Hitler and the Forgotten Nazis (17 page)

While the Heimwehr was performing intellectual gymnastics in an attempt to pacify its two disparate wings, the Austrian Nazi party was growing at an ever accelerating rate. Whereas it had had only 4,400 members in June 1928, it could boast over 43,000 in January 1933. This spurt was but a prelude to the dramatic progress it achieved following Hitler’s appointment as German chancellor on 30 January 1933. In the next four and a half months another 25,000 Austrians rushed to join the NSDAP
.
⁵¹

With the anticlerical and anti-Socialist Nazis now controlling the German government, Austria’s two largest parties, the Christian Socials and the Social Democrats, dropped their longstanding demand for an Austro-German Anschluss. Because the Greater German People’s party and the Agricultural League had already been decimated by the Nazis, this left the NSDAP as the only major Austrian party still demanding the Anschluss. Anyone regarding the union of the two German-speaking countries as Austria’s most important objective had little choice but to join the Nazis.

As early as the summer of 1932 the so-called German Legion of Honor, a veterans’ organization whose members were in the federal army, police, gendarmerie, and judicial system, asked Gauleiter Frauenfeld to join the

NSDAP. Another group that originated as a veterans’ organization, the Front Fighters’ Association, was also rapidly losing its membership to the Nazis during the same summer.    '

Following Hitler’s takeover of power the Styrian Heifhatschutz, not surprisingly, was the first important pan-German unit to “recognize the signs of the times
.”
⁵²
On 9 March 1933 the Heimatschutz joined with the Nazis to form the “Pan-German Front.” In quick succession other pan-German Austrian groups now rushed to jump on the Nazi bandwagon. On 18 April the Front was enlarged by the paramilitary Bund Oberland of Tyrol and a few days thereafter by the “German Employees Union” along with thirty
Ortsgruppen
of the Upper Austrian Heimwehr. The immediate objective of this coalition was the creation of a “strong government of national concentration
.”
⁵³
To solidify their new partnership, the Styrian Heimatschutz concluded a second Kampfgemeinschaft with the Austrian Nazis in the Upper Styrian town of Liezen on 22 April. As late as January 1933, Walter Pfrimer’s successor as leader of the Heimatschutz, Konstantin Kammerhofer, had declared that any Heimatschutz member who joined the Nazis was a “traitor.” Four months later, his newspaper,
Der Panther,
was calling every Austrian who opposed the Liezen Agreement “not only a traitor to the eternal idea of German unity . . . but an idiot
.”
⁵⁴
The Liezen pact decisively shifted the balance of power within the various pan-German groups in favor of the Nazis. The isolated GVP (and later the Landbund) thereafter felt compelled to line up with the Nazis themselves
.
⁵⁵
The GVP had been declining disastrously ever since “peaking” in the national elections of 1930 when, together with its Landbund ally, it had collected

472,000 votes
.
⁵⁶
The rise of other, far more radical, pan-German groups proved to be its undoing. The Heimwehr’s Komeuburg Oath, for example, contained many ideas long advocated by the GVP. Like the Heimwehr, the GVP was a loose coalition of heterogeneous social groups and several older national organizations. Its composition prevented the party from taking a strong stand on anything positive except the Anschluss. By the same token the GVP was never a party of members whose dues could support it, but simply a party of voters which, from the beginning, required outside financial support, above all from Germany. It was also the only significant party in Austria without its own press.

An intensive love-hate relationship developed between the GVP and the NSDAP (starting with the parliamentary elections of 1930), just as occurred between the Nazis and the Heimwehr. The Nazis and GVP were in obvious agreement over the Anschluss question, and the GVP tolerated Nazi attacks on parliamentarianism. But the GVP differed sharply with the Nazis con-

jlK
.

j!;j: corning the Fiihrerprinzip, the South Tyrol question, and the Nazis’ utopian nil. Economic thought. The GVP (Greater Germans) tried to form an electoral |r| coalition with the Nazis before the April 1932 election, but Habicht, probably i||;i wisely, turned the offer down. Younger members of the GVP wanted to ill subordinate the party to the NSDAP, but in a split resembling the Nazi schism
₀
f 1925-26, older members rejected this idea
.
⁵⁷

from late 1930 to early 1933 the Nazis regarded the GVP as one of their chief recruiting grounds. They frequently disrupted the latter’s meetings. The
Greater
Germans reacted by attacking the “Hitler papacy” (their own hierarchy was never very disciplined) and the Nazis’ sell-out of the South Tyrol
.
⁵⁸
But it was all to no avail. The GVP’s losses to the NSDAP in the local elections of 1932 were catastrophic. In Vienna alone the 124,000 votes they received in 1930 shriveled away to a paltry 9,000 two years later
.
⁵⁹
Hopes for
^!
a renaissance such as that experienced in November 1932 by the GVPs brother party in Germany, the German National People’s party (DNVP), proved illusory.

In order to salvage something from the wreckage, the GVP, after long negotiations, joined the Pan-German Front on 15 May 1933. Like the Styrian Heimatschutz, the Greater Germans preserved their organizational independence. But the Nazis were by far the biggest gainers. The GVP promised to push for new elections and the victory of the national movement. Until that day arrived, however, the Nazis gained a new respectability in their association with the GVP and its relatively distinguished membership. More specifically, the Nazis could utilize the still considerable number of GVP deputies in Parliament and in those cities and states where there had not been recent elections
.
⁶⁰
These men were especially useful as intermediaries between the Nazis and the government after June 1933 when both the Nazis and the Styrian Heimatschutz were outlawed. The Nazis’ new respectability also made it easier for still more middle-class professional people to switch their allegiance to the Nazis. When the Nazis increasingly resorted to the use of terror in the late spring and summer of 1933, some members and former members of the GVP began to dissociate themselves from the NSDAP. But they were driven right back into the Nazi camp when Dollfuss outlawed the remaining political parties and their public officeholders in 1934.
⁶¹

The Pan-German Front was joined in May 1934 by the Landbund, or what was left of it. A purely political and democratic party made up of peasants, mostly in Styria and Carinthia, its pan-Germanism and anti-Marxism made it vulnerable to the Nazi siren song. Rumor had it that the functionaries of the Agricultural League received 340,000 Schillings (or $38,200) in exchange for making common cause with the Nazis
.
⁶²
The Landbund was finally dissolved

84 - Hitler and the Forgotten Nazis

by the government in August 1934 because of its close association with the NSDAP
.
⁸³

The Pan-German Front proved highly useful to the Nazis. Not only were the GVP and Landbund public officeholders able to remain active until 1934, long after the NSDAP and the Styrian Heimatschutz had been outlawed, but the weapons and military experience of the Heimatschutz were also crucial to the Nazi attempt to overthrow the Dollfuss government in July 1934.

The two years between the spring of 1931 and the spring of 1933 thus marked a decisive turning point in the history of the Austrian Nazi party. The leadership problem, which had severely hampered its growth during the preceding five or six years, had been resolved by the appointment of Theo Habicht. The electoral victories of the Nazis in Germany had provided an inspiring example, which their Austrian comrades were eager and to a considerable degree able to emulate. The worsening of the Great Depression again made an Anschluss with Germany seem an attractive alternative to Austria’s alleged economic nonviability.

But at the very time the Anschluss was reviving as a major issue, Austria’s two largest parties became alarmed by the treatment of their brother parties in Germany and eliminated the Anschluss plank from their platforms. The Austrian NSDAP was therefore left as one of the country’s few parties still unequivocally in favor of the Anschluss and the only one that had a realistic chance of implementing it in the near future. Consequently, Austria’s pan-Germans, who had previously been scattered throughout all of the country's political parties, now gravitated to the Nazis. So with virtually all the pan-German Right either in the ranks of the Austrian NSDAP or closely allied to it by the spring of 1933, the Nazis were justifiably confident about their prospects for seizing power.

CHAPTER VI PORTRAIT OF A PARTY

Nazi Optimism in the Spring of 1933

With Adolf Hitler and the Nazis securely in power in Germany and with the pan-German Right in Austria largely “captured,” Austrian Nazis in the spring of 1933 had every reason to believe that it was just a matter of ti
_me
—and a short time at that—until they too would be at the gates of power. To be sure, caution had to be taken not to provoke an intervention by the anti-Anschluss powers (Italy, France, and Britain) at a time when the Third Reich was still militarily weak. But the “inspiring example set by the course of events in the Reich
,”
¹
along with the almost scientifically organized propaganda, would inevitably produce the same results in Austria as they had in Germany.

Hitler himself must have shared this optimism in early 1933. Two prominent historians of Nazi Germany, the American Gerhard Weinberg and the German Jens Petersen, both believe that Hitler, as chancellor, at first viewed Austria not as a foreign, but as a domestic problem to be solved in the same way he had achieved power in Germany: through agitation, elections, and coalition governments
.
²

The Nazis’ dream was soon to be shattered by the Austrian chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss, and his successor, Kurt von Schuschnigg, as well as by the constitutionally weak, but nevertheless determined, anti-Nazi president, Wilhelm Miklas. Although there are many parallels between the histories of interwar Germany and Austria, there was no Heinrich Briining in the Alpine republic to dissolve Parliament prematurely and call for parliamentary elections in the middle of the Great Depression. There was no Paul von Hindenburg to appoint a Nazi chancellor in 1933. And there was no Reichstag fire to create mass hysteria at a time when the Austrian Nazis were strong. So instead of residing comfortably in the federal chancellery, the Austrian Nazis

*

Legal Propaganda

To a substantial degree Nazi popularity in Austria, as in Germany, was the product of propaganda, both legal and illegal. Hitler discovered that one way to combat radical Marxist propaganda was by a still more radical propaganda from the far Right. The rational and peaceful atmosphere of bourgeois party meetings, as Hitler noted in
Mein Kampf,
would never appease the fears and hopes of the previously nonpolitical lower-middle class
.
⁶
The Nazis offered instead all kinds of exciting entertainment. Their torchlight processions, huge rallies illuminated by bonfires and searchlights, and enormous funerals for “martyred” heroes were all comparatively well known and, particularly in rural areas, provided a welcome alternative to the usual fare of motion pictures and an occasional play.

Not so well known, however, was the Nazis’ attempt to bring high or at least middle-brow culture to the masses. This tactic involved so-called German Evenings, which might consist of military marches, readings from Goethe, German Lieder, Nazi party songs, violin music, and humorous impersonations
.
⁷
Similarly, there were also concerts, plays, films, and slide
ij^pwings, all
designed to prove that the Nazis were interested in
Kultur
and, I'tiwfe subtly, to demonstrate the similarity of the fine arts in Austria and j^y:.Th«e affairs also strengthened the Nazi claim that their movement [j'ij liras'
Classless
and nonpartisan. In so doing they hoped to attract the attention I^f those people who ordinarily were not interested in party politics. The
1
;!!••"
6
ennan
^Evenin
S
^s
’ ^
^we
^
^{as vaf}
i°
^us
festivals and memorials, also helped to
verify
the Nazis’ contention that they did not simply want to gain power, like |!lf ievery other party, but also wanted to create a new style of life
.
⁸
gg;i' part of the Nazis’ success was a matter of timing. The beginning of their meteoric rise virtually coincided with the rapid improvement of mass com
munications
after 1929. The newspaper press was, of
course,
available to the ptozis almost from the beginning. But the introduction of sound films, the
radio,
airplanes, and perhaps most of all, loudspeakers, made it possible for :Nazi propaganda to reach a far larger audience than ever before at the very