Hitler and the Forgotten Nazis (21 page)

However, not even all women who were otherwiserconvinced Nazis were '! happy with modest roles. The Nationalistic (volkisch) Women of Vienna I

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for example, drew up a resolution in April 1932 requesting that
“women’s
affairs” within the party be controlled by women. If not, votes would be lost I to Marxist parties, which charged that Nazis did not value the well-being
₀
f women. Theo Habicht was apparently aware of this possibility, because he ordered Nazi speakers to “deny the lie that [the party regarded] women as servants
.”
⁷⁸

Habicht also assured the same Viennese women’s group that the absence of women from Nazi electoral lists did not imply any disrespect for women in general. On the contrary, the party wished to protect the delicate sensibilities of women by keeping them off the parliamentary battlefield where representatives acted like front soldiers. But this policy did not mean that the party did not welcome the active participation of women in other political affairs
.
⁷⁹

Although women held some positions within the Austrian hierarchy during the 1920s, by the early 1930s they had been eased out, in at least one instance by Hitler himself
.
⁸⁰
This may have been one reason that in the Viennese municipal election of April 1932, 18.6 percent of the male population voted for the Nazis, whereas only 16.2 percent of the Viennese women followed suit. Only the Communists had a smaller female vote, whereas the Christian Socials continued to attract the highest percentage of feminine voters
.
⁸¹

In terms of membership, the party in Austria was even more overwhelmingly composed of males. In Vienna, for example, housewives (having no outside employment) made up 21.4 percent of the city’s total population in 1939, but 2.5 percent of the party’s membership between 1926 and 1933. That figure rose substantially to over 10 percent for the party’s years of illegality, but was still less than half of all housewives in the total population. By 1938 women of all professions made up just under one-fourth of the party's membership in the Austrian capital
.
⁸²
However, membership figures alone do not tell the whole story. Whatever the Nazi women lacked in numbers they made up for in enthusiasm for the cause
.
⁸³

As we have seen, the Austrian Nazi party was probably at the peak of its strength and popularity during the first half of 1933, when it could legitimately claim to be a mass movement. About one-third of the country’s population subscribed to at least part of its program. To a very large extent this popularity resulted from the party’s extremely well-organized propaganda, which uti-

Jail
the
latest
technological means of dissemination and was aimed at liiy;every segment of Austria’s population. The Nazis took care—unique European history—to make their propaganda entertaining as well itifec. The Nazis’ propaganda storm produced some of their biggest victories in the spring of 1933 and induced Dollfuss to cancel all elections.

^Although
the Nazis’ propaganda never succeeded in winning over the ma-the Austrian population, its appeal was widespread and was by no
■leans
confined,
as has so often been assumed, to the lower-middle class or ^
_m
iddle class as a whole. Peasants, miners, Protestants, Catholics, ip^vil
servants,
merchants, and artisans, all joined the ranks of the Austrian ijP^JSDAP in considerable numbers. Young people and the intelligentsia were particularly attracted by the Nazis’ appeal, whereas industrial workers, and to
•i Jigoine
extent women, were less eager to join the Nazis’ ranks. With such a felaiass following, in the spring of 1933 the Nazis appeared to be well prepared
I;'to challenge
the government in a test of strength and will power.

CHAPTER VII TERROR, COUTERTERROR, AND PROPAGANDA

Chancellor Dollfuss refused to be intimidated by either the growing popularity of the Austrian Nazis or even by the victory of the German Nazis in the Reichstag elections of 5 March 1933. Instead, he took advantage of circumstances to make sure the Nazis would not even be able to enter the Austrian Parliament, let alone dominate it. And not long thereafter he outlawed the Austrian NSDAP altogether. Thus began a violent five-year struggle between the Austrian government and the Nazis, which did not end until the Anschluss of 1938.

Rule by Decree

On the day before the German elections the Austrian Parliament had inadvertently “dissolved itself” when its president and two vice-presidents impetuously resigned over a minor voting technicality. Far from reconvening the Parliament, Dollfuss seized this incident to avoid both Socialist obstructionism and the certainty of the Nazis' entering Parliament after the next elections and using it as a stepping stone to power as they had just done in Germany.

Therefore, on 7 March, posters appeared throughout the country announcing that henceforth the government would rule without Parliament. Moreover, all public meetings and marches were forbidden (though in practice not those of the Christian Social party and the Heimwehr). Censorship of the press also began on the same day. The subsequent government by decree was based on a legal pretext, a wartime emergency economic law dating back to 1917 that had never been rescinded.

■: The battle lines between the Nazis (and to a lesser extent the Socialists) and
^!
die government were now more sharply drawn than ever. In early May the

¹
chancellor issued a decree prohibiting the wearing of uniforms and insignia in : public, though once again progovemment groups were excluded from this ruling- But these decrees did not even faze the Nazis. The Austrians were well aware that the Prussian government had once forbidden the wearing of SA uniforms, but had succeeded only in giving a boost to Nazi propaganda. A second ban by the German government in April 1932 was only temporarily successful and was soon revoked by the Papen government. The Austrian Nazis answered the Dollfuss decree forbidding their SA brownshirts by wearing white stockings (or sometimes no shirts) and tall silk hats. On the nineteenth of May, Alfred Frauenfeld, still the Gauleiter of Vienna, was ordered by the government to make no more public speeches. Eight days later the University of Vienna, along with several other Austrian universities and other institutions of higher education, were temporarily closed because of Nazi activities. The Nazis refused to be intimidated, however, simply because they were convinced that the Dollfuss regime was too weak to enforce these measures for any length of time
.
¹

The situation became far more serious for the Nazis when on 10 June the government proscribed the sale of their official newspaper, the
Volkischer Beobachter.
Then, on the following day, an attempt was made to assassinate the Tyrolean Heimwehr leader, Richard Steidle. Although the Nazis denied all responsibility for the act, and no proof of their complicity was ever found, all “Brown Houses” (Nazi headquarters) throughout the country were closed and sealed by the police. This decree was followed by another on 11 June expelling all soldiers from the Austrian army who belonged to the Nazi party or who had engaged in Nazi activities
.
²

*

Nazi Bombings

The Nazis retaliated during the next week (12-19 June) by carrying out a series of bombing attacks in Vienna and other tourist centers. Violence had begun escalating in 1932 when there were twenty-four armed clashes between Nazis on the one hand and Socialists and Communists on the other. Most such fights involved the Nazis’ armed formations and the Socialists’ paramilitary Schutzbund. These Nazi acts of violence were more or less spontaneous, however, and were not directed by a centralized leadership
.
³
In theory, violence was to be used only in self-defense. Yet Nazi activities were often so deliberately provocative—for example, SA marches through solid working-class districts—that they invited attacks
.
⁴

All these early disturbances were but a prelude to the prolonged and well-organized terror of 1933 and the first half of 1934. During the violent June days of 1933 two businesses in Vienna were nearly destroyed, two people were killed, and nine others were wounded. Nazi propaganda disclaimed any responsibility for these “spontaneous” acts. But German diplomats in Vienna privately admitted to their Foreign Ministry that the terror had been orchestrated by the Austrian Nazi leadership, which had used fifteen- and sixteen-year-old youths to do the dirty work
.
⁵
   *'■'

The bombing incidents provoked the Austrian government into arresting known Nazis on 13 June. All those under suspicion of conducting subversive propaganda were deported. In hopes of preventing still more violence, public buildings and homes of political leaders were placed under police surveillance. Membership in the NSDAP was prohibited for all public officeholders and government pensioners. The army and police were also purged of all Nazis
.
⁶

Far from ending the assaults, however, the government’s measures only aroused the Nazis to commit still more violent acts. Beginning in October, tear-gas attacks were made on stores, coffeehouses, and in cinemas. After the twentieth, small bombs made of cardboard filled with black gunpowder and ignited by a cigarette or a match were tossed into busy streets or even into coffeehouses frequented by Jews. Although they did little damage to property, they were sufficient to wound and occasionally even to kill people
.
⁷
Sometimes more powerful explosives were used; these were mixed with clay to create tiny bulletlike missiles, which were used against shops and in public parks, beginning in December. By early February 1934 there were as many as forty explosions a day throughout Austria perpetrated by members of the Austrian SA and SS, the Austrian Legion (the newly organized armed formation of Nazi exiles stationed in Germany), the Hitler Jugend and, quite possibly, German citizens residing in Austria. All of these groups made use of explosives smuggled into the country from Germany
.
⁸

The purpose of the bombings, which were directed mainly against streets, bridges, government buildings, and railroads, was partly to weaken the Austrian economy by frightening off foreign tourists, and partly to demonstrate the inability of the Dollfuss government to control the situation
.
⁹
The bombings can be seen in large measure as a sign of the Nazis’ frustration over their own inability to bring down the hated Dollfuss regime. In the long run, these

iit .! :

!*fe '.![bpmbings not only failed to have any serious impact on the Austrian economy, ! jijy they also culminated in a near disaster for the Nazi cause. Hitler forbade

11
^;:
the use of terror in August 1933, but took no action against Habicht to make III
^!
him stop it
.
¹⁰

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Outlawing the Nazi Party

■■T    The first wave of terror reached a climax on 19 June 1933,

when fifty-six unarmed “Christian German Gymnasts,” a police auxiliary, were attacked near Vienna by two Nazis armed with handgrenades. One man ill I was killed and thirteen others were seriously wounded. In an emergency |;jj ; meeting held the same day, the Dollfuss cabinet decided to outlaw the Aus-;|j :•!]' trian Nazi party together with all its subordinate organizations; the Styrian Heirnatschutz, firmly allied with the Nazis by this time, was also included in the prohibition.

There has been considerable debate about both the justification and the wisdom of outlawing the Nazi party. The Nazis themselves either blamed the terror on the Communists, whose party had been outlawed on 26 May, or said that the acts of violence were merely “harmless shows of strength
.”
¹¹
At j other times they claimed that the terror was the work of isolated fanatics operating on their own initiative. And it is true, as the Nazis charged, that the Austrian government had in a sense provoked the terror by denying the Nazis freedom of the press and the possibility of running for office. It is equally true that the terror was an embarrassment to some Nazis. Walter Riehl and Alfred Frauenfeld told Dollfuss that they opposed such acts and objected to them in intraparty debates
.
¹²
One could also argue, as some Socialists (and Nazis) did at the time, that the government was doing nothing more than driving the Nazis underground, where they would be even more difficult to control and where they could pose as martyrs
.
¹³

Nevertheless, short of committing political suicide, it is difficult to see what else the Austrian government could have done under the circumstances, given not only the Nazis’ goals but also their tactics in achieving them. In view of the total abolition of political parties (except the NSDAP) and civil liberties in Germany, the Nazis were in no position to complain.

Despite the many measures taken against the Nazi party in May and early June, Theo Habicht and the remainder of the party leadership were surprised by the party’s proscription
.
¹⁴
Habicht, as well as most of the Nazi
Gauleiter,