1938 (6 page)

In general it was a mild speech, expressing warm feelings toward Austria. Papen thought Schuschnigg would resign soon. In his journal Goebbels noted, however, that Papen also stood up for religion while he (Goebbels) had been busy closing religious newspapers. He was itching to strike harder. On February 24 he noted a “cheeky speech” made by the cardinal archbishop of Munich, Faulhaber, and mentioned that “our revenge will not be long in coming.”

In the Austrian provinces, jubilant National Socialist demonstrations greeted Hitler’s speech. Reading the newspaper, Jochen Klepper wrote, “Austria was being spoken of as if it were already ours.” From that moment onward, the Austrian city of Graz, which had offered Hitler tremendous support from the outset, together with the rest of the province of Styria, effectively fell to the Nazis.

The British foreign secretary, Eden, resigned on the day of Hitler’s speech. “This is good for us,” noted Goebbels. He wasn’t wrong: The British Foreign Office had already abandoned Austria. Appeasement was now official policy, it seemed, and the British government felt the need to buy Germany off. The ambassador, Henderson, brought the Wilhelmstrasse an offer to return Germany’s African colonies with the exception of South West Africa, which was now owned by South Africa. Goebbels joked that they would offer Germany Portuguese colonies instead. Eventually Henderson reappeared with a suggestion they might like the Congo.

SCHUSCHNIGG HAD conferred a piece of Austria’s sovereignty on the Nazis, but he was able to redeem himself before the Austrian people to some degree with his speech to the Diet on February 24—the anniversary of the Nazi Party’s foundation, so a holy day in Germany. He declared “
Rotweissrot bis in den Tot
” (“Red-white-red until we are dead,” a reference to the colors of the Austrian republic), and in his patriotic announcements in various Austrian cities thereafter, he whipped up a last-ditch enthusiasm for Austria’s independence. The speech drove Hitler into a fury, but Schuschnigg had moved too late. To unite the country he needed to bring the Socialists and the trade unions back. Outlawed under the constitution of the Corporate State, they told him that they could not fight the country’s enemies with their hands tied. Schuschnigg’s resistance, however puny, forced the Nazis to abandon the evolutionary method: “In the end we are really going to have to use force,” Goebbels wrote.

In Berlin, Goebbels noted that more and more legitimists were rallying to Otto. When the crunch came, however, there was no serious attempt by the Austrian Left or the Right to move against the Nazi menace, which might have been brought down by a general strike. Some read the signals correctly: On February 17 the temperamental Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini cabled the Austrian government to inform them he would not be conducting at Salzburg, or anywhere else in Austria. He had flirted with Mussolini, but enough was enough. The musical director of the Vienna Philharmonic, Bruno Walter, urged him to reconsider. On Sunday, February 27, Walter conducted the Vienna Philharmonic for the last time. The music-loving Chancellor Schuschnigg was in his box. He was now at the height of his popularity and received cheers wherever he went.

In Berlin, Goebbels was flexing his muscles in all his domains and playing cat and mouse with the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler again. Goebbels had not foreseen that Austria would fall to Germany so quickly: “I will let him get up again, otherwise he’ll leave for Vienna or Salzburg.” As the Reich’s cultural supremo, he was concerned about painting as well as music. The Degenerate Art exhibition that pilloried avant-garde German painting was opening in the partly ruinous Reichstag building in Berlin, and he was in close contact with the curator, the painter Adolf Ziegler. On Sunday the 27th he went along to have a look. There were new elements to the show, which had opened in Munich the year before. “What rubbish!” noted the former collector of progressive modern artists such as Emil Nolde and Ernst Barlach. Still, he did not feel that the message struck hard enough, and ordered that the paintings be rehung.

In the second week of February, Goebbels was angry that the courts still failed to grasp the fact that they were meant to act according to the wishes of the government. Some homosexual members of the Party had been arraigned in Stuttgart: “I hope there will be the most draconian sentences.” Another case was refusing to go as planned. Pastor Martin Niemöller of the Confessing Church was in the dock for subversion. He had managed, however, to make use of the courtroom and freely air his criticisms of the regime. “Just wait until I get hold of that pig Niemöller. The lawyers are incompetent twits.” Goebbels was particularly livid that the pastor had spoken for seven hours about his “heroic life.” Goebbels succeeded in having the case heard in camera, and Niemöller was transferred from Moabit Prison in Berlin to Sachsenshausen on March 2, after being sentenced to seven months “fortress detention.”

With Niemöller out of the way, the opposition lost one of its most important early leaders, but others arose to take his place. At the very end of the month Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg returned from his skiing holiday in Bergen, and Helldorf put him in the picture over Fritsch. That very day, Monday the 28th, Helldorf informed General von Stülpnagel of the activities of the opposition to date. Fritsch’s agony had not ceased: A few days later he was interrogated in a Wannsee villa. The theme was no longer only his purported homosexuality, but also his political reliability. Fritsch protested that these sessions were a disgrace to him
and
the army.

O
n March 1—Shrove Tuesday—Hermann Göring received his new field marshal’s baton from his Führer. The portly former air ace had failed in his bid to further expand his portfolio of offices. The carnage lay all around him in the form of the shattered careers of Blomberg and Fritsch. He had been fobbed off with a bauble. Klemperer noted bitterly, “They have no sense of how ridiculous they are.”

Austria appeared ripe for the taking, but the Austrian Nazi Arthur Seyss-Inquart warned Berlin that Schuschnigg did not intend to cooperate. Hitler still had a nagging fear that Mussolini would come to Austria’s aid, as Italy had done four years before, after the Nazis murdered Austrian chancellor Dollfuss. Meanwhile his underlings were as disunited as ever, with Goebbels increasingly critical of Himmler’s methods. Berlin’s gauleiter thought the new German police state bred “cowardice, fear and hypocrisy.”

Goebbels was also annoyed by the continued proceedings against Fritsch, which he thought “no longer decent. There is hardly a shred of evidence. In any case, they should never have drawn the Führer into the business.” Hitler had continued to agonize right up to the moment he dismissed his army chief. At the same time, Fritsch’s defense lawyer, Rüdiger von der Goltz, at last learned that the evidence the Gestapo was using against Fritsch was actually from the Rittmeister von Frisch dossier. The following day Helldorf took that file to Hans Oster at the Abwehr. On Sunday, March 6, Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg appeared at Goltz’s house to warn the lawyer that he might be spied on by the Gestapo, who could be bugging his telephone.

The court of honor was to sit in judgment on Fritsch at the Preussenhaus or old House of Lords on the 10th. The judges were Göring, Raeder, and Brauchitsch. Goltz, who had been able to offer Fritsch some solace at the end of February, now possessed the proof that the case was as leaky as a sieve: “Colonel-General,” said Goltz, “you may now celebrate your victory.” The lawyer brought the general a bunch of red roses.

A few days earlier, Schulenburg paid a call on General Erwin von Witzleben to assess the possibility of an armed revolt. Witzleben had been ill in January; now he was fully open to representations of this sort. He told Schulenburg that Colonel Paul von Hase was prepared to march on Berlin with his regiment, and that Witzleben had already talked to him about this very subject. Witzleben was still smarting from the murders of the former Chancellor Schleicher and General von Bredow during the Night of the Long Knives. An old fashioned Prussian officer who wore his heart on his sleeve, he had sounded out several generals the previous year on the need to prevent Hitler from taking Germany to war. As he was fond of saying, “I know nothing about politics but I certainly don’t need to in order to know what I have to do.” He almost certainly made contact with Oster as well, who was able to put him in touch with Schulenburg and another younger member of the Opposition, Ulrich Wilhelm Graf von Schwerin-Schwanenfeld.

When the court of honor convened, Schmidt initially stuck to his story, but when Fritsch’s lawyer proved the case of mistaken identity, Schmidt finally broke down. At last he admitted, “Yes, I was lying.” Some of the leading Nazis begrudgingly admitted that the case against Fritsch was null and void. On April 1, Hitler even went so far as to send Fritsch a goodwill message congratulating him from recovering from an illness. Goebbels rightly called it “cold comfort” for the loss of his entire world.

Austria was falling apart. On March 5, two Nazis, Seyss-Inquart and Glaise-Horstenau were admitted to the Austrian cabinet. The
Deutsche Grüss
, or raised-arm salute, was permitted in private circles. Yet even as Nazis took over his own government, Chancellor Schuschnigg had evidently decided that he could go no further down the road designated by Hitler at Berchtesgaden. He summoned his parliament and told them, “Austria can and will live. It will never voluntarily give up its national existence.” Austria was German, Schuschnigg was convinced of that, but he was not prepared to become part of a National Socialist—or “Prussian”—dominated Germany. The mention of Prussia signaled that Schuschnigg was trying to manipulate his people: There was nothing Prussian about Hitler or his regime, but ever since the victories of Frederick the Great in the eighteenth century and Austrian defeat at Königgrätz in 1866, Austrians had loathed Prussians.

There was a demonstration in Schuschnigg’s favor in Vienna, but Nazis ran up a swastika flag at Graz town hall. The Italian foreign minister, Ciano, heard that Seyss would soon become chancellor: “The Duce is now strongly critical.” Otto von Habsburg implored Schuschnigg to appoint him instead. The writer and director Ernst Lothar went to see Schuschnigg on Sunday, March 6, in the little house he lived in at Upper Belvedere. Lothar voiced the fears of Austria’s Jews in the light of Schuschnigg’s appointing Nazis to his cabinet. The writer suggested that Schuschnigg should make the Jewish conductor Bruno Walter director of the National Opera. The chancellor agreed and asked Lothar to convince Walter. They then lapsed into a pleasant conversation about the conductor’s interpretation of Bruckner.

When Lothar saw Schuschnigg again two days later on Tuesday the 8th, at the Ball of the Vaterländische Front, he and his ministers were dressed in the black uniforms of the Ostmärkische Sturmscharen (storm troopers of the Ostmark, or Austria). Lothar thought they looked like SS men and said so. The Party secretary, the poet Guido Zernatto, merely shrugged his shoulders. Schuschnigg’s new policy had been to remove the attractions of Nazism by offering his people an imitative homegrown version. Schuschnigg had decided on a radical course of action, however: He would hold a plebiscite to determine the majority’s decision on unification with Germany. In this he was possibly encouraged by the French, who wanted evidence that there was no support for a merger. He went to Innsbruck on March 9 for a meeting of the Fatherland Front and made the announcement from the balcony of the royal palace. The poll was to be held on March 13 “for a free and independent, German and Christian Austria.”

Schuschnigg was getting brave, encouraged by the international response to his defiant speech of February 24. His decision to call for a vote came as a bolt from the blue for most. He had sounded out Mussolini on Monday the 7th, but the latter had given him no leave to hope. Mussolini was pleased to hear of Schuschnigg’s resistance, but he was aware that Italy was in no position to fight Germany to maintain Austrian independence. Now there was a risk of losing everything. “
C’è un errore
,” the Duce said. Halifax thought much the same: He dubbed the effort “foolish and provocative.”

Hitler was struck dumb by the news, and initially at a loss to know how to respond. He had sent Ribbentrop to London; now he would pretend that the RAM was seeking British agreement to the Anschluss. Goebbels was also caught unawares: For him, Schuschnigg was a nasty peasant who was trying to catch them out. Once he recovered, however, Hitler wanted to see Spitzy, Ribbentrop’s secretary, and vent his fury about the plebiscite: “Listen to me. This Schoschnik [
sic
], he wants to betray me . . . and by the foulest tricks like public polls, the exclusion of younger voters, an embargo on propaganda from the opposition and so on. That is an outrage, and I shall not tolerate it.” Hitler realized that it was just the provocation he was looking for: The Anschluss would be accelerated.

General Alfred Jodl noted in his diary that the plebiscite would bring in a strong majority for the monarchists who were backing Otto Habsburg. That would have added to Hitler’s fear of a restoration—and others’ as well. The Czechs were petrified of the idea of the return of the monarchy, and Otto’s progress might have destabilized the entire region. The Austrian chancellor sent out feelers to European capitals to see if there was support for military action against Germany. Ciano thought it bad news: “The Nazis are rising against the Plebiscite. . . . Schuschnigg has made a fatal mistake. . . . The Plebiscite bomb is fated to explode in his hands.” The subject was brought up in the French Chambre des Deputés, where there was a desire to take “positive” steps to preserve Austrian independence. In the end they did nothing, and the British Foreign Office was still resigned to what they perceived as Austria’s inevitable fate.