Hitler and the Forgotten Nazis (13 page)

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Leadership Quarrels

Frauenfeld paid a price for this spectacular success. Only a few weeks after he had assumed his office he had to oust one Ortsgruppenleiter, Ernst Sopper, for insubordination over a controversy involving the Hitler Jugend (HJ) and the Nazi League of Students.

Frauenfeld’s trouble with the Vienna Hitler Youth was by no means unusual. The Austrian HJ, the Sturmabteilung (SA), and later also the SS, all attempted to follow policies independent of the party’s political leadership and managed to do so with considerable success, especially when there was no strong central leadership
.
³³
One party member complained to Hitler in February 1931 that “the battle inside the party absorbs its greatest strength and directly hampers its external struggle. The political leadership fights the SA for not achieving enough. The SA is against the women’s and girls’

groups and vice versa, and these in turn are against the Hitler Youth; the SA is dissatisfied with the political leadership for not organizing enpugh events
.”
³⁴
A decree by Hitler making SA members part of the Political Organization, the main body of the party, was largely ignored in Austria
.
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The struggle in Vienna reached a climax when Sopper reacted to his dismissal by sending a circular letter to the rank-and-file party members of Vienna denouncing his dismissal, pointing out that Frauenfeld had only recently joined the party, and claiming that Frauenfeld was not even the legitimate Gauleiter of Vienna. Sopper’s appeal to the Reichsleitung found little sympathy, however, as Strasser reaffirmed Frauenfeld’s authority and acidly remarked that acts such as Sopper’s were responsible for the party’s lack -of progress in Austria
.
³⁶

Sopper’s challenge to Frauenfeld’s leadership was not unique. But more serious were Frauenfeld’s confrontations with Alfred Proksch. The Gauleiter’s phenomenal progress evidently caused Proksch to see Frauenfeld as a possible obstacle to his becoming the full-fledged Landesleiter of Austria. Frauenfeld’s repeated requests to Strasser that a new Landesleitung be established in Vienna could have been fulfilled only at Proksch’s expense. In April 1931 Proksch wrote a letter to the party court or USCHLA (Untersuchungs- und Schlichtungsausschuss) in Linz complaining that Frauenfeld had founded
Der Kampfruf
in order to compete with Proksch’s paper,
Die Volksstimme.
Proksch also called Frauenfeld a “Jewish shyster”
(Geschaftspraktiker),
and claimed that the Vienna Gauleiter had ridiculed him before the Reichsleitung
.
³⁷

Frauenfeld counterattacked by denying Proksch’s charges about his alleged Jewish ancestry. Proksch had also claimed that Frauenfeld had written for a pornographic magazine and had dedicated a book to a Jewish bank president. These accusations, Frauenfeld maintained, had all originated with Marxists and Czechs. The controversy was temporarily stilled when Frauenfeld was acquitted by the party court. But only a few months later Proksch tried to oust Frauenfeld from his post as Gauleiter; however, Frauenfeld was again reinstated by the Reichsleitung
.
³⁸

Although Proksch finally realized his ambition of becoming a regular Landesleiter, he did so only against the wishes of the Austrian Gau leaders. His appointment in July 1931 did nothing to improve his popularity or probably even his authority. Hardly any Austrian Nazis recognized him as their real leader. He was accused (with how much justice it is impossible to say) of wanting to rid himself of anyone who was intellectually superior, of making the
Gauleiter
financially dependent on the Landesleitung, and of using the USCHLA like the Russian Cheka (the police court, which carried out a policy of deliberate terror
).
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❖

Obstacles to Progress

The absence of a centralized leadership and the resultant intraparty feuding clearly slowed Nazi progress in Austria between 1928 and

1931. They were far from being the only problems, however. No doubt the most serious difficulty was the competition provided by kindred groups, especially the Austrian Heimwehr, which was reaching the peak of its popularity in these same years. The improvement of the Austrian economy, which briefly approached its prewar level of prosperity in 1928 and 1929, also blunted considerably the impact of radical propaganda coming from parties like the NSDAP.

If these conditions were beyond the Nazis’ control, there were many others that were very much self-inflicted. A favorite charge made by their opponents was that the movement was “imported.” Indeed, many points in the party’s program, such as the struggle against reparations, were simply irrelevant in Austria; the Allies had long since abandoned hope of collecting payments from the impoverished new Republic. Anti-Nazis could also point to the large number of Nazi speakers who came from the Reich. It was also a fact that the most aggressive Nazis in the Austrian universities were German citizens. Their number had risen dramatically from 210 in 1912 to 2,500 in 1930. In later years even many of the “Austrian” Nazi leaders were actually either Reich Germans or from the Sudetenland
.
⁴⁰

Compounding the problems of the Austrian Nazis was the fact that Hitler and other leading Nazis in Germany, apparently indifferent to the fate of the HB, made many speeches in 1927 and 1928 denouncing the folly of opposing Mussolini’s Italianization of the South Tyrol
.
⁴¹

The Austrian National Socialists, like their comrades in Germany, were also constantly grappling with financial headaches throughout the 1920s. Potential financiers could hardly be impressed by the Beer Hall Putsch, by the Austrian party’s split in 1925-26, or by the
incessant
bickering among party leaders. And in a country like Austria, where so many capitalists were Jewish, the party’s anticapitalist program (especially before the 1926 schism) and anti-Semitism had serious financial consequences
.
⁴²

Lacking significant benefactors before the 1930s, the party depended on admission fees charged for public rallies, profits from party newspapers (if any), and especially membership dues. Intraparty feuds, however, sometimes resulted in local groups’ not even paying these dues, as occurred in Austria in 1925-26. As a consequence, by September 1926 the Landesleitung had monthly expenses of 2,500 Schillings ($280), but an income of only 800 Schillings ($90). Rent for its office alone was 250 Schillings ($28).
⁴³
Although some aid from the German party may have reached^ the Austrians as early as 1920, an urgent plea for money in the fall of 1926 was turned down by the almost equally impoverished Reichsleitung in Munich. Not until at least 1928 did any significant financial assistance from Germany reach the Austrians
.
⁴⁴
On the contrary, the Organisationsabteilung of the party in Munich wanted SA dues sent to Germany following the dissolution of the Austrian Landesleitung in 1927. So for years the party had to stagger along as best it could.

In later years the financial woes of the twenties became almost legendary. For example, in early 1926 the
Deutsche Arbeiter-Presse
did not have enough money to pay its phone bills. The purchase of a single typewriter was a major expense, and the electricity bill was a perennial nightmare for the treasurer. In 1926 the party was so poverty-stricken that the cost of posters and leaflets advertising a meeting exhausted the treasury to the point that another rally could not be held for eight to fourteen days while the party’s coffers were replenished
.
⁴⁵
As late as September 1928 a
Deutscher Tag
for all members of the Austrian SA had to be cancelled, because fewer than three hundred of the two thousand members had agreed to attend the event. To avoid embarrassing publicity, the pan-German governor of Styria, Anton Rintelen, was asked to “forbid” the gathering
!
⁴⁶

By the Nazis’ own admission, the party was regarded as “a ridiculous little group” in 1928 insofar as anyone noticed it at all
.
⁴⁷
The situation did not improve markedly in 1929. And as late as March 1930, an Austrian Nazi
Parteitag
resolution pointed out the need for electing parliamentary deputies “so they could be paid by the state to carry on agitation [and could] then devote themselves entirely to the party.” The resolution pointed out that only 20 percent of the campaign costs for the November 1930 elections were being paid by Munich
.
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Equally worrisome was the sorry state of Nazi journalism, which was characteristic of the party not only in Austria but in Germany as well. Hitler firmly believed that the spoken word was superior to the written one and proved his point in the writing of
Mein Kampf.
But a newspaper was important for the party’s prestige; it was a sign that the movement was flourishing. And a newspaper was preferable to leaflets and posters as a means of announcing meetings and other party activities, giving party orders, and presenting the party’s ideology. However, not until the 1930s did the newspaper press assume its status as the Austrian Nazis’ most important propaganda weapon
.
⁴⁹

Nazi newspapers confined themselves almost exclusively to party affairs, except occasionally to denounce the government or other enemies of the n^rtv. They suffered from too strong a control by the party’s central office, despite the party’s generally weak leadership. To read one is therefore much like reading them all. In fact, provincial Austrian Nazi papers often simply reprinted articles of the party’s two leading journals,
Die Volksstimme
in Linz and the
Osterreichischer Beobachter
in Vienna.

Because
the press for a long time had so little status within the movement, there were few journalists with any ability, let alone real talent. In Austria most of them were simply
Gauleiter
who “moonlighted” as journalists. The party’s emphasis was on winning the support of the masses, and it was
assumed
that few converts could be won by reading a newspaper
.
⁵⁰

The
Deutsche Arbeiter-Presse
was a partial exception to the generally mediocre journalism. Mainly owing to the early editorship of Dr. Walter Riehl, the paper’s circulation was built up to a respectable twenty-four thousand copies in 1924. In later years, even members of the rival Hitler Bewegung admitted (or charged) that the
DAP
was superior to their leading paper,
Die Volksstimme,
edited by Alfred Proksch.

After the founding of the Hitler Movement in 1926, the
Osterreichischer Beobachter
was first published on 20 May of that year. A few months later, the
Unzer Volksstimme
dropped its first name and began covering news for all the Alpine provinces, including Upper Austria, Carinthia, Styria, Salzburg, Tyrol, and Vorarlberg. After the party began its rapid growth in 1930, nearly every federal state had its own Nazi organ, and members were under orders to find new subscribers and if possible new advertisers. The party’s appeal to so many different social groups, however, made it difficult for a Nazi paper to satisfy the literary tastes of, for example, both academicians and peasants
.
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Changing Fortunes: The Great Depression and the Parliamentary Elections of 1930

Not surprisingly, the economic fortunes of the Nazi party did not improve until the Austrian economy began plummeting. Austria’s postwar economy, of course, had never been robust. If 1928 and 1929 were “good years,” they were so only in relative terms. In 1929, 12.3 percent of the country’s workers were unemployed compared to 10.4 percent in Great Britain, 9.3 percent in Germany, and 2.2 percent in neighboring Czechoslovakia
.
⁵²
Industrial production in Austria was only 95 percent of the 1913 level for the same area and just 80 percent of capacity
.
⁵³
Nevertheless, if we use the figure 100 to represent Austria’s unemployment rate in 1929, then already by the next year the rate was down to 95.1 and reached 70.6 in 1933. The following table shows how poorly Austria compared to other industrial countries in Europe during the Depression. These figures clearly reveal that except for the first three years of the slump, when Austria and Germany were about equally affected, no other country in Europe (or probably in the world) was so devastated by the economic crisis as Austria.

Employment Rates in Europe, 1929-1937

(as percentages of 1929 employment rate)