Hitler and the Forgotten Nazis (28 page)

After August 1934 the Austrian Refugee Society was headed by a Reich German and sometime leader of the Austrian SS, Alfred Rodenbiicher. By 1936 Rodenbiicher's staff in Berlin had grown to some 260 men. The money was distributed in Austria by an illegal Hilfswerk that had existed since the outlawing of the party in 1933. Money was “laundered” in a variety of places—banks and organizations in Switzerland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. Especially important was an Austrian firm called Krentschker and Company, a commercial society which had its headquarters in Graz. Although the Austrian police worked feverishly to discover its identity, the company remained undetected by using middlemen. Not even the leader of the illegal Hilfswerk knew the name of this mysterious benefactor.®

The financial aid was ostensibly intended to reach the families of those
Parteigenossen
who had suffered a death or a crippling injury, or who languished in a jail or prison for their service to the party. The Hilfswerk also tried to help those who had lost their jobs or who needed legal advice.
⁷
Additional money was sent during the Christmas season.

The Hilfswerk’s resources were distributed according to a precise formula devised in Berlin, which rewarded the provinces with the largest membership and the greatest willingness to obey. Thus Styria, even though having only the third-largest population in Austria, received 26.5 percent of the funds (2,190,800 Austrian Schillings or $246,157), followed by Vienna (20 percent) and Carinthia (18 percent). Lesser amounts were given in descending order to Lower Austria, Salzburg, Upper Austria, Tyrol, Vorarlberg, and the Burgen-land. In all, 8,226,435 Schillings, worth $924,318, were disbursed
⁸

Another 2,108,514 Schillings (or $236,912) were sent to various other Nazi organizations and pro-Nazi groups. Of this amount, the largest single portion (567,750 Schillings or $63,781) went to a legal Hilfswerk headed by an Upper

Austrian pan-German politician, Franz Langoth.
⁹
Chancellor Schuschnigg was aware of the existence of this group and even sanctioned it in December 1936, but never realized its true significance.

Although the Hilfswerk was supposed to eschew politics and have only a charitable purpose, it did not always adhere to its professed aims. Roden-biicher earmarked as much as 100,000 Marks a month in loans to pro-Nazi Austrian manufacturers and industrialists who had suffered because of their political beliefs. Still more money went to Nazi-oriented farmers and landowners who were harassed by the Schuschnigg government. A total of nearly

375,000 Schillings ($42,169) was given to the Austrian Landesleitung between 1934 and 1938. Still another special fund of 417,000 Schilling! ($46,741) reached the Carinthian Nazi leader, Odilo Globocnik, on 10 March 1938 to aid in the military occupation of Austria. Although the Austrian authorities succeeded in arresting individual members of the illegal Hilfswerk, they never managed to break up the entire apparatus. Its operations were never even so much as interrupted.
¹⁰

Within Austria itself the Nazis saw their fiscal resources nearly dry up after 1934. The giant steel company in northern Styria, the Alpine-Montan Gesellschaft, which had supported the Styrian Heimatschutz until 1933 and the Nazis thereafter, was purged of its Nazi directors by the government.
¹¹
Even party members were for a time less than faithful in paying their dues. The party’s subsequent lack of financial reserves helps explain why both the Austrian Security Directorate and Franz von Papen noted that the Nazis were relatively quiet in the year following the Putsch.
¹²
This situation made it all the easier for von Papen to prevent “radical elements . . . both in Germany and Austria, from pursuing any policy that would lead to international complications.”
¹³

On the first anniversary of the Putsch, the special envoy reported to Hitler that the Austrian NSDAP had dwindled “to a small but reliable nucleus. But ultimately the dynamism of even the most zealous fighters cannot but suffer under the almost total spiritual and material isolation from the Reich, and under the impossibility of obtaining orders from the Reich and from the Fuhrer for conducting the internal opposition.”
¹⁴

Another German observer in Austria noted in December 1935 that the core of the movement, including the former members of the GVP, the anticlerical government officials and employees, as well as nationalistic students, had remained loyal to the party. But many fellow travelers, workers, and especially peasants in the provinces of Vorarlberg, Tyrol, and Salzburg had drifted away.
¹⁵

Even more pessimistic was a report sent to the German Foreign Office in January by an unidentified member of the German Volks bund fur das peutschtum im Ausland (People’s League for German Heritage Abroad) who was living in Vienna:

The organization of the NSDAP is, with a few exceptions in the provinces, fully disintegrated. There is no solution. Two years of illegality, a reckless use of the best strength and unlimited activity by the ambitious and political dilettantes were too much for the most dedicated. . . . The party is no longer an instrument of power.

There may be in the provinces some subgroups which are hardly weaker than in the period of the greatest flourishing, but there is lacking a unifying leadership apparatus. The police are well informed even about the heart of the organization so they can arrest the subleaders if danger threatens. Masses without leaders are no danger for the state.

We are seeing that the most worthwhile and farsighted people are more and more turning away from the party.
¹⁸

Although rank-and-file Nazis remained without effective leadership in the year following the Putsch, those who retained their freedom were still active. Taking their cue from the Communist underground, they built or rebuilt their organization so as to focus on the small cell, which could infiltrate any institution. They took particular care to make sure their local leaders were known only to their immediate subordinates and superiors. The carelessness of one individual was thus not permitted to endanger the whole organization.
¹⁷

Ingenious code names were developed for prominent party officials. Prior to his fall from grace, Theo Habicht had been called “Flatterer,” and (no doubt much to the delight of his enemies) the code name for Alfred Proksch was
Schweinskopf.
These tactics prevented security forces from discovering more than five or ten Nazis at any one time.
¹⁸

Equally impossible to halt was Nazi penchant for making lists.
Partei
-
genossen
were required to analyze public opinion and to determine who among the civil servants, army officers, and businessmen were pro-Nazi, or at least politically neutral. With these names the Nazis would assure themselves of reliable supporters in key places once the takeover of Austria had been completed.
¹⁹

Of more immediate use to the Nazis were secret spy reports describing the activities of the government’s Fatherland Front, the police, gendarmerie, and army. Other reports dealt with the morale and activities of the party itself.

Spies even penetrated the Security Directorate of the federal chancellery.
²
® Spying, in fact, was probably the chief occupation of the Nazi underground before the last few dramatic weeks preceding the Anschluss. '

Spies for the Nazi movement were scattered throughout the entire Austrian bureaucracy. Secretaries to state ministers, assistants to police commissioners, underlings in Jewish-owned concerns, employees of regular news agencies, and so forth, were often dedicated Nazis who would carry what they had heard or read to central espionage offices, which in turn relayed the information to Germany. “Probably no conqueror in history was so well informed of an immense variety of details concerning his prospective victim as was Hitler
.”
²¹

On the other hand, the value of all this data was substantially diminished before the Anschluss (but not later) by the wealth of information the Austrian Security Directorate had about even the most carefully guarded Nazi secrets. A major source of its knowledge was former Nazis, some of whom had been leading officials who had fled to Yugoslavia after the Putsch, moved to Germany, and finally returned to Austria
.
²²

The Nazis were also active in front organizations operating under the guise of cultural, gymnastic, and social clubs. The Deutsche Tumerbund 1919 (German Gymnastic League 1919), Deutsche Schulverein Siidmark (South German School Society), Deutsch-osterreichische Volksbund (German-Austrian People’s League) as well as the Volksbund fiir das Deutschtum im Ausland were four such groups which flourished both before and after the July Putsch and right up to the Anschluss
.
³³

Still another front group was the Bund der Reichsdeutschen in Osterreich (League of German Citizens in Austria). This League, with headquarters in Vienna since its foundation in 1919, had grown to include some twenty-seven thousand of the forty-thousand Germans living in Austria in 1934. By April

1935 the League had become a cover for the Nazis’ Auslandsorganisation (Foreign Organization) or AO, headed by Ernst Wilhelm Bohle. Although membership was supposed to be confined to German citizens, Bohle began recruiting Austrians, a clear violation of Hitler’s directive of August 1934 concerning nonintervention in Austrian affairs by German Nazis. The AO, which had a special Austrian Section in its Berlin offices, founded numerous
Reichs
-
deutsch
newspapers in Austria, which published Anschluss propaganda
.
²⁴

Camouflaged within the League of German Citizens were various Nazi affiliations, such as the Hitler Jugend, a gymnastic section, a social club of the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (German Work Front) or DAF, and others. Because it was often impossible for the police to prove any direct link with the illegal

NSDAP
it was difficult for the government to control the activities of the League and other
Nazi
front associations and
their
subgroups.
²⁵

Rebuilding the SA and SS

Nazi suborganizations, including the staffs of the SA and SS, were supposed to be dissolved after the Putsch. The same order applied to the
Austrian
Legion as well as the Landesleitung and
Gauleitungen.*
⁶
In reality, all these institutions were secretly rebuilt within a few months.

As the party’s oldest affiliate, the Austrian SA could trace its origins back to 1922 when it had been called the Ordnertruppen. The Austrian SS, as we have seen, was relatively new, having been founded in Vienna in 1929 by Alfred Frauenfeld. The Carinthian SS was inaugurated by the Reichsfiihrer SS, Heinrich Himmler himself, in April 1930. Other units were founded in the various provincial capitals in 1931. But as late as June 1932 their total membership was still only six-hundred men.

The functions of the Austrian SA and SS before the party was outlawed in

1933 had been the same as in Germany. The SA was always described as the party’s army and the SS as its police. More specifically, the partly armed SA was in charge of protecting meetings and displaying the party’s might by marching into “enemy territory,” such as industrial districts. Young men who enjoyed fighting, most of them the sons of industrial workers, tended to join (he SA. Their love of brawling meant that the SA was involved in some of the early acts of terror in 1932-33. The SS, composed mainly of employees and state officials, was assigned duties that could only be done by individuals. Such tasks included protecting Nazi speakers and other party leaders
.
²⁷

The SA and SS, like most other Nazi organizations, were autonomous. They had their own revenues and their own structures, which paralleled those of the party. However, their leaders had to be approved by the respective political leaders. A
Fachberater
(special advisor) served as a liaison between die party and the SA and SS (as well as between the party and all other Nazi affiliates). He saw to it that the orders of the party leaders were carried out, although the way in which the orders were fulfilled was supposed to be left to the SA. Members of the SA and SS were expected, but not required, to become members of the party as well
.
²⁸

Neither the SA nor the SS had been seriously affected by the outlawing of the party. Unlike the Political Organization, they had been anticipating the

prohibition and prepared for it. Both organizations were devastated, however, by the results of the Putsch.    
_/

It is extremely difficult to estimate the size of the SA after^uly 1934. I
_n
May 1933 the Austrian police believed that the SA had over 30,000 men, but the authorities tended to overestimate Nazi strength
.
²⁹
On the other hand, the Austrian SA leader from 1936 to 1938, Alfred Persche, estimated that the SA had 40,000 members after the Putsch, a catastrophic decline from the more than
100,000
members he claimed it had before the revolt
.
³⁰

The SS, which was normally supposed to have only 10 percent of the membership of the SA, counted 9,450 men in its ranks just before the July Putsch. But by even the most optimistic accounting it was back to just 7,500" Black Shirts in 1938.
³¹
In 1935 there were another 4,600 refugee SS men stationed at Dachau (Bavaria).