Hitler and the Forgotten Nazis (6 page)

In smaller things, too, Schonerer resembled the Nazis of the next generation, Adolf Hitler in particular. He used the title Fiihrer, although its exact meaning was unclear. (His leadership, unlike Hitler’s, rested on a mere voluntary recognition of his special position in the pan-German movement.) Like Hitler, much of his influence derived from his ruthlessness and his superior propaganda techniques. And again like Hitler, he considered himself a mes-siah, in his case one with a mission to save the German-Austrian people from denationalization.
²⁰

Even Schonerer’s supporters anticipated the groups that would follow the Nazi banner after the war. Most came from the middle and lower-middle classes. These were the same classes that were the first to be influenced by nationalism in the first half of the nineteenth century. They were also the same groups that felt threatened by industrialization and Jewish competition: middle and small businessmen, and small-town intelligentsia like lawyers, doctors, teachers, and accountants. Above all, university students followed both Schonerer and Hitler because they saw their hopes of entering the liberal professions and business being endangered by the well-established, hardworking, and ambitious Jews. Young people, therefore, were the most active and ardent devotees of both Nazism and proto-Nazism.
²¹

22
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Hitler and the Forgotten Nazis

Failures of the German Messiah

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The same groups that were later cool toward the Nazis were also indifferent to Schonerer: aristocrats, big industrialists, and industrial workers. An important exception in the last group were those workers living in the ethnic borderlands who did, for a time, support Schonerer and later Hitler. The comparison breaks down only with regard to peasants, who eventually flocked to Hitler, but not to Schdnerer. This particular comparison is rather meaningless, however, because most Austrian peasants did not everf have the right to vote until Schdnerer’s career was already in eclipse.

Schdnerer’s inability to capture either of the two largest social groups in the Austrian Empire, the peasants and the factory workers, condemned his movement to the status of a tiny minority. Even at the height of the agitation over the Badeni language laws at the turn of the century, a campaign which was led by Schdnerer, his Pan-German party
²²
was able to win only forty thousand votes in the parliamentary elections of January 1901. The really dedicated pan-German extremists probably made up less than 1 percent of just the adult German-speaking population. Even if we include those people who admired Schdnerer but did not belong to his party, the total still does not exceed 3 or 4 percent of the German-Austrians.
²³

So despite a similarity in die social composition of prewar pan-Germanism and postwar Nazism, the former was never anything like a mass movement. It may be that Schdnerer did not even want to lead a large party. He was so doctrinaire that he claimed a large constitutional party would only water down his ideas.
²⁴

Many of Schdnerer’s policies also drastically reduced the size of his potential following. After 1882 he openly called for the destruction of the Habsburg Monarchy and demanded union of all German-speaking people under Hohen-zollem rule. Only then, he argued, would the German-Austrians be completely safe from Slavicization. But his irredentism attracted little support beyond university students. And even they usually became
Kaisertreu
soon after graduation.
²⁵
When he ended a speech to the Austrian Reichsrat (Lower House of Parliament) in 1902 with the cry “Hoch und Heil den Hohenzoilem,” he evoked nothing but disgust.
²⁶

Part and parcel with his irredentism was Schdnerer’s
Los von Rom
(Away from Rome) movement. Not only Adolf Hitler, but also most of Schonerer’s contemporaries, as well as historians, saw this policy as Schdnerer’s worst, and most avoidable mistake. The campaign was designed to prepare the way

Nazis and Proto-Nazis • 23

for an Austro-German Anschluss by first converting the German-Austrian
Catholics to
Protestantism. Schonerer saw such a conversion as an essential proof of uncorrupted German patriotism. Failure to convert entailed expulsion from the Pan-German party. None of this is meant to imply, however, that
Schdnerer
was a devout Protestant; far from it.

Only about sixty thousand people actually converted to Protestantism. Po
tential
members of the party, especially peasants, were alienated by Schon-
erer’s
agnosticism, paganism, and anticlericalism, as well as by his rejection of the Habsburgs. His bullheadedness on the Protestant question only facilitated the rising popularity of the Christian Social party among peasants and also among craftsmen and shopkeepers.
²⁷

Adolf Hitler also blamed Schonerer’s alleged “unclear conception of the significance of the social problem” for his ultimate failure. Actually, Schdnerer did not lack an understanding of social problems; and he certainly did not eschew mass agitation. He spoke out on behalf of workers as soon as he entered the Imperial Parliament in 1873. Later he proposed legislation for a minimum wage, limited work days, mandatory rest on Sundays, prohibition of child labor, and restriction of labor for women, and a state-supported old-age insurance program. It is true that he had no thoroughly revolutionary solution to social problems. But neither did Hitler.

Still another reason for the failure of prewar Austrian pan-Germanism was the inability to unite into a single party behind a common leader. The pan-Germans always remained divided into a bewildering number of parties, clubs, and associations whose names were continually changing. Chronic factionalism was the basic characteristic of pan-Germans until they were united by the Austrian Nazis after 1933. But even then they continued to quarrel.

There is no doubt that Schdnerer was by far the most prominent of the prewar pan-German leaders. Without him “pan-Germanism would have remained an amorphous ‘tendency’ among various politically naive students, the volkisch middle class, and certain working class groups.”
²⁸
But Schonerer’s insistence on blind obedience from all his followers needlessly deprived him of potentially able lieutenants. This attitude caused his most talented follower, Karl Hermann Wolf, as well as Wolfs German Radicals (Deutschradikalen) to secede from the Pan-German party in 1902.

The split with Wolf, along with a number of other minor party feuds, cost Schdnerer dearly. In the parliamentary election of 1907 only three Pan-Germans were elected compared to twenty-one in 1901. The party as a whole received less than one-half of 1 percent of the total cast. Schdnerer himself won only 909 votes in his district of Eger in western Bohemia, barely one-fifth that of his Socialist opponent.
²⁹

The break with Wolf, and Schonerer’s parliamentary defeat, ended his career for all practical purposes; he did linger on until his deatl) in 1921 as the acknowledged “grand old man” of pan-German nationalism/tut lacked any political power. Even Adolf Hitler willingly conceded hi
s
philosophical indebtedness to Schdnerer while criticizing him for failing to win over the masses.

*

The Birth of the German Workers’ Party

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The dissolution of Schonerer’s Pan-German party, his unwillingness to favor the partition of Bohemia along ethnic lines, and his conviction that the social and national questions were essentially one, all paved the way for the founding of a new German nationalist party in 1903-4, the German Workers’ party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or DAP). The party was by no means a novelty, as numerous organizations catering to nationalistic German-Austrian workers had existed since at least the 1880s, especially in Bohemia. A fierce political and economic rivalry existed in that crownland between Czechs and Germans, which was intensified by the rapid industrialization of the 1880s and 1890s. Czechs, who were accustomed to a lower standard of living, were often willing to move into historically German-speaking areas to work for less pay. The German workers, displaced by relatively unskilled Czechs, quickly developed a burning hatred of their rivals. The Czech minority in German towns grew and sometimes even became a majority, as in Prague and Pilsen (Pizen). When this trend developed, German workers feared not only the loss of their livelihood, but the loss of their nationality as well.

Within Schonerer s pan-German movement a special group had been formed in the 1880s to represent workers’ interests. The many nationalistic workers’ groups in Bohemia organized themselves into a German National Workers’ League (Dcutschnationalen Arbciterbund) in 1893. The nationalistic fever aroused by the Badeni decrees brought various pan-German parties together in a parliamentary club called the Pan-German Union (Alldeutsche Vereinigung). But the Schdnerer-Wolf rift broke the alliance into quarreling factions after just one year. Nineteen hundred and two thus anticipated 1923, the year of Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch, as a time of disaster. In each case the movement had to begin again virtually from scratch.

The Pan-German party was the last prewar attempt to unite workers and the bourgeoisie into a single party. The breakup of Schonerer’s party paved

the way for the founding of a number of German national class parties for workers, peasants, and the bourgeoisie; they could agree only on maintaining
traditional
German predominance and in fighting all forms of Marxism.
³⁰

The German Workers’ party was just one of these sectarian parties; but it also happened to be the direct forerunner of the National Socialist German Workers’ party of Austria (NSDAP). The party was first organized in the northern Bohemian city of Aussig (Usti nad Labein) on 15 November 1903. On 17 January 1904, the first issue of the party’s newspaper,
Deutsche Arbeiter-Zeitung,
appeared.

On 15 August 1904 the first big conference of the DAP met in Trautenau (Trutnou) to approve a program drafted the previous May by Alois Ciller, a founder of the party. The Trautenauer Program declared that the party sought to rescue the German-Austrian worker from his “economic, political, and cultural oppression.” The worker, it went on to say, could realize his full potential only within the natural boundaries of his nationality. It rejected international organizations (meaning the Social Democratic party) and affirmed that it was no narrow class party. The program also repeated the demands found in the Linz Program of 1882 for the introduction of an equal and direct franchise and for complete freedom of speech and the press.
³¹

Although the DAP, like the SDP, from whose ranks many of its members had come, was composed mostly of workers, it differed from the Social Democrats in many important respects. Unlike the SDP, the leaders as well as the party rank and file were workers, although the term
Arbeiter
was broadened by the DAP to include white-collar employees. Like the Social Democrats, but in contrast to Schdnerer’s pan-Germans, the DAP supported the Habsburg Monarchy right down to the last stages of World War I. On the other hand it was a proponent of the German alliance and during the war wanted to make German the official state language. The party also denounced at Trautenau the Marxist idea of the international solidarity of the working class, although it did not reject the concept of class itself. The party’s announced goal was radical social and economic reform; yet it was deliberately vague about the usefulness of private property, popular sovereignty, civil liberties, and equal economic opportunity. In later years the party spoke of the need for socialism and denounced the evils of capitalism, but it never demanded the nationalization of all private property. From the start, in fact, it was far less concerned about theory than was the SDP.
³²
The party’s only claim to ideological originality was its idea of creating a
Volksgemeinschaft
or “people’s community” of “honest” German workers whether industrial, clerical, or professional.
³³

A new party program, drawn up in the Moravian city of Iglau (Jihlava) in

1913, added little to the Trautenauer declaration. It did talk about not just the maintenance but also the increase in the territory inhabited by Grermans, thus anticipating the Nazi theorist Alfred Rosenberg and his idea of
'Dem Volk den Raum
(land to the people).
The word
movement
was als<5 used in a party document for the first time. The party’s motto was declared to be “Work in German districts for German workers only!” The Iglau program concluded by saying that the party would “combat all medieval, clerical, and capitalistic privileges as well as all alien
(fremdvolkisch)
influences, ‘especially the ever-increasing Jewish spirit in public life.’ ”
³⁴
Thus anti-Semitism made its official appearance in the party’s program, although it was well down the list of priorities as compared to those of the bourgeois German nationalist parties.

In its irrationalism, unscrupulous opportunism, nationalistic arrogance, and racism the party was clearly the heir of Schonerer. Its claim to racial and cultural superiority over Czechs and Jews was not moderated by any Christian principles of responsibility and compassion. On the other hand, its call for an egalitarian people’s community did contain a note of idealism that was intended to appeal to the masses.