Shortly after the Berchtesgaden meeting, Jutta Rüdiger learnt Hitler’s own opinion of Schuschnigg. She was attending an official Nazi dinner in her capacity as a senior figure in the BDM (the Nazi league of young women) when Hitler joined her table and the talk turned to the character of the Austrian Chancellor. ‘Hitler said that he reminded him of a butterfly collector and only the botanist’s vasculum [collecting case] was missing.’ Hitler then described the metaphor he had used to illustrate why Austria and Germany must be together. ‘I have told him that we had always said, “a good engine alone is no good. It has to have a good chassis too, but the good chassis on its own won’t do either.”’
Chancellor Schuschnigg still tried to resist what he knew was the eventual Nazi goal – the subjugation of his whole country. On 8 March 1938 he announced that there would be a plebiscite on 13 March so that Austrians could vote on whether or not they wished to be part of the German Reich. Schuschnigg was forced to drop the planned plebiscite after German pressure, but despite this, Hitler decided to increase the tension still further. He had learnt from Ribbentrop that England would not fight over Austria and now moved to neutralize any adverse reaction from his neighbour, Italy.
On 10 March Hitler sent Prince Philip of Hesse to Rome with a letter that explained that the Italians had nothing to fear from any action the Germans might take against Austria; Hitler would always regard the Brenner Pass as the border with Italy. The following day Mussolini’s view on the potential invasion of Austria by Germany was conveyed to Hitler in a telephone call from Prince Philip of Hesse:
‘I have just come from the Palazzo Venezia. The Duce accepted the whole thing in a very friendly manner. He sends you his regards.’20
‘Then please tell Mussolini I will never forget him for this,’ said Hitler. ‘Never, never, never, whatever happens. As soon as the Austrian affair is settled, I shall be ready to go with him, through thick and thin, no matter what happens.’
The tone of Hitler’s response shows how anxious he was during the crisis, and perhaps also explains why he remained loyal to Mussolini until the end of the war. The historian Joachim Fest describes ‘the mood of hysteria and indecision’ that characterized the atmosphere around Hitler during this crisis: ‘All reports from members of Hitler’s entourage speak of the extraordinary chaos surrounding the decision, the panicky confusion that overtook Hitler on the verge of this first expansionist action of his career. A multitude of over-hasty mistaken decisions, choleric outbursts, senseless telephone calls, orders and cancellation of orders, followed in quick succession during the few hours between Schuschnigg’s call for a plebiscite and March 12 . . . Keitel [Chief of Staff of the High Command] later spoke of the period as a “martyrdom”.’21
This is not a familiar portrait of Hitler. In popular myth (and, indeed, in Nazi myth) one of Hitler’s defining characteristics is decisiveness. Yet it was Göring, not Hitler, who coolly called for the most radical action – invasion – and who actually issued the order for the troops to invade. Göring was behaving as Hitler believed a general should, as a ‘bull terrier’. (Göring’s decisiveness may also have been self-serving; it was in his own interests to keep the German Army distracted by an invasion of Austria from pursuing any investigation into the Fritsch affair and his own role in it.)
On 12 March 1938 Hitler drove in triumph into Austria, the land of his birth. Film footage captured the wild emotional response of the Austrians. They weep, they scream, they chant: ‘One Reich, One People, One Führer!’ German troops are pelted with flowers and showered in kisses. To watch this raw footage, without commentary, but accompanied by the sounds of ecstatic Austrians, is still to be affected by the emotions of the time. For the Germans who were the objects of such veneration it was overwhelming. ‘It was the nicest day of my life when we entered Austria,’ says Reinhard Spitzy. ‘I entered with Hitler in the sixth car. I had tears in my eyes.’
For Austrians such as Susi Seitz, the sight of Hitler caused an outpouring of a simple desire: ‘All the people were answering Hitler in one way – “Get us to the German country, get us to Germany, let us be with you.” And it was as if Hitler really got from all the people the answer to a question he was himself not thinking to have asked, because at that time we knew very well Hitler didn’t want to take Austria in.’ What we now know is that Hitler, too, was profoundly moved by what he saw – so moved that he altered his plans regarding Austria’s political fate. Before entering Austria his only firm plan had been to put a puppet government in place. Now, as he experienced an enthusiastic reception in his former home town of Linz, he simply changed his mind. He decided that Austria deserved not to be a puppet state but a full member of the Reich; Germany and Austria should unite.
It is hard for us today to comprehend the ecstasy with which so many Austrians greeted the Nazis in general and Hitler in particular. In fact, the cause of their joy was clear – the Germans were righting a wrong done to them by the post-World War I settlement. Only twenty years earlier Austria had been a world power wallowing in the grandeur of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but defeat in the war had reduced the country to the status of Switzerland. Now the Austrians felt they could recover their own greatness in a Germanic Reich.
After the triumphal Linz rally in March 1938, the fourteen-year-old Susi Seitz managed to shake Hitler’s hand, and has never forgotten the moment: ‘He came. Everything got quiet. And we were so excited, I felt my heart up here in the throat. And when he came to me I nearly forgot to give him my hand; I just looked at him and I saw good eyes. And in my heart I promised him, “I always will be faithful to you because you are a good man. . . .” That was a dream-like time. And later I kept my promise. All my free time, besides school, I gave to the work because he had called us: “You all,” he said to us, “you all shall help me build up my empire to be a good empire with happy people who are thinking and promising to be good people.”’
But this was to be a brutal act of union. Hitler had been met on his entry into Austria by Heinrich Himmler, who had crossed the border the night before in order to start ‘cleansing’ the country of any elements of opposition. Austrian Jews suffered immediately. Walter Kammerling was then a fifteen-year-old Jew living in Vienna: ‘We hear the noises from the streets coming in, the whole Viennese population, that is obviously the non-Jewish population, in jubilation and enjoyment. And then the first problem starts, the Jewish shops get smashed, and when you go on to the street the next day, that was the Saturday, you had already people molesting you . . . You were completely outlawed, there was no protection from anywhere. Anybody could come up to you and do what they want and that’s it, and people came into flats which they wanted and took them.’ The SS approved of all the humiliations local Austrian Nazis heaped on the Jews, especially when they made the Jews scour the streets clean: ‘I remember I once had to scrub the streets as well,’ says Walter Kammerling. ‘I can’t remember anything except that I saw in the crowd a well-dressed woman, you can’t say the uneducated proletariat, and she was holding up a little girl, a blonde lovely girl with these curls, so that the girl could see better how a twenty- or twenty-two-year-old man (a Nazi Storm Trooper) kicked an old Jew who fell down because he wasn’t allowed to kneel. He had to scrub and just bend down sort of, and he fell and he kicked him. And they all laughed and she laughed as well – it was a wonderful entertainment – and that shook me.’
Susi Seitz accepts that anti-Semitism was widespread in Austria: ‘I must say the Jews were not very much liked in Austria . . . We never had the feeling that they were the same as us, they were different, completely different . . . We only knew our families made jokes about them and didn’t like them. That we knew. But we didn’t think much about it because we had other things to think about, and we liked to play games and do sports and liked to hike around in our country. And we knew that the Jews hadn’t that feeling for our home country.’ With prejudice like this to exploit, Austria became a happy home for the SS. Austrian Jews were fo
rcefully encouraged to emigrate. Within six months of the Anschluss eager SS officers, organized by Adolf Eichmann, had expelled around a third of Vienna’s Jews. The emigrants had to leave their wealth behind. The Nazis simply stole it.
Heinrich Himmler realized that territorial expansion meant the potential for a huge increase in power for the SS. In November 1938 he told his SS generals: ‘Germany’s future is either a greater Germanic empire or a nothing. I believe that if we in the SS are doing our duty, then the Führer will create this greater Germanic empire, this greater Germanic Reich, the biggest empire ever created by mankind on the face of the earth.’22 The brutal way the SS acted in Austria in 1938 was a foretaste of how the Nazis would rule their empire. Outside the borders of Germany the SS intended to operate with little or no restraint.
The German Foreign Office basked in the glory of the Anschluss. ‘The unification of Austria was really a national dream,’ Manfred von Schröder told me. ‘It was the summit of Hitler’s popularity and that influenced everyone in Germany at that time.’ The euphoria also affected Hitler, according to von Schröder: ‘It must have been an enormous feeling of success and probably it made his megalomania grow.’
Spurred on by the bloodless success of the Anschluss, Hitler now turned to Czechoslovakia. Its strategic geographical position in Europe convinced Hitler that he could not expand further without neutralizing its army. The most obvious way of destabilizing Czechoslovakia was to incite the more than 3 million Germans who lived in the Sudetenland; they had already been calling for greater rights within Czechoslovakia as an ethnic group. Less than three weeks after his triumphant entrance into Austria, Hitler held a meeting in Berlin with the leaders of the Sudeten German Party and told them that he intended to ‘settle’ the Sudeten problem in the ‘not-too-distant-future’. Hitler knew that world opinion would not permit him to attack Czechoslovakia without a pretext, so after approving the Sudeten German Party’s tactic of agitation against the Czech government, he left events to escalate without his direct involvement.
The Czechoslovakian government suffered because their country was a creation of the post-World War I settlement. Not only did this mean that the Nazis despised it, but that the country’s genesis had created a number of ethnic minorities within it, many of whom were suspicious of each other. To outside observers, such as the British, it seemed that there was some justice in the Nazi dislike of Czechoslovakia and their support for the Sudeten Germans. An editorial in The Times on 7 September 1938 even called for the Sudetenland to be given to the Germans.
As problems with the Sudeten Germans escalated, the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, intervened to try to solve the crisis. He began by making two visits to Germany to meet Hitler on 15 and 22 September. The dispute was finally resolved at the Munich conference on 29 September at which representatives from Italy, Britain and France agreed that the Sudetenland should be ceded to Germany in stages between 1 and 10 October.
The Czechoslovakian crisis allowed the British to see what sort of statesman Hitler actually was. Chamberlain called him ‘the commonest little dog’ he had ever seen.23 The British and the French witnessed the rows, the vacillations, the bullying and the changes of mind that characterized Hitler’s diplomacy. Nor was Hitler satisfied with the Munich Agreement. He had doubted all along whether the British and French would really have risked everything over Czechoslovakia and now believed he had been badly advised. He suspected that it had not been necessary for Göring and Mussolini to devise any form of compromise at the conference. Manfred von Schröder, who had been present at the signing of the agreement, heard only the day after the Munich conference that Hitler was saying, ‘They have robbed me of my war.’
Hitler still had not finished with Czechoslovakia. Even though the Nazis now possessed the Sudetenland, and had thus deprived Czechoslovakia of her man-made fortifications and the mountains that were her natural defences, Hitler still saw the rest of Czechoslovakia as a threat. He now used the same tactic to destabilize the remainder of Czechoslovakia that he had used to gain the Sudetenland – he encouraged a minority to revolt. Now he pressed the Slovak leaders to declare full independence from the rest of Czechoslovakia. Their natural inclination to do so was reinforced by threats from Hitler that if they did not do as he wished, he would encourage Hungary to claim Slovakia as her territory. This was diplomacy the Darwinian way: we are stronger than you and if you don’t do what we want, then you will be crushed. Treaties, international law, mutual policing of nations through organizations like the League of Nations – all were devices the weak employed to hide from the strong. Hitler practised not the diplomacy of Bismarck but that of the bully. Up to now he had cloaked his brutal bullying in such a way that it was capable of another interpretation – the Anschluss was Austria’s wish, the Sudeten Germans were mistreated – but now he was to demonstrate openly the true essence of Nazi philosophy, in which the strong simply ‘take over’ the weak.
On 14 March 1939 the Slovaks declared independence (reading from a text prepared by Ribbentrop). That night the ageing Czech President, Emil Hácha, arrived in Berlin for talks. Hitler humiliated him, first by keeping him and his entourage waiting for hours, then by making them tramp through hall after hall of the new Chancellery to reach his office, and finally by meeting them at one o’clock in the morning and announcing that at six o’clock, in five hours’ time, German troops were going to invade their country. Hitler was enjoying himself; Hácha was not. As the Czech President tried to telephone Prague, Göring joined in the fun and began describing to him how German planes would bomb the Czech capital. Manfred von Schröder witnessed what happened next: ‘Hácha broke down and had a heart failure.’ Von Schröder called Hitler’s personal physician, Dr Theodor Morrell, who gave Hácha an injection. The Czech President revived sufficiently so that at four o’clock in the morning he signed away the Czech people into Hitler’s ‘care’.
Manfred von Schröder witnessed the celebrations in Hitler’s huge office following the submission of Czechoslovakia: ‘It was a sort of victory party with champagne – Hitler had his mineral water. And then I got a very close impression of that man. It was amazing to see how he behaved when he was among friends, alone, and hadn’t to behave like a statesman for the public. He was sitting first of all like this . . .’ Here von Schröder demonstrates by tousling his hair, undoing the top buttons of his shirt and sitting across his armchair, his legs dangling over one side. ‘He was talking the whole time, dictating to two secretaries; one proclamation to the Czechoslovak people, and a letter to Benito Mussolini. I thought he was behaving like a genius but that was wrong, of course. When I look back today and I have the clear picture of him standing up and then sitting down again I think he was absolutely behaving like a maniac.’
Hitler may have won the immediate prize of the Czech republic, but he had demonstrated, even to his own loyal diplomats, that he had extremely poor judgement. ‘That was the most stupid act and he ruined practically everything,’ says Reinhard Spitzy. ‘There was no necessity to invade Czechoslovakia because all electric lines, the railways, the roads, the water pipes could be cut at the ethnic frontier. After the Munich conference the Czechs were absolutely in our hands and with nice treatment we would have won them all.’ To Manfred von Schröder Hitler’s actions were diplomatic suicide: ‘That changed the whole of history because from that moment on it was clear that Hitler was an imperialist and he wanted to conquer – it had nothing to do with the self-determination of the German people.’
Hitler, of course, did not see his actions in this negative way. Removal of any potential threat from a country as strategically placed as Czechoslovakia was essential if the German Army was to move further east in search of conquest. But still nothing could be accomplished without a common border with Russia. Standing in the way was a country re-created at Versailles – Poland.
Paradoxically, since it was to be the invasion of Poland that would spark the war, Hitler’s claims on it were not
as unreasonable as his claims on Prague and the remainder of Czechoslovakia had been. Danzig, previously a German city, had been designated a Free City under the Versailles Treaty and sat in a Polish ‘corridor’ of land between German East Prussia and the rest of Germany. It was easy to argue that in this case Germany had experienced injustice.
Initially, Ribbentrop asked the Poles for the return of Danzig and a strip of German territory across the Polish corridor on which a German-run road and rail link between East Prussia and the rest of Germany could be built. This time Hitler met real resistance. On 31 March 1939 the British and French guaranteed the borders of Poland. Encouraged by the guarantee, the Poles were not about to compromise. Then, as 1939 progressed, the position of the Soviet Union became critical. If Stalin allied himself with Britain, Germany would run the risk of a two-front war if she pushed the world to conflict. British attempts at negotiation with the Soviet Union were, however, lacklustre, for both ideological and practical reasons (Stalin had purged thousands of officers from the Red Army and the Soviets were perceived to be a third-rate military force). Stalin was also unwilling to be pushed into a war that offered him little in terms of his own narrow self-interest. Then the Nazis pulled what Manfred von Schröder calls a stroke of ‘courage’ and ‘genius’ – they signed their own treaty with the Soviet Union, their greatest ideological enemy.
The Nazis- a Warning From History Page 10