stereotype in being a onetime actor, an experience that no doubt proved useful when he became a Gauleiter. He served on the Italian front as a lieutenant in the Austro-Hungarian air force during the Great War and was a stone mason from the war’s end until 1922. Like so many German nationalists, Frauenfeld had not started his political life as a Nazi. He entered politics as a Christian Social, but soon joined the Front Fighters’ Association in 1920. Although he attended a Nazi meeting as early as 1924, it was a passionate speech by Hitler in Nuremberg together with Austria’s slow economic progress which ultimately induced him to become a party member on 3 August 1929, an act that persuaded many Front Fighters to follow suit.
²⁶

Before Frauenfeld’s conversion, the Vienna Gau had been so undisciplined and chaotic that Hitler had been forced to step in and temporarily dissolve it in April 1927.
²⁷
When Frauenfeld assumed his duties in 1930, the Gau could claim only six hundred members. The failure of the Bodenkreditanstalt in 1931 cost him the job as bank clerk that he had held since 1923, but freed him to devote all his energies to his many political activities. Besides being a Gauleiter, he was a member of the provincial parliament of Vienna and the leader of the Nazi faction in the city council
(Gemeirtderat).
His previous

^:
i
^;
ii

il-’i, i:
^;

ALFRED FRAUENFELD.
Gauleiter of Vienna, 1930-ed.
Deutscher Geist in Osterreich.

experience as a short-story writer was undoubtedly helpful to him when he founded a number of Nazi publications, including the Gau’s official newspaper,
Der Kampfruf.
²⁹

Frauenfeld
now succeeded where Walter Riehl and Georg von Schonerer had failed, namely in building a mass movement. To accomplish this task he replaced about one-third of the
Ortsgruppenleiter,
appointed a new treasurer, and established a number of new committees. Even more important was his
founding
of the Austrian SS. The new Gauleiter was extremely prolific. In the first
half
of 1930 alone he gave over one hundred speeches, most of them to large audiences. To the city’s unemployed (who comprised one-half and sometimes as many as two-thirds of the country’s jobless) he promised that trade and prosperity would return to the metropolis as soon as the Anschluss with Germany was consummated
.
²⁹

Frauenfeld’s work was facilitated by his connections with major German Nazi leaders, which enabled him to bring “big name” Nazi speakers to Vienna. His younger brother, Eduard, believed that the real turning point for the party in Vienna came in March 1930 when Josef Goebbels and Hermann Goring spoke to a crowd of three thousand people in the Konzerthaus
.
³⁰
Goring spoke at another rally in Vienna’s huge Heldenplatz in October 1932, along with Robert Ley, Julius Streicher, and Hans Frank, all leading German Nazis
.
³¹
By such means the elder Frauenfeld was able to create the most intensive organization in the country and expand the Gau’s membership to forty thousand in just three years
.
³²