1938 (23 page)

Göring was in a quandary. On the one hand, he wanted to prevent a war against France and Britain that Germany was likely to lose in the long run; on the other, he hoped to get his hands on Czech goods that would be a considerable boon to the Four Year Plan. There was an added incentive in the massive Skoda arms firm, which was producing some of the most technically advanced weaponry in Europe, including the famous “bren” gun beloved of the British army. In the summer of that year all he could say was “ways will be found,” as it became increasingly clear that Germany was on the brink of economic collapse. Even the timing of Operation Green reflected this: The deadline allowed for the bringing in of the harvest, as food stocks were low too. 108 When the West allowed Germany to make off with the Sudetenland without a fight later that year, Göring was over the moon. It was all he wanted, and they would achieve it without the war that he did not believe Germany could win.

Hitler rightly perceived that the British were unlikely to produce the only winning card they had and enlist the support of the Soviet Union. They detested the Soviets even more than Nazi Germany, but together with France, the Soviet Union was a guarantor of Czechoslovakia’s independence. On June 13 the top army commanders had their own meeting at Barth in Pomerania. For the first time they were informed of Hitler’s designs on Czechoslovakia. Hitler arrived late. He assuaged his generals by telling them the Fritsch business had been a mistake, that the general was innocent. Goebbels thought this would be a humiliation for Himmler—the gauleiter of Berlin evidently did not know of Göring’s involvement. No one objected to Hitler’s wider plans, agreeing they were not as unfeasible as some had suggested. Beck was absent from the meeting.

No one seemed to be able to talk sense into Hitler. The minister of finance, the former Rhodes scholar Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk, asked for an audience with Hitler to alert him to the disastrous state of the economy. He had to content himself with writing the Führer a memo. In the second quarter of the year the stock market went down 13 percent. Beck’s lamentations also went increasingly unheeded. On July 16 he made his famous call for the senior officers to resign en masse: “Extraordinary times require extraordinary measures.” On July 29 he produced a formula for Brauchitsch: “The Commander in Chief of the Army, together with the most senior commanding generals, regret that they cannot assume responsibility for the conduct of a war of this nature without carrying a share of the guilt for it in the face of the people and of history. Should the Führer, therefore, insist on the prosecution of this war, they hereby resign from their posts.”

Brauchitsch kept the memo back and only had it read out at a meeting of the generals on August 4. While many agreed that Germany could not win a war against the Western powers, no one heeded his call. The Nazi Reichenau suggested that such ideas would have a negative effect on Hitler, while another general thought that political decisions should be left to politicians. Gerd von Rundstedt drew attention to the February crisis and thought a challenge to Hitler inopportune. Erich von Manstein thought Beck should stop worrying about politics and get on with his job. Beck went out into the wilderness on his own. Nor was Brauchitsch thanked for his work. When he passed on Beck’s memorandum through a third party, Hitler summoned him to the Berghof and subjected him to a tongue whipping in his study that was so loud that its contents were heard by those assembled on the terrace outside. He would not accept political advice from others; he alone knew what to do.

On the 24th, the second Dachau transport set off from Vienna. This time there were 120 on board, of whom 50 were Jews. There were further arrests from May 25 to 27. Intellectuals, doctors, engineers, and lawyers were told to report to the Rossauer Lände or the Karajangasse and bring nothing with them. A week later a purely Jewish cargo of 500 set off, followed by another on June 2. Ninety percent of Vienna’s jewelers left on these transports, including Moritz Österreicher, whose family had served the emperors as court jewelers for generations. Those who had been in the camp since April 1 were curious about the newcomers. Bruno Heilig noted the arrival of Grünbaum, the actor Paul Morgan, and Hermann Leopoldi. The Viennese hangman Lang came too, together with his assistant; Lang had killed Nazis, notably after the murder of Dollfuss. He hanged himself on the first night. In another account he was tortured to death before the eyes of the other prisoners. The assistant refused to end his life, so they ended it for him.

Dachau was getting seriously overcrowded. The summer’s new arrivals sought support from the hardened men who had been there since April. “Comrades around me were discussing the chances of release,” wrote Bruno Heilig.

These men were in a terrible state of mind, which I could well understand. A political prisoner accepts his punishment as one of the vicissitudes which one always risks in politics—and anyone involved in the fight against Nazism had to be prepared for concentration camp—but these men had never thought of things in that light. They had simply gone about their own affairs, paid their taxes, played cards in cafes, slept with their wives and confined their political activity to reading the newspapers. And now they had suddenly become participants in a political struggle. Utterly disconcerted, they faced their fate without understanding, and the only defence they had was their hope of speedy liberation.

Himmler had been inspecting the camps and told Goebbels, “There is only rabble. They need to be exterminated, in the interest and wellbeing of the nation.” Naturally suicides in Austria rose that month; there were 143 in May and 144 in June. In November many of the Jews in Dachau were transferred to Buchenwald above Weimar. The purpose of these shipments from Dachau to Buchenwald was to put pressure on Vienna’s Jewish colony to emigrate as soon as possible.

ON MAY 28, Schuschnigg, who had been under house arrest, was finally taken into Gestapo custody at the Hotel Metropole. He was brought to a large room on the fifth floor with “two heavily barred windows of opaque glass.” He was told he could smoke, for the time being. Any food he ordered was at his own expense. The hotel still seemed to function, and the food was brought up from the kitchens by waiters. Sentries had orders to shoot him if he made trouble. He was denied books and newspapers. He was deprived of sleep; his light was left on, and in the middle of the night there was an inspection of his belongings. Fortunately four years of service in the First World War had steeled his nerves.

With his one towel he dusted his room and cleaned the windows, and then he was forced to go next door and do the same for the sentries. He emptied their buckets and basins and cleaned the lavatory after they had made a mess of it—again with his own towel. Then the charwoman came to do the job all over again. One guard, known as the Stinker, used to amuse himself by aiming his gun at him. It appeared that these performances were revenge for the way that Nazis had been treated at Wöllersdorf and in the Corporate State’s prisons. With time the guards relented and became reasonably friendly. They told him that he was to be tried for calling the French and arming the Communists. But if he was in deep water, that was nothing to what was going to happen to “the Jew” Louis Rothschild, who was occupying another room on that floor.

Central Europe was thawing out and swallows announced the summer. For Greater Germany’s Jews, however, there was little or no relief from their dark lodgings. In Vienna they were now banned from public parks and gardens. The only area still open to them was the Jewish part of the Central Cemetery in Simmering. From his Swiss exile, Franz Werfel penned a little poem.

Volksgarten, Stadt-und Rathaus Park,
Ihr Frühling war noch nie so stark.
Den Juden Wiens ist er verboten.
Ihr einziges Grün wächst bei den Toten.
Zur Stunde, da die Stadt erblasst
Von sonntäglicher Mittagslast,
Drückt es sich scheu in Strassenbahnen.
Hinaus zu halbervergessenen Ahnen.
Der Totenstadt von Simmering
Sind Christ und Jud das gleiche Ding,
Verschieden nur durch Zins und Kosten.

City, People’s and Town Hall Park
Your spring was never quite so dark.
The Jews are banished and now it’s said
Their one splash of green lies among the dead.
The moment when the city slumps
Under the weight of Sunday lunch,
They shyly join the queues for trams
To pay respects to half-forgotten grans.
The Valhalla of Simmering, that is
Where Gentile and Jew share privileges
Distinguished only by rent and charges.

On June 1, Hitler officially launched the Kraft-durch-Freude car—the prototype for the Volkswagen Beetle that he had had a hand in designing—by opening the new factory at Helmstedt. Every German was to own a car at a price of 990 RM, a subscription of just 5 RM a week. At the end of the war, a lot of ordinary Germans had paid out to receive their Beetles, but to date no one had received a car.

Some Jews had headed for the big cities of the “old Reich,” where they believed they would be safer, particularly Berlin—a notion especially galling to Goebbels. The gauleiter believed he had a firm ally in Helldorf, who had begun rounding up Jews at the end of May. By June 1 he had bagged three hundred of them before taking temporary leave of the city. In his absence, an outraged Goebbels discovered that Schulenburg had taken it upon himself to let all but six go, retaining only those who were suspected of criminal activity. “You little bureaucrat!” Goebbels harangued him on the telephone, he was so angry that Schulenburg had to hold the receiver well away from his ear. “I was livid. I have never made such a fuss. Helldorf is to return at once and I will give him such a bollocking. You can’t do anything with all these jurists in Police Headquarters.”

On June 10, Goebbels lectured the Berlin police on why the Jews had to go. He did not want them spoiling his fun a second time by releasing them. Helldorf still had the reputation of being a committed Nazi and an intimate friend of Goebbels, but he was playing a double game. At the time of the Fritsch crisis he had joined the opposition. He later lied to Goebbels, claiming that he had purged the police, when he had done no such thing, as Schulenburg remained at his desk.

Other “old” Reich cities began to get tough too. The first synagogue was destroyed in Munich on June 9. Hitler had decided that it was a blot on the landscape when he had visited the new Deutsches Künstlerhaus—the House of German Artists—a few days before. The congregation was given a few hours to empty the building. In Nuremberg, the gauleiter Julius Streicher was anxious to destroy his synagogue. He ran a picture of it on the front page of
Der Stürmer
in July, calling synagogues “dens of thieves” and “Nuremberg’s disgrace.” The “eyesore” came down on August 10.

The Reich was jubilant on June 2: its first lady, Emmy Göring, gave birth to a baby girl. The child was named Edda. The actress was forty-five, and her husband had been shot in the groin during the Beer-Hall Putsch, so there was talk of immaculate conception. In Nuremberg, Streicher put it about that Emmy Göring had been artificially inseminated. There were naturally rumors that the Duce was the father, as Emmy had been in Italy with her husband nine months before. Adolf Hitler sent several hundred roses to the mother. When Göring came to pick up his wife and child from the sanatorium ten days later, the streets were black with cheering crowds. They went directly to show the baby to the Führer, who volunteered to be her godfather. He shared that office with Göring’s old comrade in arms, Pilli Körner. Tributes came in from all over the world, including telegrams from Lords Halifax and Londonderry. Later that month a family gathering in Berlin to celebrate the birth mustered two hundred Görings.

Little Edda had come two weeks late for Mothers’ Day, a festival held on the second Sunday in May. That year the state had decided to honor motherhood, granting crosses of gold, silver, or bronze to women “rich in children.” Candidates were selected by Nazi block or cell leaders. The children had to be legitimate and have Aryan fathers. Childlessness was declared grounds for divorce. There had to be no history of mental illness, no dependence on alcohol, and no known antisocial traits. The crosses were to be worn on important occasions, but mothers were also provided with miniscule replicas for everyday use.