1938 (27 page)

On June 2, Schuschnigg, in Gestapo custody at the Hotel Metropole, had been equally astonished and delighted to learn that he got married—by proxy. His brother had stood in for him. A package arrived containing a wedding ring. His pleasure was interrupted by the shouts of his tormenter informing him that he should have hanged Innitzer rather than Planetta, the man who killed his predecessor, Dollfuss. The cardinal had failed to placate the Nazis. Schuschnigg cried out rather pathetically, “But Innitzer never killed anybody.”

The temptation to move against the clergy must have been strong. The Nazis were jealous of the wealth of the Austrian Church. In the diocese of St. Pölten alone, the bishop and eleven abbeys owned 35,439 hectares of land (some of it in Romania), and there were over a hundred well-endowed abbeys and convents. Their first move was to secularize education on July 19 and move state schools into the vacant spaces. On July 24 Hitler’s secretary Lammers informed Bürckel that there was no concordat operating in Austria, and he could do what he liked. On the 27th, the Nazi authorities began to take over the Cistercian abbey of Lilienfeld and majestic Melk on the Danube. With time they would fill up with soldiers, POWs, and injured soldiers. A NAPOLA was established in the great Benedictine abbey of Göttweig.

After vacationing on his yacht, Göring returned to work on July 8th and was informed of the latest intelligence vis-à-vis the Western powers. Britain was opposed to war, and he did not think the French would fight on their own. Chamberlain was still making noises in the House about finding a solution to the Sudeten question. America was unpredictable. The Jews were dismissed as troublemakers. The airplane manufacturers Claude Dornier, Ernst Heinkel, and Willi Messerschmidt were told that the war with Czechoslovakia would begin with a provocation, but the world would see all too clearly that the Germans were to blame. The compensation was in the form of markets: Germany would control them, and the industrialists would be richer than ever.

The next day he entertained the Italian chief of staff, Alberto Pariani, and repeated his claim that no one would go to the aid of the Czechs. General Pariani disagreed and warned Göring that he needed to slay the enemy with one blow. On July 11, Göring held a conference on securing manpower for the air industry. The problem was acute in Germany and would result in the drafting of millions of slave laborers to leave the Germans free to fight. That day he conferred with a building contractor to find out if the new autobahns might be used as emergency runways. He discussed airraid shelters and underground factories. He was back at the grindstone.

As early as June 16, Hitler had reiterated his intention of grasping Prague but was isolated within his own entourage. He had support from Goebbels—who worshipped his master—the bellicose Ribbentrop, and to a more limited degree Himmler, but Göring was reluctant to commit Germany to war. He was behind the dispatch of Hitler’s former commanding officer and present adjutant, Captain Fritz Wiedemann, to London on July 18. Wiedemann was a succession of things, including a prizefighter and a roué. Göring wanted to avail himself of the services of Wiedemann’s lover, the remarkable Princess Stephanie zu Hohenlohe-Schillingfürst, a fortyseven-year-old Viennese Jewess who had charmed her way into Hitler’s intimate circle and who lived in London’s Dorchester Hotel.

Princess Stephanie was well-known to Halifax and was able to introduce Wiedemann to the British foreign secretary. She was summoned to Karinhall to prepare the way for a visit by Göring or a possible state visit from Hitler. Hitler smiled on the plan, but Ribbentrop was naturally not to hear of it. Göring told Princess Stephanie that “it was no bluff, Hitler was going to declare war soon.” Halifax was worried about receiving Göring, who was rather too large to bring over discreetly. He met Wiedemann at his residence in Eaton Square on July 18, with a nod and a wink from the prime minister. Wiedemann told him that Hitler would “solve” the Sudeten problem by violence if Britain failed to mediate.

As he flew home, Wiedemann saw an article in the
Daily Herald
that alluded to his secret mission. The author was another Viennese Jew, Willi Frischauer, whose brother, Eddie, would eventually marry Stephanie’s half-sister Gina Kaus. The article hit the Wilhelmstrasse like a sixteen-inch shell, making Ribbentrop predictably furious. It excited almost as much fury in Prague, with the minister in London, Jan Masaryk, penning an angry letter to Halifax claiming there was no decency in the world and that he was being manipulated by a “Jewess.” Wiedemann went to the Berghof to face the music. Hitler was walking with Unity Mitford when he arrived. Göring’s London visit had already been ruled out. Ribbentrop forced Wiedemann to write out a pledge never to meddle in foreign affairs again. He was eventually banished to San Francisco, where he was appointed consul general. Princess Stephanie survived the storm for the time being. She was awarded the country seat of theater director Max Reinhardt, Schloss Leopoldskron near Salzburg, where she entertained lavishly.

The Munich-based festival of German Art opened on July 8. This year there was a reception for the artists favored by the regime and a chance to see the Third Reich’s latest monument: the Führerbau, which would come into its own at the Conference in September. Karl Krauss conducted a performance of
Lohengrin
at the Staatsoper the next day, when the Führer in person graced the Reichs Conference on the Arts, at which the painter Adolf Ziegler presented his report on the artistic health of the nation. The solemn opening of the Great Art Exhibition occurred on the 10th, providing Hitler with the chance to make another speech. Despite early rain outside, a procession of floats, historic costumes, and animals thronged the streets for the “Day of German Art.” Goebbels found the costumes effective and admired the pretty women.

The year before Hitler had issued guidelines to German artists: They were not to use any color other than those perceived by the human eye—a reference to the willful pigmentation of Expressionists and Fauves. Goebbels must have winced. Not so long ago he had to take down his Noldes because the Führer had voiced his displeasure at seeing them on his walls. In 1938, Hitler took aim at Jews, Dadaists, and Cubists. The exhibition was revolutionary that year for containing a brace of industrial scenes among the Germanic landscapes, Nordic nudes, and scenes of brave SA men toiling for national glory. There were the usual works by Ziegler, displaying the full-frontal German womanhood, which had led to his being dubbed the Master of German Pubic Hair, and sculptures by Josef Thorak, known as “Professor Thorax” as a result of his obsession with the bodybuilder physique.

Hitler lent huge support to the exhibition, buying no fewer than 202 works for his own use or for the various Party buildings at a cost of over half a million RM. It transpired that the modern works went mostly into storage, as Hitler preferred old German masters for his various homes. Goebbels prudently followed suit, but there was no danger of him buying any Noldes anymore: They were exhibited at the Degenerate Art show.

Munich was the capital of “German” art. The House of German Art played host every winter to an exhibition of architecture and arts and crafts as well. It had been designed by Hitler’s former favorite architect Troost and officially opened the year before. The Munichois were quick to dub the building “Athens Railway Shed” or the “White Pudding Station.” Troost had committed suicide in 1934, but his widow, Gerdy, remained a member of Hitler’s circle. Despite the rigid limits Hitler had imposed on the German artist’s imagination, there were rich pickings for painters and other artists in the Third Reich. In 1938 alone there were 170 competitions with prizes totaling 150 million RM. The sculptor Arno Breker earned nearly 100,000 RM that year.

After the art show, it was time for music. Following on the success of the “degenerate art” exhibition the previous year, there was a “degenerate music” show in Düsseldorf. Jewish composers were pilloried along with those who founded their rhythms on jazz or adhered to the twelve-tone scale. The exhibition was mounted by Severus Ziegler, the manager of the Weimar Theatre and brother of Adolf, who had put on the degenerate art show. The Ziegler brothers had the full support of Goebbels. In May 1938 the Nazis tried to make a little money out of their
salon des refusés
and had created the Commission for the Evaluation of Confiscated Works of Degenerate Art to sell them to foreign buyers or exchanged “for good masters”: “We are hoping in this way to make a little money from this manure.” What failed to sell was burned in March 1939.

Richard Strauss was not considered degenerate, but Hitler did not care for his work. On July 24, his new opera
Der Friedenstag
was premiered as part of the festival. It was possibly the last international cultural gathering in Germany before Allied soldiers arrived in 1945.
Der Friedenstag
was one of two one-act operas Strauss staged that year. Set during the Thirty Years War, it ended with a paean to peace—not exactly what Hitler had in mind. Even worse, the original idea had been Stefan Zweig’s, who was not only a Jew but a pacifist. Hitler did not attend.

Goebbels was at the height of his popularity. In Innsbruck he was showered with flowers. On the 17th, Goebbels proceeded to his alma mater, Heidelberg, for the theater festival. A performance of
Faust
was staged in the castle courtyard, with Werner Krauss as Mephisto, Werner Hinz as Faust, and Maria Wimmer as Gretchen. Goebbels went on to Linz, where he dutifully took the trip to Leonding to visit his master’s childhood home and the cemetery where his mother and father were buried: “Eery feeling that the parents of such a great historical genius rest here. I stayed standing by their graves for a long time.” In the village he met people who had been at school with Hitler—he had always been a natural leader.

The Salzburg Festival had gone ahead, but without the famous director Max Reinhardt or the conductors Bruno Walter and Toscanini. Furtwängler, however, had come to the rescue and agreed to conduct four performances of
Die Meistersinger
—surely the most frequently aired opera of the Third Reich. Goebbels thought the Festival Theater “dreadful . . . proper Viennese kitsch. . . . It should be pulled down.” The conductor merited praise, but the rest of the performance was awful. Meanwhile, Hitler’s favorite composer, Lehár, was still having a hard time. He had lost his librettist to Buchenwald and was having problems keeping the police off his Jewish wife.

The Führer may have preferred operetta, but as far as his public persona was concerned, Wagner captured the German soul. On the 23rd, Hitler and Goebbels met up at the Bayreuth Festival. The Führer was accompanied by a squad of his Leibstandarte, as he felt that his proximity to the Czech frontier merited particular attention to his security. As it was, 1,500 Sudeten Germans had crossed the border to cheer on their
real
Führer—Henlein was merely his stooge.

Hitler was jubilant and loquacious with Goebbels between visits to the opera house on the Green Hill. It was decided that Wagner was wrong for Salzburg and that it should focus on Mozart. The talks between the two men were by no means restricted to musical matters. Wiedemann was in London buying time. The generals in Berlin were “shitting themselves” because Hitler was going to lead them to war. He told Goebbels he approved of his campaign against the Jews. In ten years he would have got rid of them. The princes were also giving him trouble, particularly Weimar and Dessau. The fruit of the discussion was a wave of arrests on July 30 as the Gestapo mopped up well-known monarchists.

The program that year contained guidelines on how Wagner’s music was to be interpreted by National Socialists.
Lohengrin
taught Germans to be hard, while Hans Sachs in
Die Meistersinger
made it clear that they were to honor all things German.
The Ring
was naturally about the seriousness of the racial problem, while
Parsifal
was not about Christianity at all, rather “the struggle towards a life made divine.” Emil Preetorius had designed some radical sets for the production of
Tristan und Isolde
, which both Goebbels and the Führer disliked. Max Lorenz was a “fat and ursine” Tristan, even if he sang magnificently. Goebbels thought the sets for
Parsifal
awful, and the sacred spear toppled over during the performance.