More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
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
...more
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.”
Unmindful of the fact that he had just fired Papen, he ordered him to return to Vienna and arrange the meeting.
A Jesuit-trained intellectual, he was getting on his guard.
Shocked at Hitler’s outburst, the quiet-mannered Austrian Chancellor tried to remain conciliatory and yet stand his ground.
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.
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.”
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.
The behavior of men under duress differs according to their character and is often puzzling.
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.
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.
Later Miklas, a devout Catholic as was Schuschnigg, confessed that he was favorably impressed by the fact that Seyss was “a diligent churchgoer.”
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.
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.)
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
The resourceful Jodl 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.
When he asked for details of the Otto plan, Beck replied, “We have prepared nothing, nothing has been done, nothing at all.”
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.* 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 gazed at the candles burning in front of the image of Our Lady of Perpetual 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.
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.
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.
But in the Nazi scheme of things one concession from a yielding opponent must lead quickly to another.
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 corner “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.
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.
But still the resolute President held out.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
There were incredible stories hatched up by Goebbels describing Red disorders—fighting, shooting, pillaging—in the main streets of Vienna.
They were concocted, he says, sometime later by the German Minister of Posts and Telegraph and deposited in the government files.
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 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.
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.*
But a formal diplomatic protest at this late hour was the least of Hitler’s worries.
A little later when the two big Western democracies and the League had a better opportunity of stopping Hitler they shrank from it.
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.
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.
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.
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 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: Certain foreign newspapers have said that we fell on Austria with brutal methods. I can only say: even in death they cannot stop lying.
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.
