In parallel to this tactical approach to the ‘Jewish question’, Hitler was also careful about how he spoke of his other deeply held conviction – his wish to create a German empire in the western regions of the Soviet Union. He never voiced this desire in public during the 1930s. But in private, the year before his 1937 speech at Nuremberg, he had made clear his intention to confront the ‘danger’ of Bolshevism. In a memorandum he wrote in August 1936, at the time he appointed Hermann Göring head of the economic programme known as the ‘Four Year Plan’, Hitler reiterated that – on the military front – it was the destiny of Germany to deal with Bolshevism. Since Germany was overpopulated, it was necessary to gain more land, thus ‘the final solution [to this problem] lies in extending our living space.’37 The use of the words ‘final solution’ in this context is worth noting – since the plan to exterminate the Jews would also come to be known by the same two words. Here they are meant to distinguish the transitional phase, during which the Germans would build up their military strength, from the ‘final solution’ phase, when the actual military conflict would commence.
At a cabinet meeting on 4 September 1936, Göring read out Hitler’s memo and stated that the logic of it was clear – ‘the showdown with Russia is inevitable.’38 Two months later, in November 1936, Goebbels confirmed that he too was aware that the time was rapidly approaching when Germany would have to confront the Soviet Union. After lunch with Hitler, he had a ‘thorough talk alone with the Führer’ and concluded that ‘Rearmament continues. We’re investing fabulous sums. In 1941 we’ll have completed it. The confrontation with Bolshevism is coming … Dominance in Europe for us is virtually certain.’39
In his fiery speech at Nuremberg ten months later, in September 1937, Hitler made an attempt to close the gap between what he was saying in private and what he was saying in public, though he never went as far as to say that Germany would invade the Soviet Union. Instead, he told the world that it was necessary for Germany both to rearm and to be prepared to fight against the Bolshevik menace should the ‘Russians’ attack. And since, according to Hitler, behind the Bolsheviks stood the Jews, a military conflict with the Russians would also mean an armed conflict with the Jewish ‘menace’. Even at this early stage, it was obvious that any war between Germany and the Soviet Union would be no ordinary fight, but a struggle between different ideologies, and – as Hitler saw it – different ‘races’.
Those in the German government who did not enthusiastically embrace this vision were soon discarded. Hjalmar Schacht, the Reich Minister of Economics, who had done so much to make rearmament possible by his creative reorganization of the German economy, was fired in November 1937. He was simply not radical enough. Schacht remained as President of the Reichsbank until he was sacked from that post too in January 1939. He was finally removed from the meaningless post of Minister without Portfolio at the start of 1943. The following year, after the 20 July attempt on Hitler’s life, he was sent to a concentration camp.
Schacht’s fall from power was characteristic of the fate of a number of those in the traditional right-wing elite who had supported Hitler in the early 1930s. Schacht’s trajectory may have been extreme – not many of them gained such a high position in the Nazi state, and few fell so low as to see the inside of a concentration camp – but the journey from initial euphoria at the creation of the Third Reich to disillusionment at the subsequent aggressive policies of the regime was not uncommon. On 5 November 1937, a few weeks before Schacht lost his job as Economics Minister, Hitler briefed several more members of the old-school German elite on his radical thinking; and when subsequently they failed to manifest fervent approval of his ideas, their careers suffered the same fate as Schacht’s. Present at the meeting in the Reich Chancellery that day were the commanders-in-chief of the army (Generaloberst Werner von Fritsch), the navy (Generaladmiral Erich Raeder) and the air force (Reichsminister of Aviation Hermann Göring), together with the War Minister (Generalfeldmarschall Werner von Blomberg) and the Foreign Minister (Konstantin von Neurath). The infamous Hossbach Memorandum – notes of this meeting taken by Colonel Hossbach, Hitler’s military adjutant – reveals that Hitler openly expressed his desire to gain more territory for Germany in the next few years, and to risk war in order to achieve this end. He didn’t mention at the meeting his most grandiose ambition, the invasion of the Soviet Union, most probably because he wanted to focus on shorter-term goals like the seizing of Austria and Czechoslovakia.
Hitler’s statement at the meeting that ‘the aim of German policy was to make secure and to preserve the racial community and to enlarge it. It was therefore a question of space …’ was consistent with the worldview he had expressed as far back as Mein Kampf in 1924.40 Hitler said that Germany should push forward as quickly as possible with an aggressive foreign policy, because the lead that had been established in rearmament would not last much longer. He also revealed that he had finally grasped how unlikely it would be that Germany could form a partnership with Great Britain. This was unsurprising, given that Ribbentrop, sent as German ambassador to London in the summer of 1936, had failed to deliver the hoped-for alliance. Hitler now said that Great Britain would more likely be an adversary in the coming conflict.
Göring, as usual, supported Hitler in the discussion that followed, but the others were sceptical. In particular they feared, presciently, that Germany might be trapped in a war on two fronts between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies. These reasoned arguments were not what Hitler wanted to hear from his underlings, and all of those who voiced doubts at the meeting were to leave office within the next few months. Blomberg resigned on 27 January 1938 after making an unsuitable marriage to a young woman who had once posed for pornographic photos; Fritsch was forced out on 4 February after he was falsely accused of a homosexual liaison; and Neurath was moved from the Foreign Office on the same day and ‘promoted’ to the post of President of a new Cabinet Council, a consultative committee that never met.
All the replacements for these key positions within the Nazi state were either more compliant than their predecessors or more bellicose – or both. Ribbentrop, the former ambassador to Great Britain, became Foreign Minister, the obliging Walther von Brauchitsch took over from Fritsch as head of the army, and Hitler replaced Blomberg himself, abolishing the title of Minister of War. There is no evidence that Hitler planned to make every one of these changes in the wake of the Hossbach meeting, but he did seize on various opportunities, such as Blomberg’s inopportune marriage, when they were presented to him. As a result of these moves his ability to push forward with a more radical foreign policy was considerably strengthened.
The first manifestation of that more aggressive approach came little more than four months after the Hossbach meeting, as tensions grew between Hitler and the government in the land of his birth – Austria. This confrontation would, in turn, lead to a seismic change in Nazi anti-Semitic policy.
The recent history of the Austrian Jews was similar in many ways to that of the neighbouring German Jews, prior to Hitler’s Chancellorship. The status of Viennese Jews in the first half of the nineteenth century was illustrated by the building of the ornate Stadttempel in the centre of the city in the 1820s. On the one hand the interior, with ionic columns and domed ceiling, boasted of the wealth and success of the Viennese Jewish community, and on the other the understated entrance – largely concealed from the street – demonstrated their oppression, since the Jews were forbidden from building an open place of worship by the Edict of Tolerance issued by Emperor Joseph II in 1782.
In 1867 Austrian Jews finally received equal rights under the law, and a golden age of Jewish culture began in Vienna. This was the time of the composer Gustav Mahler, of the author Arthur Schnitzler and the psychiatrist Sigmund Freud – all of them born Jewish. But not every Austrian was pleased by the Jews’ newfound freedom. Two politicians in particular voiced virulent anti-Semitism. One was Georg von Schönerer, a parliamentarian obsessed with three idea
s: the desire for closer union with Germany, a rejection of Catholicism and a hatred of Jews. His anti-Semitism was based more on racial than religious grounds. ‘Religion’s only a disguise,’ went one of his sayings, ‘in the blood the foulness lies.’41 The second was Karl Lueger, the populist mayor of Vienna. He criticized, in terms that would sound familiar to the Nazis, the over-representation of Jews in certain professions and the way Jews allegedly corrupted the body politic. ‘Whenever a state has allowed the Jews to become powerful,’ he said, ‘the state has soon collapsed, while in those states where they understood enough to isolate the Jews, the monarchical principle was saved …’42 Lueger was quick to capitalize on Viennese fears about the influx of Jews from eastern Europe, in particular those fleeing from Russia. There were calls for the Austrian border to be closed to prevent Jews entering the country, and a fear that the Jews brought with them both disease and the seeds of political revolution. Lueger told the Jews of Vienna, in a speech in November 1905, ‘not to admit the [Jewish] Social Democrat revolutionaries. I warn the Jews, most expressly: for the same thing could perhaps happen [here] as in Russia. We in Vienna are anti-Semites, but are certainly not inclined to murder and violence. But if the Jews should threaten our fatherland, then we will show no mercy.’43
While a great deal of this Austrian anti-Semitic rhetoric would have been recognizable to anti-Semites in Germany, there was one major difference between the two countries when it came to the ‘Jewish question’ – the proportion of the population that was Jewish. In Germany fewer than 1 per cent of Germans were Jews, while in Vienna in 1890 around 12 per cent of the population was Jewish – about 100,000 out of 820,000. By the time the Nazis entered Austria in March 1938 there were more than 180,000 Jews in Vienna alone, perhaps as many as 200,000 – while in the whole of Germany there were now fewer than twice that number. Thus for the Nazis the Jewish ‘problem’ in Austria was proportionately even bigger than it was in Germany.
At the end of the First World War the victorious powers had decided to split the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Austria became a separate country. The new government in Vienna wanted Austria to become part of the German Republic, but by the Treaty of Saint-Germain in 1919 the victors forbade a union between the two. The Austrians would not forget that this request had been denied – a decision seemingly at odds with President Woodrow Wilson’s promise of national ‘self-determination’.
But there was no escaping geographical reality, and during the 1920s and 1930s Germany played a part in the affairs of Austria. In the 1920s Austria – like Germany – suffered economic difficulties, though not on the same scale as its larger neighbour. In 1934 amid an atmosphere of political crisis, Austrian Nazis assassinated the Austrian Chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss. Kurt Schuschnigg, who succeeded Dollfuss, struggled to establish an independent Austria in the presence of a Germany now led by a Chancellor who had been born an Austrian but considered himself a German – just as he believed every ‘Aryan’ Austrian was a German as well.
Hitler put political pressure on Austria and on Schuschnigg, but he was wary of taking direct military action in order to force a union – or ‘Anschluss’. His greatest anxiety was that such an adventure would antagonize Mussolini, since Italy had guaranteed Austria’s independence. Hitler hoped that some kind of union might still occur without violence, and this seemed possible after the signing in 1936 of an Austro-German agreement. Though under the terms of the agreement Hitler had recognized Austria’s ‘sovereignty’, in return Schuschnigg had said he would include one Nazi supporter in his cabinet.
In the early weeks of 1938, the German ambassador to Vienna – the ex-Chancellor Franz von Papen – suggested to Schuschnigg that he should visit Berchtesgaden for a meeting with Hitler in order to correct any ‘misunderstandings’ between the two countries. The resulting conference, held on 12 February that year, is one of the most instructive examples of how Hitler unsettled his opponents. In the first discussion between Hitler and Schuschnigg, in his study on the first floor of the Berghof, Hitler threw a whole series of accusations at the Austrian leader: that Austria should have withdrawn from the League of Nations; that Austria had historically sabotaged any attempt at union with Germany; that Austria was now trying to fortify the border with the Reich, and so on. He coupled these charges with the threat that he was determined to ‘make an end of all this’ and warned that, ‘Perhaps you will wake up one morning in Vienna to find us there – just like a spring storm. And then you’ll see something.’ Furthermore, said Hitler, after a successful invasion, the country would be occupied by Nazi Stormtroopers and the Austrian Legion, a paramilitary group formed by Austrian Nazis, and ‘nobody can stop their just revenge – not even I.’44
Like many of Hitler’s political opponents, Schuschnigg was something of an intellectual – a graduate in law who after the war became a professor of political science. For people like this, Hitler was an almost impossible adversary. He would pile false charge after false charge in such quick succession that they could not be answered. Schuschnigg was one of the first foreign statesmen to be thrown off balance by this tactic – and he would not be the last. He did not seem to understand that Hitler did not respond to intellectual argument. The German leader was not a ‘normal’ statesman. He did not want to come to a mutually agreeable compromise and it did not matter to him that his ‘facts’ were wrong.
Hitler used a similar rhetorical tactic in his attack on the Jews. His sweeping claim, for example, that various ‘foreign Jews’ were plotting to unsettle Nazi Germany was much the same as his blanket accusation to Schuschnigg that ‘the whole history of Austria is just one uninterrupted act of high treason’. Equally, his intimidating statement that ‘not even’ he could stop the ‘just revenge’ of fanatical elements within the Third Reich if they entered Austria was akin to his statement, at the time of the 1933 Nazi boycott of Jewish shops and businesses, that there was a danger of the people taking the law into their own hands and attacking the Jews themselves. In both cases Hitler presented himself as a moderating force, holding back even more radical groups. It was an obvious but effective threat. If you did not accept what Hitler offered now, worse would follow.
Kurt Schuschnigg was certainly disconcerted by his meeting with Hitler at the Berghof. Dr Otto Pirkham, an Austrian diplomat who accompanied him that day, remembers that ‘at luncheon, Schuschnigg was completely silent … very depressed, and his silence was due to the fact that what he had learned at the meeting with Hitler would not have been very agreeable.’45 Schuschnigg left Berchtesgaden that evening having been bullied into signing a document that made a number of concessions to Hitler, including an agreement to appoint the Austrian Nazi supporter Arthur Seyss-Inquart as Minister of the Interior. On 20 February, Hitler gave a lengthy speech to the Reichstag, in the course of which he praised Schuschnigg for his ‘great understanding and warm-hearted willingness … to find a way forward in the interests of both countries as much as in the interest of the German Volk – that entire German Volk, the sons of which we all are …’.46 Four days later in Munich, at a celebration of the anniversary of the forming of the Nazi party, Hitler linked together both the Austrian and Jewish questions, when he spoke out against the ‘filthy lies’ in the foreign press about Germany’s real intentions towards Austria. He singled out the British News Chronicle, which he said had claimed that German troops were massed on the border. These ‘brazen accusations’, he declared, according to a report in the Völkischer Beobachter, served to demonstrate ‘how the Jewish international poisoners manufacture and spread lies’. Furthermore, ‘we can learn a lesson from this. We shall vigorously combat the Jewish rabble-rousers in Germany. We know that they are agents of an International, and we shall treat them all accordingly.’47
Schuschnigg now attempted to outmanoeuvre Hitler by calling for a plebiscite in Austria on the question of unification with Germany. In response Hitler, with Göring urging him on, put more pressure on the Austrians by mobilizing troops in Bav
aria. Schuschnigg resigned and Seyss-Inquart was appointed Chancellor of Austria. He ‘invited’ German troops into Austria and they crossed the border on the morning of 12 March. Austrian troops offered no resistance to the Germans as they moved through the country and millions of ordinary Austrians welcomed the Wehrmacht, garlanding them with flowers. Many Austrians thought the arrival of the Nazis offered hope of a new, stronger Austria no longer beset by economic problems. For example, Susi Seitz, an Austrian teenager, says that she and her family saw Hitler as their ‘saviour’ because ‘we really had to belong to Germany.’48 They had wanted Austria to be joined to Germany after the First World War, and now at last it seemed that this ‘dream’ would be fulfilled.
The Holocaust: A New History Page 15