The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (215 page)

But Henderson had already sandbagged British objections by telling Göring that Austria had fallen victim to “Schuschnigg’s ill-conceived and ill-prepared folly.” And words after an event have little force anyhow. Before the Anschluss, Halifax had encouraged it, and during Schuschnigg’s last bitter hours in office he had telegraphed him that he could not “take the responsibility” of advising him to take measures “which might expose [your] country to dangers against which His Majesty’s Government are unable to guarantee protection”—this despite Britain’s Stresa pledge to guarantee Austrian independence.
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In Berlin, Neurath accepted the British note. Long afterward, Henderson acknowledged that “protests without the resolute intent to use force if they were disregarded were not going to stop the German troops, which were already on the march.” Considering the Rhineland fiasco two years earlier, he realized “Germany had become too strong to be impressed by empty gestures, which merely confirmed those like Ribbentrop in their opinion that Britain would put up with anything rather than fight. Lung power was no match for armed power.”
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In Nicolson’s diary one senses the momentum, the rush of events that weekend. On Friday evening, March 11, he noted Schuschnigg’s capitulation after “a pathetic farewell broadcast saying that he is yielding to ‘brutal force.’ ” Saturday Hitler crossed the border and entered Linz, where he had spent his boyhood. Göring, reproached by the vacillating Henderson, replied with “a diatribe against Schuschnigg’s lack of good faith.” Nicolson, mingling with his working-class constituents, wrote: “They are all anti-Chamberlain, saying ‘Eden has been proved right.’ ”
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At No. 10 on Saturday Chamberlain told the cabinet that Eden, in opposing friendly approaches to the Duce, had been proved wrong: “It might be said that we were too late in taking up the conversation with Italy…. Signor Mussolini would have moved troops to the Brenner Pass at the time of the Berchtesgaden talks, but he had not felt sure of his position in the Mediterranean.” Cadogan blamed his predecessor, Vansittart (“an idiot with an idée fixe—all facade and nothing else”), for being obsessed with Austria “when we can’t do anything about it.” But to the prime minister, Eden remained the scapegoat. Writing his sister the next day Chamberlain reflected that “very possibly this might have been prevented if I had had Halifax at the Foreign Office instead of Anthony.” He added: “What a fool Roosevelt would have looked like if he had launched his precious proposal. What would he have thought of us if we had encouraged him to publish it, as Anthony wanted us to do? And now we too would have made ourselves the laughing stock of the world.” Chamberlain did not consider that a prime minister who had wined and dined with the Nazi foreign minister while Hitler was seizing Austria might look like a bigger fool and a greater laughingstock.
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Mapping out strategy for a forthcoming parliamentary debate on military policy, Horace Wilson had written to Chamberlain on Thursday predicting that Churchill would demand an air defense inquiry. Now he noted that at the cabinet meeting the P.M. decided that “an enquiry should be refused and refused flatly and firmly, the decision to be adhered to notwithstanding any criticism that may be raised during the debate.” According to the meeting’s official minutes, all present were informed “that the Right Hon Winston Churchill was intending to attack the Government on the inadequacy of their Air Force programme, and to support the motion of the Opposition for an enquiry into the Air Ministry. It was suggested that a speech belittling our efforts might have a very adverse effect on the international position just now,” when dealings with Germany might be better served “by creating the impression of force.” How the Nazis could be gulled when they already knew the frailty of Britain’s defenses—particularly the RAF—was among the questions unraised by the cabinet.
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It is Sunday, March 13, the day Schuschnigg had set for his plebiscite, but 100,000 German troops, led by General Heinz Guderian’s Second Panzer Division and the SS
Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler
are being pelted with flowers by their Austrian admirers—Goebbels calls it a “
Blumenkrieg
” (“flower war”). Seyss-Inquart presents his führer with a proclamation declaring that Austria no longer exists. It is now the Ostmark, “a province of the German Reich.”

By Monday the Austrian scene is clearer. The enthusiasm of the crowds cheering Wehrmacht and Waffen SS troops is beyond doubt, but they are a minority. Churchill writes Unity Mitford: “It was because Herr Hitler feared the free expression of opinion that we are compelled to witness the present dastardly outrage.” The Führer has added another seven million subjects to his expanding Reich, while seizing a military position of priceless strategic value without the firing of a single shot.
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In permitting the Führer to take Austria, the governments of Europe have betrayed tens of thousands of anti-Nazis, not only Austrians but also German citizens of Austria. Many have fled for their lives and choke the roads to Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary. Some are turned back at the border; others, more affluent, possess passports and are passed through the frontier roadblocks, only to be rejected because they have no visas. Acquiring these documents is, for thousands, a matter of life or death. When they return to the Austrian capital their visa applications at the British and French consulates are rejected. In Vienna alone seventy thousand are arrested. Before the month is out virtually all who tried to flee have been shot by SS firing squads, have died by their own hands, or have been sent to the Reich’s new Austrian concentration camps.

No photographs of the refugees appear in
The Times
. Instead, Dawson runs pictures of Austrian Nazis beaming on Wehrmacht battalions, creating an impression of a tumultuous, wildly enthusiastic welcome from all their countrymen. It is a shocking distortion; foreign tourists and foreign correspondents, particularly the Americans, give it the lie. Shirer is among them. Later he will recall that “the behavior of the Vienna Nazis was worse than anything I had seen in Germany. There was an orgy of sadism.”
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In one of his syndicated newspaper columns Churchill writes, “The Austrian Nazis are a peculiarly virulent type who carried pillage, corruption and brutality beyond the wide limits of political discretion.” Reports reaching Chartwell from his Austrian informants confirm him. An emaciated, haggard Schuschnigg will spend the next seven years in Dachau and then Neiderdorf, a concentration camp in the South Tyrol, whence he will be rescued by American troops just as a Gestapo guard is about to execute him. The litany of misery which will end there may be glimpsed in Churchill’s post-Anschluss mail from Austrian informants: “My many friends in this city are in the depths of despair”; “… many sickening incidents. A family of six Jews have just shot themselves, a few houses down the street”; “Yesterday morning I saw two well-dressed women forced to their knees to scrub out a ‘Heil Schuschnigg!’ on the pavement.” Churchill writes Dawson, asking why this side of the story is unreported and is frostily told: “There is no doubt, I think, that the impression of jubilation was overwhelming.”
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That would have been enough to satisfy his readers two years earlier. But the mood of the British public has shifted since the Rhineland. MPs hear from their constituents: even if most Austrians wanted to live under the swastika, those who don’t have rights, too; are they being persecuted? Replies from the Foreign Office are vague. The temper of the upper classes has also changed. Their wealth has permitted them to visit the Continent often. The Rhineland was declassé; one couldn’t have been seen there by one’s equals, gaping at the Cologne Cathedral like shopkeepers’ wives on tour. Hitler’s seizure of it menaced few of their peers. Austria is another matter. They have friends there, even cousins, in Vienna, in lodges on the slopes of the Austrian Alps, and in shooting boxes in the deep, dark evergreen woods. And now they are worried about them. Among the worriers are Lady Londonderry, Lady Halifax, and the wife of the British prime minister. Ambassador Henderson cannot fob these people off with excuses. They send him names. He submits the lists to Ribbentrop, inquiring as to their whereabouts. The Reich’s foreign minister replies that he finds their interest “incomprehensible. The British Government never lifted a finger for the victims of the Schuschnigg regime.” It is an insolent note, and inauspicious. The Germans are beginning to feel like Germans again—like the Germans of the Second Reich, Bismarck’s great creation in the wake of Prussia’s victory over Louis Napoleon’s France in 1871, memorable for its faith in Blood and Iron, its allegiance to
ein Volk, ein Kaiser, ein Reich
, the pigheadedness of its Junker leaders, and the rising hauteur of their officers, monocled and rude, who slapped “insolent” civilians in Alsace-Lorraine, and expected even German ladies to step in gutters and let them pass.
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Neurath strengthens this impression of arrogance by returning Henderson’s initial note of protest with the comment: “Relations between the Reich and Austria can only be regarded as an internal affair of the German people which is no concern of third powers…. For this reason the German Government must from the outset reject as inadmissible the protest lodged by the British Government.” If His Majesty’s envoy wants proof of Seyss-Inquart’s telegram inviting the Führer’s troops into the Ostmark, he will find it “already published in the German press.”
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O
n Monday, March 14, Nicolson heard the P.M. make “a dry statement” in the Commons, “giving little indication of real policy.” The House had expected to hear more about Austria, but there seemed to be a conspiracy on the Treasury Bench (and in the FO, under its new permanent under secretary) to sidestep the Anschluss and turn to other matters. Of Hitler’s conquest the prime minister declared: “The hard fact is that nothing could have arrested what actually happened—unless this country and other countries had been prepared to use force.” A backbencher called: “What about rearmament?” Chamberlain’s reply was evasive; the government “would make a fresh review” of the subject and “in due course we shall announce what further steps we may think it necessary to take.” Nicolson wrote: “There is a sense of real national crisis.” But it was felt in neither Downing Street nor the corridors of Whitehall.
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Since the defrocking of Vansittart the Foreign Office had drifted under uncertain leadership. Cadogan, whose office gave him such wide discretionary powers that they rivaled Halifax’s, seemed incapable of contemplating meeting force with force. As early as Saturday, March 12, he wrote in his diary: “We are helpless as regards Austria—that is finished. We
may
be helpless as regards Czechoslovakia…. Must we have a death-struggle with Germany again?… I’m inclined to think not. But I shall have to fight Van… and all the forces of evil. God give me courage. So far we’ve not done wrong.”
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A month before the crisis, after Schuschnigg’s mortification at Berchtesgaden, Cadogan had “almost” wished that “Germany would swallow Austria and get it over,” and now that Hitler had devoured it he wrote Nevile Henderson: “Thank goodness, Austria’s out of the way. I can’t help thinking we were very badly informed about that country…. We should evidently have been very wrong to try to prevent
Anschluss
against the wishes of a very considerable proportion of the population. After all, it wasn’t our business: We had no particular feelings for the Austrians: We only forbade
Anschluss
to spite Germany.”
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Churchill was ready with an answer for both the prime minister and the Foreign Office during that same House session Monday. Nicolson wrote: “Winston makes the speech of his life.” Churchill’s instinctive response to the Anschluss had been that the issue should be laid before the League of Nations. He and Lord Cecil had approached Halifax with that suggestion, but the foreign secretary told them that “such procedure would be of no practical advantage in redressing the present situation.” So Churchill offered the House of Commons a foreign policy which, we now know, would almost certainly have led to a military coup in Berlin, toppling the Nazi regime.
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Churchill saw the need for British unity, British action, and a firm policy to discourage new aggression. He surveyed the wreckage in Austria, submitting that the damage had been great. Nazi mastery of Vienna, “the center of all the communications of all the countries which formed the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, and of all the countries lying to the southeast of Europe,” threatened the entire Danube basin, particularly Czechoslovakia, which had been “the greatest manufacturing area” in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. No doubt its name “sounds outlandish” to English ears, he said, but the Czech army was “two or three times as large” as Britain’s, its munitions supplies were triple Italy’s, and “they are a virile people; they have their treaty rights, they have a line of fortresses, and they have a strongly manifested will to live freely.” At present, however, they were isolated.
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