Hitler's Charisma (20 page)

Ludwig Beck, chief of staff of the German army, remained outraged over the treatment of Fritsch, but still confused about Hitler’s role in the crisis. Not susceptible to Hitler’s charismatic leadership, Beck had dutifully obeyed him as head of state—though not without reserving the right to question his decisions. However, in the wake of the dismissal of Fritsch, Beck gradually came to the view that Hitler was not to be trusted. After a conference on 5 February 1938 he told a senior colleague that Hitler had broken his promise to him. Hitler had said that he would consult him on any proposed military restructure and yet he had failed to do so. Beck’s colleague called him a “fool” for believing Hitler’s promise and asked “How long will you continue to be taken in by Hitler’s tricks?”
¹⁴

The Fritsch affair was thus an important turning point in the history of Hitler’s leadership, the moment at which traditionalists like Beck finally had their eyes opened about the character and personality of their head of state. For soldiers like Beck, their “word of honour” was a sacred promise. And not only had Hitler broken his promise to Beck about consulting him over senior personnel changes in the army, but he had also refused to accept Fritsch’s word of honour when he had said that the charges against him of homosexuality were false. And Fritsch was no ordinary officer, but the head of an officer corps which valued honour above all else.

“I knew him [i.e., Fritsch] very well,” says Johann-Adolf Kielmansegg. “He was the godfather of one of my sons, and so there’s a human relationship there. Fritsch was a conservative Prussian officer from a good
background and not just a good background, but [a background] in the best sense … there are very many good Prussian qualities and Fritsch had them.” Moreover, as far as Kielmansegg was concerned, “Fritsch was the last dam against Hitler, and the army were the only ones who could do anything [against Nazi rule].”
¹⁵

Beck now helped prepare Fritsch’s defence against the homosexuality charge at a forthcoming army court. Beck still believed in the old-fashioned, “honourable” way of doing things. And it seemed as if this course of action might be the right one, when Beck’s colleagues investigating the case discovered that a junior army officer, Captain von Frisch, had been sexually involved with the man who now accused Fritsch. It was not only evidence of the innocence of the head of the army but a possible explanation for the whole episode. Perhaps the incident had been a case of simple mistaken identity. Beck now looked forward to Fritsch’s rehabilitation.

But events had moved on for Hitler. At the same moment as the army’s formal investigation into the Fritsch case opened, a long-running foreign policy sore reached a moment of crisis. On 10 March 1938 Beck and his assistant, von Manstein, were called to a meeting with Hitler and were told that the army must be readied immediately for a move into Austria.

Ever since his youth Hitler had longed for
Anschluss
(union) between Germany and Austria, and Austrian Nazis had been agitating for just such a merger for years. What made matters so urgent was the decision of the Austrian Chancellor, Kurt Schuschnigg, to hold a referendum on 13 March on the issue of unification with Germany.

Hitler was determined that the Austrian public would never get a chance to vote in Schuschnigg’s referendum. But in response to Hitler’s demand for military action against Austria, Beck expressed considerable anxiety. He worried principally about foreign reaction to any invasion. Eventually, only after Hitler had made clear his absolute determination to invade Austria did Beck leave to make plans—reluctantly—for the army to do his Führer’s bidding.

Beck was not alone in his anxiety about the political consequences of any German incursion into Austria. General Keitel, now working in his new role of cross-service coordination at the headquarters of all the armed forces, the OKW, described the night of 10–11 March 1938 as a
“martyrdom.”
¹⁶
He received several telephone calls from senior army figures—even including Brauchitsch—almost begging him to make Hitler “renounce” his plans to invade Austria. Keitel, who was already well aware of the sensitivities of his new boss, didn’t mention anything about these calls to Hitler. He knew Hitler would be outraged at the caution of his army chiefs, and he “wanted to spare” all concerned “that experience.”

In the face of Hitler’s threats, Schuschnigg called off the referendum and resigned. But Hitler still ordered the invasion to go ahead on 12 March. And contrary to the anxieties of the German generals, the move into Austria was an overwhelming success. German troops were pelted with flowers by welcoming Austrians amidst scenes of near ecstasy. “The Austrian
Anschluss
was like a ripe apple, it was at the moment to fall,”
¹⁷
says Reinhard Spitzy, an Austrian-born Nazi who returned to his homeland with Hitler.

Weakened by an economic depression not dissimilar to the one Germany had suffered six years before, millions of Austrians embraced the German troops. “I got the feeling that we really had to belong to Germany,”
¹⁸
says Susi Seitz, then a teenager. She had been taught that Austrians had been denied the right to join with Germany after the First World War, and had personally witnessed the effects of the economic depression in the 1930s. “We saw the needs of the people, and I was terribly depressed when I walked on our main street and I saw at each corner someone who lifted his hands up or had a little plate to ask for some money … Children were there and they looked starved … At the end of ’37, people used to come to the doors of apartments and flats and ask for food. And I saw lots of people coming, and I always had to take out a plate of soup or some bread, a crust of bread.”

As they entered Austria, Germans like Foreign Office official Herbert Richter were astonished at the scale of the welcome they received. “On the day of the
Anschluss
, I was driving with my wife in my open-top car through the Austrian Tyrol. And we found that our Berlin licence plates were already provoking enthusiasm amongst the Austrians. And we ate lunch in a restaurant in Schwaz, which is a little town before you get to Innsbruck, and there was a Tyrolean farmer leading his oxen, and he had put little flags with swastikas between their horns … I remember it very clearly. That is the extent of the enthusiasm. Austria was in a very poor economic situation at the time. And they were hoping for an
improvement in their economic situation. But anyway, the enthusiasm was immense.”
¹⁹

For a committed Nazi like Bruno Hähnel this was a moment of intense joy: “During my 10 years at party conferences or at rallies with Adolf Hitler, I had certainly witnessed my share of enthusiasm, but the degree of enthusiasm that was prevalent in Austria at that time was not only surprising to us, but also quite unbelievable. That was the impression we had from the first day to the last one. When I was telling people how I’d witnessed it, I used to say that the Austrians were climbing up the front of their houses to the third floor out of sheer enthusiasm!”
²⁰

It was a dramatic success for Hitler, especially since none of the foreign problems that Beck and his colleagues had feared ever transpired. Hitler had received Mussolini’s blessing for the invasion just before it was launched, and Britain and France never looked as if they would go to war over the
Anschluss
. The attitude in Britain was summed up by Sir Frank Roberts, a British diplomat: “I suppose a lot of people in England would say ‘well, they are Germans [in Austria] after all, and if that’s what they really want … ’ ”
²¹
And this view was set against a broader feeling that perhaps Germany had previously been badly treated. “The general view in Britain,” says Sir Frank, “was that the French had imposed, and we had obviously been connected with it, too harsh a settlement on Germany in 1918, and that this should be rectified. And to that extent there was a slight feeling of ‘we ought to have done better.’ If you call that a sentiment of guilt, all right. I’m not sure we felt it as guilt, quite.”

Hitler drove in triumph into his homeland of Austria at just before four o’clock on 12 March 1938. He passed through his birthplace of Braunau am Inn and then drove slowly on to Linz, acknowledging the vast cheering crowds along the way. Speaking that night from the balcony of Linz town hall to the rapturous crowd below in the main square he said, “The fact that Providence once summoned me forth from this city to the leadership of the Reich, must have meant it was giving me a special assignment, and it can only have been the assignment of restoring my cherished home to the German Reich!”
²²
The next day he signed a proclamation announcing that Austria was now united with Germany, and on 15 March he declared in a speech in Vienna that “this land is German” and that it had “understood its mission.”
²³

This was a watershed moment in the evolution of Hitler’s charismatic
attraction. It was by far his biggest foreign policy triumph to date—and one made all the sweeter for him by the emotional connection to his homeland. Almost more importantly, he had pushed on with his plans to invade Austria despite the fact that many senior officers had expressed grave misgivings at the idea. “The result,” Franz von Papen wrote, “was that Hitler became impervious to the advice of all those who wished him to exercise moderation in his foreign policy.”
²⁴

Hitler received the direct adulation of the hundreds of thousands of Austrians who welcomed him as a hero. The scenes in Vienna, in particular, were monumental in scale. It is scarcely possible that witnessing a crowd of almost a quarter of a million people shouting
“Sieg Heil!”
and
“Ein Volk, Ein Führer!”
did not reinforce Hitler’s belief in his own “mission” and his own charismatic powers. His was, indeed, a remarkable journey. He had left Vienna twenty-five years before without qualifications, without prospects, seemingly without hope, and had now returned as the leader who had united Germany and Austria.

As for those who stood in the town squares of Linz or Vienna and listened to Hitler speak, many would never forget the emotions they experienced. “I think we cried, most of us at that time,” says Susi Seitz who was part of the crowd in Linz on the evening of 12 March. “Tears were running down our cheeks, and when we looked to the neighbours it was the same.”

Seitz managed to present Hitler with some flowers and basked in the glow she felt in his presence. She claims she was inspired by this encounter to become a better person. “And I promised in my heart I will try everything to be good, help others, and never do anything which was dishonest. All my free time, besides school, I gave to the work because he had called us ‘You all,’ and he had said that to us, ‘You all shall help me build up my empire to be a good empire with happy people who are thinking and promising to be good people.’ ”
²⁵
She was able to embrace her new life in the German Reich with joy: “Everything before the war, of course, and even the first years of the war, it was the best time of my life. With many others who were enthusiastic, we were happy to help … All the aims for the future that we were taught about: healthy family, healthy people, a healthy country, and people who work with pleasure and enthusiasm; that was something we thought worthwhile. And so, of course, we thought of that time as a good one.”

People today often ask “why did so many Germans and Austrians go along with Hitler and the Nazis in the 1930s?” But Susi Seitz’s testimony is a reminder that this can be the wrong question to ask. A better question is “why did so many Germans and Austrians
embrace
Hitler and Nazism in the 1930s?” And in this respect Seitz’s testimony offers many clues. Not only in the emotional quality it displays but also in the connection she experienced between the audience and Hitler. She felt that Hitler almost became a vessel that enthusiastic Austrians could fill with their own longings. In the contemporary parlance of political consultants, Hitler successfully “spoke to the needs” of his audience.

All the component elements of Hitler’s charisma we have examined so far in this history were present—either overtly or behind the scenes—during his triumphal progress through Austria: his mission, to unite all Germans under his rule; his ability through his oratory to establish a connection and express what his audience were wanting and feeling; his “heroic” homecoming as an Austrian; his vision of a “classless” society; the hope he offered Austrians in their economic crisis; his certainty that all would come well for the two nations now they were united; his statement of his own place in these great events, not as an ordinary leader but as one chosen by “Providence” for a special task; and his ability to act entirely on his own intuition, given that the decision to move on Austria had been his and his alone.

The part of Hitler’s charisma that appealed to many of his most dedicated supporters was also on show—his desire to isolate vulnerable groups and persecute them as enemies of the state. Large numbers of Jews were brutally treated immediately after the Nazis’ takeover of Austria, and many political opponents of the Nazis were imprisoned in concentration camps—former chancellor Schuschnigg, for example, was arrested moments after the Nazis entered the country. But to the majority of Austrians all this was unimportant in the face of the “national revival” which Hitler offered.

The contrast between the near hysteria in Austria and the reaction of a number of still sober German generals like Ludwig Beck could scarcely have been greater. Beck was disgusted by the behaviour of Nazis in Austria, revolted by “the carrion-vultures of the party who follow behind the untarnished shield of the army.”
²⁶
He was also appalled at the resolution to the Fritsch case. On 18 March, when the focus of the vast majority
of Germans was on events in Austria, Fritsch was finally cleared of any wrongdoing—the case of the Gestapo against him was shown to be fabricated. But it did him little good. Hitler, fresh from his Austrian triumph, would not reinstate Fritsch now that the more compliant Brauchitsch was in the job.