by Ian Kershaw
The Anschluß did not just set the roller-coaster of foreign expansion moving. It gave massive impetus to the assault on ‘internal enemies’. Early arrivals in Vienna had been Himmler and Heydrich. The repression was ferocious – worse even than it had been in Germany following the Nazi takeover in 1933. The Austrian police records fell immediately into the Gestapo’s hands. Supporters of the fallen regime, but especially Socialists, Communists, and Jews – rounded up under the aegis of the rising star in the SD’s ‘Jewish Department’, Adolf Eichmann – were taken in their thousands into ‘protective custody’.155
Many other Jews were manhandled, beaten, and tortured in horrific ordeals by Nazi thugs, looting and rampaging. Jewish shops were plundered at will. Individual Jews were robbed on the open streets of their money, jewellery, and fur coats. Groups of Jews, men and women, young and old, were dragged from offices, shops, or homes and forced to scrub the pavements in ‘cleaning squads’, their tormentors standing over them and, watched by crowds of onlookers screaming ‘Work for the Jews at last,’ kicking them, drenching them with cold, dirty water, and subjecting them to every conceivable form of merciless humiliation.156
The pent-up fury of the Nazi mobs threatened to explode into a full-scale pogrom. The Daily Telegraph’s long-standing correspondent in Vienna, G.E.R. Gedye, described the menacing atmosphere: ‘As I crossed the Graben [one of the main streets in the centre of Vienna] to my office, the Brown flood was sweeping through the streets. It was an indescribable witches’ sabbath – stormtroopers, lots of them barely out of the schoolroom, with cartridge belts and carbines, the only other evidence of authority being swastika brassards, were marching side by side with police turncoats, men and women shrieking or crying hysterically the name of their leader, embracing the police and dragging them along in the swirling stream of humanity, motor-lorries filled with stormtroopers clutching their long-concealed weapons, hooting furiously, trying to make themselves heard above the din, men and women leaping, shouting, and dancing in the light of the smoking torches which soon began to make their appearance, the air filled with a pandemonium of sound in which intermingled screams of: “Down with the Jews! Heil Hitler! Heil Hitler! Sieg Heil! Perish the Jews!…” ‘157
‘Hades had opened its gates and released its basest, most despicable, most unpure spirits,’ was how the esteemed playwright and writer Carl Zuckmayer, his own works banned in Germany since 1933, described the scene. Vienna had transformed itself, in his eyes, ‘into a nightmare painting of Hieronymus Bosch’.158
One seventeen-year-old Jew later recalled his own experience, only a short few weeks after being part of a fun-loving crowd enjoying the dancing, drinking, and merriment of the Viennese carnival: ‘I rushed to the window and looked out into Nußdorferstraße… Then the first lorry came into sight. It was packed with shouting, screaming men. A huge swastika flag fluttered over their heads… Now we could hear clearly what they were shouting: “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer!” they were chanting in chorus, followed by “Ju-da verr-rrecke! Ju-da verr-rrecke!” (“Per-rish Judah!”)… I was still looking out into Nußdorferstraße when I suddenly heard a muffled shout from right below our window. I craned my neck and saw an Austrian policeman, a swastika brassard already over his dark green uniform sleeve, his truncheon in his fist, lashing out with berserk fury at a man writhing at his feet. I immediately recognized that policeman. I had known him all my life…’159
Thousands tried to flee. Masses packed the railway stations, trying to get out to Prague. They had the few possessions they could carry with them ransacked by the squads of men with swastika armbands who had assembled at the stations, ‘confiscating’ property at will, entering compartments on the trains and dragging out arbitrarily selected victims for further mishandling and internment. Those who left on the 11.15p.m. night express thought they had escaped. But they were turned back at the Czech border. Their ordeal was only just beginning. Others tried to flee by road. Soon, the roads to the Czech border were jammed. They became littered with abandoned cars as their occupants, realizing that the Czech authorities were turning back refugees at the borders, headed into the woods to try to cross the frontier illegally on foot.160
For many, there was only one way out. Suicide among the Viennese Jewish community became commonplace in these terrible days.161
The quest to root out ‘enemies of the people’, which in Germany had subsided in the mid-1930s and had begun to gather new pace in 1937, was revitalized through the new ‘opportunities’ that had opened up in Austria. The radicalized campaign would very quickly be reimported to the ‘Old Reich’, both in the new and horrifying wave of antisemitism in the summer of 1938, and – behind the scenes but ultimately even more sinister – in the rapid expansion of the SS’s involvement in looking for solutions to the ‘Jewish Question’.162
After the tremors of the Blomberg–Fritsch affair, Hitler’s internal position was now stronger than ever. His leadership was absolute. The officer corps of the army, deeply angered at the treatment of Fritsch, had had the wind taken out of their sails by the Anschluß triumph. For a small number of officers, the seeds of resistance had been sown which would eventually germinate into a conspiracy that would nearly take Hitler’s life on 20 July 1944. But at this stage the bitter animosity was directed largely against Himmler, Heydrich, and Göring, not Hitler. And they recognized that there were no forces capable of carrying through a putsch since, as Major-General Friedrich Olbricht put it, ‘the people are behind Hitler’.163 Nor was the reception accorded to the German troops on the Austrian roads lost on them. The vast majority of officers were, as regards the Anschluß, of one mind with the people: they could only approve and – if sometimes begrudgingly – admire Hitler’s latest triumph.
Among the mass of the population, ‘the German miracle’ brought about by Hitler released what was described as ‘an elemental frenzy of enthusiasm’ – once it was clear that the western powers would again stand by and do nothing, and that ‘our Führer has pulled it off without bloodshed’.164 It would be the last time that the German people – now with the addition of their cousins to the east whose rapid disillusionment soon dissipated the wild euphoria with which many of them had greeted Hitler165 – would feel the threat of war lifted so rapidly from them through a foreign-policy coup completed within days and presented as a fait accompli. The next crisis, over the Sudetenland, would drag over months and have them in near-panic over the likelihood of war. And if Hitler had had his way, there would have been war.
II
The crisis over Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1938 took Germany’s expansionist drive on to a new plane. This crisis was different from those which had preceded it in a number of significant ways. Down to the Anschluß, the major triumphs in foreign policy had been in line with the revisionist and nationalist expectations of all powerful interests in the Reich, and quite especially those of the army. The withdrawal from the League of Nations in 1933, the reintroduction of general military service in 1935, the reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936, and probably the Anschluß, too, would have been sought by any nationalist government in Germany at the time. The methods – on which the army, the Foreign Office, and others often looked askance – were Hitlerian. The timing had been determined by Hitler. The decisions to act were his alone. But in each case there had been powerful backing, as well as some hesitancy, among his advisers. And in each case, he was reflecting diverse currents of revisionist expression. The immense popularity of his triumphs in all sections of the political élite and among the masses of the population testified to the underlying consensus behind the revisionism. The earlier crises had also all been of brief duration. The tension had in each case been short-lived, the success rapidly attained. And in each case, the popular jubilation was in part an expression of relief that the western powers had not intervened, that the threat of another war – something which sent shivers of horror down the spines of most ordinary people – had been averted. The resulting popularity and p
restige that accrued to Hitler drew heavily upon his ‘triumphs without bloodshed’.166 In reality, as we have seen, there had in every instance been little chance of allied intervention, even to counter the reoccupation of the Rhineland. The weakness and divisions of the western powers had in each case been the platform for Hitler’s bloodless coups.
For the first time, in the summer of 1938, Hitler’s foreign policy went beyond revisionism and national integration, even if the western powers did not grasp this. Whatever his public veneer of concern about the treatment of the Sudeten Germans,167 there was no doubt at all to the ruling groups in Germany aware of Hitler’s thinking – his comments at the ‘Hoßbach meeting’ had already made it plain – that he was aiming not just at the incorporation of the Sudetenland in the German Reich, but at destroying the state of Czechoslovakia itself. By the end of May this aim, and the timing envisaged to accomplish it, had been outlined to the army leadership. It meant war – certainly against Czechoslovakia, and probably (so it seemed to others), despite Hitler’s presumption of the contrary, against the western powers. Hitler, it became unmistakably plain, actually wanted war. ‘Long live war – even if it lasts from two to eight years,’ he would proclaim to the Sudeten leader Konrad Henlein in September, at the height of the crisis.168 ‘Every generation must at one time have experienced war,’ his adjutant Fritz Wiedemann recalled him commenting around the same time.169 Whatever the warnings, he was even prepared for war (though he did not think it likely at this juncture) against Britain and France.
The sheer recklessness of courting disaster by the wholly unnecessary (in their view) risk of war at this time against the western powers – which they thought Germany in its current state of preparation could not win – appalled and horrified a number of those who knew what Hitler had in mind.
It was not the prospect of destroying Czechoslovakia that alienated them. The state that had been founded in 1918 out of the ruins of the Habsburg empire had sustained its democracy despite German, Hungarian, Polish, and Ruthenian minorities alongside Czechs and Slovaks (though since Hitler’s assumption of power in Germany the German ethnic minority, over 3 million strong, had proved increasingly restless). The country had a strong industrial base, and had expanded its defence capabilities until its army had to be regarded as a force to be reckoned with. Given that its long north and south borders abutted Germany, Austria, Hungary, Romania, the Ukraine, and Poland, the emphasis on defence was scarcely surprising. Czechoslovakia looked to Germany’s arch-enemies – not just to France, but also to the Soviet Union – for support, and Communism had a sizeable following in the country. To German nationalist eyes, therefore, Czechoslovakia could only be seen as a major irritant occupying a strategically crucial area. Coloured in addition by anti-Slav prejudice, there was little love lost for a democracy, hostile to the Reich, whose destruction would bring major advantages for Germany’s military and economic dominance of central Europe. The army had already planned in 1937 for the possibility of a pre-emptive strike against Czechoslovakia – ‘Case Green’ – to counter the possibility of the Czechs joining in from the east if their allies, the French, attacked the Reich from the west.170 As the prospect of a war with the French, something taken extremely seriously in the mid-1930s, had receded, ‘Case Green’ had been amended a month after the ‘Hoßbach meeting’ to take account of likely circumstances in which the Wehrmacht could invade Czechoslovakia to solve the problem of ‘living space’.171
In economic terms, too, the fall of Czechoslovakia offered an enticing prospect. Göring, his staff directing the Four-Year Plan, and the leaders of the arms industry, were for their part casting greedy eyes on the raw materials and armaments plants of Czechoslovakia. The problems built into an economy so heavily tilted towards armaments production but still heavily dependent upon costly imports of food and raw materials, facing too an increasingly acute labour shortage, and with an agricultural sector strained to the limit, were – as countless reports indicated – mounting alarmingly.172 The economic pressures for expansion accorded fully with the power-political aims of the regime’s leadership. Those who had argued for an alternative economic strategy, most of all of course Schacht, had by now lost their influence. Göring was the dominant figure. And in Göring’s dreams of German dominion in south-eastern Europe, the acquisition of Czechoslovakia was plainly pivotal.
But neither military strategy nor economic necessity compelled a Czech crisis in 1938. It is true that Beck, the Chief of Staff, could state in late May 1938 that ‘Czechia (die Tschechei) in the form that the Versailles Diktat compelled it to take is intolerable for Germany’, so that ‘a way must be found to eliminate it as a danger-spot for Germany, if necessary through a military solution’. He nevertheless took the lead in the army in opposing what he saw as a catastrophic step in involving the Reich in conflict with the west.173 Göring, the arch-bully of the Austrian government during the Anschluß crisis, whose rapaciousness was second to no one’s, shared Beck’s forebodings, and pressed for territorial concessions from the western powers in Czechoslovakia in order to avoid what he saw as the disaster of war with Britain. There were few keener than he was to see the end of the Czech state. But his views on how that end should come about – gradual liquidation over time through relentless pressure – were closer to those of the national-conservatives than to Hitler’s intention to achieve it through military might in the near future. As war with Britain seemed increasingly likely, Göring’s feet became ever colder. At the peak of the crisis, he would push for peace at Munich rather than Hitler’s preferred military aggression against the Czechs. It did not enhance his standing as a foreign-policy adviser with a disappointed Hitler. His political influence would never again be as high after Munich.174
It was the vision of national disaster that led for the first time to the tentative emergence of significant strands of opposition to what was regarded as Hitler’s madness. In the army leadership (still smarting from the Fritsch scandal), in the Foreign Office, and in other high places, the germs of resistance were planted among those certain that Germany was being driven headlong into catastrophe.175 In the military, the leading opponents of Hitler’s high-risk policy emerged as Colonel-General Beck, who resigned as Chief of Staff in the summer, and Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr (military intelligence).176 In the Foreign Office, the State Secretary Ernst von Weizsäcker was at the forefront of those in opposition to the policy supported avidly by his immediate superior, Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop.177 Among civilians with inside knowledge of what was going on, Carl Goerdeler, the former Reich Price Commissar, used his extensive foreign contacts to warn about Hitler’s aims.178
Nor was there any popular pressure for a foreign adventure, let alone one which was thought likely to bring war with the western powers. Among ordinary people, excluded from the deliberations in high places which kept Europe on the thinnest of tightropes between war and peace in September, the long-drawn-out crisis over Czechoslovakia, lasting throughout the late spring and summer, unlike earlier crises allowed time for the anxieties about war to gather momentum. The acute tension produced what was described as a ‘real war psychosis’.179 No love was lost on the Czechs. And the relentless propaganda about their alleged persecution of the German minority was not without impact. There were indeed some feelings of real gung-ho aggression, though these were largely confined to gullible younger Germans, who had not lived through the World War. The overwhelming sentiment was a fervent desire that war should be avoided and peace preserved. For the first time there was a hint of lack of confidence in Hitler’s policy. Most looked to him to preserve peace, not take Germany into a new war.180 But this time, both to the leading actors in the drama and to the millions looking on anxiously, war looked a more likely outcome than peace.
Among those with power and influence, the most forthright supporter of war to destroy Czechoslovakia was the new Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, an entirely different entity to the displaced conservative, vo
n Neurath. Ribbentrop was more than keen to stamp his imprint on the Foreign Office – and to make up for the embarrassment he had sustained when, largely at Göring’s doing, he had been sidelined in London and allowed to play no part in the Austrian triumph that his arch-rival in foreign policy had been instrumental in orchestrating.181 He provided Hitler with his main backing in these months. His hatred of Britain – the country which had spurned and ridiculed him – as well as his fawning devotion to the Führer made him the most hawkish of the hawks, a warmonger second only to Hitler himself. When he was not directly spurring on Hitler, he was doing his utmost to shore up the conviction that, when it came to it, Britain would not fight, that any war would be a localized one. State Secretary von Weizsäcker was sure of Ribbentrop’s baleful influence on Hitler in this respect. When, in the middle of August, Weizsäcker contradicted Ribbentrop’s assertion that the western powers would not act, the Foreign Minister retorted that ‘the Führer had so far never made a mistake; his most difficult decisions and actions (Rhineland occupation) were already behind him. One had to believe in his genius, just as he, Ribbentrop, did from long years of experience.’ He hoped that Weizsäcker could also come to have ‘such blind faith’. The State Secretary would later regret it if that were not the case, and the facts then spoke against him.182
For all Ribbentrop’s influence, however, there could be no doubt that the crisis that brought Europe to the very brink of war in the summer of 1938 was instigated and directed by Hitler himself. And unlike the rapid improvisation and breakneck speed which had characterized previous crises, this one was consciously devised to escalate over a period of months.