Hitler and the Forgotten Nazis (7 page)

The German Workers’ Party:

Social Composition and Growth

From its founding in 1903 until its partition just after the close of the World War, the DAP drew the bulk of its following from northern Bohemia, where the Czech-German rivalry was the most pronounced. Of the first party leaders who met in Trautenau, nine came from what would later be called the Sudetenland, the German-speaking portions of Bohemia, Moravia, and Austrian Silesia. Of the others, two came from Klagenfurt, two from Linz, and one from Graz. By 1909 the party had organized fifteen
Ortsgruppen
(local groups) in Styria, four in Carinthia, one in the predominantly Slovene crownland of Camiola, and two in Trieste and Kiistenland, which had mixed Italian and Slovene populations and only small German minorities. Between 1909 and 1918 the only new
Ortsgruppen
were in Upper Austria, Salzburg, and the German South Tyrol.
³⁵

What is interesting about this distribution is that it was confined almost exclusively to the ethnic borderlands where the German-Austrians clashed with Slavs and Italians, who aggressively sought equal political, cultural, and economic rights. The German Workers’ party thus resembled other proto
fascist
and fascist parties throughout Europe that arose both before and after the World War where nationalities came into conflict along ethnic borders.
³⁶

Just as most prewar members and leaders of the DAP were workers (often
railroad
employees and skilled craftsmen), so too were nationalist trade unions the backbone of the party. Moreover, both the union and party leadership were democratically elected by the membership. According to Whiteside, there is no evidence that either the party or its trade union was dominated by employers, the rich, or aristocrats.
³⁷

At first the growth of the new party was slow, in part perhaps because its members, and also those of the nationalist trade union, ran the risk of being beaten up by Marxists. In the parliamentary elections held in 1907 it mustered fewer than four thousand votes. But its fortunes began to improve in 1908 when Dr. Walter Riehl (1881-1955), a lawyer and government attorney from the northern Bohemian town of Reichenberg (Liberec), joined the party. Riehl’s grandfather had been a radical during the revolutions of 1848. Like so many other members of the early DAP, the young Riehl had begun his political career as a Social Democrat. He became disenchanted as early as 1903, however, with the party’s revolutionary theory. He himself preferred an evolutionary, democratic development, a conviction that would cause him to break with Adolf Hitler twenty years later. In most other respects, even in his prewar anticlericalism, Riehl still followed the Socialists’ line, although he renounced their internationalism.
³⁸

Riehl’s nationalist agitation cost him his civil-service job in 1908, but did not stop him from preaching, at mass meetings around Reichenberg, the necessity for workers and the bourgeoisie to unite in a single party to protect German interests. He tried to broaden the party’s base still further by insisting on the inclusion of people with Czech names just as long as they spoke German and considered themselves Germans. (Many Czech nationalist leaders had German names, as is still the case.)

With the help of Riehl’s emotional oratory, the DAP managed to gain twenty-six thousand votes and three parliamentary delegates in the elections of 1911, seven times the vote the party had received just four years earlier. Meanwhile, Schdnerer’s Pan-German party managed only seventeen thousand votes and soon disappeared from the political scene.
³⁹

It was Walter Riehl, together with Rudolf Jung, a railway worker, who teamed up to draft the DAFs new program at Iglau in 1913. The two men had complementary personalities. Whereas Riehl was gregarious, emotional, and untheoretical, Jung tended to be reserved and more philosophical. Jung hoped to become the party’s Karl Marx by writing a profound analysis of society. Indeed, he did produce a theoretical study in 1918, entitled
Der national Sozial-ismus: Seine Grundlagen, seine Werdegang, seine Ziele (National Socialism: Its Foundations, Its Development, Its Goals).
The book anticipated the German Nazis’ Twenty-five Point program by two years and Hitler’s
Mein Kampf
by seven. Jung’s political activity, like Riehl’s, also proved costly, as he lost his job in 1910; thereafter he devoted himself full-time to party activities.

When the World War broke out in 1914 the DAP came to the defense of Austria-Hungary as the best way to preserve the interests of all Germans, including the German Reich. During the war Jung wrote an article denouncing “Western” democracy, which he claimed favored men of money and did not produce the most capable leaders. Everyone should place the good of the< group above himself; therefore, the party’s slogan became
Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz
(the common good goes before self-interest). He called for the nationalization of monopolies, department stores, and large landed estates that were not the product of “honest work,” a disguised form of anti-Semitism. He was also a proponent of an annexationist program in the East based on the need for Lebensraum.
⁴⁰

In response to Czech demands for independence, the Bohemian members of the DAP, at a meeting of the provincial parliament in April 1918, called for a separate province of “German-Bohemia.” Then in May the party rejected plans to save the Habsburg Monarchy or to make German-Austria part of a Danube federation. Instead, the party reverted to Schdnerer’s old battle cry that the German-Austrians be united with their brethren in the Reich to create a single German state free of Jews,
⁴¹

A large part of the membership of the German Workers’ party, including Walter Riehl, served on the many Austro-Hungarian fronts during the war. By default, party leadership fell to Jung, Ferdinand Burschofsky, a printer and one of the founders of the party, and Walter Gattermayer, an aggressive trade-union leader who had joined the DAP in 1909. It was Gattermayer who suggested in April 1918 that the party’s name be enlarged, for propaganda purposes, to German National Socialist Workers’ party (Deutsche National-sozialistische Arbeiterpartei or DNSAP). The proposal was accepted by a party congress meeting in Vienna in August. The term “National Socialist” itself was not new. A party by that name had been founded by Czechs in 1897 after the Austrian Social Democratic party began breaking into national groups. Members of the DAP had informally used the name since about 1910 and it was proposed at a party meeting in Vienna in 1913. The Sudeten Nazis continued to use the title DNSAP until they dissolved their party in 1933.

The German Nazi party was founded in January 1919, only a few months after the name change in Austria. A controversy exists over the extent to which the Austrian Nazis may have influenced the birth and development of the German Nazis. No direct evidence has been discovered that would link Hitler with the prewar Austrian Nazis.
⁴²
Indeed, Hitler himself, while readily
acknowledging
his intellectual indebtedness to Georg von Schdnerer in
Mein Kampf
, made absolutely no mention of Walter Riehl, Rudolf Jung, or any of the other early leaders of the Austrian DAP. Andrew G. Whiteside has stated flatly that “the German Nazis were [not] the direct descendants of the prewar Austrian National Socialists.”
⁴³
Despite remarkable parallels between the two movements, the German Nazis, according to Whiteside, had independent origins of their own, uninfluenced by Austria.

On the other hand, as the American historian Max H. Kele has pointed out, “We know that the young Hitler was an avid newspaper reader and a student of
vdlkish
politics. During these very years, the DAP had its headquarters in the same Viennese district where Hitler lived. He would have had to be both deaf and blind to have escaped the pamphlets, newspapers, and rallies of the Austrian Nazis.”
⁴⁴

In any event, there were certainly striking similarities between the prewar Austrian Nazis and the postwar German Nazis that may be more than simply coincidental. Both were antiliberal, anticapitalist, anti-Marxist, and of course, both were anti-Semitic, though the Austrians were much less so before the war than the Germans were after it. Even the terminology and the militancy of the two parties were much the same.
⁴⁵
As Hitler himself confessed in a speech in Salzburg in August 1920, “I am ashamed to say that not until today, after so many years, the
same
movement which began in German-Austria in 1904 has just begun to gain a footing in Germany.”
⁴⁶

❖

New Beginnings: Walter Riehl and the DNSAP, 1918-1923

When the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy collapsed in the fall of 1918, the German Workers’ party, like the other parties of Austria, demanded the inclusion of both the Sudeten and Alpine Germans in the new German Republic. When the Anschluss was prohibited by the Allies, it proved to be particularly disastrous for the DNSAP. The creation of an independent Austrian Republic and the Allies’ recognition of the historic unity of the “Bohemian crownlands” (Bohemia, Moravia, and Austrian Silesia) within Czechoslovakia split the DNSAP in two, with by far the larger part being isolated in the new Czech-dominated state.

Dr. Riehl, who had been elected chairman of the DNSAP in May, moved his residence to Vienna and continued as leader of the Austrian Nazis until 1923. Although he and Hitler differed, and in 1923 split over tactics, the ideologies of the two men were similar, though certainly not identical. Both advocated a strong central government (though Riehl wanted only a temporary dictatorship), and both regarded parliaments as obstacles to vigorous decision making. Proportional representation made personal responsibility impossible. Both men favored an Anschluss, and violently opposed Austria’s joining a Danubian federation. Riehl also shared Hitler’s anti-Semitism and, like Hitler, blamed the Jews for almost all his country’s problems, both foreign and domestic. His goal was to reduce the Jews’ influence to their" proportion of Austria’s total population. But this objective did not prevent Riehl from mixing with Jews socially, something Hitler would never have dreamed of doing in his adult years.
⁴⁷

Despite the many similarities, there were profound differences between the two men that reflected Hitler’s radical brand of Nazism and the relative moderation of at least some of the Austrian National Socialists. Riehl was in many respects a typical Austrian: jovial,
gemutlich
, and helpful; he was perhaps a throwback to the popular Viennese mayor Karl Lueger. He criticized his opponents with wit and satire rather than sarcasm. On the other hand, to many Austrians, Hitler was a stereotyped, hard-nosed Prussian (despite his Austrian birth), unwilling to make concessions either in his policies or in his speeches. Riehl and his followers, moreover, unlike Hitler, took the socialism in National Socialism seriously. As a former Social Democrat he had broken with the party only because of its international and revolutionary doctrines. Riehl was also eight years older than Hitler. Therefore, the latter’s uncompromising and revolutionary tactics appealed more to the younger Austrian Nazis.
⁴⁸

Nowhere were the differences between Riehl and Hitler, and between “moderate” and radical Nazis in general, sharper than over the question of the internal organization of the Nazi party. Part of the Austrian DNSAP, like its brother party in the Sudetenland, remained comparatively democratic in its structure to its very end in 1934, despite its vehement criticism of Austrian parliamentarianism. All local organizations elected a district leadership; the local and district units were subordinate to a national Staatsparteileitung (State Party Leadership) consisting of twelve members elected by the entire membership. Riehl was elected chairman of the party at these annual meetings. The Parteitag even voted on future party policies. At the 1920 gathering, for example, two-thirds of the membership voted for the resolution that “every hope for a rebirth of Austria depends on the Anschluss.”
⁴⁹
At the same meeting, which was held in Salzburg, there was a debate about whether the
word
Arbeiter
should be retained in the party’s title. Those like Walter
Gattermayer
and Rudolf Jung wanted to keep the DNSAP a class party of
laborers;
they did not even wish to recruit businessmen and peasants.
⁵⁰
Although the German Workers’ party had similar democratic rules when Hitler joined it in 1919, he put an end to that system soon after he took over control of the party in July 1921. By 1923 there were no more meaningful discussions
_a
t party meetings of the German NSDAP.

The debate at the Salzburg convention in 1920 was characteristic of the ideological tug of war that took place within the DNSAP in the early postwar
years.
Gattermayer and Jung led the party’s left wing and tried to push the DNSAP in a socialistic direction. However, a demand by a delegate to the party congress in Vienna in December 1919, that the Marxist idea of class struggle be incorporated into the party’s program, was rejected. Walter Riehl, the lawyer, followed a middle-of-the-road philosophy on social questions and argued that the party should represent the interests of the entire German people while recognizing the workers as the principal fighters for the National Socialist idea.
⁵¹

But Rudolf Jung, who maintained a close contact with Austria even after he returned to Czechoslovakia in 1919 to lead the Sudeten Nazis, did not easily give up the ideological fight. In an article printed in the
DAP
in June 1921 Jung asserted that bigger industries, which represented private monopolies, ought to be socialized. Such monopolies included land, coal, water, transportation, insurance, and advertising. Workers, Jung wrote, should take part in profit sharing in both private and public businesses and should be represented equally on business-advisory councils.
⁵²
Hitler later denounced such ideas as “Bolshevistic.”