The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

by William L. Shirer

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.

While they worked on their hands and knees with jeering storm troopers standing over them, crowds gathered to taunt them.

Their worldly possessions were confiscated or stolen.

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.

German businessmen and bankers poured in to buy up the concerns of dispossessed Jews and anti-Nazis at a fraction of their value.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Ja, since they regarded Schuschnigg as a lesser evil than Hitler and moreover had been promised the restoration of political freedom.

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.

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.

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. ‡ 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.”

Three years before, another friend and collaborator at the legation, Baron Tschirschky, had fled to England to escape certain death from the S.S.

In Hitler’s gangster world German envoys abroad were certainly expendable.

It was also the handiwork of two remarkable Czech intellectuals, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, a self-educated son of a coachman, who became a noted savant and the country’s first President; and Eduard Beneš, son of a peasant, who worked his way through the University of Prague and three French institutions of higher learning, and who after serving almost continually as Foreign Minister became the second President on the retirement of Masaryk in 1935. Carved out of the Hapsburg Empire, which in the sixteenth century had acquired the ancient Kingdom of Bohemia, Czechoslovakia developed during the years that followed its founding in 1918 into the most democratic, progressive, enlightened and prosperous state in Central Europe.

These peoples looked longingly toward their “mother” countries, Hungary, Russia, and Germany respectively, though the Sudeteners had never belonged to the German Reich (except as a part of the loosely formed Holy Roman Empire) but only to Austria. At the least, these minorities desired more autonomy than they had been given.

To be sure, compared to minorities in most other countries even in the West, even in America, those in Czechoslovakia were not badly off. They enjoyed not only full democratic and civil rights—including the right to vote—but to a certain extent were given their own schools and allowed to maintain their own cultural institutions.

They found it difficult to adjust to the loss of their former dominance in Bohemia and Moravia under the Hapsburgs.

Thus, the plight of the German minority in Czechoslovakia was for Hitler merely a pretext, as Danzig was to be a year later in regard to Poland, for cooking up a stew in a land he coveted, undermining it, confusing and misleading its friends and concealing his real purpose.

Hitler and Ribbentrop seemed quite pleased to find that the British and French governments were so concerned with aiding them.

During the ensuing forty-eight hours, the governments in London, Paris, Prague and Moscow were panicked into the belief that Europe stood nearer to war than it had at any time since the summer of 1914.

In this belief the Czechs began to mobilize and Britain, France and Russia displayed a firmness and a unity in the face of what their governments feared to be an imminent German threat which they were not to show again until a new world war had almost destroyed them.

The Czech government, in contrast to the Austrian two months before, did not intend to give up without a fight.

The Germans had never been subjected to such strenuous and persistent diplomatic pressure as the British employed on this weekend.

There is no doubt that he was egged on by Lord Halifax and the British Foreign Office, for Henderson, a suave, debonair diplomat, had little sympathy with the Czechs, as all who knew him in Berlin were aware.

His fury was all the more intense because he was accused, prematurely, of being on the point of committing an aggression which he indeed intended to commit.

Later this sensitive, intelligent, decent but indecisive general would base his struggle against the Nazi dictator on broad grounds.

It was not the Fuehrer’s aggression against Austria—which Beck had supported—but the rolling of General von Fritsch’s head after the Gestapo frame-up which seems to have cleared his mind.

Although Beck overestimated the strength of will of Britain and France, the political shrewdness of their leaders and the power of the French Army, and in the end proved wrong on the outcome of the Czech problem, his long-range predictions turned out, so far as Germany was concerned, to be deadly accurate. Beck was convinced, he wrote in his May 5 memorandum, that a German attack on Czechoslovakia would provoke a European war in which Britain, France and Russia would oppose Germany and in which the United States would be the arsenal of the Western democracies.

Its lack of raw materials alone made victory impossible. In fact, he contended, Germany’s “military-economic situation is worse than it was in 1917–18,” when the collapse of the Kaiser’s armies began.

And for the first time in the Third Reich, he raised a question which later haunted the Nuremberg trials: Did an officer have a higher allegiance than the one to the Fuehrer?

A state and society ruled by law must be restored.

But no decisive action was taken and the meeting of the top brass of the German Army broke up without their having had the courage to call Hitler to count, as their predecessors once had done with the Hohenzollern emperors and the Reich Chancellors.

Admittedly it does the last with traditional devotion but the vigor of the soul is lacking because in the end it does not believe in the genius of the Fuehrer. And one does perhaps compare him with Charles XII.

Beck saw that he was defeated, largely by the spinelessness of his own brother officers, and on August 18 he resigned as Chief of the Army General Staff.

He did not try to persuade them. He was, as Hassell later said of him, “pure Clausewitz, without a spark of Bluecher or Yorck”22—a man of principles and thought, but not of action.

Halder became the first Bavarian and the first Catholic ever to become Chief of the German General Staff—a severe break with the old Protestant Prussian tradition of the officer corps. A man of wide intellectual interests, with a special bent for mathematics and botany (my own first impression of him was that he looked like a university professor of mathematics or science) and a devout Christian, there was no doubt that he had the mind and the spirit to be a true successor to Beck.

They had no organization outside of the Nazi party groups and they were, of course, unarmed. Though much would later be written about the German “resistance” movement, it remained from the beginning to the end a small and feeble thing, led, to be sure, by a handful of courageous and decent men, but lacking followers.

Moreover, how could a tiny group—or even a large group, had there been one—rise up in revolt against the machine guns, the tanks, the flame throwers of the S.S.?

One of his first acts was to journey to France, England and the United States in 1937 to discreetly warn of the peril of Nazi Germany.

A fine Greek scholar as well as eminent economist, he, along with General Beck and Hassell, was a member of the Wednesday Club, a group of sixteen intellectuals who gathered once a week to discuss philosophy, history, art, science and literature and who as time went on—or ran out—formed one of the centers of the opposition.

The latter became the darling of the American prosecution at Nuremberg and wrote a book which sheds much light on the anti-Hitler plots, though most historians take the book and the author with more than a grain of salt.

In the meantime, for a short interim, there would be a military dictatorship followed by a provisional government presided over by some eminent civilian. In due course a conservative democratic government would be formed.

Beck, a cultivated European with a sense of history, could not conceive that Britain and France would willfully sacrifice their self-interest by not intervening in case of a German attack on Czechoslovakia. He had a sense of history but not of contemporary politics.

If they wanted to get in on the Czech feast, Hitler told them, they must hurry. “He who wants to sit at the table,” he put it, “must at least help in the kitchen.”

Nevertheless Sir Robert Vansittart, chief diplomatic adviser to the Foreign Secretary and one of the leading opponents in London of the appeasement of Hitler, saw Kleist on the afternoon of his arrival, and Winston Churchill, still in the political wilderness in Britain, received him the next day.