Hitler's Hangman (32 page)

had become more and more ambivalent over the course of the 1930s.

Based on their friendship in Kiel in the mid-1920s, Canaris had wrongly

assumed that, in his capacity as chief of Germany’s military espionage, he

could control the much younger Heydrich. When Canaris was appointed

as head of the Abwehr in 1935, his predecessor, Conrad Patzig, had warned

him about Heydrich and Himmler, but Canaris told him confidently:

‘Don’t you worry, I can handle those boys.’8 The gradual extension of SS

competences from 1935 onwards had proven Canaris wrong and increas-

ingly undermined the Abwehr’s authority. He was now prepared to see his

former protégé removed from his position of power.9 However, the putsch

plans secretly advocated by Fritsch, Beck and Canaris became obsolete

when Hitler pul ed off a major foreign policy success: the Anschluss of

Austria. For Heydrich, the military operation against Austria offered the

badly needed opportunity to divert attention from the Fritsch affair and to

prove that the SS was capable of col aborating with the army.10

Anschluss

At the beginning of 1938, Heydrich’s attention turned to Austria.

Eighteen months earlier, in July 1936, Hitler had concluded a formal

agreement with the Austrian Chancellor, Kurt von Schuschnigg, under

R E H E A R S A L S F O R W A R

119

which the Austrians complied with Hitler’s request to give the Austrian

Nazi Party a number of ministerial posts in government. But while

Schuschnigg regarded this as a settlement of the difficulties that had

emerged in Austro-German relations following a German-sponsored

coup attempt of 1934, Hitler saw it only as the beginning of a gradual

process that would ultimately lead to the Anschluss with Germany. Yet for

a long time Hitler did not think the moment appropriate for such a move.

Throughout 1936, he ordered the Austrian Nazis to stay quiet not wanting

to cause international tensions while the rest of Europe was still alarmed

by the recent remilitarization of the Rhineland – the Wehrmacht’s illegal

entry into the previously demilitarized zone east of the German–French

border.11

In early 1938, however, Hitler changed his mind. On 12 February, a

meeting between the Führer and Schuschnigg took place in the Berghof,

Hitler’s mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden on the German–Austrian

border. In order to intimidate Schuschnigg, Hitler had arranged for senior

German police and military figures to be present, including Himmler,

Heydrich, and the newly appointed chief of the Wehrmacht’s High

Command, Wilhelm Keitel. Hitler made it clear that military action

would follow if the Austrians did not give in to his demands. The following

morning Keitel was ordered to make arrangements for intimidating mili-

tary manoeuvres on the Austrian border.12 Meanwhile, Himmler and

Heydrich had begun their own extensive preparations for the invasion of

Austria. From January 1938 onwards, some 20,000 members of the Order

and Security Police were mobilized and trained for the purpose of

supporting the Wehrmacht in its task of occupying Germany’s southern

neighbour.13

Three weeks after the meeting at the Berghof, Schuschnigg inadvert-

ently provided Hitler with a pretext for a German invasion when he

suddenly announced that a referendum on Austrian independence was

to be held on 13 March. To ensure a resounding yes for Austrian

independence, voting was restricted to people over twenty-four years of

age, thus disenfranchising a large part of the predominantly young Nazi

movement. Hitler was outraged and sent an ultimatum to Schuschnigg on

11 March: the referendum’s wording had to be changed to encourage

people to approve union rather than oppose it. Schuschnigg was to resign

as chancellor and be replaced by Arthur Seyss-Inquart, an Austrian

Lawyer and Nazi activist who had been appointed as Interior Minister as

a result of the Berchtesgarden agreement.14

Hitler did not wait for the Austrian Chancellor to make up his mind.

Encouraged by Göring, he gave Keitel the invasion order. At 5.30 in the

morning on 12 March, German troops crossed the Austrian border

120

HITLER’S HANGMAN

without meeting any resistance.15 But the Nazis were not taking any

chances of a repetition of the disastrous failed putsch attempt of 1934

when the Austrian Chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss, was shot by an SS

man before the coup collapsed in the face of determined opposition.

Among the first to arrive in Vienna were Himmler and Heydrich, who

landed at the Austrian capital’s airport at 5 a.m. on 12 March, before

German troops had even marched into the city.16 Hitler had authorized

Himmler the previous day to secure police control over the annexed terri-

tory. Himmler, as usual, passed on the order to Heydrich, who was

instructed to supervise the first wave of arrests and to ‘cleanse’ the Austrian

police.17

At a meeting at the Hotel Regina in Vienna on 13 and 14 March, the

SS and police leadership – Himmler, Heydrich and the head of the Order

Police, Kurt Daluege – held talks on the future of police organization in

Austria. The State Secretary for Security was swiftly replaced by the leader

of the Austrian SS, Heydrich’s future successor as head of the Reich

Security Main Office, Ernst Kaltenbrunner. Six thousand ordinary

German policemen were drafted in as reinforcements, along with 1,500

Security Police agents.18 But in general the Austrian police did not need

a thorough purge. Many of them were Nazi sympathizers anyhow or at

least flexible enough to adjust their political views to those of the new

rulers. More than 80 per cent of the staff of the Austrian Gestapo between

1938 and 1942 came from the old Austrian police apparatus, with an

additional 10 per cent from the Old Reich. A mere 5 per cent were new

recruits without any previous police experience.19

Heydrich ordered a first wave of arrests even before the meeting at the

Hotel Regina. He brought with him from Germany a team of trusted

SD and Gestapo officers to eliminate the opposition and to confiscate

important documents, including the police files on SS involvement in the

failed Austrian putsch of 1934.20 Heydrich’s Security Police officers,

armed with extensive lists of ‘oppositional elements’ compiled under

Dollfuss and Schuschnigg, moved swiftly into action, arresting anyone

thought to pose a real or potential threat to Nazi rule – 21,000 in all –

on the night of 12–13 March.21 Among those arrested were former

members of the Schuschnigg government, Communists and German

émigrés, but also Austrian royalists and leading ex-members of the

Heimwehren
, the conservative Home Defence Leagues. Some of the

most prominent Heimwehr leaders, such as Ernst-Rüdiger Starhemberg,

a descendant of the Count Starhemberg who had defended Vienna

against the Turks in the sixteenth century, managed to flee the country.

Others were less fortunate. Another former leader of the Home Defence

Leagues, Major Emil Fey, who had played a crucial role in putting down

R E H E A R S A L S F O R W A R

121

the Nazi uprising in Vienna in 1934, killed himself with his entire

family.22

The main immediate target was the Austrian Communists. Heydrich

consciously stoked fears of a violent Communist uprising when he

suggested to the newly appointed Reich commissioner for the unification

of Austria and the Reich, Joseph Bürckel, that the Communist under-

ground might stage a boycott of the impending plebiscite in order to

highlight the illegitimacy of the Anschluss to the outside world.23 By the

end of 1938, the Gestapo had detained nearly the entire leadership of the

Austrian Communist Party, the majority of whom were deported to

concentration camps.24 In order to cope with the new influx of political

prisoners, special new facilities were made available in the recently

extended Dachau concentration camp near Munich. In addition, the SS

set up a camp at Mauthausen, close to Linz. It was to become the harshest

of all the camps within the territory of the Greater German Reich before

the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.25

Although most of those imprisoned were released over the following

months, some 2,000 Austrians remained in the camps after July 1938, or

so Heydrich maintained in a conversation with the Foreign Ministry’s

State Secretary, Ernst von Weizsäcker.26 Alongside the first wave of arrests

in Vienna, a targeted operation was launched on the night of 12–13

March designed to confiscate Jewish valuables, including jewellery,

paintings and carpets. On 17 March, concerned about the safety of this

new ‘property of the German people’, Heydrich ordered the newly

established Gestapo office in Vienna to ensure the systematic registration

of all captured documents and objects, threatening to ‘take steps merci-

lessly against anyone who tries to enrich himself with the confiscated

items’.27

The motivation for Heydrich’s concern was the looting and uncon-

trol ed terror that had been spreading alongside the ‘control ed’ SS police

operations since the German invasion, and which ultimately reflected

badly on him and his ability to control his men. Austria was not, after

al , an enemy state, but an integral part of the future German Reich.

Heydrich’s position became even more precarious when, on 13 March, a

close associate of Vice Chancel or Franz von Papen and a conservative

critic of the Nazi terror in Austria, Wilhelm Emanuel von Ketteler, was

drowned by the young SD official Horst Böhme, the future head of the

SD in Bohemia and Moravia under Heydrich. As Goebbels noted in his

diary shortly after the murder: ‘Heydrich has had some very unpleasant

executions carried out in Austria. That is not to be tolerated. Göring is

outraged, and so is the Führer. Heydrich wil not get away with this so

easily.’28

122

HITLER’S HANGMAN

The uncontrolled terror to which Heydrich objected for ‘optical reasons’

was primarily directed against Austria’s Jews, the overwhelming majority

of whom (170,000 out of nearly 200,000) lived in Vienna. The violence

unleashed by Austria’s Nazis went further than anything seen so far in the

Old Reich. From the very beginning of the German invasion Jewish busi-

nesses and apartments were looted and their inhabitants maltreated. Amid

the applause of bystanders, Jews were made to kneel and scrub the

streets.29 The playwright Carl Zuckmayer described the first days after

the Anschluss:

The underworld had opened up its gates and set loose its lowest, most

disgusting hordes. The city transformed itself into a nightmarish

painting by Hieronymus Bosch: . . . demons seemed to have crawled out

of filthy eggs and risen from marshy burrows. The air was constantly

filled with a desolate, hysterical shrieking . . . and people’s faces were

distorted: some with fear, others with lies, still others with wild, hate-

filled triumph.30

The pogrom-like violent excesses in Austria threatened to disrupt

‘orderly’ Gestapo operations and to undermine Heydrich’s authority.

Immediately after the invasion, he ordered a special SD commando of

Jewish experts, including Herbert Hagen and Adolf Eichmann, to take up

their work in Vienna. The initial task of the
Sonderkommando
was to arrest

Jewish officials – using a previously compiled list – and to confiscate docu-

ments from Jewish organizations and private individuals.31 Their task was

severely disrupted by the pogrom-like atmosphere in Vienna and other

Austrian cities. Heydrich lost no time in threatening to arrest those Nazis

who were responsible for mob violence. Annoyed that these excesses

undermined his own efforts at a surgical strike against the ideological

opponents of Nazism, he also undertook an exercise in damage control by

publishing an article in the
Völkischer Beobachter
on 17 March. In the

article, he maintained that the pogroms of the previous days had been

carried out not by members of the Nazi Party but rather by disguised

Communists, seeking to provide foreign hate propaganda with further

material.32

That same day, Heydrich wrote to Gauleiter Bürckel to express his

conviction that arrests should be undertaken within an ‘orderly’ frame-

work and with at least the appearance of legality, arguing that it lay in the

best interests of the Reich’s foreign policy to depict conditions to the

outside world as being as calm as possible in view of the upcoming plebi-