Hitler and the Forgotten Nazis (5 page)

The refusal of the Socialists to enter any national government after 1920, together with their inability to win an absolute majority of the votes, meant that the Christian Socials became, by default, the ruling party for most of the First Republic. It also meant that the Socialists lost their influence in the army, police, and civil bureaucracy, something which cost them dearly in future years.
³⁴

The CSP likewise never succeeded in winning an absolute majority of the ballots. Consequently, it was forced to form unstable coalition governments vvith smaller bourgeois parties like the Greater German People’s party (Gross-
deutsche
Volkspartei or GVP) and the Agricultural League (Landbund). Every new government was therefore a compromise, which made an energetic policy nearly impossible. Moreover, unlike the SDP, the Christian Socials were not socially homogeneous, consisting instead of genuine democrats, monarchists,
capitalists,
small shop owners, pan-Germans, and, above all, peasants. Only with great difficulty could these groups be held together; indeed, some of them broke away to join the Nazis in 1932 and thereafter.

The prospects for success of the new Austrian democracy were, all things considered, tenuous at best. It was bom in an atmosphere of military defeat, political catastrophe, and patriotic humiliation. Conservatives associated it with socialism. The majority of its citizens doubted the permanence and viability of the state. On the fundamental questions of social welfare, church-state relations, and the Anschluss the rival political parties could reach no consensus. Extremists saw their rivals as heretics to be eliminated by one means or another. To top it all, the Great Depression struck Austria in 1930 with an especial ferocity. Thus, by the early 1930s many Austrians were prepared to believe that democracy was corrupt, inefficient, and doomed to failure. Only a fascist or semifascist system, an Anschluss with Germany, or both, could save their homeland. Eager to offer itself as the country’s savior was the Austrian Nazi party.

CHAPTER II NAZIS AND PROTO-NAZIS: FROM EMPIRE TO REPUBLIC

Austrian National Socialism, like the Anschluss movement, had roots that were well established before the First World War. Although the origins of any ideology are notoriously difficult to trace, it would be reasonably safe to say that there were three major ingredients of Austrian Nazism: political anti-Semitism, pan-Germanism, and the clash between the rising national aspirations of the long-submerged Czechs of Moravia, especially Bohemia, and the desire of the German-speaking inhabitants of those crown-lands to preserve their superior economic and political position. A similar, though somewhat less intense, conflict occurred in Styria and Carinthia between the German- and Slovene-speaking inhabitants of those crownlands.

Austrian Anti-Semitism

Although religious anti-Judaism in Austria dates back to the Middle Ages, modem racial anti-Semitism has its Austrian origins in the emancipation of the Jews, completed in 1867,
¹
and the Industrial Revolution, which followed. These phenomena were accompanied by a rapid migration of Jews from the monarchy’s eastern provinces and the Russian Empire to Vienna. Whereas the capital city counted only 6,217 Jews out of a total population of 476,220 in 1857, by 1910 the comparative figures were 175,294 and 2,031,420.® Thirteen years later, following a mass immigration of war refugees, the city’s Jewish population reached 201,510 or 10.8 percent of the total population of 1,865,780. The Austrian capital now had the third largest Jewish population of any city in Europe.
³
Outside Vienna, however, the Jewish population was minuscule, amounting to well under 20,000 after the war. Thus, Austria’s Jewish population in the 1920s was only 3 percent of the

Nazis and Proto-Nazis - 17

country’s total.
⁴
But this did not prevent a virulent brand of anti-Semitism
from
existing in the provinces.

Emancipation
and
migration
to the big cities of the Empire were accompanied by a remarkably rapid increase in Jewish involvement in higher education. By 1914, 27.5 percent of the students at the University of Vienna were
of
Jewish extraction, more than th/ee times their proportion of the city’s
population. Almost
35 percent of
the
students at the city’s elite secondary schools, the
Gymnasia,
were also Jewish in 1913. On the other hand, the fact that Jewish enrollment was low, only 2.95 percent, at Vienna’s School of
Agriculture
(Hochschule
fur
Bodenkultur) in 1910, was seen by anti-Semites as proof that Jews were averse to dirt and manual labor.
⁵

Austrian Jews used their newly acquired advanced education to enter the so-called free professions in large numbers. Whereas there were only 33 Jewish lawyers in Vienna in 1869, there were 394 of them in 1893 out of a total of 683. In the latter year, 48 percent of the medical students in Vienna were Jewish.
⁶
A large minority of the city’s university instructors were also Jewish. An English author estimated in 1913 that no fewer than 75 percent of the Viennese journalists were Jewish.
⁷
The editors of Socialist newspapers were nearly all Jewish. Hence, there was some truth in the Nazis’ description of the Viennese press as being “Jewish.” Yet the charge overlooked the fact that Jewish journalists, like other Jews, were hardly monolithic in their political views. Some even wrote for newspapers that were notoriously anti-Semitic.
⁸
Austrian anti-Semites also ignored the fact that Jews made up hardly more than one-fourth of 1 percent of postwar Austria’s civil service.

The coming of the Industrial Revolution to Austria was to a large extent a Jewish enterprise. Most of the country’s bankers and many of its industrialists (especially in textiles, paper milling, and coal mining) were Jewish.
⁹
To a skilled artisan, the big industrialist with mass production seemed like a threat to his very existence. The same feeling prevailed among lower-middle-class merchants toward wealthy department-store owners. Even the poor Jewish peddler, though scarcely a product of the Industrial Revolution, was viewed by gentile businessmen as an unfair competitor. Certain trades, like furniture retailing and advertising, were 85 to 90 percent in Jewish hands by the eve of the World War.
¹⁰
To all who suffered from the inroads of capitalism it was tempting to believe that capitalism was nothing more than a Jewish invention.

The cultural and economic prominence of Austro-Hungarian Jews made anti-Semitism even more virulent in the Dual Monarchy than in Germany. And nowhere was the strength of anti-Semitism more apparent than in the Austrian universities. Indeed, it was the Austrian universities that helped to make anti-Semitism respectable throughout the country.
¹¹

*

Georg von Schdnerer and Austrian Pan-Germanism

/

Students at the universities of Vienna and Graz were among the first Austrians to adopt both racial anti-Semitism and pan-Germanism as the bases for a modem rightist movement fanatically opposed to liberalism and laissez faire capitalism. After 1859 nationalistic social fraternities called
Burschenschaften
began to spread from Germany into Austria to form the earliest focal points of pan-German activity. Pan-Germanism no doubt seemed relevant to the German-speaking students at these institutions, because tkeir schools registered thousands of Slavic- and Italian-speaking students from the monarchy’s crownlands. So zealous were these young hotheads that when they could not convert fellow students to their ideal of an all-German Reich dominated by Prussia, they used less peaceful means to try to destroy all other student organizations. Their trademark was the saber scar. “Vienna and Graz were the earliest and always remained the chief centers of pan-Germanism.”
¹²
At the heart of the students’ political ideology was the assumption that German national unity was of supreme importance in every political question. After Austria’s defeat by Prussia in 1866, and Prussia’s victory over France in 1870, it became clear that German unity could best be achieved by Bismarck’s new Reich. What now stood in the way of this goal was the existence of Imperial Austria. All political activity therefore was directed toward Austria’s destruction. The pan-German students developed a veritable cult of Prussia, which led to speeches and pamphlets in the 1870s glorifying service to the German state. They worshiped force, had contempt for humanitarian law and justice, and criticized parliamentary government and capitalism as selfish, “individualistic,” and antinational. In keeping with their idolization of all things “German,” the pan-German students also sought to purify university life by eliminating all “foreign influence,” which in practice often meant the expulsion of religious and ethnic Jews, as well as Slavs, from their nationalistic societies.

About 1876, contact was made between the pan-German fraternities of Vienna and Georg Ritter von Schdnerer (1842-1921), at that time a left-wing Liberal deputy in the Austrian Parliament. Schdnerer, who in many respects might be called the “father,” or at least the “grandfather,” of National Socialism, was already well-known in Austria for his bellicose German nationalism and soon made a powerful impact on the pan-German students. He taught them the importance of the social question for the political struggle and revealed how they could persuade the “masses” to defend German culture.
¹³

The
spiritual
leader of the German national movement in Austria since the time of his election to the Lower House of Parliament in 1873, Schonerer was an
extreme
example of the reaction by German-speaking Austrians
to
the
even-handed
treatment Prime Minister Eduard Taaffe tried to mete out to the Slavs of the Austrian Empire during his ministry between 1879 and 1893- Taaffe’s extension of political representation and language rights to the Austro- Slavs
was
interpreted by German-Austrian nationalists as a menace to their superior economic and political position or even to their national
existence.
Schonerer himself reacted by founding the nationalistic German
People’s
party (Deutsche Volkspartei) in 1881. Elsewhere in Austria, especially along the ethnic borders, various national clubs and school leagues were founded by German-Austrians during the 1880s.

In 1882 Schonerer helped to draft the famous “Linz Program.” The two most important points in this declaration were a demand for an extension of the franchise and the protection of the Germans of Austria. The latter would be accomplished by detaching the Slavic parts of the Empire (Bucovina, Galicia, and Dalmatia) from the predominantly German-speaking areas (the Alpine crownlands, Bohemia, Moravia, and Austrian Silesia). Thus the German-speaking Austrians would be raised from a 35 percent minority to an absolute majority in the greatly reduced Austrian Empire. German would become the official state language while the Czechs, Slovenes, and Italians would presumably become declining minorities. Although the Linz Program included a demand for greater civil liberties, this could not disguise the basically imperialist nature of the declaration.
¹⁴

Anti-Semitism was not originally part of the Linz Program, as demonstrated by the fact that Schdnerer’s chief collaborators on the document, the historian Heinrich Friedjung and the Socialist leader Viktor Adler, were both ethnic Jews. Schonerer was simply against a “preponderance” of Jewish political influence in 1882. Three years later, however, he added a twelfth point to the Linz declaration, stating that “the removal of Jewish influence from all sections of public life is indispensable for carrying out the reforms aimed at.”
¹⁵
Like Hitler after him, Schonerer was convinced that Jewish intellectuals were responsible for Marxism and internationalism, both of which were harmful to German interests.

Schdnerer’s racial anti-Semitism was just one of many ways in which he anticipated the ideology and tactics of postwar National Socialism. For Schdnerer, who was the most effective prewar propagandist of anti-Semitism, blood was the basis of all civil rights. In 1883 he demanded the dismissal of all Jewish teachers. After another four years he was calling for legislation restricting Jewish immigration. Those Jews already in the country he wanted
georg von schonerer.
The spiritual godfather of National Socialism. Karl Wache, ed.
Deutscher Geist in Osterreich.

confined
once again to ghettos.
But
in the same year (1887) Schonerer’s
effectiveness
as an anti-Semitic rabble-rouser was sharply reduced when a
Viennese
newspaper published documentary proof that his
wife
had a Jewish ancestor.
¹
®

The essence of Schonerer’s brand of pan-Germanism
was
its extremism. He demanded unconditional victory for himself and his followers, and un
conditional
surrender for
his
many enemies. Negotiation and compromise were no better than thinly disguised forms of surrender.
¹⁷
Thirty years later, the highest Nazi virtue was to be
kompromislos.

Schonerer’s
most recent biographer, Andrew G. Whiteside, has also pointed out a number of contradictions
in
the pan-German leader. He and his followers “combined racial abuse and demands for censorship and Aryanization with
courageous
defense of the civil liberties of workers, demands for far reaching advances in political and economic democracy, and denunciations of police censorship and press confiscations.”
¹⁸
Typical of Nazis a generation later, Schonerer deliberately provoked the state authorities and then complained about persecution. War, he felt, was a basic fact of political life and violence was a necessity. The Austrian pan-Germans, in fact, became one of the first movements in Europe to break with existing laws and normal social behavior and to resort to direct action. Force and even terrorism became a way both to attract attention and to intimidate enemies.
¹⁹