1938 (12 page)

One black raven, Cardinal Theodor Innitzer, paid Hitler his respects at the Imperial Hotel on the 15th (as did the new rector of Vienna University, Fritz Knoll). He had been considering a fitting reaction to Anschluss. The Sudetenländer Innitzer had been a minister in the clerical government of Ignaz Seipel and was seen as one of the pillars of the Corporate State. When local Nazis demanded a gesture acknowledging the Anschluss, the cardinal ordered the bells rung in Vienna’s churches. He prudently expressed his “delight at the old dream of German unity” and sent a telegram to Hitler on the road to that effect.

He was more than aware of the tough line the Nazis were taking toward the Church. On March 12 the Primas Germaniae, Cardinal Sigismond Waitz, archbishop of Salzburg, had been placed under house arrest, and the prince bishop of Graz and Sekau, Ferdinand Pawlikowski, was taken to prison by a jeering crowd. Elsewhere the abbot Ambros Minarz of Altenburg Abbey refused to fly a swastika flag, causing the SA to occupy the abbey on the 17th. The bishop of Linz, Johannes Maria Gföllner, had famously said it was impossible to be a National Socialist and a Catholic. He took no notice of Hitler’s presence in his see. The Church was second only to the Jews in unpopularity, and the mood was so explosive that Innitzer must have felt a need to prevent it blowing up in his face. Everyone in the Church feared a new Kulturkampf. On March 13, the bishop had offered prayers of thanks for the bloodless transformation. Such behavior appeared to mar a good record. As rector of the university he had been sympathetic to poor Jewish students, when many of his fellow bishops had been openly antisemitic. Now he appeared to be cowering in the face of Austria’s new masters.

Innitzer had taken advice from the Catholic former German chancellor, Papen, who was anxious that the relationship between Hitler and the cardinal should start on the correct footing. The Church had been hand-inglove with the Corporate State, and the Nazis wanted to see its influence curtailed, but Papen believed that Austria would soon become ungovernable if the Church were not treated properly. To that end, Papen and Seyss convinced Hitler to see Innitzer.

Innitzer made his way to the Imperial at 9:15 AM, accompanied by two clerics, his secretary Joseph Weinbauer and Johann Jauner-Schrofenegg. There was an ugly crowd of Austrian Nazis outside, whistling and shouting “
Pfui
” and “
In den Kanal mit dem Kardinal
” (“Throw the cardinal in the canal”). Hitler made to kiss the cardinal’s ring, but Innitzer raised the chain on his chest and made the sign of the cross. Hitler reassured Innitzer that, provided the Church remained loyal, there would be no trouble. Innitzer suggested that loyalty was conditional on the maintenance of the concordat guaranteeing the position of the Church. Hitler was impressed by the behavior of the Austrian prelates, whom he compared favorably to the Germans. The SS scattered the hostile crowd as Innitzer left. Innitzer would later regret these actions, when he realized that the Catholics had been duped. The Vatican was outraged by Innitzer’s fifteen-minute audience. The pope condemned the cardinal for “breach of loyalty and treason,” although this was later rescinded. Austria’s small Evangelical Church had declared the Anschluss “blessed” the day before the Catholics. Certain Evangelicals had been hoping that the Nazis would launch a new Reformation and free Austria from the power of the Catholic Church.

After the cardinal left, the devoted Ribbentrop had finally been given leave to join his master for his moment of glory in Vienna. Around noon on the 15th, Hitler addressed an audience of some 250,000 people on the Heldenplatz. Goebbels thought it “a popular uprising in the truest sense of the words,” but to some extent he had connived at it by making it a public holiday. Hitler returned to the Heldenplatz after lunch to lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior at the Burgtor. Austria’s army and police were paraded before him to swear their new allegiance. On returning to the airport at Aspern, Ribbentrop got lost and ended up in a farmyard.

Hitler flew to Munich. As the aircraft passed over the Austrian Alps, he turned to Keitel and said, “Now that is all German again.” After a quick snack with Keitel at the airport, he repaired to his own apartment. The next day, he returned to Berlin, where he was met by Göring, proudly waving his baton. Goebbels had ordered that the factories and places of business be closed at 1 PM so that the people could be on the streets to welcome the conquering hero. It was to be a reception “such as the capital has never seen.”

THE AUSTRIAN “revolution” and the violence directed against the Jews had gone too far, even for the Nazis. On March 17 Heydrich threatened Commissar Bürckel with disciplinary action for the rowdiness of the rank and file. He would send a Gestapo unit to deal with Party members who had allowed others to act in a “completely undisciplined manner.” At the time of the plebiscite in April there was a halfhearted attempt to blame the Communists, who had been dressing up in Nazi uniforms and robbing people. The next day Berlin reaffirmed its authority in Austria with a second regulation: Power was in the hands of the Reichsführer SS. Bürckel took the hint; he threatened to expel the plunderers from the Party. On April 29 he thundered in the Austrian edition of the Nazi
Völkische Beobachter
, “Germany is governed by the rule of law. That means that nothing happens that has no foundation in law. . . . There will be no organised pogroms, not even by Frau Hintenhuber against Sara Kohn in the third courtyard, one floor up next to the taps.” Himmler too vented his fury on any Reichs German SS men found working for their own personal profit. They were to be arrested and ejected from the SS. Once again the Nazis were conscious of foreign opinion and the fragility of German exports.

On the 18th Hitler addressed the Reichstag to report on the union with Austria. He promptly dissolved the assembly before fresh elections on April 10. This time the poll was to give total power to the Führer: “Then we’ll throw away the last democratic-parliamentary eggshells.”

Hitler was closely monitoring events on the Baltic and wondering whether it might afford him the chance to right one of the wrongs perpetrated at Versailles—the peace treaty that concluded the First World War. A rumpus had broken out between the Poles and the Lithuanians. Memel, with its largely German-speaking population, had been awarded to Lithuania in 1919. Under the terms of the treaty, the Lithuanians were meant to allow the Poles to use the port, but they refused to honor their obligations and looked to Moscow to protect them. Faced with the threat of invasion by Poland, they backed down on the 19th, but Hitler now saw the time was ripe to gather the fruits of his good relations with Poland.

The policy of Beck, the Polish foreign minister, was dictated by the German-Polish rapprochement of 1934. The Poles coveted Memel too, but Beck wanted to hold both Germany and Russia at arm’s length and maintain Danzig. He therefore needed to make concessions. For Hitler, the Teschen pocket in Sudetenland, with its largely Polish population, was a gobbet to dangle in front of the Poles to gain their support for the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. In the meantime any German claims to the Corridor were played down—the price of cooperation from Warsaw.

On March 19, Goebbels found Hitler studying the map. “First comes Czecho. We are going to split it with the Hungarians and the Poles. And we are going to exploit the next opportunity should Warsaw come to blows with Kovno to pop Memel in the bag. Good, but not yet: we are a boa constrictor digesting its prey. Then the rest of the Baltic [and] a piece of Alsace-Lorraine. . . .”

In Vienna, the Austrian bishops were being subjected to all the bullying Bürckel could muster. They met on the 18th and were given a draft document urging all Austrians “as Germans to recognise the German Reich.” Innitzer objected to an article in the text that had them agree to assimilate the Church’s youth organizations. The document passed to and fro, until all six bishops gave in. Innitzer even added “and
Heil Hitler
” in his own hand at Bürckel’s insistence. The message was doubtless put out to try to ease the situation and to create a modus vivendi: After four years of “clerical fascism” the clergy had a great many enemies. Austrian priests had already suffered physical violence. Bürckel passed as a man sympathetic to Catholics. Waitz wrote of his astonishment that the bishops had submitted, however, and the bishops were not proud of their pusillanimity. Only two published the text in their diocesan organs, and Gföllner had boycotted the session.

EICHMANN ARRIVED in Vienna on March 16 to take up the job of directing Department II-112. Two days later he took part in the
razzia
at the IKG building (the headquarters of the Jewish congregation) in the Seitenstettengasse, seizing documents relating to Jewish support for Schuschnigg. Friedmann, his two assistants, the architect Robert Stricker, Jakob Ehrlich, and the office director Löwenherz were arrested together with the president of the Zionist National Union, Oskar Grünbaum. Eichmann slapped Löwenherz, telling him that he had been to Palestine and that he had been born in the old Templar colony of Sarona. This was evidently a fantasy: Eichmann came from Solingen near Düsseldorf but had been brought up in Linz. Others taken into custody were the presidents of the Jewish Freemasonic lodges and sixteen high-ranking Jewish Masons.

The Duke of Windsor was supposed to have intervened in an attempt to save Louis von Rothschild and the ear specialist, Professor Heinrich von Neumann. The duke was told that Rothschild would be released when he had compensated the state for the losses that occurred with the collapse of the Creditanstalt bank, although Rothschild had resigned a year before the crash. There was a rumor too that Freud had been taken into custody, but that proved unfounded.

The university was purged on March 17, the same day that the formal machinery of the Corporate State was shut down. Out went the professors of physics (Leo Ehrenhaft), ethnology (Wilhelm Koppers), and Romance languages (Alfred Kurzbach). They also expelled Stefan Meyer and Karl Przibaum together with Ernst Zerner, the professor of organic chemistry and an old frontline soldier, and the chemist Fritz Feigl. Eichmann’s men also mopped up the head of the Jewish old soldiers’ league, Friedmann. The IKG was asked to raise a contribution of 500,000 RM, more than half what they had paid out to the former chancellor’s fund-raisers.

The Gestapo operated from the
piano nobile
of the former Metropole. The secret policemen were mostly young, educated people, many of them lawyers with doctorates. Half of Prussia’s 4,000-articled lawyers had been out of work in 1932, and the percentage of Austrian advocates who were idle in 1938 must have been similar. The Gestapo provided work of sorts. Othmar Trencker was head of the SD, and Dr. Viktor Siegl of Department II/E was appointed to the task of making sure the Jews left all their valuable possessions behind them. This was a serious position: The Gestapo had an office dealing with the location of hidden assets that stopped at nothing. They didn’t wear kid gloves. The father of writer Erich Fried had his stomach kicked in by the Gestapo man Göttler from Düsseldorf because he wouldn’t tell him where his money was concealed.

Eichmann was a relatively lowly Nazi then, a significant cog in a larger wheel. The formal machinery of terror was established with the Gestapo office, responsible to Himmler and Heydrich. The chief was the Bavarian Franz Josef Huber assisted by the jurist Humbert Pifrader. Huber was a favorite of Heydrich’s and a personal friend of Heinrich “Gestapo” Müller, the big man in Berlin. He had run the Austrian branch of the Gestapo since 1934 and had probably been involved in the planning of the putsch against Dollfuss. He was also one of the three greatest enthusiasts for the extermination of the Jews, together with the future gauleiter, Baldur von Schirach and Huber’s later assistant, Karl Ebner.

At the Gestapo’s Department II/D Rux and Heger had responsibility for the imprisonment of Jews, while Department III dealt with illegal emigration. Eichmann took the portfolio of legal emigration, the interpretation of the Nuremberg Law, and the issue of passports and passes, helped by Emil Komers of the Emigration Office. The Vienna Gestapo grew to become the largest in the Reich, with 850 of the 2,000 men active in Austria. As many as a third of them were German, as Austrians were often dismissed as “soft and spineless.” Every day between 450 and 500 people were examined in the Metropole.

The Gestapo could avail themselves of a network of between six hundred and eight hundred police spies. The Café Viktoria was often used to lure the unfortunate victims to their fates, as it was close to the Gestapo headquarters. The Gestapo’s work was massively assisted by the Viennese propensity to denounce all and sundry. There was a mythical Viennese saint called Sancta Denunziata. After the war it was reckoned that a quarter of all investigations came from information provided by private persons. They even reported the assistant Gestapo chief for allowing his Russian maid to go out without the statutory “Easterner’s Badge.”

THE STARS of the Nazi scene now came to visit their new province and its capital, Vienna. Göring loved Austria and was popular there. After visiting the former home of his Jewish godfather, Epenstein, he arrived by boat from Linz and spoke in the decommissioned Northwest Station on the 26th. He claimed 300,000 Jews had caused the impoverishment of Vienna. In a radio broadcast he mentioned the increasing numbers of Jews who were taking their own lives. He said he could not put a policeman behind every Jew to stop them. If they were unhappy, they had only to go to Palestine. Everyone knew of a good Jew, but that would not solve the Jewish problem.

The real message behind Göring’s speech was that he was expecting to be able to fund German arms production by making off with the coffers of the state and fleecing Vienna’s Jews. On the other hand, he was keen to avoid anything that would disrupt trade, particularly the export trade, and left instructions with Bürckel to preserve it at all costs. Goring’s Four Year Plan was formally introduced on March 19. On March 23 Austria’s economy was brought into line with that of the Altreich. The federal reserves would provide a brief respite for the German economy and allow the country to run its highest trade deficit since 1929. Jewish businesses were to be “Aryanized” without further ado. The Four Year Plan had been acquiring chunks of Germany’s most important industrial concerns. Göring, it seemed, had only to ask, and a part of the empire was made over to him. In the case of Jewish factories, he was not content with a slice of the action: He wanted the whole lot.