Hitler

by Ian Kershaw

  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. 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, 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.

  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. 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.

  Shortly before 4 p.m., 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, 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 journey 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. His bodyguards pushed a way through the crowd so that he could go the last few yards to the town hall on foot. Peals of bells rang out; the rapturous crowd was screaming ‘Heil’; Seyß-Inquart could hardly make himself heard in his introductory remarks. Hitler looked deeply moved. Tears ran down his cheeks. 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.

  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. 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. In an interview he gave to the British journalist Ward Price, Hitler hinted that Austria would become a German province ‘like Bavaria or Saxony’. He evidently pondered the matter further during the night. The next day, 13 March, the Anschluß, not intended before the previous evening, was completed. 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 with the Reich.

  Stuckart had meanwhile arrived overnight and was drafting the ‘Law for the Reunion of Austria with the German Reich’, put together in all haste through much toing and froing between Stuckart in Linz and Keppler in Vienna. Around 5 p.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 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. Austria had become a German province.

  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. 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. 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. 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.’

  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. They had had time to ensure the preparations were complete. Work-places were ordered to be closed; 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. 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.

  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’. He ended, to tumultuous cheering lasting for minutes, by declaring ‘before history the entry of my homeland into the German Reich’.

  In the early evening, Hitler left Vienna and flew to Munich, before returning next day to Berlin to another ‘hero’s welcome’. 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’. 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. 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. 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’. 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.

  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. 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. ‘Czechia comes first now,’ the Propaganda Minister recorded. ‘… And drastically, 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 himself.’

  The Anschluß was a watershed for Hitler, and for the Third Reich. The intoxication of the crowds made him feel like a god. The rapid improvisation of the Anschluß there and then 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 feeble. The doubters and sceptics at home were, as always, revealed as weak and wrong. There was no one to stand in his way.

  Hitler had, with the Anschluß, created ‘Greater Germany’, now incorporating his homeland. He was impatient for more. The Anschluß suggested to him that the Great Germanic Reich, embracing all Germans and dominating the Continent of Europe, did not have to be a long-term project, as he had once imagined. 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.

  The Anschluß did not just set the roller-coaster of foreign expansion moving. It gave massive impetus to the assault on ‘internal enemies’. The repression was ferocious – worse even than it had been in Germany following the Nazi takeover in 1933. 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’.

  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.

  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 1 1.1 5 p.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.

  For many, there was only one way out. Suicide among the Viennese Jewish community became commonplace in these terrible days.

  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’.

  After the tremors of the Blomberg – Fritsch affair, Hitler’s internal position was now stronger than ever. 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’. 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 Hitler – 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

  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 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 prestige that accrued to Hitler drew heavily upon his ‘triumphs without bloodshed’. 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, there was no doubt at all to the ruling groups in Germany aware of Hitler’s thinking 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.

  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. To German nationalist eyes, 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 advant
ages 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. 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’ of 5 November 1937 to take account of likely circumstances in which the Wehrmacht could invade Czechoslovakia to solve the problem of ‘living space’.

  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 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. And even Göring, keen as he was to see the end of the Czech state, was anxious, as were others in the upper echelons of the regime, to avoid what seemed that almost certain consequence of any move against Czechoslovakia: war against the western powers.

  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. In the military, the leading opponents of Hitler’s high-risk policy emerged as General Beck, who resigned as Chief of Staff in the summer, and Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr (military intelligence). 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. 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.