[b]11: ANSCHLUSS: THE RAPE OF AUSTRIA[/b]

 

 

TOWARD THE END OF 1937, due to a change of jobs from newspaper to radio reporting, my headquarters were transferred from Berlin to Vienna, which I had come to know as a youthful correspondent a decade before. Though I would spend most of the period of the next three crucial years in Germany, my new assignment, which was to cover continental Europe, gave me a certain perspective of the Third Reich and, as it happened, set me down in those very neighboring countries which were to be victims of Hitler's aggression just prior to and during the time the aggression took place. I roved back and forth in those days between Germany and the country that for the moment was the object of Hitler's fury and so gathered a firsthand experience of the events which are now to be described and which led inexorably to the greatest and bloodiest war in man's experience. Though we observed these happenings at first hand, it is amazing how little we really knew of how they came about. The plottings and maneuvers, the treachery, the fateful decisions and moments of indecision, and the dramatic encounters of the principal participants which shaped the course of events took place in secret beneath the surface, hidden from the prying eyes of foreign diplomats, journalists and spies, and thus for years remained largely unknown to all but a few who took part in them.

 

We have had to wait for the maze of secret documents and the testimony of the surviving leading actors in the drama, most of whom were not free at the time -- many landed in Nazi concentration camps -- to tell their story. What follows, therefore, in the ensuing pages is based largely on the mass of factual evidence which has been accumulated since 1945. But it was perhaps helpful for a narrator of such a history as this to have been personally present at its main crises and turning points. Thus, it happened that I was in Vienna on the memorable night of March 11-12, 1938, when Austria ceased to exist.

 

For more than a month the beautiful baroque capital by the Danube, whose inhabitants were more attractive, more genial, more gifted in enjoying life, such as it was, than any people I had ever known, had been prey to deep anxieties. Dr. Kurt von Schuschnigg, the Austrian Chancellor, would later recall the period between February 12 and March 11 as "The Four Weeks' Agony." Since the Austro-German agreement of July 11, 1936, in which Schuschnigg, in a secret annex to the treaty, had made far-reaching concessions to the Austrian Nazis, [i] Franz von Papen, Hitler's special ambassador in Vienna, had been continuing his labors to undermine the independence of Austria and bring about its union with Nazi Germany. In a long report to the Fuehrer at the end of 1936, he had reported on his progress and a year later had done the same, this time stressing "that only by subjecting the Federal Chancellor [Schuschnigg] to the strongest possible pressure can further progress be made." [1] His advice, though scarcely needed, was soon to be taken more literally than even he could conceive.

 

Throughout 1937, the Austrian Nazis, financed and egged on by Berlin, had stepped up their campaign of terror. Bombings took place nearly every day in some part of the country, and in the mountain provinces massive and often violent Nazi demonstrations weakened the government's position. Plans were uncovered disclosing that Nazi thugs were preparing to bump off Schuschnigg as they had his predecessor. Finally on January 25, 1938, Austrian police raided the Vienna headquarters of a group called the Committee of Seven, which had been set up to bring about peace between the Nazis and the Austrian government, but which in reality served as the central office of the illegal Nazi underground. There they found documents initialed by Rudolf Hess, the Fuehrer's deputy, which made it clear that the Austrian Nazis were to stage an open revolt in the spring of 1938 and that when Schuschnigg attempted to put it down, the German Army would enter Austria to prevent "German blood from being shed by Germans." According to Papen, one of the documents called for his own murder or that of his military attache, Lieutenant General Muff, by local Nazis so as to provide an excuse for German intervention.  [2]

 

If the debonair Papen was less than amused to learn that he was marked -- for the second time -- for assassination by Nazi roughnecks on orders from party leaders in Berlin, he was also distressed by a telephone call which came to him at the German Legation in Vienna on the evening of February 4. State Secretary Hans Lammers was on the line from the Chancellery in Berlin to inform him that his special mission in Austria had ended. He had been fired, along with Neurath, Fritsch and several others.

 

"I was almost speechless with astonishment," Papen later remembered.3 He recovered sufficiently to realize that Hitler evidently had decided on more drastic action in Austria, now that he had rid himself of Neurath, Fritsch and Blomberg. In fact, Papen recovered sufficiently to decide to do "something unusual for a diplomat," as he put it. He resolved to deposit copies of all his correspondence with Hitler "in a safe place," which turned out to be Switzerland. "The defamatory campaigns of the Third Reich," he says, "were only too well known to me." As we have seen, they had almost cost him his life in June 1934.

 

Papen's dismissal was also a warning to Schuschnigg. He had not fully trusted the suave former cavalry officer, but he was quick to see that Hitler must have something worse in mind than inflicting on him the wily ambassador, who at least was a devout Catholic, as was he, and a gentleman. In the last few months the course of European diplomacy had not favored Austria. Mussolini had drawn closer to Hitler since the establishment of the Rome-Berlin Axis and was not so concerned about maintaining the little country's independence as he had been at the time of the murder of Dollfuss, when he had rushed four divisions to the Brenner Pass to frighten the Fuehrer. Neither Britain, freshly embarked under Chamberlain upon a policy of appeasing Hitler, nor France, beset by grave internal political strife, had recently shown much interest in defending Austria's independence should Hitler strike. And now, with Papen, had gone the conservative leaders of the German Army and Foreign Office, who had exercised some restraining influence on Hitler's towering ambitions. Schuschnigg, who was a narrow-minded man but, within his limits, an intelligent one, and who was quite well informed, had few illusions about his worsening situation. The time had come, as he felt it had come after the Nazis slew Dollfuss, to further appease the German dictator.

 

Papen, discharged from office though he was, offered an opportunity. Never a man to resent a slap in the face if it came from above, he had hurried to Hitler the very day after his dismissal "to obtain some picture of what was going on." At Berchtesgaden on February 5, he found the Fuehrer "exhausted and distrait" from his struggle with the generals. But Hitler's recuperative powers were considerable, and soon the cashiered envoy was interesting him in a proposal that he had already broached to him a fortnight before when they had met in Berlin: Why not have it out with Schuschnigg personally? Why not invite him to come to Berchtesgaden for a personal talk? Hitler found the idea interesting. Unmindful of the fact that he had just fired Papen, he ordered him to return to Vienna and arrange the meeting.

 

Schuschnigg readily assented to it, but, weak as his position was, laid down certain conditions. He must be informed in advance of the precise points which Hitler wanted to discuss, and he must be assured beforehand that the agreement of July 11, 1936, in which Germany promised to respect Austria's independence and not to interfere in her internal affairs, would be maintained. Furthermore, the communique at the end of the meeting must reaffirm that both countries would continue to abide by the 1936 treaty. Schuschnigg wanted to take no chances in bearding the lion in his den. Papen hurried off to Obersalzberg to confer with Hitler and returned with the Fuehrer's assurance that the 1936 agreement would remain unchanged and that he merely wanted to discuss "such misunderstandings and points of friction as have persisted" since it was signed. This was not as precise as the Austrian Chancellor had requested, but he said he was satisfied with the answer. The meeting was set for the morning of February 12, [ii] and on the evening of February II Schuschnigg, accompanied by his Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs, Guido Schmidt, set off by special train in the strictest secrecy for Salzburg, whence he would drive by car over the border to Hitler's mountain retreat on the following morning. It was to prove a fateful journey.

 

[b]THE MEETING AT BERCHTESGADEN: FEBRUARY 12, 1938[/b]

 

Papen showed up at the frontier to greet his Austrian visitors and in the frosty winter morning air seemed to be, Schuschnigg thought, "in the very best of humor." Hitler, he assured his guests, was in an excellent mood this day. And then came the first warning note. The Fuehrer, Papen said genially, hoped Dr. Schuschnigg would not mind the presence at the Berghof of three generals who had arrived quite by chance: Keitel, the new Chief of OKW, Reichenau, who commanded the Army forces on the Bavarian-Austrian frontier, and Sperrle, who was in charge of the Air Force in this area.

 

Papen later remembered of his guests that this was "a piece of information that seemed little to their taste." Schuschnigg says he told the ambassador he would not mind, especially since he had "not much choice in the matter." A Jesuit-trained intellectual, he was getting on his guard.

 

Even so, he was not prepared for what now took place. Hitler, wearing the brown tunic of a storm trooper, with black trousers, and flanked by the three generals, greeted the Austrian Chancellor and his aide on the steps of the villa. Schuschnigg felt it was a friendly but formal greeting. In a few moments he found himself alone with the German dictator in the spacious second-floor study whose great picture windows looked out upon the stately, snow-capped Alps and on Austria, the birthplace of both these men, beyond.

 

Kurt von Schuschnigg, forty-one years old, was, as all who have known him would agree, a man of impeccable Old World Austrian manners, and it was not unnatural for him to begin the conversation with a graceful tidbit about the magnificent view, the fine weather that day, and a flattering word about this room having been, no doubt, the scene of many decisive conferences. Adolf Hitler cut him short: "We did not gather here to speak of the fine view or of the weather." Then the storm broke. As the Austrian Chancellor later testified, the ensuing two-hour "conversation was somewhat unilateral." [iii]

 

[quote]You have done everything to avoid a friendly policy [Hitler fumed] ... The whole history of Austria is just one uninterrupted act of high treason. That was so in the past and is no better today. This historical paradox must now reach its long-overdue end. And I can tell you right now, Herr Schuschnigg, that I am absolutely determined to make an end of all this. The German Reich is one of the great powers, and nobody will raise his voice if it settles its border problems.[/quote]

 

Shocked at Hitler's outburst, the quiet-mannered Austrian Chancellor tried to remain conciliatory and yet stand his ground. He said he differed from his host on the question of Austria's role in German history. "Austria's contribution in this respect," he maintained, "is considerable."

 

[quote]HITLER: Absolutely zero. I am telling you, absolutely zero. Every national idea was sabotaged by Austria throughout history; and indeed all this sabotage was the chief activity of the Hapsburgs and the Catholic Church. [iv]

 

SCHUSCHNIGG: All the same, Herr Reichskanzler, many an Austrian contribution cannot possibly be separated from the general picture of German culture. Take for instance a man like Beethoven ...

 

HITLER: Oh -- Beethoven? Let me tell you that Beethoven came from the lower Rhineland.

 

SCHUSCHNIGG:Yet Austria was the country of his choice, as it was for so many others ...

 

HITLER: That's as may be. I am telling you once more that things cannot go on in this way. I have a historic mission, and this mission I will fulfill be· cause Providence has destined me to do so ... who is not with me will be crushed ... I have chosen the most difficult road that any German ever took; I have made the greatest achievement in the history of Germany, greater than any other German. And not by force, mind you. I am carried along by the love of my people ...

 

SCHUSCHNIGG: Herr Reichskanzler, I am quite willing to believe that.[/quote]

 

After an hour of this, Schuschnigg asked his antagonist to enumerate his complaints. "We will do everything," he said, "to remove obstacles to a better understanding, as far as it is possible."

 

[quote]HITLER: That is what you say, Herr Schuschnigg. But I am telling you that I am going to solve the so-called Austrian problem one way or the other.[/quote]

 

He then launched into a tirade against Austria for fortifying its border against Germany, a charge that Schuschnigg denied.

 

[quote]HITLER: Listen, you don't really think you can move a single stone in Austria without my hearing about it the next day, do you? ... I have only to give an order, and in one single night all your ridiculous defense mechanisms will be blown to bits. You don't seriously believe that you can stop me for half an hour, do you? ... I would very much like to save Austria from such a fate, because such an action would mean blood. After the Army, my S.A. and Austrian Legion would move in, and nobody can stop their just revenge -- not even I.[/quote]

 

After these threats, Hitler reminded Schuschnigg (rudely addressing him always by his name instead of by his title, as diplomatic courtesy called for) of Austria's isolation and consequent helplessness.

 

[quote]HITLER: Don't think for one moment that anybody on earth is going to thwart my decisions. Italy? I see eye to eye with Mussolini ... England? England will not move one finger for Austria ... And France?[/quote]

 

France, he said, could have stopped Germany in the Rhineland "and then we would have had to retreat. But now it is too late for France." Finally:

 

[quote]HITLER: I give you once more, and for the last time, the opportunity to come to terms, Herr Schuschnigg. Either we find a solution now or else events will take their course ... Think it over, Herr Schuschnigg, think it over well. I can only wait until this afternoon ...[/quote]

 

What exactly were the German Chancellor's terms? Schuschnigg asked.

 

"We can discuss that this afternoon," Hitler said.

 

During lunch Hitler appeared to be, Schuschnigg observed somewhat to his surprise, "in excellent spirits." His monologue dwelt on horses and houses. He was going to build the greatest skyscrapers the world had ever seen. "The Americans will see," he remarked to Schuschnigg, "that Germany is building bigger and better buildings than the United States." As for the harried Austrian Chancellor, Papen noted that he appeared "worried and preoccupied." A chain cigarette smoker, he had not been allowed to smoke in Hitler's presence. But after coffee in an adjoining room, Hitler excused himself and Schuschnigg was able for the first time to snatch a smoke. He was also able to tell his Foreign Undersecretary, Guido Schmidt, the bad news. It was soon to grow worse.

 

After cooling their heels for two hours in a small anteroom, the two Austrians were ushered into the presence of Ribbentrop, the new German Foreign Minister, and of Papen. Ribbentrop presented them with a two-page typewritten draft of an "agreement" and remarked that they were Hitler's final demands and that the Fuehrer would not permit discussion of them. They must be signed forthwith. Schuschnigg says he felt relieved to have at least something definite from Hitler. But as he perused the document his relief evaporated. For here was a German ultimatum calling on him, in effect, to turn the Austrian government over to the Nazis within one week.

 

The ban against the Austrian Nazi Party was to be lifted, all Nazis in jail were to be amnestied and the pro-Nazi Viennese lawyer Dr. Seyss-Inquart was to be made Minister of the Interior, with authority over the police and security. Another pro-Nazi, Glaise-Horstenau, was to be appointed Minister of War, and the Austrian and German armies were to establish closer relations by a number of measures, including the systematic exchange of one hundred officers. "Preparations will be made," the final demand read, "for the assimilation of the Austrian into the German economic system. For this purpose Dr. Fischboeck [a pro-Nazi] will be appointed Minister of Finance." [5]

 

Schuschnigg, as he later wrote, realized at once that to accept the ultimatum would mean the end of Austria's independence.

 

[quote]Ribbentrop advised me to accept the demands at once. I protested, and referred him to my previous agreement with von Papen, made prior to coming to Berchtesgaden, and made clear to Ribbentrop that I was not prepared to be confronted with such unreasonable demands ... [6][/quote]

 

But was Schuschnigg prepared to accept them? That he was not prepared to be confronted with them was obvious even to a dullard such as Ribbentrop. The question was: Would he sign them? In this difficult and decisive moment the young Austrian Chancellor began to weaken. He inquired lamely, according to his own account, "whether we could count on the good will of Germany, whether the Reich government had at least the intention to keep its side of the bargain." [7] He says he received an answer "in the affirmative."

 

Then Papen went to work on him. The slippery ambassador admits to his "amazement" when he read the ultimatum. It was an "unwarrantable interference in Austrian sovereignty." Schuschnigg says Papen apologized to him and expressed his "complete surprise" at the terms. Nevertheless, he advised the Austrian Chancellor to sign them.

 

[quote]He furthermore informed me that I could be assured that Hitler would take care that, if I signed, and acceded to these demands, from that time on Germany would remain loyal to this agreement and that there would be no further difficulties for Austria. [8][/quote]

 

Schuschnigg, it would appear from the above statements, the last given in an affidavit at Nuremberg, was not only weakening but letting his naivete get the best of him.

 

He had one last chance to make a stand. He was summoned again to Hitler. He found the Fuehrer pacing excitedly up and down in his study.

 

[quote]HITLER: Herr Schuschnigg ... here is the draft of the document. There is nothing to be discussed. I will not change one single iota. You will either sign it as it is and fulfill my demands within three days, or I will order the march into Austria. [9][/quote]

 

Schuschnigg capitulated. He told Hitler he was willing to sign. But he reminded him that under the Austrian constitution only the President of the Republic had the legal power to accept such an agreement and carry it out. Therefore, while he was willing to appeal to the President to accept it, he could give no guarantee.

 

"You have to guarantee it!" Hitler shouted.

 

"I could not possibly, Herr Reichskanzler," Schuschnigg says he replied. [10]

 

[quote]At this answer [Schuschnigg later recounted] Hitler seemed to lose his self-control. He ran to the doors, opened them, and shouted, "General Keitel!" Then turning back to me, he said, "I shall have you called later." [11][/quote]

 

This was pure bluff, but the harassed Austrian Chancellor, who had been made aware of the presence of the generals all day, did not perhaps know it. Papen relates that Keitel told later of how Hitler greeted him with a broad grin when he rushed in and asked for orders. "There are no orders," Hitler chuckled. "I just wanted to have you here."

 

But Schuschnigg and Dr. Schmidt, waiting outside the Fuehrer's study, were impressed. Schmidt whispered that he would not be surprised if the both of them were arrested within the next five minutes. Thirty minutes later Schuschnigg was again ushered into the presence of Hitler.

 

[quote]I have decided to change my mind -- for the first time in my life [Hitler said]. But I warn you this is your very last chance. I have given you three additional days to carry out the agreement. [12][/quote]

 

That was the extent of the German dictator's concessions, and though the wording of the final draft was somewhat softened, the changes, as Schuschnigg later testified, were inconsequential. Schuschnigg signed. It was Austria's death warrant.

 

The behavior of men under duress differs according to their character and is often puzzling. That Schuschnigg, a veteran despite his comparative youth of the rough and tumble of politics which had seen his predecessor murdered by the Nazis, was a brave man few would doubt. Yet his capitulation to Hitler on February 11, 1938, under the terrible threat of armed attack has left a residue of unresolved doubts among his fellow countrymen and the observers and historians of this fateful period. Was surrender necessary? Was there no alternative? It would be a rash man who would argue that Britain and France, in view of their subsequent behavior in the face of Hitler's aggressions, might have come to the aid of Austria had Hitler then and there marched in. But up to this moment Hitler had not yet broken across the German borders nor had he prepared his own people and the world for any such act of wanton aggression. The German Army itself was scarcely prepared for a war should France and Britain intervene. In a few weeks Austria, as a result of the Berchtesgaden "agreement," would be softened up by the local Nazis and German machinations to a point where Hitler could take it with much less risk of foreign intervention than on February 11. Schuschnigg himself, as he later wrote, recognized that acceptance of Hitler's terms meant "nothing else but the complete end of the independence of the Austrian government."

 

Perhaps he was in a daze from his ordeal. After signing away his country's independence at the point of a gun he indulged in a strange conversation with Hitler which he himself later recorded in his book. "Does the Herr Reichskanzler," he asked, "believe that the various crises in the world today can be solved in a peaceful manner?" The Fuehrer answered fatuously that they could -- "if my advice were followed." Whereupon Schuschnigg said, apparently with no sign of sarcasm, "At the moment the state of the world looks rather promising, don't you think?" [13]

 

Such an utterance at such a moment seems incredible, but that is what the beaten Austrian Chancellor says he said. Hitler had one more humiliation to administer to him. When Schuschnigg suggested that in the press release of their meeting mention be made that their discussion reaffirmed the July 1936 agreement, Hitler exclaimed, "Oh, no! First you have to fulfill the conditions of our agreement. This is what is going to the press: 'Today the Fuehrer and Reichskanzler conferred with the Austrian Bundeskanzler at the Berghof.' That's all."

 

Declining the Fuehrer's invitation to stay for dinner, Schuschnigg and Schmidt drove down from the mountains to Salzburg. It was a gray and foggy winter night. The ubiquitous Papen accompanied them as far as the frontier and was somewhat uncomfortable in what he terms the "oppressive silence." He could not refrain from trying to cheer his Austrian friends up.

 

"Well, now," he exclaimed to them, "you have seen what the Fuehrer can be like at times! But the next time I am sure it will be different. You know, the Fuehrer can be absolutely charming." [v]

 

[b]THE FOUR WEEKS' AGONY: FEBRUARY 12 - MARCH 11, 1938[/b]

 

Hitler had given Schuschnigg four days -- until Tuesday, February 15  -- to send him a "binding reply" that he would carry out the ultimatum, and an additional three days -- until February 18 -- to fulfill its specific terms. Schuschnigg returned to Vienna on the morning of February 12 and immediately sought out President Miklas. Wilhelm Miklas was a plodding, mediocre man of whom the Viennese said that his chief accomplishment in life had been to father a large brood of children. But there was in him a certain peasant solidity, and in this crisis at the end of fifty-two years as a state official he was to display more courage than any other Austrian. He was willing to make certain concessions to Hitler such as amnestying the Austrian Nazis, but he balked at putting Seyss-Inquart in charge of the police and the Army. Papen duly reported this to Berlin on the evening of February 14. He said Schuschnigg hoped "to overcome the resistance of the President by tomorrow."

 

At 7: 30 that same evening Hitler approved orders drawn up by General Keitel to put military pressure on Austria.

 

[quote]Spread false, but quite credible news, which may lead to the conclusion of military preparations against Austria.[14] [/quote]

 

As a matter of fact, Schuschnigg had hardly departed from Berchtesgaden when the Fuehrer began shamming military action in order to see that the Austrian Chancellor did as he was told. Jodl jotted it all down in his diary.

 

[quote]February 13. In the afternoon General K[eitel] asks Admiral C[anaris] [vi] and myself to come to his apartment. He tells us that the Fuehrer's order is that military pressure by shamming military action should be kept up until the 15th. Proposals for these measures are drafted and submitted to the Fuehrer by telephone for approval.

 

February 14. The effect is quick and strong. In Austria the impression is created that Germany is undertaking serious military preparations. [15] [/quote]

 

General Jodl was not exaggerating. Before the threat of armed invasion President Miklas gave in and on the last day of grace, February 15, Schuschnigg formally advised Ambassador von Papen that the Berchtesgaden agreement would be carried out before February 18. On February 16 the Austrian government announced a general amnesty for Nazis, including those convicted in the murder of Dollfuss, and made public the reorganized cabinet, in which Arthur Seyss-Inquart was named Minister of Security. The next day this Nazi Minister hurried off to Berlin to see Hitler and receive his orders.

 

Seyss-Inquart, the first of the quislings, was a pleasant-mannered, intelligent young Viennese lawyer who since 1918 had been possessed with a burning desire to see Austria joined with Germany. This was a popular notion in the first years after the war. Indeed, on November 12, 1918, the day after the armistice, the Provisional National Assembly in Vienna, which had just overthrown the Hapsburg monarchy and proclaimed the Austrian Republic, had tried to effect an Anschluss by affirming that "German Austria is a component part of the German Republic." The victorious Allies had not allowed it and by the time Hitler came to power in 1933 there was no doubt that the majority of Austrians were against their little country's joining with Nazi Germany. But to Seyss-Inquart, as he said at his trial in Nuremberg, the Nazis stood unflinchingly for the Anschluss and for this reason he gave them his support. He did not join the party and took no part in its rowdy excesses. He played the role, rather, of a respectable front for the Austrian Nazis, and after the July 1936 agreement, when he was appointed State Councilor, he concentrated his efforts, aided by Papen and other German officials and agents, in burrowing from within. Strangely, both Schuschnigg and Miklas seem to have trusted him almost to the end. Later Miklas, a devout Catholic as was Schuschnigg, confessed that he was favorably impressed by the fact that Seyss was "a diligent churchgoer." The man's Catholicism and also the circumstance that he, like Schuschnigg, had served in a Tyrolean Kaiserjaeger regiment during the First World War, in which he was severely wounded, seems to have been the basis of the trust which the Austrian Chancellor had for him. Schuschnigg, unfortunately, had a fatal inability to judge a man on more substantial grounds. Perhaps he thought he could keep his new Nazi Minister in line by simple bribes. He himself tells in his book of the magic effect of $500 on Seyss-Inquart a year before when he threatened to resign as State Councilor and then reconsidered on the receipt of this paltry sum. But Hitler had the bigger prizes to dazzle before the ambitious young lawyer, as Schuschnigg was soon to learn.

 

On February 20 Hitler made his long-expected speech to the Reichstag, which had been postponed from January 30 because of the Blomberg-Fritsch crisis and his own machinations against Austria. Though he spoke warmly of Schuschnigg's "understanding" and of his "warmhearted willingness" to bring about a closer understanding between Austria and Germany --  a piece of humbug which impressed Prime Minister Chamberlain  -- the Fuehrer issued a warning which, however much lost on London, did not fall upon deaf ears in Vienna -- and in Prague.

 

[quote]Over ten million Germans live in two of the states adjoining our frontiers . . There must be no doubt about one thing. Political separation from the Reich may not lead to deprivation of rights -- that is, the general rights of self-determination. It is unbearable for a world power to know there are racial comrades at its side who are constantly being afflicted with the severest suffering for their sympathy or unity with the whole nation, its destiny and its Weltanschauung. To the interests of the German Reich belong the protection of those German peoples who are not in a position to secure along our frontiers their political and spiritual freedom by their own efforts. [16] [/quote]

 

That was blunt, public notice that henceforth Hitler regarded the future of the seven million Austrians and the three million Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia as the affair of the Third Reich.

 

Schuschnigg answered Hitler four days later -- on February 24 -- in a speech to the Austrian Bundestag, whose members, like those of the German Reichstag, were hand-picked by a one-party dictatorial regime. Though conciliatory toward Germany, Schuschnigg emphasized that Austria had gone to the very limit of concessions "where we must call a halt and say: 'Thus far and no further.'" Austria, he said, would never voluntarily give up its independence, and he ended with a stirring call: "Red-White-Red [the Austrian national colors] until we're dead!" (The expression also rhymes in German.)

 

"The twenty-fourth of February," Schuschnigg wrote after the war, "was for me the crucial date." He awaited anxiously the Fuehrer's reaction to his defiant speech. Papen telegraphed to Berlin the next day advising the Foreign Office that the speech should not be taken too seriously. Schuschnigg, he said, had expressed his rather strong nationalist feelings in order to retrieve his domestic position; there were plots in Vienna to overthrow him because of his concessions at Berchtesgaden. In the meantime, Papen informed Berlin, "the work of Seyss-Inquart ... is proceeding according to plan." [17] The next day Papen, his long years of devious work in Austria nearing fruition, took formal leave of the Austrian Chancellor and set off for Kitzbuehl to do some skiing.

 

Hitler's speech of February 20, which had been broadcast by the Austrian radio network, had set off a series of massive Nazi demonstrations throughout Austria. On February 24, during the broadcast of Schuschnigg's reply, a wild mob of twenty thousand Nazis in Graz had invaded the town square, torn down the loudspeakers, hauled down the Austrian flag and raised the swastika banner of Germany. With Seyss-Inquart in personal command of the police, no effort was made to curb the Nazi outbreaks. Schuschnigg's government was breaking down. Not only political but economic chaos was setting in. There were large withdrawals of accounts from the banks both from abroad and by the local people. Cancellation of orders from uneasy foreign firms poured into Vienna. The foreign tourists, one of the main props of the Austrian economy, were being frightened away. Toscanini cabled from New York that he was canceling his appearance at the Salzburg Festival, which drew tens of thousands of tourists each summer, "because of political developments in Austria." The situation was becoming so desperate that Otto of Hapsburg, the exiled youthful pretender to the throne, sent a letter from his home in Belgium and, as Schuschnigg later revealed, implored him on his old oath of allegiance as a former officer of the Imperial Army to appoint him as Chancellor if he thought such a step might save Austria.

 

In his desperation Schuschnigg turned to the Austrian workers whose free trade unions and political party, the Social Democrats, he had kept suppressed after Dollfuss had brutally smashed them in 1934. These people had represented 42 per cent of the Austrian electorate, and if at any time during the past four years the Chancellor had been able to see beyond the narrow horizons of his own clerical-fascist dictatorship and had enlisted their support for a moderate, anti-Nazi democratic coalition the Nazis, a relatively small minority, could have been easily handled. But Schuschnigg had lacked the stature to take such a step. A decent, upright man as a human being, he had become possessed, as had certain others in Europe, with a contempt for Western democracy and a passion for authoritarian one-party rule.

 

Out of the factories and the prisons, from which many of them recently had been released along with the Nazis, the Social Democrats came in a body on March 4 to respond to the Chancellor's call. Despite all that had happened they said they were ready to help the government defend the nation's independence. All they asked was what the Chancellor had already conceded to the Nazis: the right to have their own political party and preach their own principles. Schuschnigg agreed, but it was too late.

 

On March 3 the always well-informed General Jodl noted in his diary: "The Austrian question is becoming critical. 100 officers shall be dispatched here. The Fuehrer wants to see them personally. They should not see to it that the Austrian armed forces will fight better against us, but rather that they do not fight at all."

 

At this crucial moment, Schuschnigg decided to make one more final, desperate move which he had been mulling over in his mind since the last days of February when the Nazis began to take over in the provinces. He would hold a plebiscite. He would ask the Austrian people whether they were for a "free, independent, social, Christian and united Austria -- Ja oder Nein?" [vii]

 

[quote]I felt that the moment for a clear decision had come [he wrote later]. It seemed irresponsible to wait with fettered hands until, in the course of some weeks, we should be gagged as well. The gamble now was for stakes which demanded the ultimate and supreme effort. [19][/quote]

 

Shortly after his return from Berchtesgaden, Schuschnigg had apprised Mussolini, Austria's protector, of Hitler's threats and had received an immediate reply from the Duce that Italy's position on Austria remained unchanged. Now on March 7 he sent his military attache in Rome to Mussolini to inform him that in view of events he "was probably going to have to resort to a plebiscite." The Italian dictator answered that it was a mistake  -- "C' e un errore!" He advised Schuschnigg to hold to his previous course. Things were improving; an impending relaxation of relations between Rome and London would do much to ease the pressure. It was the last Schuschnigg ever heard from Mussolini.

 

On the evening of March 9, Schuschnigg announced in a speech at Innsbruck that a plebiscite would be held in four days -- on Sunday, March 13. The unexpected news sent Adolf Hitler into a fit of fury. Jodi's diary entry of March 10 described the initial reaction in Berlin:

 

[quote]By surprise and without consulting his Ministers, Schuschnigg ordered a plebiscite for Sunday, March 13 ...

 

Fuehrer is determined not to tolerate it. The same night, March 9 to 10, he calls for Goering. General v. Reichenau is called back from Cairo Olympic Committee. General v. Schobert [commander of the Munich Military District on the Austrian border] is ordered to come, as well as [Austrian] Minister Glaise-Horstenau, who is .. . in the Palatinate ... Ribbentrop is being detained in London. Neurath takes over the Foreign Office. [20][/quote]

 

The next day, Thursday, March 10, there was a great bustle in Berlin. Hitler had decided on a military occupation of Austria and there is no doubt that his generals were taken by surprise. If Schuschnigg's plebiscite on Sunday were to be prevented by force the Army would have to move into Austria by Saturday, and there were no plans for such a hasty move. Hitler summoned Keitel for 10 A.M., but before hurrying to the Fuehrer the General conferred with Jodl and General Max von Viebahn, chief of the Fuehrungsstab (Operations Staff) of OKW. The resourceful Jodi remembered Special Case Otto which had been drawn up to counter an attempt to place Otto of Hapsburg on the Austrian throne. Since it was the only plan that existed for military action against Austria, Hitler decided it would have to do. "Prepare Case Otto," he ordered.

 

Keitel raced back to OKW headquarters in the Bendlerstrasse to confer with General Beck, Chief of the General Staff. When he asked for details of the Otto plan, Beck replied, "We have prepared nothing, nothing has been done, nothing at all." Beck in turn was summoned to the Reich Chancellery. Seizing General von Manstein, who was about to leave Berlin to take up a divisional post, he drove with him over to see Hitler, who told them the Army must be ready to march into Austria by Saturday. Neither of the generals offered any objection to this proposal for armed aggression. They were merely concerned with the difficulty of improvising military action on such short notice. Manstein, returning to the Bendlerstrasse, set to work to draft the necessary orders, finishing his task within five hours, at 6 P.M. At 6:30 P.M., according to Jodl's diary, mobilization orders went out to three Army corps and the Air Force. At 2 A.M. the next morning, March 11, Hitler issued Directive Number One for Operation Otto. Such was his haste that he neglected to sign it, and his signature was not obtained until 1 P.M.

 

[quote]TOP SECRET

 

1. If other measures prove unsuccessful, I intend to invade Austria with armed forces to establish constitutional conditions and to prevent further outrages against the pro-German population.

 

2. The whole operation will be directed by myself....

 

4. The forces of the Army and Air Force detailed for this operation must be ready for invasion on March 12, 1938, at the latest by 12:00 hours ...

 

5. The behavior of the troops must give the impression that we do not want to wage war against our Austrian brothers... . Therefore any provocation is to be avoided. If, however, resistance is offered it must be broken ruthlessly by force of arms.... [21][/quote]

 

A few hours later Jodl issued supplemental "top-secret" orders on behalf of the Chief of the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces:

 

[quote]1. If Czechoslovakian troops or militia units are encountered in Austria, they are to be regarded as hostile.

 

2. The Italians are everywhere to be treated as friends, especially as Mussolini has declared himself disinterested in the solution of the Austrian question.  [22] [/quote]

 

Hitler had been worried about Mussolini. On the afternoon of March 10, as soon as he had decided on military invasion, he had sent off by special plane Prince Philip of Hesse, with a letter to the Duce (dated March 11) informing him of the action he contemplated and asking for the Italian dictator's understanding. The letter, a tissue of lies concerning his treatment of Schuschnigg and conditions in Austria, which he assured the Duce were "approaching a state of anarchy," began with such a fraudulent argument that Hitler had it omitted when the letter was later published in Germany. [viii] He stated that Austria and Czechoslovakia were plotting to restore the Hapsburgs and preparing "to throw the weight of a mass of at least twenty million men against Germany." He then outlined his demands to Schuschnigg, which, he assured Mussolini, "were more than moderate," told of Schuschnigg's failure to carry them out and spoke of the "mockery" of "a so-called plebiscite."

 

[quote]In my responsibility as Fuehrer and Chancellor of the German Reich and likewise as a son of this soil, I can no longer remain passive in the face of these developments.

 

I am now determined to restore law and order in my homeland and enable the people to decide their own fate according to their judgment in an unmistakable, clear and open manner ....

 

Whatever the manner may be in which this plebiscite is to be carried out, I now wish solemnly to assure Your Excellency, as the Duce of Fascist Italy:

 

1. Consider this step only as one of national self-defense and therefore as an act that any man of character would do in the same way, were he in my position. You too, Excellency, could not act differently if the fate of Italians were at stake... .

 

2. In a critical hour for Italy I proved to you the steadfastness of my sympathy. Do not doubt that in the future there will be no change in this respect.

 

3. Whatever the consequences of the coming events may be, I have drawn a definite boundary between Germany and France and now draw one just as definite between Italy and us. It is the Brenner . .  [ix]

 

Always in friendship,

Yours,

ADOLF HITLER [23][/quote]

 

[b]THE COLLAPSE OF SCHUSCHNIGG[/b]

 

Unmindful of the feverish goings on over the border in the Third Reich, Dr. Schuschnigg went to bed on the evening of March 10 firmly convinced, as he later testified, that the plebiscite would be a success for Austria and that the Nazis "would present no formidable obstacle." [x] Indeed, that evening Dr. Seyss-Inquart had assured him that he would support the plebiscite and even broadcast a speech in its favor.

 

At half past five on the morning of Friday, March 11, the Austrian Chancellor was wakened by the ringing of the telephone at his bedside. Dr. Skubl, the Austrian chief of police, was speaking. The Germans had closed the border at Salzburg, he said. Rail traffic between the two countries had been halted. German troops were reported concentrating on the Austrian frontier.

 

By 6: 15 Schuschnigg was on his way to his office at the Ballhausplatz, but he decided to stop first at St. Stephen's Cathedral. There in the first dim light of dawn while early mass was being read he sat restlessly in his pew thinking of the ominous message from the chief of police. "I was not quite sure what it meant," he later recalled. "I only knew that it would bring some change." He gazed at the candles burning in front of the image of Our Lady of Perpewal Succor, looked furtively around and then made the sign of the cross, as countless Viennese had done before this figure in past times of stress.

 

At the Chancellery all was quiet; not even any disturbing dispatches had arrived during the night from Austria's diplomats abroad. He called police headquarters and asked tllat as a precautionary measure a police cordon be thrown around the Inner City and the government buildings. He also convoked his cabinet colleagues. Only Seyss-Inquart failed to show up. Schuschnigg could not locate him anywhere. Actually the Nazi Minister was out at the Vienna airport. Papen, summarily summoned to Berlin the night before, had departed by special plane at 6 A.M. and Seyss had seen him off. Now the Number One quisling was waiting for the Number Two -- Glaise-Horstenau, like Seyss a minister in Schuschnigg's cabinet, like him already deep in treason, who was due to arrive from Berlin with Hitler's orders on what they were to do about the plebiscite.

 

The orders were to call it off, and these were duly presented to Schuschnigg by the two gentlemen at 10 A.M. along with the information that Hitler was furious. After several hours of consultations with President Miklas, his cabinet colleagues and Dr. Skubl, Schuschnigg agreed to cancel the plebiscite. The police chief had reluctantly told him that the police, liberally sprinkled with Nazis who had been restored to their posts in accordance with the Berchtesgaden ultimatum, could no longer be counted on by the government. On the other hand, Schuschnigg felt sure that the Army and the militia of the Patriotic Front -- the official authoritarian party in Austria -- would fight. But at this crucial moment Schuschnigg decided -- he says, in fact, that his mind had long been made up on the matter -- that he would not offer resistance to Hitler if it meant spilling German blood. Hitler was quite willing to do this, but Schuschnigg shrank back from the very prospect.

 

At 2 P.M. he called in Seyss-Inquart and told him that he was calling off the plebiscite. The gentle Judas immediately made for the telephone to inform Goering in Berlin. But in the Nazi scheme of things one concession from a yielding opponent must lead quickly to another. Goering and Hitler then and there began raising the ante. The minute-by-minute account of how this was done, of the threats and the swindles employed, was recorded --  ironically enough -- by Goering's own Forschungsamt, the "Institute for Research," which took down and transcribed twenty-seven telephone conversations from the Field Marshal's office beginning at 2:45 P.M. on March 11. The documents were found in the German Air Ministry after the war and constitute an illuminating record of how Austria's fate was settled by telephone from Berlin during the next few critical hours. [24]

 

During Seyss's first call to Goering at 2:45 P.M. the Field Marshal told him that Schuschnigg's cancellation of the plebiscite was not enough and that after talking with Hitler he would call him back. This he did at 3:05. Schuschnigg, he ordered, must resign, and Seyss-Inquart must be named Chancellor within two hours. Goering also told Seyss then to "send the telegram to the Fuehrer, as agreed upon." This is the first mention of a telegram that was to pop up throughout the frantic events of the next few hours and which would be used to perpetrate the swindle by which Hitler justified his aggression to the German people and to the foreign offices of the world.

 

Wilhelm Keppler, Hitler's special agent in Austria, arriving in the afternoon from Berlin to take charge in Papen's absence, had shown Seyssl. Inquart the text of a telegram he was to send the Fuehrer. It requested the dispatch of German troops to Austria to put down disorder. In his Nuremberg affidavit, Seyss declared that he refused to send such a wire since there were no disorders. Keppler, insisting that it would have to be done, hurried to the Austrian Chancellery, where he was brazen enough to set up an emergency office along with Seyss and Glaise-Horstenau. Why Schuschnigg allowed such interlopers and traitors to establish themselves physically in the seat of the Austrian government at this critical hour is incomprehensible, but he did. Later he remembered the Chancellery as looking "like a disturbed beehive," with Seyss-Inquart and Glaise-Horstenau holding "court" in one comer "and around them a busy coming and going of strange-looking men"; but apparently it never occurred to the courteous but dazed Chancellor to throw them out.

 

He had made up his mind to yield to Hitler's pressure and resign. While still closeted with Seyss he had put through a telephone call to Mussolini, but the Duce was not immediately available and a few minutes later Schuschnigg canceled the call. To ask for Mussolini's help, he decided, "would be a waste of time." Even Austria's pompous protector was deserting her in the hour of need. A few minutes later, when Schuschnigg was trying to talk President Miklas into accepting his resignation, a message came from the Foreign Office: "The Italian government declares that it could give no advice under the circumstances, in case such advice should be asked for." [25]

 

President Wilhelm Miklas was not a great man, but he was a stubborn, upright one. He reluctantly accepted Schuschnigg's resignation but he refused to make Seyss-Inquart his successor. "That is quite impossible," he said. "We will not be coerced." He instructed Schuschnigg to inform the Germans that their ultimatum was refused. [26]

 

This was promptly reported by Seyss-Inquart to Goering at 5:30 P.M.

 

[quote] SEYSS-INQUART: The President has accepted the resignation [of Schuschnigg] ... I suggested he entrust the Chancellorship to me ... but he would like to entrust a man like Ender ...

 

GOERING: Well, that won't do! Under no circumstances! The President has to be informed immediately that he has to turn the powers of the Federal Chancellor over to you and to accept the cabinet as it was arranged.[/quote]

 

There was an interruption at this point. Seyss-Inquart put a Dr. Muehlmann, a shadowy Austrian Nazi whom Schuschnigg had noticed lurking in the background at Berchtesgaden and who was a personal friend of Goering, on the line.

 

[quote]MUEHLMANN: The President still refuses persistently to give his consent. We three National Socialists went to speak to him personally ... He would not even let us see him. So far, it looks as if he were not willing to give in.

 

GOERING: Give me Seyss. [To Seyss] Now, remember the following: You go immediately together with Lieutenant General Muff [the German military attache] and tell the President that if the conditions are not accepted immediately, the troops which are already advancing to the frontier will march in tonight along the whole line, and Austria will cease to exist ... Tell him there is no time now for any joke. The situation now is that tonight the invasion will begin from all the corners of Austria. The invasion will be stopped and the troops held on the border only if we are informed by seven-thirty that Miklas has entrusted you with the Federal Chancellorship ... Then can out the National Socialists all over the country. They should now be in the streets. So remember, a report must be given by seven-thirty. If Miklas could not understand it in four hours, we shall make him understand it now in four minutes.[/quote]

 

But still the resolute President held out.

 

At 6:30 Goering was back on the phone to Keppler and Seyss-Inquart. Both reported that President Miklas refused to go along with them.

 

[quote]GOERING: Well, then, Seyss-Inquart has to dismiss him! Just go upstairs again and ten him plainly that Seyss will call on the National Socialist guards and in five minutes the troops will march in on my order.[/quote]

 

After this order General Muff and Keppler presented to the President a second military ultimatum threatening that if he did not yield within an hour, by 7: 30, German troops would march into Austria. "I informed the two gentlemen," Miklas testified later, "that I refused the ultimatum ... and that Austria alone determines who is to be the head of government."

 

By this time the Austrian Nazis had gained control of the streets as well as of the Chancellery. About six that evening, returning from the hospital where my wife was fighting for her life after a difficult childbirth which had ended with a Caesarean operation, I had emerged from the subway at the Karlsplatz to find myself engulfed in a shouting, hysterical Nazi mob which was sweeping toward the Inner City. These contorted faces I had seen before, at the Nuremberg party rallies. They were yelling, "Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Heil Hitler! Heil Hitler! Hang Schuschnigg! Hang Schuschnigg!" The police, whom only a few hours before I had seen disperse a small Nazi group without any trouble, were standing by, grinning.

 

Schuschnigg heard the tramp and the shouts of the mob, and the sounds impressed him. He hurried to the President's office to make a final plea. But, he says:

 

[quote]President Miklas was adamant. He would not appoint a Nazi as Austrian Chancellor. On my insistence that he appoint Seyss-Inquart he said again: "You all desert me now, all of you." But I saw no other possibility than Seyss-Inquart. With the little hope I had left I clung to all the promises he had made me, I clung to his personal reputation as a practicing Catholic and an honest man. [27] [/quote]

 

Schuschnigg clung to his illusions to the last.

 

The fallen Chancellor then proposed that he make a farewell broadcast and explain why he had resigned. He says that Miklas agreed, though the President would later dispute it. It was the most moving broadcast I have ever heard. The microphone was set up some five paces from where Dollfuss had been shot to death by the Nazis.

 

[quote]... The German government [Schuschnigg said] today handed to President Miklas an ultimatum, with a time limit, ordering him to nominate as Chancellor a person designated by the German government ... otherwise German troops would invade Austria.

 

I declare before the world that the reports launched in Germany concerning disorders by the workers, the shedding of streams of blood and the creation of a situation beyond the control of the Austrian government are lies from A to Z. President Miklas has asked me to tell the people of Austria that we have yielded to force since we are not prepared even in this terrible hour to shed blood. We have decided to order the troops to offer no resistance. [xi]

 

So I take leave of the Austrian people with a German word of farewell, uttered from the depth of my heart: God protect Austria![/quote]

 

The Chancellor might take leave but the stubborn President was not yet ready to. Goering learned this when he phoned General Muff shortly after Schuschnigg's broadcast. "The best thing will be if Miklas resigns," Goering told him.

 

"Yes, but he won't," Muff rejoined. "It was very dramatic. I spoke to him almost fifteen minutes. He declared that under no circumstances will he yield to force."

 

"So? He will not give in to force?" Goering could not believe the words.

 

"He does not yield to force," the General repeated.

 

"So he just wants to be kicked out?"

 

"Yes," said Muff. "He is staying put."

 

"Well, with fourteen children," Goering laughed, "a man has to stay put. Anyway, tell Seyss to take over."

 

There was still the matter of the telegram which Hitler wanted in order to justify his invasion. The Fuehrer, according to Papen, who had joined him at the Chancellery in Berlin, was now "in a state bordering on hysteria." The stubborn Austrian President was fouling up his plans. So was Seyss-Inquart, because of his failure to send the telegram calling on Hitler to send troops into Austria to quell disorder. Exasperated beyond enduring, Hitler flashed the invasion order at 8: 45 P.M. on the evening of March 11. [xii] Three minutes later, at 8: 48, Goering was on the phone to Keppler in Vienna.

 

[quote]Listen carefully. The following telegram should be sent here by Seyss-Inquart. Take the notes.

 

"The provisional Austrian Government, which after the resignation of the Schuschnigg Government considers it its task to establish peace and order in Austria, sends to the German Government the urgent request to support it in the task and to help it to prevent bloodshed. For this purpose it asks the German Government to send German troops as soon as possible."[/quote]

 

Keppler assured the Field Marshal he would show Seyss-Inquart the text of the "telegram" immediately.

 

"Well," Goering said, "he does not even have to send the telegram. All he needs to do is say 'Agreed.'"

 

One hour later Keppler called back Berlin. "Tell the Field Marshal," he said, "that Seyss-Inquart agrees." [xiii]

 

 

Thus it was that when I passed through Berlin the next day I found a screaming headline in the Voelkischer Beobachter: GERMAN AUSTRIA SAVEDFROMCHAOS. There were incredible stories hatched up by Goebbels describing Red disorders -- fighting, shooting, pillaging -- in the main streets of Vienna. And there was the text of the telegram, issued by D.N.B., the official German news agency, which said that it had been dispatched by Seyss-Inquart to Hitler the night before. Actually two copies of the "telegram," just as Goering had dictated it, were found in the German Foreign Office archives at the end of the war. Papen later explained how they got there. They were concocted, he says, sometime later by the German Minister of Posts and Telegraph and deposited in the government files.

 

Hitler had waited anxiously throughout the frenzied afternoon and evening not only for President Miklas to capitulate but for some word from Mussolini. The silence of Austria's protector was becoming ominous. At 10:25 P.M. Prince Philip of Hesse called the Chancellery from Rome. Hitler himself grabbed the telephone. Goering's technicians recorded the conversation that followed:

 

[quote]PRINCE: I have just come back from the Palazzo Venezia. The Duce accepted the whole thing in a very friendly manner. He sends you his regards.... Schuschnigg gave him the news ... Mussolini said that Austria would be immaterial to him.[/quote]

 

Hitler was beside himself with relief and joy.

 

[quote]HITLER: Then, please tell Mussolini I will never forget him for this!

 

PRINCE: Yes, sir.

 

HITLER: Never, never, never, no matter what happens! I am ready to make a quite different agreement with him.

 

PRINCE: Yes, sir. I told him that too.

 

HITLER: As soon as the Austrian affair has been settled I shall be ready to go with him through thick and thin -- through anything!

 

PRINCE: Yes, my Fuehrer.

 

HITLER: Listen! I shall make any agreement. I am no longer in fear of the terrible position which would have existed militarily in case we had gotten into a conflict. You may tell him that I do thank him from the bottom of my heart. Never, never shall I forget it.

 

PRINCE: Yes, my Fuehrer.

 

HITLER: I shall never forget him for this, no matter what happens. If he should ever need any help or be in any danger, he can be convinced that I shall stick to him whatever may happen, even if the whole world gangs up on him.

 

PRINCE: Yes, my Fuehrer.[/quote]

 

And what stand were Great Britain and France and the League of Nations taking at this critical moment to halt Germany's aggression against a peaceful neighboring country? None. For the moment France was again without a government. On Thursday, March 10, Premier Chautemps and his cabinet had resigned. All through the crucial day of Friday, March 11, when Goering was telephoning his ultimatums to Vienna, there was no one in Paris who could act. It was not until the Anschluss had been proclaimed on the thirteenth that a French government was formed under Leon Blum.

 

And Britain? On February 20, a week after Schuschnigg had capitulated at Berchtesgaden, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden had resigned, principally because of his opposition to further appeasement of Mussolini by Prime Minister Chamberlain. He was replaced by Lord Halifax. This change was welcomed in Berlin. So was Chamberlain's statement to the Commons after the Berchtesgaden ultimatum. The German Embassy in London reported fully on it in a dispatch to Berlin on March 4. [31] Chamberlain was quoted as saying that "what happened [at Berchtesgaden] was merely that two statesmen had agreed upon certain measures for the improvement of relations between their two countries ... It appeared hardly possible to insist that just because two statesmen had agreed on certain domestic changes in one of two countries -- changes desirable in the interest of relations between them -- the one country had renounced its independence in favor of the other. On the contrary, the Federal Chancellor's speech of February 24 contained nothing that might convey the impression that the Federal Chancellor [Schuschnigg] himself believed in the surrender of the independence of his country."

 

In view of the fact that the British Legation in Vienna, as I myself learned at the time, had provided Chamberlain with the details of Hitler's Berchtesgaden ultimatum to Schuschnigg, this speech, which was made to the Commons on March 2, is astounding. [xiv] But it was pleasing to Hitler. He knew that he could march into Austria without getting into complications with Britain. On March 9, Ribbentrop, the new German Foreign Minister, had arrived in London to wind up his affairs at the embassy, where he had been ambassador. He had long talks with Chamberlain, Halifax, the King and the Archbishop of Canterbury. His impressions of the British Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary, he reported back to Berlin, were "very good." After a long conference with Lord Halifax, Ribbentrop reported directly to Hitler on March 10 as to what Britain would do "if the Austrian question cannot be settled peacefully." Basically he was convinced from his London talks "that England will do nothing in regard to Austria." [33]

 

On Friday, March 11, Ribbentrop was lunching at Downing Street with the Prime Minister and his associates when a Foreign Office messenger broke in with urgent dispatches for Chamberlain telling of the startling news from Vienna. Only a few minutes before, Chamberlain had asked Ribbentrop to inform the Fuehrer "of his sincere wish and firm determination to clear up German-British relations." Now, at the receipt of the sour news from Austria, the statesmen adjourned to the Prime Minister's study, where Chamberlain read to the uncomfortable German Foreign Minister two telegrams from the British Legation in Vienna telling of Hitler's ultimatum. "The discussion," Ribbentrop reported to Hitler, "took place in a tense atmosphere and the usually calm Lord Halifax was more excited than Chamberlain, who outwardly at least appeared calm and coolheaded." Ribbentrop expressed doubts about "the truth of the reports" and this seems to have calmed down his British hosts, for "our leave-taking," he reported, "was entirely amiable, and even Halifax was calm again." [xv] [34]

 

Chamberlain's reaction to the dispatches from Vienna was to instruct Ambassador Henderson in Berlin to pen a note to Acting Foreign Minister von Neurath stating that if the report of the German ultimatum to Austria was correct, "His Majesty's Government feel bound to register a protest in the strongest terms." [35] But a formal diplomatic protest at this late hour was the least of Hitler's worries. The next day, March 12, while German troops were streaming into Austria, Neurath returned a contemptuous reply, 36 declaring that Austro-German relations were the exclusive concern of the German people and not of the British government, and repeating the lies that there had been no German ultimatum to Austria and that troops had been dispatched only in answer to "urgent" appeals from the newly formed Austrian government. He referred the British ambassador to the telegram, "already published in the German press." [xvi]

 

Hitler's only serious worry on the evening of March 11 had been over Mussolini's reaction to his aggression, [xvii] but there was some concern in Berlin too as to what Czechoslovakia might do. However, the indefatigable Goering quickly cleared this up. Busy though he was at the telephone directing the coup in Vienna, he managed to slip over during the evening to the Haus der Flieger, where he was official host to a thousand high-ranking officials and diplomats, who were being entertained at a glittering soiree by the orchestra, the singers and the ballet of the State Opera. When the Czech minister in Berlin, Dr. Mastny, arrived at the gala fete he was immediately taken aside by the bemedaled Field Marshal, who told him on his word of honor that Czechoslovakia had nothing to fear from Germany, that the entry of the Reich's troops into Austria was "nothing more than a family affair" and that Hitler wanted to improve relations with Prague. In return he asked for assurances that the Czechs would not mobilize. Dr. Mastny left the reception, telephoned to his Foreign Minister in Prague, and returned to the hall to tell Goering that his country was not mobilizing and that Czechoslovakia had no intention of trying to interfere with events in Austria. Goering was relieved and repeated his assurances, adding that he was authorized to back them up by Hitler's word too.

 

It may have been that even the astute Czech President, Eduard Benes, did not have time to realize that evening that Austria's end meant Czechoslovakia's as well. There were some in Europe that weekend who thought the Czech government was shortsighted, who argued that in view of the disastrous strategic position in which Czechoslovakia would be left by the Nazi occupation of Austria -- with German troops surrounding her on three sides -- and considering too that her intervention to help save Austria might have brought Russia, France and Britain, as well as the League of Nations, into a conflict with the Third Reich which the Germans were in no condition to meet, the Czechs should have acted on the night of March 11. But subsequent events, which shortly will be chronicled here, surely demolish any such argument. A little later when the two big Western democracies and the League had a better opportunity of stopping Hitler they shrank from it. Anyway, at no time on the eventful day did Schuschnigg make a formal appeal to London, Paris, Prague or Geneva. Perhaps, as his memoirs indicate, he thought this would be a waste of time. Presi· dent Miklas, on the other hand, was under the impression, as he later testified, that the Austrian government, which immediately had informed Paris and London of the German ultimatum, was continuing "conversations" with the French and British governments throughout the afternoon in order to ascertain their "frame of mind."

 

When it became clear that their "frame of mind" was to do nothing more than utter empty protests President Miklas, a little before midnight, gave in. He appointed Seyss-Inquart Chancellor and accepted his list of cabinet ministers. "I was completely abandoned both at home and abroad," he commented bitterly later.

 

Having issued a grandiose proclamation to the German people in which he justified his aggression with his usual contempt for the truth and promised that the Austrian people would choose their future in "a real plebiscite" -- Goebbels read it over the German and Austrian radio stations at noon on March 12 -- Hitler set off for his native land. He received a tumultuous welcome. At every village, hastily decorated in his honor, there were cheering crowds. During the afternoon he reached his first goal, Linz, where he had spent his school days. The reception there was delirious and Hitler was deeply touched. The next day, after getting off a telegram to Mussolini -- "I shall never forget you for this!" -- he laid a wreath on the graves of his parents at Leonding and then returned to Linz to make a speech:

 

[quote]When years ago I went forth from this town I bore within me precisely the same profession of faith which today fills my heart. Judge the depth of my emotion when after so many years I have been able to bring that profession of faith to its fulfillment. If Providence once called me forth from this town to be the leader of the Reich, it must in so doing have charged me with a mission, and that mission could only be to restore my dear homeland to the German Reich. I have believed in this mission, I have lived and fought for it, and I believe I have now fulfilled it.[/quote]

 

On the afternoon of the twelfth, Seyss-Inquart, accompanied by Himmler, had flown to Linz to meet Hitler and had proudly proclaimed that Article 88 of the Treaty of St. Germain, which proclaimed Austria's independence as inalienable and made the League of Nations its guarantor; had been voided. To Hitler, carried away by the enthusiasm of the Austrian crowds, this was not enough. He ordered Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart, an undersecretary in the Ministry of the Interior who had been rushed by his Minister, Frick, to Vienna to draft a law making Hitler President of Austria, to come at once to Linz. Somewhat to the surprise of this legal expert, the Fuehrer instructed him, as he later deposed at Nuremberg, to "draft a law providing for a total Anschluss." [39]

 

This draft Stuckart presented to the newly formed Austrian government in Vienna on Sunday, March 13, the day on which Schuschnigg's plebiscite was to have been held. President Miklas, as we have seen, refused to sign it, but Seyss-Inquart, who had taken over the President's powers, did and late that evening flew back to Linz to present it to the Fuehrer. It proclaimed the end of Austria. "Austria," it began, "is a province of the German Reich." Hitler shed tears of joy, Seyss-Inquart later recalled. [40] The so-called Anschluss law was also promulgated the same day at Linz by the German government and signed by Hitler, Goering, Ribbentrop, Frick and Hess. It provided for "a free and secret plebiscite" on April 10 in which the Austrians could determine "the question of reunion with the German Reich." The Reich Germans, Hitler announced on March 18, were also to have a plebiscite on the Anschluss, along with new elections to the Reichstag.

 

Hitler did not make his triumphal entry into Vienna, where he had lived so long as a tramp, until the afternoon of Monday, March 14. He was delayed by two unforeseen developments. Despite the delirium of the Austrians at the prospect of seeing the Fuehrer in the capital, Himmler asked for an extra day to perfect security arrangements. He was already carrying out the arrest of thousands of "unreliables" -- within a few weeks the number would reach 79,000 in Vienna alone. Also the vaunted German panzer units had broken down long before they got within sight of Vienna's hills. According to Jodl, some 70 per cent of the armored vehicles were stranded on the road from Salzburg and Passau to Vienna, though General Guderian, who commanded the panzer troops, later contended that only 30 per cent of his forces became stalled. At any rate, Hitler was furious at the delay. He remained in Vienna only overnight, putting up at the Hotel Imperial.

 

Still, this triumphant return to the former imperial capital which he felt had rejected him and condemned him in his youth to a starved and miserable gutter life and which was now acclaiming him with such tumultuous jubilation could not have failed to revive his spirits. The ubiquitous Papen, rushing by plane from Berlin to Vienna to get in on the festivities, found Hitler in the reviewing stand opposite the Hofburg, the ancient palace of the Hapsburgs. "I can only describe him," Papen later wrote, "as being in a state of ecstasy." [xviii]

 

He remained in this state during most of the next four weeks, when he traversed Germany and Austria from one end to the other whipping up public fervor for a big la vote in favor of the Anschluss. But in his exuberant speeches he missed no opportunity to vilify Schuschnigg or to peddle the by now shopworn lies about how the Anschluss was achieved. In his address to the Reichstag on March 18 he asserted that Schuschnigg had "broken his word" by his "election forgery," adding that "only a crazy, blinded man" could have behaved in such a manner. On March 25 at Koenigsberg the "election forgery" had become in Hitler's mind "this ridiculous comedy." Letters had been found, Hitler claimed, proving that Schuschnigg had deliberately double-crossed him by seeking delays in augmenting the Berchtesgaden agreement until "a more propitious hour to stir up foreign countries against Germany."

 

In Koenigsberg Hitler also answered the taunts of the foreign press at his use of brutal force and his trickery in having proclaimed the Anschluss without even waiting for the decision of the plebiscite:

 

[quote]Certain foreign newspapers have said that we fell on Austria with brutal methods. I can only say: even in death they cannot stop lying. I have in the course of my political struggle won much love from my people, but when I crossed the former frontier [into Austria] there met me such a stream of love as I have never experienced. Not as tyrants have we come, but as liberators ... Under the force of this impression I decided not to wait until April tenth but to effect the unification forthwith ...[/quote]

 

If this sounded less than logical -- or honest -- to foreign ears, there is no doubt that it made a great impression on the Germans. When at the conclusion of his Reichstag speech Hitler implored, in a voice choked with emotion, "German people, give me another four years so that I can now exploit the accomplished union for the benefit of all!" he received an ovation so overwhelming that it dwarfed all his former triumphs at this tribune.

 

The Fuehrer wound up his election campaign in Vienna on April 9, on the eve of the polling. The man who had once tramped the pavements of this city as a vagabond, unwashed and empty-bellied, who but four years before had assumed in Germany the powers of the Hohenzollern kings and had now taken upon himself those of the Hapsburg emperors, was full of a sense of God-given mission.

 

[quote]I believe that it was God's will to send a youth from here into the Reich, to let him grow up, to raise him to be the leader of the nation so as to enable him to lead back his homeland into the Reich.

 

There is a higher ordering and we all are nothing else than its agents. When on March 9 Herr Schuschnigg broke his agreement, then in that second I felt that now the call of Providence had come to me. And that which then took place in three days was only conceivable as the fulfillment of the wish and the will of this Providence.

 

In three days the Lord has smitten them! ... And to me the grace was given on the day of the betrayal to be able to unite my homeland with the Reich! ...

 

I would now give thanks to Him who let me return to my homeland in order that I might now lead it into my German Reich! Tomorrow may every German recognize the hour and measure its import and bow in humility before the Almighty, who in a few weeks has wrought a miracle upon us![/quote]

 

That a majority of Austrians, who undoubtedly would have said Ja to Schuschnigg on March 13, would say the same to Hitler on April 10 was a foregone conclusion. Many of them sincerely believed that ultimate union with any kind of Germany, even a Nazi Germany, was a desirable and inevitable end, that Austria, cut off from its vast Slavic and Hungarian hinterland in 1918, could not in the long run exist decently by itself, that it could only survive as part of the German Reich. In addition to these Austrians were the fanatical Nazis whose ranks were swelling rapidly with jobseekers and jobholders attracted by success and anxious to improve their position. Many Catholics in this overwhelmingly Catholic country were undoubtedly swayed by a widely publicized statement of Cardinal Innitzer welcoming Nazism to Austria and urging a Ja vote. [xix]

 

In a fair and honest election in which the Social Democrats and Schuschnigg's Christian Socials would have had freedom to campaign openly the plebiscite, in my opinion, might have been close. As it was, it took a very brave Austrian to vote No. As in Germany, and not without reason, the voters feared that their failure to cast an affirmative ballot might be found out. In the polling station which I visited in Vienna that Sunday afternoon, wide slits in the comer of the polling booths gave the Nazi election committee sitting a few feet away a good view of how one voted. In the country districts few bothered -- or dared -- to cast their ballots in the secrecy of the booth; they voted openly for all to see. I happened to broadcast at seven-thirty that evening, a half hour after the polls had closed, when few votes had yet been counted. A Nazi official assured me before the broadcast that the Austrians were voting 99 per cent la. That was the figure officially given later -- 99.08 per cent in Greater Germany, 99.75 in Austria.

 

And so Austria, as Austria, passed for a moment out of history, its very name suppressed by the revengeful Austrian who had now joined it to Germany. The ancient German word for Austria, Oesterreich, was abolished. Austria became the Ostmark and soon even that name was dropped and Berlin administered the country by Gaue (districts) which corresponded roughly to the historic Laender such as Tyrol, Salzburg, Styria and Carinthia. Vienna became just another city of the Reich, a provincial district administrative center, withering away. The former Austrian tramp become dictator had wiped his native land off the map and deprived its once glittering capital of its last shred of glory and importance. Disillusionment among the Austrians was inevitable.

 

For the first few weeks the behavior of the Vienna Nazis was worse than anything I had seen in Germany. There was an orgy of sadism. Day after day large numbers of Jewish men and women could be seen scrubbing Schuschnigg signs off the sidewalk and cleaning the gutters. While they worked on their hands and knees with jeering storm troopers standing over them, crowds gathered to taunt them. Hundreds of Jews, men and women, were picked off the streets and put to work cleaning public latrines and the toilets of the barracks where the S.A. and the S.S. were quartered. Tens of thousands more were jailed. Their worldly possessions were confiscated or stolen. I myself, from our apartment in the Plosslgasse, watched squads of S.S. men carting off silver, tapestries, paintings and other loot from the Rothschild palace next door. Baron Louis de Rothschild himself was later able to buy his way out of Vienna by turning over his steel mills to the Hermann Goering Works. Perhaps half of the city's 180,000 Jews managed, by the time the war started, to purchase their freedom to emigrate by handing over what they owned to the Nazis.

 

This lucrative trade in human freedom was handled by a special organization set up under the S.S. by Heydrich, the "Office for Jewish Emigration," which became the sole Nazi agency authorized to issue permits to Jews to leave the country. Administered from the beginning to the end by an Austrian Nazi, a native of Hitler's home town of Linz by the name of Karl Adolf Eichmann, it was to become eventually an agency not of emigration but of extermination and to organize the slaughter of more than four million persons, mostly Jews. Himmler and Heydrich also took advantage of their stay in Austria during the first weeks of the Anschluss to set up a huge concentration camp at Mauthausen, on the north bank of the Danube near Enns. It was too much trouble to continue to transport thousands of Austrians to the concentration camps of Germany. Austria, Himmler decided, needed one of its own. Before the Third Reich tumbled to its fall the non-Austrian prisoners were to outnumber the local inmates and Mauthausen was to achieve the dubious record as the German concentration camp (the extermination camps in the East were something else) with the largest number of officially listed executions --  35,318 in the six and a half years of its existence.

 

Despite the Gestapo terror led by Himmler and Heydrich after the Anschluss Germans flocked by the hundreds of thousands to Austria, where they could pay with their marks for sumptuous meals not available in Germany for years and for bargain-priced vacations amid Austria's matchless mountains and lakes. German businessmen and bankers poured in to buy up the concerns of dispossessed Jews and anti-Nazis at a fraction of their value. Among the smiling visitors was the inimitable Dr. Schacht, who, despite his quarrels with Hitler, was still a minister (without portfolio) in the Reich cabinet, still the president of the Reichsbank, and who was overjoyed with the Anschluss. Arriving to take over the Austrian National Bank on behalf of the Reichsbank even before the plebiscite, he addressed the staff of the Austrian bank on March 21. Ridiculing the foreign press for criticizing Hitler's methods of effecting the union, Dr. Schacht stoutly defended the methods, arguing that the Anschluss was "the consequence of countless perfidies and brutal acts of violence which foreign countries have practiced against us.

 

[quote]"Thank God ... Adolf Hitler has created a communion of German will and German thought. He bolstered it up with the newly strengthened Wehrmacht and he then finally gave the external form to the inner union between Germany and Austria....

 

"Not a single person will find a future with us who is not wholeheartedly for Adolf Hitler ... The Reichsbank will always be nothing but National Socialist or I shall cease to be its manager."[/quote]

 

Whereupon Dr. Schacht administered to the Austrian staff an oath to be "faithful and obedient to the Fuehrer."

 

"A scoundrel he who breaks it!" Dr. Schacht cried, and then led his audience in the bellowing of a triple "Sieg Heil!" [42]

 

In the meantime Dr. Schuschnigg had been arrested and subjected to treatment so degrading that it is difficult to believe that it was not prescribed by Hitler himself. Kept under house arrest from March 12 until May 28, during which time the Gestapo contrived to prevent him from getting any sleep by the most petty devices, he was then taken to Gestapo headquarters at the Hotel Metropole in Vienna, where he was incarcerated in a tiny room on the fifth floor for the next seventeen months. There, with the towel issued to him for his personal use, he was forced to clean the quarters, washbasins, slop buckets and latrines of the S.S. guards and perform other various menial tasks thought up by the Gestapo. By March 11, the first anniversary of his fall, he had lost fifty-eight pounds, but the S.S. doctor reported that his condition was excellent. The years of solitary confinement and then of life "among the living dead" in some of the worst of the German concentration camps such as Dachau and Sachsenhausen that followed have been described by Dr. Schuschnigg in his book. [xx]

 

Shortly after his arrest he was allowed to marry by proxy the former Countess Vera Czernin, whose marriage had been annulled by an ecclesiastical court, [xxi] and in the last war years she was permitted to share his existence in the concentration camps along with their child, who was born in 1941. How they survived the nightmare of imprisonment is a miracle. Toward the end they were joined by a number of other distinguished victims of Hitler's wrath such as Dr. Schacht, Leon Blum, the former French Premier, and Madame Blum, Pastor Niemoeller, a host of high-ranking generals and Prince Philip of Hesse, whose wife, Princess Mafalda, the daughter of the King of Italy, had been done to death by the S.S. at Buchenwald in 1944 as part of the Fuehrer's revenge for Victor Emmanuel's desertion to the Allied side.

 

On May 1, 1945, the eminent group of prisoners, whp had been hastily evacuated from Dachau and transported southward to keep them from being liberated by the Americans advancing from the West, arrived at a village high in the mountains of southern Tyrol. The Gestapo officers showed Schuschnigg a list of those who, on Himmler's orders, were to be done away with before they fell into the hands of the Allies. Schuschnigg noted his own name and that of his wife, "neatly printed." His spirits fell. To have survived so much so long -- and then to be bumped off at the last minute!

 

On May 4, however, Schuschnigg was able to write in his diary:

 

[quote]At two o'clock this afternoon, alarm! The Americans!

An American detachment takes over the hotel.

We are free![/quote]

 

Without firing a shot and without interference from Great Britain, France and Russia, whose military forces could have overwhelmed him, Hitler had added seven million subjects to the Reich and gained a strategic position of immense value to his future plans. Not only did his armies flank Czechoslovakia on three sides but he now possessed in Vienna the gateway to Southeast Europe. As the capital of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, Vienna had long stood at the center of the communications and the trading systems of Central and Southeast Europe. Now that nerve center was in German hands.

 

Perhaps most important to Hitler was the demonstration again that neither Britain nor France would lift a finger to stop him. On March 14 Chamberlain had addressed the Commons on Hitler's fait accompli in Austria, and the German Embassy in London had got off to Berlin a succession of urgent telegrams on the course of the debate. There was not much for Hitler to fear. "The hard fact is," Chamberlain declared, "that nothing could have arrested what actually has happened [in Austria] --  unless this country and other countries had been prepared to use force."

 

The British Prime Minister, it became clear to Hitler, was unwilling not only to employ force but even to concert with the other Big Powers about halting Germany's future moves. On March 17 the Soviet government had proposed a conference of powers, within or without the League of Nations, to consider means of seeing that there was no further German aggression. Chamberlain took a chilly view of any such meeting and on March 24, in the House of Commons, publicly rejected it. "The inevitable consequence of any such action," he said, "would be to aggravate the tendency towards the establishment of exclusive groups of nations which must ... be inimical to the prospects of European peace." Apparently he overlooked, or did not take seriously, the Rome-Berlin Axis or the tripartite Anti-Comintern Pact of Germany, Italy and Japan.

 

In the same speech Chamberlain announced a decision of his government which must have been even more pleasing to Hitler. He bluntly rejected the suggestion not only that Britain should give a guarantee to come to the aid of Czechoslovakia in case she were attacked but also that Britain should support France if the French were called upon to implement their obligations under the Franco-Czech pact. This forthright statement eased Hitler's problems considerably. He now knew that Britain would also stand by when he took on his next victim. If Britain held back would not France also? As his secret papers of the next few months make clear, he was sure of it. And he knew that, by the terms of the Russian pacts with France and Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union was not obliged to come to the aid of the Czechs until the French moved first. Such knowledge was all that he needed to enable him to go ahead at once with his plans.

 

The reluctant German generals, Hitler could assume after the success of the Anschluss, would no longer stand in his way. If he had any doubts at all on this, they were removed by the denouement of the Fritsch affair.

 

As we have seen, [xxii] General von Fritsch's trial before a military court of honor on charges of homosexualism had been abruptly suspended on its opening day, March 10, when Field Marshal Goering and the commanders of the Army and Navy were convoked by Hitler to handle more urgent affairs in connection with Austria. The trial resumed on March 17, but in view of what had happened in the interval it was bound to be anticlimactic. A few weeks before, the senior generals had been confident that when the military court exposed the unbelievable machinations of Himmler and Heydrich against Fritsch not only would their fallen Commander in Chief be restored to his post in the Army but the S.S., perhaps even the Third Reich, possibly even Adolf Hitler, would be shaken to a fall. Vain and empty hope! On February 4, as has been recounted, Hitler had smashed the dreams of the old officer corps by taking over command of the armed forces himself and cashiering Fritsch and most of the high-ranking generals around him. Now he had conquered Austria without a shot. After this astounding triumph, nobody in Germany, not even the old generals, had much thought for General von Fritsch.

 

True, he was quickly cleared. After some browbeating from Goering, who could now pose as the fairest of judges, the blackmailing ex-convict, Schmidt, broke down in court and confessed that the Gestapo had threatened his life unless he implicated General von Fritsch -- a threat, incidentally, which was carried out anyway a few days later -- and that the similarity of names between Fritsch and Rittmeister von Frisch, whom he had actually blackmailed for homosexualism, had led to the frame-up. No attempt was made by Fritsch or the Army to expose the Gestapo's real role, nor the personal guilt of Himmler and Heydrich in cooking up the false charges. On the second day, March 18, the trial was concluded with the inevitable verdict: "Proven not guilty as charged, and acquitted."

 

It was a personal exoneration for General von Fritsch but it did not restore him to his command, nor the Army to its former position of some independence in the Third Reich. Since the trial was held in camera, the public knew nothing of it or of the issues involved. On March 25 Hitler sent a telegram to Fritsch congratulating him on his "recovery of health." That was all.

 

The deposed General, who had declined to point an accusing finger at Himmler in court, now made a final futile gesture. He challenged the Gestapo chief to a duel. The challenge, drawn up in strict accordance with the old military code of honor by General Beck himself, was given to General von Rundstedt, as the senior ranking Army officer, to deliver to the head of the S.S. But Rundstedt got cold feet, carried it around in his pocket for weeks and in the end forgot it.

 

General von Fritsch, and all he stood for, soon faded out of German life. But what did he stand for in the end? In December he was writing his friend Baroness Margot von Schutzbar a letter which indicated the pathetic confusion into which he, like so many of the other generals, had fallen.

 

[quote]It is really strange that so many people should regard the future with increasing fears, in spite of the Fuehrer's indisputable successes during the past years ...

 

Soon after the war I came to the conclusion that we should have to be victorious in three battles if Germany were to become powerful again:

 

1. The battle against the working class -- Hitler has won this.

 

2. Against the Catholic Church, perhaps better expressed against Ultra-montanism, and

 

3. Against the Jews.

 

We are in the midst of these battles and the one against the Jews is the most difficult. I hope everyone realizes the intricacies of this campaign. [43] [/quote]

 

On August 7, 1939, as the war clouds darkened, he wrote the Baroness: "For me there is, neither in peace nor in war, any part in Herr Hitler's Germany. I shall accompany my regiment only as a target, because I cannot stay at home."

 

That is what he did. On August 11, 1938, he had been named colonel in chief of his old regiment, the 12th Artillery Regiment, a purely honorary title. On September 22, 1939, he was the target of a Polish machine gunner before beleaguered Warsaw, and four days later he was buried with full military honors in Berlin on a cold, rainy, dark morning, one of the dreariest days, according to my diary, I ever lived through in the capital.

 

With Fritsch's discharge as Commander in Chief of the German Army twenty months before, Hitler had won, as we have seen, a complete victory over the last citadel of possible opposition in Germany, the old, traditional Army officer caste. Now, in the spring of 1938, by his clever coup in Austria, he had further established his hold on the Army, demonstrating his bold leadership and emphasizing that he alone would make the decisions in foreign policy and that it was the Army's role merely to supply the force, or the threat of force. Moreover, he had given the Army, without the sacrifice of a man, a strategic position which rendered Czechoslovakia militarily indefensible. There was no time to lose in taking advantage of it.

 

On April 21, eleven days after the Nazi plebiscite on Austria, Hitler called in General Keitel, Chief of the High Command of the Armed Forces, to discuss Case Green.

 

_______________

 

[b]Notes:[/b]

 

 i. See above, p. 296.

 ii. Which happened to be the fourth anniversary of the slaughter of the Austrian  Social Democrats by the Dollfuss government, of which Schuschnigg was a member.  On February 12, 1934, seventeen thousand government troops and fascist militia  had turned artillery on the workers' flats in Vienna, killing a thousand men, women  and children and wounding three or four thousand more. Democratic political  freedom was stamped out and Austria thereafter was ruled first by Dollfuss and then  by Schuschnigg as a clerical-fascist dictatorship. It was certainly milder than the  Nazi variety, as those of us who worked in both Berlin and Vienna in those days  can testify. Nevertheless it deprived the Austrian people of their political freedom  and subjected them to more repression than they had known under the Hapsburgs  in the last decades of the monarchy. The author has discussed this more fully In  Midcentury Journey.

iii. Later Dr. Schuschnigg wrote down from memory an account of what he calls the "significant passages" of the one-sided conversation, and though it is therefore not a verbatim record it rings true to anyone who has heard and studied Hitler's countless utterances and its substance is verified not only by all that happened subsequently but by others who were present at the Berghof that day, notably Papen, Jodi and Guido Schmidt. I have followed Schuschnigg's account given in his book Austrian Requiem and in his Nuremberg affidavit on the meeting. [4]

 

iv. It is evident that Hitler's warped version of Austro-German history, which, as we have seen in earlier chapters, was picked up in his youth at Linz and Vienna, remained unchanged.

 

v. Papen's version (see his Memoirs, p. 420) is somewhat different, but that of  Schuschnigg rings more true.

 

vi. Wilhelm Canaris was head of the Intelligence Bureau (Abwehr) of OKW.

 

vii. According to the testimony of President Miklas during a trial of an Austrian Nazi  in Vienna after the war, the plebiscite was suggested to Schuschnigg by France.  Papen in his memoirs suggests that the French minister in Vienna, M. Puaux, a close  personal friend of the Chancellor, was the "father of the plebiscite idea." He concedes,  however, that Schuschnigg certainly adopted it on his own responsibility. [18]

 

viii. The stricken passages were found after the war in the archives of the Italian  Foreign Ministry.

 

ix. Drawing the frontier at the Brenner was a sop to Mussolini. It meant that Hitler would not be asking for the return of the southern Tyrol, which was taken from Austria and awarded to Italy at Versailles.

 

x. In all fairness, it should be pointed out that Schuschnigg's plebiscite was scarcely more free or democratic than those perpetrated by Hitler in Germany. Since there had been no free elections in Austria since 1933, there were no up-to-date polling lists. Only those persons above twenty-four were eligible to vote. Only four days' notice of the plebiscite had been given to the public, so there was no time for campaigning even if the opposition groups, the Nazis and the Social Democrats, had been free to do so. The Social Democrats undoubtedly would have voted la, since they regarded Schuschnigg as a lesser evil than Hitler and moreover had been promised the restoration of political freedom. There is no question that their vote would have given Schuschnigg a victory.

 

xi. In his postwar testimony already referred to, Miklas denied that he asked  Schuschnigg to say any such thing or that he even agreed that the broadcast should  be made. Contrary to what the retiring Chancellor said, the President was not yet  ready to yield to force. "Things have not gone so far that we must capitulate," he  says he told Schuschnigg. He had just turned down the second German ultimatum.  He was standing firm. But Schuschnigg's broadcast did help to undermine his  position and force his hand. As we shall see, the obstinate old President held out  for several hours more before capitulating. On March 13, he refused to sign the  Anschluss law snuffing out Austria's independent existence which Seyss-Inquart, at  Hitler's insistence, promulgated. Though he surrendered the functions of his office  to the Nazi Chancellor for as long as he was prevented from carrying them out, he  maintained that he never formally resigned as President. "It would have been too  cowardly," he later explained to a Vienna court. This did not prevent Seyss-Inquart  from announcing officially on March 13 that "the President, upon request of the  Chancellor," had "resigned from his office" and that his "affairs" were transferred  to the Chancellor. [28]

 

xii. Marked "Top Secret" and identified as Directive No. 2 of Operation Otto, it read in part: "The demands of the German ultimatum to the Austrian government have not been fulfilled ... To avoid further bloodshed in Austrian cities, the entry of the German armed forces into Austria will commence, according to Directive No. 1, at daybreak of March 12. I expect the set objectives to be reached by exerting all forces to the full as quickly as possible. (Signed) Adolf Hitler." [29]

 

xiii. Actually, Seyss-Inquart tried until long after midnight to get Hitler to call off the German invasion. A German Foreign Office memorandum reveals that at 2:10 A.M. on March 12 General Muff telephoned Berlin and stated that on the instructions of Chancellor Seyss-Inquart he was requesting that "the alerted troops should remain on, but not cross, the border." Keppler also came on the telephone to support the request. General Muff, a decent man and an officer of the old school,  seems to have been embarrassed by his role in Vienna. When he was informed by  Berlin that Hitler declined to halt his troops he replied that he "regretted this  message." [30]

 

 xiv. In his testimony at Nuremberg Guido Schmidt swore that both he and Schuschnigg  informed the envoys of the "Big Powers" of Hitler's ultimatum "in detail." [32] Moreover,  the Vienna correspondents of the Times and the Daily Telegraph of London,  to my knowledge, also telephoned their respective newspapers a full and accurate  report.

 

xv. Churchill has given an amusing description of this luncheon in The Gathering Storm (pp. 271-72).

 

xvi. The lies were repeated in a circular telegram dispatched by Baron von Weizsaecker of the Foreign Office March 12 to German envoys abroad for "information and orientation of your conversations." Weizsaecker stated that Schuschnigg's declaration concerning a German ultimatum "was sheer fabrication" and went on to inform his diplomats abroad: "The truth was that the question of sending military forces ... was first raised in the well-known telegram of the newly formed Austrian government. In view of the imminent danger of civil war, the Reich government decided to comply with this appeal." [37] Thus the German Foreign Office lied not only to foreign diplomats but to its own. In a long and ineffectual book written after the war Weizsaecker, like so many other Germans who served Hitler, maintained that he was anti-Nazi all along.

 

xvii. In his testimony at Nuremberg on August 9, 1946, Field Marshal von Manstein emphasized that "at the time when Hitler gave us the orders for Austria his chief worry was not so much that there might be interference on the part of the Western Powers, but his only worry was as to how Italy would behave, because it appeared that Italy always sided with Austria and the Hapsburgs." [38]

 

xviii. Yet underneath the ecstasy, and unnoticed by the shallow Papen, there may have burned in Hitler a feeling of revenge for a city and a people which had not appreciated him as a young man and which at heart he despised. This in part may have accounted for his brief stay. Though a few weeks later he would publicly say to the burgomaster of Vienna, "Be assured that this city is in my eyes a pearl -- I will bring it into a setting which is worthy of it," this was probably more electioneering propaganda than an expression of his inner feelings. These feelings were revealed to Baldur von 5chirach, the Nazi Governor and Gauleiter of Vienna during the war, at a heated meeting at the Berghof in 1943. Describing it during his testimony at Nuremberg, Schirach said:

 

[quote]Then the Fuehrer began with, I might say, incredible and unlimited hatred to speak against the people of Vienna... . At four o'clock in the morning Hitler suddenly said something which I should now like to repeat for historical reasons. He said: "Vienna should never have been admitted into the Union of the Greater Germany." Hitler never loved Vienna. He hated its people. [41][/quote]

 

Papen's own festive spirits on March 14 were spoiled that same day when he learned that Wilhelm von Ketteler, his close friend and aide at the German Legation, had disappeared under circumstances which indicated foul play by the Gestapo. Three years before, another friend and collaborator at the legation, Baron Tschirschky, had fled to England to escape certain death from the S.S. At the end of April Ketteler's body was fished out of the Danube, where Gestapo thugs in Vienna had thrown it after murdering him.

 

xix. A few months later, on October 8, the cardinal's palace opposite St. Stephen's  Cathedral was sacked by Nazi hooligans. Too late Innitzer had learned what  National Socialism was, and had spoken out in a sermon against the Nazi persecution  of his Church.

xx. Austrian Requiem.

 

xxi. At this time Schuschnigg was a widower.

 

xxii. See previous chapter.

Go to Next Page