The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (71 page)

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:

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.

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.
^*

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 corner 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
Ja
. 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.

   “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.”

   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.
^*

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,
^†
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, Léon 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, who 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:

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.