by Ian Kershaw
Then news came through that only part of the second ultimatum had been accepted. Schuschnigg’s desperate plea for British help had solicited a telegram from Lord Halifax, baldly stating: ‘His Majesty’s Government are unable to guarantee protection.’89 About 3.30p.m. Schuschnigg resigned.90 But President Wilhelm Miklas was refusing to appoint Seyß-Inquart as Chancellor.91 A further ultimatum was sent to Vienna, expiring at 7.30p.m.92 By now Göring was in full swing. Returning to the Reich Chancellery in the early evening, Nicolaus von Below found him ‘in his element’, constantly on the phone to Vienna, the complete ‘master of the situation’.93 Just before 8.00 that evening, Schuschnigg made an emotional speech on the radio, describing the ultimatum. Austria, he said, had yielded to force. To spare bloodshed, the troops would offer no resistance.94
By now, Nazi mobs were rampaging through Austrian cities, occupying provincial government buildings. Local Nazi leaders were hoping for Gleichschaltung through a seizure of power from within to forestall an invasion from Germany.95 Göring pressed Seyß-Inquart to send a prearranged telegram, dictated from Berlin, asking the German government for help to ‘restore order’ in the Austrian cities, ‘so that we have legitimation’, as Goebbels frankly admitted.96 Keppler rang at 8.48p.m. to inform Göring that Seyß was refusing to send the telegram. Göring replied that the telegram need not be sent; all Seyß needed do was to say ‘agreed’.97 Eventually, Keppler sent the telegram, at 9.10p.m. It was irrelevant. Twenty-five minutes earlier, persuaded by Göring that he would lose face by not acting after putting the ultimatum, Hitler had already given the Wehrmacht the order to march.98 Brauchitsch had left the Reich Chancellery, the invasion order in his pocket, depressed and worried about the response abroad.99 Just before 10.30p.m. Hitler heard the news he had been impatiently awaiting: Mussolini was prepared to accept German intervention. ‘Please tell Mussolini I will never forget him for it, never, never, never, come what may,’ a hugely relieved Hitler gushed over the telephone to Philipp of Hesse. ‘If he should ever need any help or be in any danger, he can be sure that do or die I shall stick by him, come what may, even if the whole world rises against him,’ he added, carried away by his elation.100
At midnight, President Miklas gave in. Seyß-Inquart was appointed Federal Chancellor.101 All German demands had now been met. But the invasion went ahead. As the American journalist William Shirer, observing the scenes in Vienna, cynically commented: with the invasion Hitler broke the terms of his own ultimatum.102 A last attempt by Seyß-Inquart, at 2.30a.m., to have the invasion stopped was brusquely rejected by Hitler: the military intervention could no longer be halted.103 Keitel did not dare pass on a plea he received at 4a.m. from General Max von Viebahn, in the Wehrmacht Head Office, imploring him to intervene with the Führer to desist from the invasion. Had Hitler known of the request, Keitel claimed, he would have been utterly contemptuous of the army leadership.104 That, in Keitel’s eyes, had to be avoided at all costs in the light of the events of the previous weeks. The ‘friendly visit’ of German troops began at 5.30a.m.105
Later that morning, Hitler, accompanied by Keitel, landed in Munich, en route for his triumphal entry into Austria, leaving Göring to serve as his deputy in the Reich.106 By midday, the cavalcade of grey Mercedes, with open tops despite the freezing weather, had reached Mühldorf am Inn, close to the Austrian border. General Fedor von Bock, Commander-in-Chief of the newly formed 8th Army, hastily put together in two days out of troop units in Bavaria, reported to Hitler. The motorized Leibstandarte-SS Adolf Hitler had joined them from Berlin. Bock could tell Hitler that the German troops had been received with flowers and jubilation since crossing the border two hours earlier. Hitler listened to the report of reactions abroad by Reich Press Chief Otto Dietrich. He did not expect either military or political complications, and gave the order to drive on to Linz.107
Back in Berlin, Frick was drafting a set of laws to accommodate the German takeover in Austria. A full Anschluß – the complete incorporation of Austria, marking its disappearance as a country – was still not envisaged; at any rate, not in the immediate future. Elections were prescribed for 10 April, with Austria ‘under Germany’s protection’. Hitler was to be Federal President, determining the constitution. ‘We can then push along the development as we want,’ commented Goebbels.108 Hitler himself had not hinted at an Anschluß in his proclamation, read out at midday by Goebbels on German and Austrian radio, stating only that there would be a ‘true plebiscite’ on Austria’s future and fate within a short time.109
Shortly before 4p.m. that afternoon, Hitler crossed the Austrian border over the narrow bridge at his birthplace, Braunau am Inn. The church-bells were ringing. Tens of thousands of people (most of them from outside Braunau), in ecstasies of joy, lined the streets of the small town. But Hitler did not linger. Propaganda value, not sentiment, had dictated his visit. Braunau played its brief symbolic part. That sufficed. The cavalcade passed on its triumphal progression to Linz.
Progress was much slower than expected because of the jubilant crowds packing the roadsides. It was in darkness, four hours later, that Hitler eventually reached the Upper Austrian capital. Seyß-Inquart and Glaise-Horstenau, along with Himmler and other leading Nazis, had long been waiting for him.110 So had an enormous crowd, gathered on the marketplace. The cars could go no further. Hitler’s bodyguards pushed a way through the crowd so that he could go the last few yards to the town hall on foot.111 Peals of bells rang out; the ecstatic crowd was screaming ‘Heil’; Seyß-Inquart could hardly make himself heard in his introductory remarks. Hitler looked deeply moved.112 Tears ran down his cheeks.113 In his speech on the balcony of the Linz town hall, he told the masses, constantly interrupting him with their wild cheering, that Providence must have singled him out to return his homeland to the German Reich. They were witnesses that he had now fulfilled his mission. ‘I don’t know on which day you will be called,’ he added. ‘I hope it is not far off.’ This somewhat mystical remark seemed to indicate that even up to this point, he was not intending within hours to end Austria’s identity by incorporating the country into Germany.114
Once more, plans were rapidly altered. He had meant to go straight on to Vienna. But he decided to stay in Linz throughout the next day, Sunday the 13th, and enter Vienna on the Monday.115 To the accompaniment of unending cries of ‘One people, one Reich, one Leader’ (‘ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer’), his party took up rooms in the Hotel Weinzinger on the banks of the Danube. Beds were hastily allocated. The restaurant could not cope with the food requirements. The single telephone in the hotel had to be reserved solely for Hitler’s use.116 The extraordinary reception had made a huge impact on him. He was told that foreign newspapers were already speaking of the ‘Anschluß’ of Austria to Germany as a fait accompli. It was in this atmosphere that the idea rapidly took shape of annexing Austria immediately.
In an excited mood, Hitler was heard to say that he wanted no half-measures. Stuckart, from the Reich Ministry of the Interior, was hurriedly summoned to Linz to draft legislation.117 In an interview he gave to the British journalist Ward Price in the Hotel Weinzinger, Hitler hinted that Austria would become a German province ‘like Bavaria or Saxony’.118 He evidently pondered the matter further during the night.119 The next day, 13 March – the day originally scheduled for Schuschnigg’s referendum on Austrian independence – the Anschluß, not intended before the previous evening, was completed.120 Hitler’s visit to Leonding, where he laid flowers on his parents’ grave and returned to the house where the family had lived, meeting some acquaintances he had not seen for thirty years, perhaps reinforced the belief, stimulated the previous evening by his reception in Linz, that Providence had predestined him to reunite his homeland (Heimat) with the Reich.121
At some point during the day Hitler contacted Mussolini to assure himself of the Duce’s acceptance of the final move to full Anschluß. On hearing the news he wanted, he dispatched an effusive telegram, in the same vein as his telephone messag
e two days earlier: ‘Mussolini, I will never forget you for this!’122 The Duce’s reply the following day, addressed simply to ‘Hitler. Vienna’, was less emotional: ‘My stance is determined by the friendship between our two countries sealed in the axis,’ he wrote.123
Stuckart had meanwhile arrived overnight and sat in the Hotel Weinzinger on the morning of the 13th drafting the ‘Law for the Reunion of Austria with the German Reich’.124 This was put together in all haste through much toing and froing between Stuckart in Linz and Keppler in Vienna.125 Hitler told a group of surprised and jubilant Austrian Nazi leaders, invited to lunch in the Hotel Weinzinger, around 3p.m. that ‘an important law’ announcing Austria’s incorporation within the German Reich was about to appear.126 Around 5p.m. the Austrian Ministerial Council – a body by now bearing scant resemblance to the cabinet under Schuschnigg – unanimously accepted Stuckart’s draft with one or two minor reformulations. The meeting lasted a mere five minutes and ended with the members of the Council rising to their feet to give the ‘German Greeting’. The Austrian President, Wilhelm Miklas, laid down his office at about the same time, refusing to sign the reunion law and handing his powers over to Seyß-Inquart. That evening, Seyß-Inquart and Keppler drove to Linz to confirm that the law had been accepted. Hitler signed the law before the evening was out.127 Austria had become a German province.128 Göring, who before the events triggered by the Berchtesgaden meeting had, as we have seen, been the one most strongly pressing for the union of the two countries, was taken by surprise – astonished at the manner in which the actual Anschluß had come about.129
Immediately, the Austrian army was sworn in to Hitler. In a surprise move, Gauleiter Josef Bürckel, a trusted ‘old fighter’ of the Movement but with no connections with Austria, was brought in from the Saar to reorganize the NSDAP.130 Hitler was well aware of the need to bring the Party in Austria fully into line as quickly as possible, and not to leave it in the hands of the turbulent, ill-disciplined, and unpredictable Austrian leadership.
In mid-morning on 14 March, Hitler left Linz for Vienna. Cheering crowds greeted the cavalcade of limousines – thirteen police cars accompanied Hitler’s Mercedes – all the way to the capital, where he arrived, again delayed, in the late afternoon.131 On the orders of Cardinal Innitzer, Archbishop of Vienna, all the Catholic churches in the city pealed their bells in Hitler’s honour and flew swastika banners from their steeples – an extraordinary gesture given the ‘Church struggle’ which had raged in the Reich itself over the previous years.132 The scenes of enthusiasm, according to a Swiss reporter who witnessed them, ‘defied all description’.133 An English observer of the scene commented: ‘To say that the crowds which greeted [Hitler] along the Ringstraße were delirious with joy is an understatement.’134 Hitler had to appear repeatedly on the balcony of the Hotel Imperial in response to the crowd’s continual shouts of ‘We want to see our Führer.’135 Keitel, whose room faced the front of the hotel, found it impossible to sleep for the clamour.136
The next day, 15 March, in beautiful spring weather, Hitler addressed a vast, delirious crowd, estimated at a quarter of a million people, in Vienna’s Heldenplatz. The Viennese Nazi Party had been impatiently expecting him to come to the capital for three days.137 They had had time to ensure the preparations were complete. Work-places were ordered to be closed (though employees were still to be paid – some compensation for the hours spent standing and waiting for Hitler’s speech); many factories and offices had marched their employees as a group to hear the historic speech; schools had not been open since the Saturday; Hitler Youth and girls from the Bund Deutscher Mädel were bussed in from all parts of Austria; party formations had turned out in force.138 But for all the organization, the wild enthusiasm of the immense crowd was undeniable – and infectious. Those less enthusiastic had already been cowed into submission by the open brutality of the Nazi hordes, exploiting their triumph since the weekend to inflict fearful beatings or to rob and plunder at will, and by the first waves of mass arrests (already numbering between 10,000 and 20,000 in the early days) orchestrated by Himmler and Heydrich, who had arrived in Vienna on 12 March.139
Ominous in Hitler’s speech was his reference to the ‘new mission’ of the ‘Eastern Marches (Ostmark) of the German People’ (as the once independent country of Austria was now to be known) as the ‘bulwark’ against the ‘storms of the east’.140 He ended, to tumultuous cheering lasting for minutes, by declaring ‘before history the entry of my homeland into the German Reich’.141
After attending a military parade in the afternoon, Hitler had a short but important audience, arranged by Papen, with the Austrian primate, Cardinal Innitzer.142 The Cardinal assured Hitler of the loyalty of Austria’s Catholics, the overwhelming body of the population.143 Three days later, along with six other Austrian bishops and archbishops, he put his signature to a declaration of their full support and blessing for the new regime in Austria and their conviction ‘that through the actions of the National Socialist Movement the danger of godless Bolshevism, which would destroy everything, would be fended off’.144 Cardinal Innitzer added in his own hand: ‘Heil Hitler.’145
In the early evening, Hitler left Vienna and flew to Munich, before returning next day to Berlin to another ‘hero’s welcome’.146 Two days later, on 18 March, a hastily summoned Reichstag heard his account of the events leading up to what he described as the ‘fulfilment of the supreme historical commission’.147 He then dissolved the Reichstag and set new elections for 10 April. On 25 March, in Königsberg, he began what was to prove his last ‘election’ campaign, holding six out of fourteen major speeches in the former Austria.148 In both parts of the extended Reich, the propaganda machine once more went into overdrive. Newspapers were prohibited from using the word ‘ja’ in any context other than in connection with the plebiscite.149 When the results were announced on 10 April, 99.08 per cent in the ‘Old Reich’, and 99.75 per cent in ‘Austria’ voted ‘yes’ to the Anschluß and to the ‘list of the Führer’.150 Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry congratulated itself. ‘Such an almost 100 per cent election result is at the same time a badge of honour for all election propagandists,’ it concluded.151
From Hitler’s perspective, it was a near-perfect result. Whatever the undoubted manipulative methods, ballot-rigging, and pressure to conform which helped produce it, genuine support for Hitler’s action had unquestionably been massive.152 Once again, a foreign-policy triumph had strengthened his hand at home and abroad. For the mass of the German people, Hitler once more seemed a statesman of extraordinary virtuoso talents. For the leaders of the western democracies, anxieties about the mounting instability of central Europe were further magnified.
The Austrian adventure was over. Hitler’s attentions were already moving elsewhere. Within days of returning from Vienna, he was poring over maps together with Goebbels. ‘First comes now Czechia (Tschechei),’ the Propaganda Minister recorded. ‘… And drastically (rigoros), at the next opportunity… The Führer is wonderful… A true genius. Now he sits for hours over the map and broods. Moving, when he says he wants to experience the great German Reich of the Teutons (Germanen) himself.’153
The Anschluß was a watershed for Hitler, and for the Third Reich. The backcloth to it had been one of domestic crisis. Yet almost overnight any lingering threat in the Blomberg–Fritsch affair had been defused by a triumph greater than any that Hitler had enjoyed before. The overwhelming reception he had encountered on his grandiose procession to Vienna, above all his return to Linz, had made a strong impression on the German Dictator. The intoxication of the crowds made him feel like a god. The rapid improvisation of the Anschluß there and then, fulfilling a dream he had entertained as a young Schönerer supporter all those years earlier, proved once more – so it seemed to him – that he could do anything he wanted. His instincts were, it seemed, always right. The western ‘powers’ were powerless. The doubters and sceptics at home were, as always, revealed as weak and wrong. There was no one to stan
d in his way. As Papen later put it: ‘Hitler had brought about the Anschluß by force; in spite of all warnings and prophecies, his own methods had proved the most direct and successful. Not only had there been no armed conflict between the two countries, but no foreign power had seen fit to intervene. They adopted the same passive attitude as they had shown towards the reintroduction of conscription in Germany and the reoccupation of the Rhineland. The result was that Hitler became impervious to the advice of all those who wished him to exercise moderation in his foreign policy.’154
Hitler had, with the Anschluß, created ‘Greater Germany’ (‘Großdeutschland’), now incorporating his homeland. As Goebbels’s diary entry, just noted, indicates, he was impatient for more. He had once seen himself as the ‘drummer’, paving the way for the ‘great leader’ to follow. He had then come to see himself as that ‘great leader’, rebuilding Germany, ‘nationalizing’ the masses for the great future conflict. Would he live to see the creation of the Great Germanic Reich, embracing all Germans and dominating the continent of Europe, himself? He had doubted it. Perhaps a later ‘great leader’ would be needed to complete the task. But from 1936 onwards, he was sure, Europe was ‘on the move’; the conflict would not be long delayed. By late 1937 he was envisaging expansion in the foreseeable future. The Anschluß now suggested to him that the Great Germanic Reich did not have to be a long-term project. He could create it himself. But it had to be soon. The incorporation of Austria had seriously weakened the defences of Czechoslovakia – the Slav state he had detested since its foundation, and one allied with the Bolshevik arch-enemy and with France. The next step to German dominance on the European continent beckoned.