Hitler and the Forgotten Nazis (16 page)

After only two days of discussions the first
Kampfgemeinschaft
(fighting alliance) between the Austrian Nazis and the Styrian Heimatschutz was concluded in Klagenfurt and ratified at a public meeting in Graz on 31 October. The terms of the agreement were vague: both organizations agreed to work together for an Anschluss and to oppose any action that would hinder the attainment of this goal, in particular a Habsburg restoration. Secondly, both groups promised to fight bolshevism, Marxism, parliamentary democracy, and capitalism
.
²⁸

At first glance, this Kampfgemeinschaft would appear to fly in the face of Hitler’s tactics of opposing federations, which he outlined in
Mein Kampf.
But Hitler had left himself a loophole: “It can occur that from purely tactical considerations the top leadership of a movement which looks to the future nevertheless enters into an agreement with such associations for a short time as regards the treatment of definite questions and perhaps undertakes steps in common. But this must never lead to the perpetuation of such a state of affairs unless the movement itself wants to renounce its redeeming mission
.”*
⁹

"HU ■    ■

|l" -

, p
₀
]iowing the Klagenfurt Kampfgemeinschaft, Nazi speakers were ordered ill io draw a sharp distinction between the pro-Anschluss Styrian, Carinthian, fl-
Salzburg,
and Lower Austrian
Waldviertel
(forest district) units of the Heim-|||
_we
ju-, and all other Heimwehr groups that either directly or indirectly opposed pi the
Anschluss;
the latter were to be designated as “separatists, Francophiles, !'• and traitors.” To bind the Styrian Heimatschutz still closer to the Nazis,
^:
Heimatschutz members would be privately permitted to hold dual membership I: in the NSDAP, provided they recognized the Nazi political leadership
.
³⁰
it
In an effort to split the Styrian Heimatschutz from the rest of the Heimwehr, the Nazi press leveled the improbable charge that a Heimwehr dictatorship
would
lead to a Habsburg restoration and claimed (this time with considerable
justification)
that the Heimwehr was unclear on the Anschluss question. The Heimwehr was supposedly France’s loyal “foreign legion” and the “storm f troopers” of the Habsburgs
.
³¹

Y As it turned out, the attack on Starhemberg misfired. Tom between its revo-B lutionary, pro-Anschluss, antigovemment ideology, which drew it to the Nail zis, and its traditional ties with the rest of the Austrian Heimwehr, the Styrian Heimatschutz decided to choose the latter, at least for the moment. When Nazi attacks on the Bundesfuhrer increased, the Heimatschutz demanded that they cease. The Nazis refused, and consequently the Kampfgemeinschaft was dissolved on 30 December 1931.
³²

Once this “fighting alliance” was terminated, the Nazi-Heimatschutz friendship was quickly transformed into a bitter rivalry into which the whole Heimwehr was drawn. Although ideological differences continued to be slight (especially between the Styrian Heimatschutz and the Nazis), the two movements came to regard each other as mortal enemies
.
³³

The Heimwehr lashed out against the Nazis by ridiculing the fact that many Austrian Nazi leaders had Germanized Slavic names. A favorite charge was that the Nazis (unlike the Heimwehr) had played no role in suppressing the Viennese workers’ uprising in 1927. There were also personal attacks. The Heimwehr’s official newspaper, the
dsterreichische Heimatschutz-Zeitung,
accused Frauenfeld of being a one-time Legitimist (in 1923), and Starhemberg described Proksch as being a “little, unpatriotic demagogue.” Perhaps the most vicious Heimwehr accusation against the Nazis was that the latter resorted to using “American propaganda
.”
³⁴
In Styria, the Heimatschutz accused the Nazis of attacking them “in a Jewish way” and denouncing their members to the police, a charge the Nazis only half denied by saying they had done so “only when circumstances demanded it
.”
³⁵
Of all the Heimwehr’s criticisms aimed at the Nazis, probably the most interesting was the oft-repeated assertion that the Austrian Nazis were some-

how completely different from their counterparts in Germany. Starhemberg himself wrote in an open letter to Alfred Proksch that “the Gerpian NSDAP is a genuine national renewal and freedom movement. It is impossible to believe that a national fighter like Hitler could approve of an [Austrian Nazi] policy which means nothing else but the support of Austro-Bolshevism
.”
³⁶

In reality the policies and ideology of the German and Austrian Nazis were in most respects very similar, because the Austrian NSDAP was part of the larger Gesamtpartei. The contrast lay only in different local circumstances that required altered tactics and the desire for autonomy by Austrian leaders. Yet misconceptions over the true nature of German National Socialism continued, not only in Heimwehr quarters, but also among the general Austrian population, and played a significant role in the willingness of so many Austrians to welcome or at least to tolerate the Anschluss in 1938.

*

The Nazi Breakthrough

The spring of 1932 proved to be one of the major turning points in Nazi-Heimwehr relations and in the whole history of the First Austrian Republic. Within a span of just ten weeks the Nazis had made their first real breakthrough in the local elections of 24 April, a new government was organized by the former minister of agriculture, Engelbert Dollfuss, and the Austrian pan-Germans were outraged by conditions attached to the League of Nations’ “Lausanne” loan, which was ratified by the Austrian Parliament on

30 June.

The local elections took place at a time when 600,000 Austrians were both unemployed and under the influence of another impressive Nazi victory in Germany. In the contest for the presidency, which occurred just two weeks before the Austrian elections, Hitler had amassed 13.4 million votes, or double the Nazis’ effort in September 1930. Although Nazi successes in Austria were more modest, they can still be fairly described as a genuine breakthrough.

In the three federal states holding elections for their
Landtage
(state parliaments), Vienna, Lower Austria, and Salzburg, the Nazis’ vote was 336,000, as compared to just 66,000 for the same three states in 1930. The Nazis gained another 42,000 ballots in municipal elections held at the same time in Styria and Carinthia, thus raising their total to 378,000 or over 16 percent of the 3,149,000 votes cast
.
³⁷
In Vienna alone their vote jumped from 27,540 in 1930 to over 201,000 a year and a half later
.
³⁸
Alfred Proksch was probably not far wrong in claiming that new national elections would give the

Nazis 500,000 votes and thirty-three parliamentary mandates among the 165 members of Parliament.

Several historians have pointed out that the Austrian Nazi vote in 1932 was less significant than raw statistics might seem to indicate. For one thing, Nazi gains were made mostly at the expense of other pan-German groups, like the
Heimwehr,
the GVP, and the Landbund, the last two of which were virtually
wiped
out. Of the Nazis’ 174,000 net gain in Vienna, for example, 115,000 votes came at the expense of the Greater Germans. In Lower Austria the Nazi vote increased by 76,400, with over 61,000 coming from the Landbund. The Nazis of Salzburg added 20,000 ballots to their 1930 total, with 13,600 of these coming from the GVP and another 2,000 from the Heimwehr
.
³⁹

On the other hand, the Nazis’ success was by no means confined exclusively to the pan-German
Lager.
In Vienna, 49,000 votes or 24 percent of their total came from the ranks of the Christian Socials and another 17,000 (8.5 percent) switched over from the Social Democrats
.
⁴⁰
In Salzburg, the Socialists’ vote dropped by 7,000 ballots or about 26 percent
.
⁴¹
The losses of the CSP in Vienna and Lower Austria would have been even higher if the Heimwehr had not declined to stand for election.

In a curiously delayed fashion the Nazi vote in Austria nearly duplicated that in Germany. In the Reichstag elections of May 1928 the German Nazis collected a mere 2.6 percent of the vote compared to 3 percent in Austria two years later. In the September elections of 1930 the German Nazis captured 18.3 percent of the vote
⁴²
compared to 16.4 percent for their Austrian brethren in 1932.
⁴³
Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to assume that the Austrian Nazis were capable of matching nationwide the 37.4 percent of the vote the German NSDAP won in July 1932.

Austria’s party structure and voting habits were simply too different from those in Germany to make any such projection likely. In Austria almost 80 percent of the electorate habitually voted for one of the two established parties
.
⁴⁴
By contrast, in Germany the SDP and the Catholic Center party, together with the latter s Bavarian People’s party ally, could muster a combined total of only 43.3 percent of the vote in the relatively normal election of 1928.
⁴⁵
For their great victories in the 1930s the German Nazis drew heavily on the
Wahlmude
or traditional nonvoter, who had made up 30 percent of the potential electorate during the 1920s. But in Austria, where 90 percent of the electorate usually voted, no such reservoir existed. Nonparticipation actually increased by 4 percent in Vienna in April 1932.
⁴⁶

The formation of the Dollfuss government on 20 May 1932 was itself significant in bringing about a shift in the country’s political balance of power, a shift ultimately advantageous to the Nazis. The new chancellor, a

thirty-nine-year-old illegitimate son of a woodcutter and peasant, would soon be regarded by the Nazis as their mortal enemy. What interests us here, however, is the effect the new government had on the non-Nazi, pan-German parties.    /-

Since 1920 every bourgeois coalition government had included, of necessity, the Greater German People’s party. But the party’s smashing defeat in the elections of 1932 made it fear still further losses to the Nazis if it should join the Dollfuss ministry. This apprehension was especially strong in the spring of 1932, when the Austrian government was considering a 300-million-Schilling (or $36-million) Lausanne loan from the League of Nations. Britain and France took advantage of Austria’s desperate economic plight by
demanding
that in exchange for the loan, Austria renounce an Anschluss with Germany for another ten years beyond the twenty years already stipulated in an earlier “Geneva” loan in 1922. Pan-Germans of all stripes were incensed by the prohibition. Among them were the Greater Germans, who now refused to join the new Dollfuss ministry.

The GVP’s short-sighted policy was useless in preserving the party’s integrity; its only real consequence was to undermine the already weakened Austrian democracy. Without the GVP’s support Dollfuss had to look either to the Socialists or to the Heimwehr to maintain his fragile majority. But the Socialists refused to enter a coalition; Dollfuss’s only other alternative was to move to the right by bringing the Heimwehr into his government.
^
⁷

*

Capturing the Pan-German “Right”: Phase Two

Nazi electoral successes in both Germany and Austria, as well as Starhemberg’s decision to join the Dollfuss government and support the Lausanne treaty, simply accelerated the drift of the Austrian pan-Germans toward the NSDAP. The trend, which had begun in the latter part of 1930, would culminate in 1933 with Hitler’s takeover in Germany.

This pro-Nazi tendency became apparent in the ideology of the Heimwehr even before parts of the organization broke away to join the Nazis. A frequent Nazi attack, which had been used earlier against the independent German Combat Leagues, was that the Heimwehr lacked a clear, positive program. Whereas they (the Nazis) “had a great overriding idea [racism] which incorporated all aspects of political, economic, and cultural life
,”
⁴⁸
the Heimwehr was “soft” on Jews and indecisive on the Anschluss question. These accusations were essentially true, though no one should assume that the Heimwehr

Wt\\-

P ' was philo-Semitic or anti-Anschluss. Fascists in all countries were notorious Ij ' for their ideological “flexibility
.”
⁴⁹

|p Although the Heimwehr had its rabid anti-Semites, especially in Styria, the || I'; .movement as a whole was only mildly anti-Jewish. It was closer to the i|l; ■:relatively easygoing, nonracial anti-Judaism of the early twentieth-century
ill-
Viennese mayor Karl Lueger, who was famous for his assertion that he determined for himself who was a Jew. But to any truly bigoted anti-Semite ^ this philosophy was pure heresy; no such “compromises” were found in the Nazi ideology.

On the Anschluss issue the Heimwehr was equally fuzzy. Although its pan-German members adamantly supported this goal, its clerical wing, which |;| included aristocrats and peasants, was at best lukewarm, at worst hostile. |||i| To minimize internal quarreling over the question and to avoid offending |ijj "the Heimwehr’s financial benefactor, Mussolini, the Anschluss issue was j[ji! simply shelved. The Heimwehr’s Komeuburg Oath of May 1930 did not even mention Anschluss. A compromise “Nine Point” program drawn up by the Styrian Heimatschutz on 30 November 1932 Delphically proclaimed that the “Heimatschutz undertakes to develop German-Austria into a German state, both internally and externally, which will
one day
be regarded by the great German fatherland as a valuable German branch
worthy
of being annexed
.”
⁵⁰
By February 1932 this program had been accepted by the rest of the Heimwehr.