Hitler and the Forgotten Nazis (9 page)

Perhaps overreacting, or more likely hoping to reverse the vote, as Hitler had done in similar circumstances in 1921, Riehl resigned his chairmanship of both the Austrian NSDAP and the Interstate Bureau (where he was succeeded by Rudolf Jung) for reasons of “health.”
⁹
The motives for Riehl’s actions became clearer during the fall of 1923. In a letter to a journalist in Salzburg, a copy of which was sent to Hitler, Riehl claimed that the executive committee that voted against him had been composed of “the most radical of the radicals.” The new Austrian Nazi leaders were “young fanatics.” He had resigned his offices because he did not want his name associated with the coming (Munich) Putsch, which he felt could only end in disaster. It was impossible to see how the Bavarian Nazis could profit from the weakening of the anti-Marxist forces in Austria.
¹⁰

After his resignations Riehl received some very welcome support from Rudolf Jung. In an open letter to the Austrian leadership, which was distributed by Riehl, Jung harshly criticized an article appearing in the 25 August issue of the
Deutsche Arbeiter-Presse.
The article, written by Josef Muller, one of the editors of the
DAP,
was entitled “Kampf, nicht Wahl.” Jung claimed the article could only be interpreted as a call for a Putsch. He warned that any “intoxicated enthusiasm [
Begeisterungsrausch
] could only lead to the destruction of the party. . . . Our time has not yet come.”
¹¹

*

From Disaster to Resurgence: Hitler’s Drive for Power, 1925-1926

Soon after Riehl’s resignation the Austrian Nazi party was shaken by repercussions from the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich. Although many Austrians took part in the uprising, the party as a whole was not involved. Only three days after the fiasco, however, Karl Schulz organized a rally in Vienna to proclaim the Austrian party’s unswerving loyalty to Hitler.
¹²
For months during the winter of 1923-24, the Austrian Nazis, who were anything but affluent themselves, also smuggled money as well as their party newspapers into Germany to aid the now outlawed German NSDAP. Numerous German exiles, including Hermann Goring, were given refuge by the Austrian party.
¹³
If the Austrians expected Hitler’s gratitude for this assistance, however, they were soon to be disappointed.
¹⁴

Nineteen twenty-four and the first part of 1925 witnessed a modest renaissance in the party’s fortunes. In district elections held in Styria in May of

1924 the Nazis won an impressive (for them) twelve thousand votes and sixty municipal representatives.
¹⁵
The outcome was one of the first indications that Styria was to be a fascist stronghold. Otherwise, there was little the Nazis could honestly cheer about in 1924. When they attempted to hold a “German pay” in Salzburg in August, the Austrian government refused permission. The presence of eighteen thousand German gymnasts and members of paramilitary formations, it feared, would provoke unfavorable foreign reaction.
¹⁶
For similar reasons Vienna rejected an attempt by the Bavarian government to deport Hitler to his native country after his release from prison in December.
¹⁷

The year 1925 was for a time somewhat more encouraging, because the
Austrian
Nazis were able to attract attention through their stormy protests and
organized
riots during an international Zionist congress held in Vienna in midsummer. One of the protest rallies drew an estimated ten thousand participants, of whom the Nazis were the largest single element. The impact of the Nazis’ demonstrations, however, was undoubtedly blunted by the inclusion of
countless
other anti-Semitic groups and even by the bourgeois parties. Moreover, the Nazis could not prevent the congress from taking place, a number of their members were arrested by the police, and they found themselves financially exhausted by their propaganda expenditures. The whole episode cost Karl Schulz the respect of many of the younger Nazis.
¹⁸

But the continued independence and relative unity of the Austrian Nazi party between 1923 and 1925 was due mainly to “fortuitous” events in Germany. The Beer Hall Putsch, and especially Hitler’s subsequent imprisonment in the Landsberg fortress, interrupted—but only temporarily—Hitler’s drive for mastery over the entire Nazi party, including the Austrian branch. As early as the congress of the German NSDAP in 1922 Hitler had insisted that power be concentrated at the party’s headquarters in Munich. Only in this fashion, he maintained, could the kinds of splits that plagued other
v'dlkisch
movements be avoided.
¹⁹
In writing
Mein Kampf
in 1924, Hitler made it clear that the type of federation which Walter Riehl had established among the Austrian, German, Sudeten, and Polish Nazi parties in 1919-20 was absolutely anathema to him. “By the formation of a working federation weak organizations are never transformed into strong ones, but a strong organization can and will not seldom be weakened. . . . Coalition successes bear by the very nature of their origin the germ of future crumbling, in fact of the loss of what had already been achieved.”
²⁰

The model that Hitler thought Karl Schulz should emulate had been provided by Julius Streicher, the former leader of the German Socialist party of Nuremberg, who, in Hitler’s words, “as soon as he recognized the greater and superior growth of the NSDAP clearly and beyond all doubt . . . ceased his activity for the DSP [German Socialist party].”
²¹

While in prison Hitler made no attempt to take sides in party disputes so as to prevent the emergence of a successor. Thus, while the NSDAP was outlawed and disintegrating in Germany, the still legal Austria^ party continued to function and even to grow. Its halcyon days were numbered, however.

Once released from prison in December 1924, Hitler immediately set to work rebuilding the party and reestablishing his own personal ascendancy. On 26 February 1925, the
Volkischer Beobachter
in Munich resumed publication; its first issue announced the “Basic Guidelines for the Reorganization of the NSDAP.” The SA was subjected to strict political control and forbidden to admit into its ranks “armed groups and organizations.”
²²
Fifteen months later Hitler again laid down the law by drawing a sharp distinction between the NSDAP and all other volkisch groups.
²³
The second volume of
Mein Kampf,
also written in 1926, claimed that the Ftihrer was “the exclusive leader of the movement.”
²⁴

*

The Social Transformation of the Austrian Nazi Party

Meanwhile, conditions within the Austrian party were undergoing dramatic changes, changes that would soon create a new crisis. The prewar Deutsche Arbeiterpartei had drawn its support primarily from trade unions, industrial workers, and the petty bourgeoisie; among these groups the bulk of the members came from northern Bohemia.
²⁵
The first postwar elections revealed that the party was moderately strong only in the industrial regions of Vienna and Upper Styria (where there was an old tradition of radicalism), and also in Salzburg, where there was a well-established organization.
²⁶
Not until the next decade would the party gain appreciable support from the countryside. In class terms it stood midway between the Social Democrats and the bourgeois parties. The older leaders such as Rudolf Jung, Walter Gattermayer, and Karl Schulz, all of whom were railroad workers, naturally looked to the same social groups for support after the war. Their social background likewise led them to take the socialism in National Socialism seriously.

The loss of the northern Bohemian heartland inexorably changed the social composition and therefore the very nature of the Austrian Nazi party. Trade-union influence continued to be significant in the party until 1926 (and for some Nazis even later). Many party members also belonged to a national trade union, which claimed some forty-five thousand members in 1923.
²⁷
Trade-union influence, however, began declining after about 1922. There was

0
   The Nazi Civil War, 1923-1930    41

•i‘
^:

m:.:-

! ' w
a great influx
of university and high-school-aged students,
hurt
by the
^I;
|
devastating
inflation of the postwar years. They were frequently persuaded to
^!
! • ■ the NSDAP by their own teachers or by the German Athletes’ Asso-:::
j^
₀
n (Deutscher
Tumerbund). Twenty-two percent of the members of the

1    party’s paramilitary formation (whose name was changed to the Vaterlan-

i    Schutzbund
in 1923) consisted of such students by 1924-25. After

1923 there was a definite decline in the relative strength of manual workers in the party and a corresponding increase in the size and importance of the lower middle class.
²⁸

The explosion that finally tore the Austrian party to pieces in 1925-26 basically involved a clash between trade unionists, led by men who had been bom in the early 1880s, and younger members, bom about fifteen years later, who lived mostly in medium-sized provincial capitals like Graz, Linz, Salzburg, and Klagenfurt. The latter faction threw its weight behind Adolf Hider. The older men had established their careers during the relatively peaceful years of the late Empire; the young militants had grown to maturity during the World War. The younger veterans were likely to be members of the Vaterlan-dische Schutzbund in and around Vienna.*
⁹
The same division between older trade unionists and young firebrands existed in the German NSDAP until Hitler seized dictatorial control in 1921.

The younger members of the Austrian Nazi party had little knowledge of and even less interest in the prewar struggles of the German Workers’ party. They were impatient with the party’s painfully slow progress and blamed it on the party’s democratic structure, which, they claimed, maximized debate and minimized action. The old leaders later recognized that the party’s democratic organization, which permitted “even the lowliest Parteigenosse” to voice his opinion, had made it possible for the
Hitlergeist
to spread and disrupt the party.
³⁰
The young hotheads admired Hitler’s dictatorial leadership, radical rhetoric, and frequent, noisy mass rallies. From 1920 to 1922 they had had numerous opportunities to hear him as well as other German radicals speak in Austria.
³¹
They were also enthusiastic about Hitler’s willingness to use force in 1923.
³²
They tried, but with only limited success, to persuade the Austrian leaders to imitate Hitler’s methods in their own country. But they were told that conditions were different, particularly in Vienna (with its huge Socialist and Jewish population) from those in Munich and therefore required different tactics.
³³
The leadership, sensitive to the charge of undue “moderation,” retorted,

No one could say that our party has not been radical enough. . . . But the ideal of a German workers’ movement does not consist of collecting

a few hundred or a few thousand desperadoes and creating an uproar like farmhands, but of saturating the mass of the German workers with the national and social ideals of our program. . . . We, too, honor the leadership principle, but that does not prevent the leader from speaking with his membership, accepting advice, and from time to time submitting an account of his activities. But the leader in Germany claims the rights of a lord toward his subjects. . . . There are no elections of the leader or subleaders, only someone who appoints himself and who is as infallible as the pope.
³⁴

❖

Growing Opposition, 1925-1926

Opposition to the old Nazi leadership had been building long before a split finally occurred in 1925-26. As early as October 1920, Josef Muller persuaded the party leadership to allow him to establish a Meeting and Propaganda Committee. This group, impatient with Riehl’s infrequent rallies, organized countless rallies of its own in 1921 against the Treaty of Lana negotiated between Austria and Czechoslovakia.
³⁵
The treaty was primarily designed to reopen commerce between the countries, trade that was desperately needed by Austria. However, the treaty also stipulated a more or less “voluntary” Austrian renunciation of the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia.

Walter RiehFs resignation in August 1923 was essentially a victory for the young Hitler advocates, although a major party split was avoided. But in 1925 the party was again rent by differing attitudes toward the international Zionist congress, the older party leaders not wanting to take to the streets. Another quarrel erupted in October between the editor of the
DAP
and the paper’s administrative officials, who wanted higher salaries. The party’s general secretary, Ernst Graber, and some leaders of the Vaterlandische Schutzbund, supported the demands, while the other leaders opposed them on financial grounds.
³⁵

The Schulz partisans thought the party’s internal problems were caused in large measure by Graber, whose alleged
Schlamperei
resulted in letters to Schulz from
Parteigenossen
in the provinces going unanswered. Subsequent indignation, they believed, had been unfairly directed at Schulz. Matters started coming to a head toward the end of October, when several local leaders
(Ortsgruppenleiter)
in Vienna got together with Muller and decided to eliminate all harmful problems “in the shortest possible time, and m arrange for an Anschluss with the Adolf Hitler movement in the Reich.”