Hitler and the Forgotten Nazis (43 page)

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The Disappointing Spoils of Victory

Of all the Austrians none were more disillusioned by the Anschluss than some of the leading Nazis themselves. Only seven days after the German invasion the American charge in Austria sent this perceptive dispatch to Washington:

Seyss-Inquart himself was duped by the German tactics. He had no idea that the independence of Austria would be extinguished.

He foresaw a National Socialist Austria with himself as Chancellor. . . .

My impression is that the German Government and National Socialist Party in Germany took over Austria by a series of surprise moves which the local National Socialist leaders were obliged to accept with

the best grace they could. Rumors have it that disillusionment in Austrian Nazi circles has not been long in coming. The “plums” are going to the German Party comrades
.
¹¹

The Austrian Nazis discovered just who was in charge already before daybreak on 12 March, well before German troops arrived in Vienna. When Reichsfiihrer SS Heinrich Himmler landed at Vienna’s Aspem airfield at 4:30

a.m.,
he immediately replaced Seyss-Inquart’s choice for state secretary of security, Michael Skubl, with the Austrian SS leader, Ernst Kaltenbrunner. But even Kaltenbrunner, though an SS man, was not fully trusted by Himm-ler’s nominal subordinate and head of the State Police (Gestapo), Reinhard Heydrich. Heydrich put Kaltenbrunner as well as Seyss-Inquart and his circle under constant surveillance beginning on 13 March
.
¹²

What little regard Himmler had for Odilo Globocnik and Friedrich Rainer was revealed when the two Austrian Nazi leaders, who had come to the airport to greet the Reichsfiihrer, were left standing with no means to return to the city. So discouraged were Globocnik and Rainer that a few days later they, along with Major Klausner, flew to Berlin to persuade Hitler that they had played an important role in the takeover of Austria
.
¹³

Their efforts were only partly successful. To be sure, Kaltenbrunner became the Austrian minister of security in Seyss-Inquart’s cabinet and remained in charge of the police in the Ostmark for the next three years. Major Klausner became the education minister and Dr. Jury and Anton Reinthaller also received cabinet posts as did Franz Hueber, who became minister of justice. But other Austrian Nazi leaders, including Rainer, Globocnik, Leopold, and Persche, were left out of Seyss-Inquart’s forty-hour government. Alfred Frauenfeld, whose popularity was feared by Hitler, was even forbidden to return to his native Vienna
.
¹⁴

Although some Austrian Nazis were bitterly disappointed by the Anschluss, it would be grossly inaccurate to say that the majority of the
Parteigenossen
were left empty-handed. Lesser Nazis benefited from the “Aryanization” of Jewish businesses and the civil service. Many Austrian Nazi leaders did get important positions outside Seyss-Inquart’s cabinet. All of the new
Gauleiter
were Austrians. Globocnik became the Gauleiter of Vienna, albeit for only a year. He was later to gain far more notoriety as the man who directed the extermination of the Polish Jews, before he committed suicide in June 1945.
¹⁵
Dr. Jury was named Gauleiter of the Lower Danube. Rainer became the leader of Gau Salzburg, and Carinthia was headed by Hubert Klausner, to name but a few of the more prominent
Gauleiter.
Klausner also became the deputy of Josef Biirckel, who was named “Reichskommissar for the Reunification of the Ostmark with the Reich” on 23 April 1938. Biirckel became the real ruler of the Ostmark until the middle of 1940, because Hitler, as usual, could not be bothered with day-to-day operations in Austria. As for Klausner, his career ended with his sudden death in 1939.
¹⁶
_r

Even though all of the new
Gauleiter
of the Ostmark were Austrians and
Altkampfer,
with the exception of Klausner, none of them had ever held a national office in the Austrian Nazi party; and none at all had ever defied Hitler’s leadership
.
¹⁷
Even Klausner was replaced as Landesleiter of the Austrian NSDAP by Biirckel immediately after the Anschluss.

Vienna was the only Gau after 1939 to be led by a German from the Altreich. But even there the great majority of the subleaders were mostly Austrians, often native Viennese. Only about eleven hundred members of the Vienna municipal employees were ever dismissed by the Germans or just 4.5 percent of the total employed. Of those who were fired, about half were Jewish. The Nazis simply did not have enough experienced administrators to afford a wholesale purge. Most Austrian officials cooperated with the German carpetbaggers, fearing that if they did not their jobs would be in jeopardy. Nevertheless, the Germans never fully trusted them
.
¹⁸

A close examination of the Austrian
Gauleiter
reveals that six of the seven were members of the SS. Only one, the Gauleiter of Upper Austria, August Eigruber, had been a follower of the SA man and former Landesleiter Josef Leopold; and none at all had been an Emigre
.'
⁹
Instead of becoming the chancellor of an
angesschlossen
Austria, Captain Leopold did not even remain the Gauleiter of his native province. Alfred Persche observed that Hitler did not give Leopold or himself the slightest sign of recognition or thanks during a ceremony at the Vienna Rathaus on 14 March. For Persche, this was the most bitter day of his life
.
²⁰

Leopold later complained to Persche that his whole staff was being treated like criminals. When the former SA leader asked the Hauptmann what explanation or reproach Hitler had offered for this treatment, Leopold tearfully replied that the Fuhrer had said nothing to him at all
.
⁸¹
Obviously, the former Landesleiter had still not learned that one did not challenge the authority of the Leader with impunity.

Leopold spent the next three years of his life working in a back room of the party chancellery in Munich, lacking any real power or responsibility. In order to escape this dreary existence he volunteered to fight on the Russian front, where he died as a lieutenant colonel (Oberstleutnant) on 24 June 1941, just two days after the start of the German invasion. For his part, Persche had seen so much Byzantine intrigue and lack of consideration among high party officials that he had no desire to remain a party leader after 1938.
²²

Those Austrian Nazi leaders who had tried to follow an independent policy of one kind or another were given jobs, if at all, outside of the Ostmark after the Anschluss. Leopold’s former deputy, Franz Schattenfroh, became the director of a minor department in the German Foreign Ministry. Anton Rintelen, the would-be Nazi successor of Dollfuss, was simply ignored when the spoils were divided. Theo Habicht was also not permitted to return to Austria and was killed on the Russian front in 1944.
²³

Another former Austrian Nazi leader who had once challenged Hitler’s supremacy, Dr. Walter Riehl, was arrested after the Anschluss but was soon released. His appeal to be reinstated in the party was rejected by a party court, however, because of the anti-Hitlerian tone adopted by the
Deutsche Arbeiter-Presse
during his renewed editorship in 1934-35.
²⁴
Riehl survived the war and lived in Vienna until his death in 1957.

Alfred Frauenfeld was comparatively fortunate, being appointed to the German Reichstag. During the war he became the Generalkommissar for the Crimea. In this capacity he dreamed of transferring to the Crimea the Volga Germans, some South Tyroleans, and even German Russians who had emigrated to the United States. After the war Frauenfeld was arrested on the charge of plotting to overthrow the Bonn government in 1953. He died in Hamburg in 1977.

Hermann Neubacher momentarily became the popular mayor of Vienna after the Anschluss; but his prominence declined rapidly after the Nazi plebiscite in April when the Austro-German union was formally ratified
.
²⁵
He was dismissed in March 1940, possibly in part because of his willingness to aid Jews, but more likely because neither Hitler nor Biirckel wanted a truly popular Austrian Nazi leader
.
²⁶
After the war he worked for the municipal government of Addis Ababa in Ethiopia; he died in 1961.
²⁷
Anton Reinthaller, the peasant leader and minister of agriculture in Seyss-Inquart’s ephemeral cabinet, was the only Austrian Nazi leader to pursue a political career inside Austria after the war. In 1955 he founded a small right-wing party called the Freiheitspartei and died in 1959.
²⁸

As for Seyss-Inquart, he was apparently forced to agree to the Anschluss law, which united Austria and Germany on 13 March 1938, something he had certainly not desired. His request to Hitler, that Austria retain a measure of administrative autonomy, was in practice ignored as Austria was just as thoroughly dominated after 1938 by Berlin and the party’s headquarters in Munich as was the rest of the Greater German Reich. Seyss himself was named by Hitler to be the Reichsstatthalter (governor) of the Ostmark from the Anschluss until 1 May 1939. But in reality he was increasingly subordinate to Josef Burckel
.
²⁹
Seyss-Inquart and his Land government were allowed to

linger on with steadily diminishing powers until March 1940 when the government was abolished altogether. By that time Seyss had been made governor of Poland, and finally, from 1940 to 1945, Reichskommrssar of the Netherlands. Tried at Nuremberg, he was acquitted of the charge of conspiring to prepare an aggressive war, but was convicted as a war criminal for his activities in Holland. He was hanged in 1946.
³⁰

^{CHAPTER XIV HITLER AND THE FORGOTTEN NAZIS}

La Plus qa change, la plus qa meme chose
(the more things change the more they stay the same). One could hardly find a better example of this proverb than in the history of Austrian pan-Germanism and National Socialism. From the formulation of the Linz Program in 1882 until the Anschluss fifty-six years later, most of the basic goals, leadership problems, ideology, and social composition of the proto-Nazis, Nazis, and near Nazis remained remarkably consistent even during very different political circumstances.

As early as Austria’s expulsion from the German Confederation (Deutsche Bund) in 1866, a union (or reunion) with Germany became the fundamental policy of the Austrian pan-Germans. Yet, however anti-Habsburg, anti-Catholic, antiliberal, antisemitic, or antidemocratic they might be, they nevertheless clung to the idea of a special autonomous position for German-Austria in a Greater German Reich. To this program the postwar Austrian Nazis added the idea of preserving the autonomy of their party within the Gesamtpartei.

But neither the German Imperial government during the First World War
¹
nor Adolf Hitler after it displayed any sympathy for these objectives. Hitler was as contemptuous of an independent Austrian Nazi party as he was of Austrian independence itself. He went out of his way to display this attitude in opposing Walter Riehl at the Interstate Nazi meeting in Salzburg in 1923, in his “conversations” with Karl Schulz in 1925-26, at the Weimar party congress in 1926, and in his policy toward the South Tyrol. His humiliating treatment of Schulz in Munich in 1925 was virtually a dress rehearsal for his performance against Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg at Berchtesgaden thirteen years later.

Hitler shackled the Austrian Nazis’ hopes for autonomy by refusing to appoint a strong leader with unambiguous powers. He could hardly have imagined that Friedrich Jankovic, Heinrich Schmidt, or even Hans Krebs

could have provided the Austrian Nazis with the firm leadership they were demanding. Although Theo Habicht was a more effective leader, his powers were diluted by those of Alfred Proksch.

Despite Hitler’s unwillingness to support or even permit ar strong, autonomous Austrian party, the Austrians nonetheless managed to assert themselves, as became painfully evident to Hitler in July 1934. The disastrous Putsch forced the Fuhrer to grant the Austrian Nazis the independence they had long desired, but without most of the financial support they needed to become a major force in Austrian politics. And Hitler did nothing to resolve the leadership quarrels in Austria, refusing to give his unqualified support to any of the rival leaders.

The Austrian Nazis at last had an opportunity to flex their muscles in February 1938 after Hitler decided to speed up the Gleichschaltung of Austria. But even then the Austrians were to be disappointed. Hoping for a mere
threat
of a German invasion, they got instead the real thing. The entrance of German troops extinguished their hopes for a Nazified but autonomous Austrian state.

When it came to uniting behind a single leader, the Austrian Nazis and proto-Nazis were their own worst enemies. Even though they had subscribed to the Fuhrerprinzip ever since the time of Georg von Schonerer, they remained divided into a confusing number of parties, clubs, and leagues, which often fought each other with more fanaticism than they did their common enemies. Schonerer’s insistence on blind obedience alienated even his most loyal supporters. Riehl in 1923 and Schulz three years later proved to be too moderate to retain the support of young Hitler advocates. Jankovic was too old and incompetent, Schmidt too bland, and Krebs too preoccupied with Sudeten affairs to be able to provide the party with capable leadership. The Sudeten-bom Alfred Proksch was regarded as little better than a foreigner,