Hitler and the Forgotten Nazis (42 page)

Actually, little needed to be done in several of the provinces by this time (8:00
p.m.).
In Graz the Nazis merely celebrated their already accomplished victory with a torchlight parade, which attracted an estimated sixty to seventy thousand screaming spectators. In Linz, Innsbruck, and Klagenfurt, SA and SS units demonstrated in public squares and occupied provincial parliament buildings, railroad stations, governors’ offices, Fatherland Front headquarters, and newspaper offices. Later that evening, whenever a frantic local official called the Chancellery in Vienna, he was blandly misinformed by Globocnik, who was manning the switchboard, that the Nazis had already taken over the federal government
.
⁸⁰

Meanwhile, in Vienna, Lukesch and his SA men had occupied the Ring-strasse, the broad avenue surrounding the central government district, and Kaltenbrunner’s SS men had surrounded the Chancellery, virtually shutting it off from the outside world. Around 10:00
p.m.
a special group of forty, seventeen- to twenty-two-year-old SS youths from the same 89th Standarte that had led the July Putsch began to enter the building. Armed, but without uniforms, save for their swastika armbands, they encountered no resistance from the guards. Elsewhere in Vienna, the Nazi flag was hoisted over the police headquarters at exactly 10:31
p.m.;
an hour later members of the Nazi-front German Gymnasts* Club, equipped with rifles, began their takeover of the huge neo-Gothic city hall. Now only the defiant president Wilhelm Miklas stood between the Austrian Nazis and total power.

*

Austria and the German Invasion

Schuschnigg’s resignation and speech, together with the de facto seizure of power by the Austrian Nazis, left the Austrian and German Nazis working at cross-purposes during the evening hours of 11 March. Whereas the Austrian Nazis were happy to have the
threat
of a German invasion as a means of intimidating the Schuschnigg government into allowing a peaceful takeover, an
actual
invasion was quite another matter. The value of the threat was demonstrated when the president, acknowledging the Nazi takeover of the provinces, and receiving confirmed reports of the movement of German troops toward the Austrian border, finally gave in around midnight and appointed Seyss-Inquart chancellor. But the Austrian Nazis could only realize their dream of a Nazified but formally independent Austria if the German army stayed on its side of the Inn River.

A mere Gleichschaltung of Austria was no longer good enough for Goring, however. On 10 March he had instructed Keppler to carry a letter to Seyss-Inquart that contained the draft of a telegram the Austrian minister was to send to Germany. Seyss was supposed to beg for German troops to “restore order'’ in the Austrian cities. But Seyss refused to send this message. Keppler, once again in Vienna, was forced to phone Goring at 8:48
p.m.
on the eleventh to inform him of Seyss’s refusal. He added that “the SA and SS are marching through the streets, but things are very quiet here
.”
⁸¹
The Gauleiter of Upper Austria, August Eigruber, likewise testified years later in Nuremberg that “there was no necessity for the invasion because there was no unrest, at least there was no unrest in my district
.”
⁸²
The lack of disturbances did not impress the Reich marshal in the least. He told Keppler: “show [Seyss] the telegram and tell him all we ask—in fact he doesn’t need to send the telegram at all. All he needs to do is say: ‘agreed.’
”
⁸³

Contrary to the claims of the prosecution at Nuremberg, the telegram was finally sent to Berlin. However, the sender was not Seyss-Inquart but Keppler. The former, after having been repeatedly pestered by Keppler, had finally told the German emissary to do whatever he pleased about the telegram
.
⁸⁴
Therefore it was duly sent at 9:10
p.m.
What significance this act may have had is revealed in the fact that twenty-five minutes earlier, at 8:45, Hitler had already ordered the Wehrmacht to march. After considerable cajoling, the Fuhrer had finally accepted Goring’s argument that Germany would lose face if it remained inactive after having issued an ultimatum. But the invasion may have also been directed against the Austrian Nazis themselves whose “dan-

gerous” autonomist tendencies would have been increased by a takeover of the government in Vienna
.
⁸⁵

The news was hardly welcome to the new chancellor in Vienna, Seyss-Inquart. With Austria now firmly under Nazi control, he did his'best to stop the German invasion and the loss of Austrian autonomy. To emphasize the “Austrian” character of his new ministry, and to prevent domination by the German NSDAP, which he feared would follow from a purely Nazi cabinet, he attempted to form a coalition with non-Nazis. The effort was in defiance of instructions from Goring, who at 5:00
p.m.
had ordered the formation of a cabinet composed solely of National Socialists. Goring had even specified the names of several individuals who were supposed to be appointed to various positions. Seyss-Inquart’s exertions met with limited success. Guido Schmidt, for example, Schuschnigg’s foreign minister, declined an invitation to join Seyss’s cabinet
.
⁸⁶

Meanwhile, at 2:10 on the morning of 12 March, General Muff, the German military attache, acting on instructions from Seyss-Inquart, called Gunther Altenburg, the Austrian desk officer in the German Foreign Ministry, asking that the German troops be halted at the border
.
⁸⁷
But ten minutes later Altenburg called back to say that the Fiihrer had decided the invasion could no longer be stopped
.
⁸⁸
The Austrian Nazis’ dream had lasted approximately six hours.

Hitler provided an ex post facto justification for the invasion in an interview on 13 March with Ward Price, a special correspondent of Britain’s
Daily Mail.
The Reich chancellor claimed that if Schuschnigg had gone ahead with his plebiscite a civil war would have broken out and Austria would have become a “second Spain ” More than two thousand Austrians had lost their lives in their struggle for freedom against a government which had the support of only 10 percent of the country’s population. Hitler concluded the interview by inviting Price to return to Austria in four years to see how much things had improved
.
⁸⁹

The history of the last month of the First Austrian Republic is full of paradoxes. At no time in all of Austria’s history were its people more divided and filled with hatred toward each other. Rivalries between Nazi factions reached a peak at the same time that the enmity between the Nazis and the Austrian government was also reaching a climax. Yet strangely enough, beyond all the noisy demonstrations the Austrian people had far more in common than they realized. Even the most patriotic and anti-Nazi Austrians conceded that they were Germans—albeit a special kind. But at the same !:jl time, the most fanatical Nazis resisted the prospect of a German invasion and if the total loss of their Austrian identity.

;:jj| ; The quarrel within Austria, then, was not so much over whether the country should remain autonomous, but over who should rule it and how they should

■    ■, come to power. The Nazis all favored the policy of Gleichschaltung and at

f; one time or another all preferred using an evolutionary process to achieve it. Josef Leopold merely abandoned this tactic when he was unable to reach an accommodation with the Schuschnigg government. Leopold’s rivals, the Carinthian Nazis, were for a long time too numerically weak to contemplate the use of force. Their greater moderation was ultimately rewarded when Hubert Klausner replaced Leopold as Landesleiter in February 1938. But only four weeks later the Carinthians, with Hitler’s approval, employed the same kind of force to seize power that they had denounced when Leopold used it.

Not until the Anschluss did the Austrian people finally discover just how much they had in common. For twenty years they had been asking themselves whether they were more German or Austrian. Only when their country’s independence was a thing of the past would they finally realize the answer.

CHAPTER XIII THE GREAT DISILLUSIONMENT: AUSTRIA NAZIZ AFTER THE ANSCHLUSS

Popular Reactions to the Anschluss

Although neither Seyss-Inquart nor any of the Austrian Nazi leaders had wanted a German invasion, it was not immediately certain that such an invasion would entail the end of a nominally independent Austrian Nazi state. Nearly all historians now agree that not even Hitler had made up his mind about the future status of Austria until he was swept away by the enthusiasm of the crowds which greeted him and the German army and he realized that the Great Powers were not going to offer any armed resistance to the invasion. He may also have been influenced by Goring’s plea to “go the whole hog” and annex Austria.
¹

Although there were instances of Nazis being transported from the provinces to Vienna to welcome Hitler, it would be a serious mistake to imagine that most of the enthusiasm was not genuine. Even many people who were normally indifferent to politics wildly greeted the Germans on 12-13 March.
²
A quarter of a million people crowded into the ancient capital’s huge Helden-platz to hear Hitler announce the “reunification” of Austria and Germany and another five hundred thousand to six hundred thousand spectators lined the Ringstrasse to cheer the Fiihrer after the speech.
³

This display of emotion does not mean that every Austrian wishing to catch a glimpse of the German chancellor and approving a union of the two countries necessarily accepted all of the Nazi ideology. Many were simply relieved that five years of almost constant civil strife and twenty years of economic misery were now at last (presumably) about to end. For all those groups which had felt neglected by the Dollfuss-Schuschnigg regime or by the Socialists’ doctrine, Nazism appeared to offer the hope that many old bureaucratic structures and institutions would soon be removed.
⁴

Contributing to the easy German takeover was the attitude of foreign countries and the churches of Austria. Despite the efforts of the pretender to the Austrian throne, Otto von Habsburg, to preserve at least the legal fiction of Austrian independence, the governments of Britain, France, and the United States accorded the Anschluss, not just a de facto, but instead a full de jure recognition even before the Nazi plebiscite of 10 April had confirmed Austria’s change of status.
⁵
Both the Catholic and Protestant churches of Austria were eager to pledge their loyalty to the new order. On the very day of the invasion, 12 March, Protestants issued declarations of loyalty to the Nazi leadership, followed by a similar pronouncement by Cardinal Innitzer the next day. Innitzer went so far as to order church bells in Vienna rung when Hitler entered the city on 14 March.

The euphoria after the Anschluss lasted only a few weeks, and in some cases much less. By the fourteenth there were one hundred thousand German troops in Austria.
⁸
Following close behind them was a second army consisting of German administrators who were assigned to every branch of the civil service and even to the economy. Officially, they came only as advisers. But in reality they took charge of the highest offices from the very beginning.
⁷
Soon most Austrians felt like natives in a conquered colony. The German name for Austria,
Osterreick,
was immediately replaced by the old Carolingian name,
Ostmark,
and the provinces of Upper and Lower Austria became Operand
Niederdonau
(Upper and Lower Danube) without the respective
Gauleiter
even being informed in advance. By 1942 even the word
Ostmark
had too much of a separatist ring to it and was replaced by the phrase “Alpine and Danube
Gaue''
The change in nomenclature was all the more galling when the Austrians noted that the Bavarians and people of other German states were allowed to keep their historic names.
⁸

By the fall of 1938, the Germans had managed to alienate virtually every social and political group in Austria. The Catholic nationalists were indignant over the Nazis’ virulent anticlericalism. Former members of the GVP did not care for the attacks on economic liberalism. Austrian Protestants, who had been among the Nazis’ strongest supporters even before 1938, were antagonized by the nationalization of their private schools and the Nazis’ attack on religion in general.
⁸
Peasants and industrial workers resented the growing shortages of food and consumer goods even before the outbreak of World War II.

The popularity of the Germans deteriorated so rapidly that already by June

1938, just three months after the Anschluss, a Gestapo report compiled in Innsbruck observed that only 15 percent of the Tyrolean population could be regarded as “absolutely reliable National Socialists.” Another 30 percent of the people had joined the party for strictly opportunistic reasons. Ten to 20

adolf hitler
reviews the German army in Vienna just after the Anschluss. Arthur Seyss-Inquart is on the extreme right side of the picture. To Hitler’s immediate right is Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler. DOW.

percent were “occasional supporters” and the remaining 30 to 40 percent were “open or hidden opponents of the movement” Other secret public-opinion reports for Vienna revealed substantially the same attitudes
.
¹⁰