Hitler and the Forgotten Nazis (19 page)

youth stood in their ranks
²⁷
may not have been far off target. The American historian R. John Rath, who was a graduate student in Austria shortly before and after the Anschluss, estimated that at least 75 percent of the active Nazis were youths, many still in their teens
.
²⁸
   
/

Nazi activism, which stressed quick, radical, and simple solutions to complicated problems instead of hair-splitting ideological debates, had a natural appeal to young minds. The party’s moral absolutes made Nazi youths feel they were being guided by the highest moral principles. In the words of one American historian, “They liked to parade their principles before the tawdry world of social prejudice, selfishness and compromise of their elders
.”
²⁹
The numerous Nazi organizations also gave young people a welcome sense ^of comradeship. Equally attractive for them was the party’s emphasis on charismatic leadership, personal commitment, and a sense of belonging.

Already in 1923 an organization called Deutsche Arbeiterjugend Oster-reichs (German Workers’ Youth of Austria) was founded, although its membership remained small for the next two years. After the split in the Austrian Nazi party, the pro-Hitler faction founded its own Hitlerjugend in 1927. In the years of illegality between 1933 and 1938 the Hitler Youth, to which “every reputable member of the German people of pure Aryan ancestry and between the ages of eight and twenty could belong,” maintained uninterrupted contact with the parent group in Germany
.
³⁰

Just as in the Reich, young boys between eight and fifteen were eligible for the Jungvolk, which engaged in largely nonpolitical activities, such as taking trips together, camping out, and holding weekly club meetings. All of these activities were designed to develop a volkisch way of life
(Lebenserhaltung
). For girls between twelve and twenty-four there was the Bund Deutscher Madel (BDM, or League of German Girls) which had about the same regulations as the HJ. The activities of the BDM, however, were kept strictly segregated from those of the HJ except for certain public events. For the training of future leaders, the Austrian Nazis, like their comrades in Germany, established Fuhrer schools.

Great care was taken by party leaders to make their young followers feel they were a vital part of a movement that was reshaping history. They were given tasks like distributing propaganda for party rallies and helping in the Nazi campaign to eliminate corruption and pornography.

The unhappy interwar economic, social, and political conditions of Austria also heightened the party’s attractiveness for young people. The German-speaking Austrians had for centuries provided by far the highest percentage of the old monarchy’s professional class: public servants, professional soldiers, teachers, lawyers, doctors, and the like. With the war’s end many of these iLgople became superfluous to what was left of Austria. There is no question jjjgj in Austria, at least, the Nazis drew their strongest support from the unemployed, particularly the unemployed intelligentsia
.
³¹

Students

Employ
^ment
difficulties were especially severe for university graduates, of which there were many in Austria owing to the high prewar birthrate. Of course that problem existed in nearly every European country; but it was worse in Austria, where there were 38.3 students for every ten thousand people, or nearly twice the ratio of the next highest country, France, with 20.9.
^3!
And no other European country faced Austria’s staggering economic problems.

The situation was perhaps worst in Vienna where, as we saw in chapter two, Jews enjoyed a near monopoly in the fields of journalism, banking, and medicine. They were also disproportionately strong in the cultural and intellectual life of the Austrian capital
.
³³
Consequently, Jewish graduates, with their personal connections, had a considerably easier time entering the professions than did gentiles
.
³⁴
The Nazis, of course, promised to change all this by expelling Jews from the city and by opening up new economic opportunities through an Austro-German Anschluss. Students in universities and advanced technical and agricultural schools were therefore especially susceptible to National Socialist ideas. Enhancing the appeal was the Nazi Student League (Studentenbund).

As we have already seen, the affinity for right-wing extremism and pan-German nationalism of university students long preceded the First World War
.
³⁵
After the war, when the Nazi party was virtually unknown in Austria, Nazi students at the universities of Graz and Vienna were already so numerous that they succeeded in closing their schools with a series of demonstrations in the fall of 1923. By February 1931 Nazi students at the School of Agriculture in Vienna captured two-thirds of the mandates in the student senate
.
³⁶
Six months later the Nazis won an absolute majority of the votes in Graz at a congress of the Deutschen Studentenschaft (or German Student Association), which included students from Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland. In 1933 the University of Graz became the scene of violent student demonstrations by Nazis. For four hours the university’s main building was turned into a veritable fortress, with only professors and their assistants allowed entrance.

The whole university was decorated with Nazi propaganda, while clashes between students and police occurred in the inner city. Similar episodes
were
also common at the University of Vienna
.
³⁷

The Intelligentsia, Middle Class, and Civil Servants

A major reason for the Nazi proclivities of young academicians can be traced to many of their schoolteachers and professors who were at best indifferent to the new Republic if not actually members of the NSDAP themselves
.
³⁸
The proportion of academicians in the Austrian Nazi party was even higher than in Germany
.
³⁹
Walter Riehl was able to report after the local elections of April 1932 that “the entire Aryan intelligentsia and a large part of the academicians . . . voted for us
.”
⁴⁰

In addition to teachers, the pro-Nazi intelligentsia included lawyers, veterinarians, pharmacists, architects, and engineers. Many of these people, particularly in the small towns, had supported the Heimwehr until about 1932, but thereafter they shifted their support to the National Socialists
.
⁴¹

As with every social group, the Nazis had special organizations for every profession. Teachers were encouraged to join the National Socialist German Teachers’ League (Lehrerbund) to help fight “cultural bolshevism” For physicians there was the NSD Arztebund. Lawyers could find a home in the NS Juristenbund. Industrial workers were organized in NS Betriebszellen. These organizations in turn helped to spread propaganda to non-Nazi professional people.

Other middle-class groups attracted to National Socialism in Austria included private employees, civil servants, hotel keepers, and merchants and small businessmen. Further down the social scale were chauffeurs and railroad and streetcar workers
.
⁴²
German-owned firms or those with German managers were also pro-Nazi. Merchants and artisans, with their traditional anti-Semitism, were particularly susceptible to Nazi propaganda. On the other hand, most big industrialists were staunchly anti-Nazi, sometimes because they were Jewish, but more often because they feared the economic competition an Anschluss would bring
.
⁴³

Civil servants were also likely candidates for Nazi membership. The superabundance of civil servants both before and after the war grew still worse in the Depression years. In 1932 nearly 100,000 government workers were dismissed in order to comply with the stipulations of the Lausanne loan, even though Austria did not receive the money until 1934. Unemployed civil servants were hopeful that an Austro-German Anschluss would put them back

§ftfdrk- Those fortunate enough to retain their jobs often surreptitiously the Nazi party as a kind of insurance policy in case of a Nazi takeover, ^io gain
^{a secon}
d position in the elaborate Nazi hierarchy. These “closet” jjfijyis Were thus in an excellent position to give away vital government secrets.
Ifjji%ierina,
where fewer than 5 percent of the total population were civil lervantsi around 19 percent of the party consisted of public employees. The - risk of being dismissed from their posts during the illegal period, however, paused the number of civil servants and other public employees to decline i^y
around
20 percent from the previous decade, if Linz can be used as 'a model
.
⁴⁴
Railroad workers acted as couriers, customs officials smuggled
propaganda
material and explosives, and Nazi policemen warned their com-ff rades of impending arrest. Nazi attorneys and judges also discriminated in
It favor
of accused party comrades. And in contrast to pre-1933 Germany, Nazis |||could be found in the Austrian civil service from the bottom to the very top,
III I
including the Security Directorate
.
⁴⁵

liil Hie middle-class nature of Austrian Nazi support was clearly revealed in Voting patterns. Already in 1930, when the party was still very small, it did ,!'v
^!
:• best in provincial capitals and county seats. The Nazi vote in Klagenfurt, Graz, and Linz was two to four times the national average
.
⁴⁶

I;:
^:!

-
'

Peasants and Miners

I The Nazis were particularly eager to win over the peasants. Nazi ideology held the peasantry to be “the backbone of Austria.” It was a matter of urgency that they be won over to the Nazi cause. Habicht’s
Dienstbuch
emphasized in 1932 that “if we have seized the mass of the peasants we have the whole land and with it the state
.”
⁴⁷
This was not to be an easy task, however.

Until the beginning of 1931 Austrian peasants and agricultural workers had been solid supporters of the Christian Social party and the Heimwehr. But with the deepening of the Great Depression, Nazi strength in rural areas began to increase, above all in Styria and Carinthia
.
⁴⁸
A Bauemschaft (Peasants’ Association) was organized for the many peasants who could not afford the party’s membership dues. A legal and later illegal newspaper supplement called
Bauernsturm
painted a rosy picture of agricultural conditions in Germany. It may have been such stories that encouraged many farm workers to seek employment in the Reich in the mid-1930s. When they returned to Austria, well clothed and with money in their pockets, they were full of enthusiasm for the new Germany. Finally, mine workers, especially in north-

em Styria, were also hard hit by the economic crisis and began to join th* Nazis in ever-increasing numbers during the early 1930s.
⁴
,
⁹
Economic considerations, though extremely important, were not the only reasons for the Nazis’ growing popularity in rural districts. If Austrian pea*! ants were traditionally Catholic, many others were traditionally anticlerical 1 and deeply resented the Church’s increasing political influence during the! Dollfuss and Schuschnigg regimes. Growing Nazi strength among the peas-f antry was demonstrated in local elections in early 1933 and in a more alarming ) way during the Nazi Putsch of 1934.
⁵⁰

Protestants

An entirely different kind of pro-Nazi group was the Austrian Protestants. Numbering only 248,600 in 1933,
⁵¹
they were the remnant of a once far larger minority that had barely survived the persecutions of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. Although Protestants were officially tolerated by Joseph II in 1781, discrimination continued at the local level. Therefore, an antigovem-ment tradition arose among Protestants, which was first exploited politically by Georg von Schonerer in his anti-Habsburg
Los von Rom
movement.

The anticlerical Nazis, following in the footsteps of Schonerer, had a similar success identifying Protestantism with pan-Germanism, promoting conversions, and in securing the support of many longtime Protestants. Within a span of just one year, 1933-34, the number of evangelical Christians increased by 24,357, or six times the annual rate for the previous ten years.
^s
* In the local elections of April 1932 the only community where the Nazis gained an absolute majority was the Carinthian town of Weissbriach, which was
88
percent Protestant. Of the 13 Carinthian communities where the Nazis polled between 30 and 40 percent of the vote, 4 had Protestant majorities even though there were only 13 such towns in the province out of a total of 249.”

Certainly aiding the Nazi cause among Austrian Protestants was the repeated emphasis by the Dollfuss and Schuschnigg regimes on the
Catholic
(not just Christian) character of the Austrian state. Nazi propaganda was quick to claim that government measures taken against individual Protestant clergymen, who were allegedly
100
percent National Socialists, were directed against Protestants as a whole. Protestants themselves had the impression that they were all assumed to be friends of the Reich and enemies of the Austrian state
.
⁵⁴