Hitler and the Forgotten Nazis (20 page)

*

How Strong the Faith?

To what extent the various Nazi supporters really accepted the tic, anti-Semitic, and anticlerical Nazi ideology will always remain . In most cases the pro-Nazi Austrians probably resembled the Ger-jn having an aversion to other political ideologies rather than having a •|fear understanding of Nazi beliefs
.
⁵⁵
The head of the Austrian Security k^torate, Eduard Baar-Baarenfels, wrote in a long report dated 4 April ^Si36, that “the rejection of Austrian state thought
(Stoatsgedankens)
for ijjfteen years, the propagation of the Anschluss idea by representatives of all lijj
p
^;
former political parties, and not least, the great-power idea, which has pfrfljyived after the destruction of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy by members i of the prewar and war generations, have contributed to the rise of the National ; Socialist party
.”
⁵⁶

: According to Alfred Persche, the leader of the Austrian SA from 1936 to j jt February 1938, of those party members who came from the working class, 90 i! percent were “true believers”; but among officials and peasants the figure was only
10
percent. Of the well-to-do intelligentsia only 3 percent really ifd": took the Nazi principles seriously. Altogether, these groups had in common ■tiiill- cwily their nationalism. Persche’s analysis is borne out by the findings of the i|j|: Austrian historian Gerhard Botz. Whenever the Nazi party shrank in size, !pl Botz contends, the Nazi wage workers grew in relative importance, whereas !
^;
r the significance of the self-employed party members declined
.
⁵⁷

The Nonbelievers

Social Democrats

The social base of the Austrian Nazi party was clearly widespread, yet many large groups stubbornly remained immune from its magnetism even during the desperate years of the Great Depression. The most significant of these groups was the industrial workers, who continued to belong to the underground Socialist movement even after their party had been outlawed in February 1934.

The Nazis were fully aware that if they were ever to capture an absolute

majority of the Austrian people it would have to be at the expense of these “irreconcilable enemies.” The Nazis had reason to be optimistic about their chances of winning the Socialists over to their ranks. Both “groups had no use for Austria’s traditions and they rejected clericalism. Both professed to be anticapitalist, antiliberal, and anti-Habsburg. And the Nazis had deliberately imitated the SDP’s mass organization. The illegal Nazi press took a cautiously friendly attitude toward the Austrian working class and cited the declining unemployment rate in Nazi Germany. Further proselytizing was conducted in factories by the NSDAP Betriebszellen
.
⁵⁸

The Nazis’ efforts did not go entirely unrewarded. For young workers and those who had lost their jobs, the Nazis’ promise of better times to come "Was too tempting to resist. This was seen when the Nazis attracted 17,000 former Socialist voters in Vienna in April 1932 and another 7,000 in Salzburg. Between 1929 and April 1933 the Socialist vote in Innsbruck declined from 14,016 to 9,932, while the Nazis’ jumped from 202 to 14,996.
⁵⁹
The Socialists also lost 4,000 of 16,000 votes in Vorarlberg in 1932. Their losses, however, tended to be in areas where they were already weak. In Vienna the Socialists consistently drew around 78 percent of the vote of the industrial workers and employees, and most of the voters they lost gravitated to the Communist fold
.
⁶⁰
Nevertheless, of those people who joined the Nazi party in Vienna between 1926 and 1933, nearly 14 percent were manual workers (compared to 32 percent of the city’s total population). The percentage of
Parteigenossen
who were workers rose significantly to 24.6 percent between

1933 and 1938, but was still well below the workers’ proportion of the city’s population
.
⁸¹

When the brief Socialist uprising of February 1934 was crushed with needless brutality by the Dollfuss regime (or to be more exact, by the Heimwehr), the Nazis expected at least half of the Socialist party to cross over to their ranks. Some condemned Socialist leaders did flee the country with the aid of the Nazi underground, especially those from Upper Austria, and some Social Democrats even joined the Austrian Legion, the Nazi paramilitary formation for Austrian exiles in Germany. But by June a German observer in Austria noted that Socialist conversions had lasted for “only a very short time” after the February revolt
.
⁶²
When Nazis and Socialists were forced to mix in detention camps, some Socialists did convert to Nazism (never the other way around), yet the number of such converts was insignificant
,
⁶³

Roman
Catholics

The attitude of Austrian Catholics and the Roman Catholic hierarchy in Austria toward National Socialism is difficult to assess. The Nazis themselves regarded Catholicism and also legitimism as “the chief sources of anti-German hate” in the country
.
⁶⁴
The Nazi cause was badly hurt in the Alpine republic by the state-church conflict in Germany. The Austrian bishops, in numerous open letters to the faithful, condemned the extreme nationalism of Nazism along with its hatred of religion and the Church. They warned that the strivings of Nazi leaders could soon result in revolution and both civil and foreign wars. The general vicar of St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna turned down a request in 1932 to permit the SA Gauparteitag to attend a mass at the church en bloc and the Catholic journal,
Neues Reich
, took an uncompromising stand against the Nazis.

On the other hand, not even the Church leaders were consistently anti-Nazi in their pronouncements. The priest and former chancellor Ignaz Seipel was quoted by a Berlin newspaper in February 1932 as saying that there were ‘‘two sides to National Socialism” and Cardinal Innitzer, who came from the ultranationalistic Sudetenland, accepted a proreligion statement by Hitler at its face value
.
⁶⁵
The Nazis loved to quote from a “Hirten” letter to the faithful written in January 1933 by the bishop of Linz, Johannes Gfollner, in which he said that Christians ought to break with the harmful influence of Jews who poisoned their souls. The Jews, Gfollner wrote, were responsible for capitalism, socialism, and communism. The Nazis were careful, however, to avoid mentioning that in the same letter the bishop said it was impossible to be both a good Catholic and a good Nazi. Nor could they have been pleased when later in the same year the entire Austrian episcopate denounced Gfollner’s letter for arousing social hatred and conflict
.
⁶⁶

Another Austrian bishop, Alois Hudal, published a book in 1937 entitled
Das Grundlagen des Nationalsozialismus
, in which he sought an understanding between Christianity and Nazism. He discovered a common ground for compromise in the Nazis’ idea of Volksgemeinschaft, the German language as the spiritual expression
(Raum)
of the nation, the mutual desire to solve the Jewish problem and (o have large and healthy families, military preparedness, and the aristocratic Fuhrerprinzip. The racial teachings of the Nazis were approved by Hudal as long as they did not challenge the philosophy of the Roman Catholic church
.
⁶⁷

Josef Eberle, editor of the Austrian Catholic journal
Schonere Zukunft
, reflected the ambiguous attitude of many Austrian Catholics toward National Socialism. He rejected Nazis as an enemy of the Church, but believed the best

100 - Hitler and the Forgotten Nazis

way of fighting them was to take over those Nazi ideas that were “correct
/’
⁶⁸
advice which, in fact, was followed by chancellors Dollfuss and Schuschnigg. The
Schonere Zukunfi
claimed to approve the goals, but not the methods, of the Nazis in defending Germany against the Jews, but die journal supported the burning of books by German Nazis in May 1933. Other Austrian Catholic periodicals rejected the anti-Semitic policies of the German (and Austrian) Nazis, as too harsh, but said they were understandable. In many instances the papers chose to report anti-Semitic actions by Nazis without comment
.
⁶⁹
Finally, Austrian Catholics were both confused and shocked by the Concordat signed between the Vatican and Nazi Germany in July 1933.
⁷⁰

The Nazis tried to improve their image with the Roman Catholic hierarchy in a meeting attended by Cardinal Piffl and Theo Habicht on 17 November

1932. The cardinal objected to the use of the term “positive Christianity” by the Nazis. But Habicht, who had postponed an important conference in Berlin to attend the meeting, insisted that Hitler had made a point of declaring that the term represented merely the private opinion of Alfred Rosenberg in his book,
The Myth of the Twentieth Century
, and not the official policy of the party. Habicht also reminded the cardinal that Hitler had specifically rejected the
Los von Rom
movement in
Mein Kampf
⁷¹

At about the same time that the above meeting was being held in Vienna, Alfred Frauenfeld was assuring the archbishop of Vienna that he was willing to confer with the clergyman at any time to clear up misunderstandings concerning the Nazi attitude toward Christianity. Although he currently opposed the policies of the Christian Social party, he hoped that at some future date all Christian, nationalistic, and patriotic elements would form a common front against bolshevism
.
⁷²

Not surprisingly, then, there was no one position on Nazism held by Austrian Catholics. Even though the country was officially more than 94 percent Roman Catholic, probably no more than 40 percent were practicing Catholics in good standing and not even these people were uniform in their political beliefs. Arthur Seyss-Inquart, for example, who later was to be unfairly given so much of the blame for the Anschluss, was a practicing Catholic, as were many other Nazi and pro-Nazi leaders
.
⁷³

Legitimists

Among the Catholic anti-Nazis probably the most ardent were the Legitimists. Aristocrats, officers of the World War, and many middle-aged civil servants were stunned by the breakup of the Habsburg Monarchy and longed for its

Portrait of a Party • 101

restoration.
They adamantly opposed an Anschluss with Germany, preferring instead a Danubian confederation. Although many Legitimists enrolled in the janks of the Heimwehr, they kept their political views relatively quiet during ; the 1920s.
⁷⁴

The Legitimists' goal of a restoration would have provided Nazi Germany i with a welcome pretext for invasion. As a matter of fact, their only contin-gency plan for an invasion of Austria was labeled “Case Otto” in reference to the former crown prince, Otto von Habsburg. A restoration would also have aroused the wrath of secessionist states like Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia that, surprisingly, preferred an Anschluss to a return of the Habsburgs, which they feared would only increase the unrest of their already highly dissatisfied

minorities.

: It is impossible to measure the strength of legitimism though its adherents were certainly a fairly small minority. They were rejected by the Socialists as well as by the Nazis. In any event, their usefulness in the anti-Nazi cause was dubious because they were a liability in Austria’s international relations. And as the English historian F. L. Carsten has pointed out, “It is virtually impossible to create an activist mass movement based on the support of the middle-aged
.”
⁷⁵

Feminists

Another group that was relatively impervious to Nazism prior to Hitler’s coming to power was women, especially feminists
.
⁷⁶
There had long been a definite connection between antifeminism and anti-Semitism, and the Nazis were the heirs of this tradition. Although the Nazis devoted little thought to the role of women, especially before 1933, what they did think was ultra-conservative. Family life, they believed (or at least said they believed), had been destroyed by the Industrial Revolution when women started working outside the home. For family life to be restored, and the declining birthrate of Germany and Austria to be reversed, women would have to revert to their time-honored tasks of caring for children, attending church, and preparing meals (
Kinder, Kirche, Kuche).

A National Socialist Frauenschaft was established for Nazi women, but it was no true organization because it had no leaders of its own and did not collect dues. It was subordinate to the party’s political leadership in every respect. Insofar as it was given any responsibilities at all in party affairs they were again traditional ones: doing charitable work; caring for unemployed, sick, and imprisoned party members; and rooting out “scandalous” films and

plays, “shameless” fashions, and “Negro music
.”
⁷⁷
For Nazi university!]
coeds
there was also an
Arbeitsgemeinschaft Nationsozifllistischer tinnen
(Study Group for National Socialist Women Students).