The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

by William L. Shirer

  He remained in this state during most of the next four weeks, when he traversed Germany and Austria from one end to the other whipping up public fervor for a big Ja vote in favor of the Anschluss. But in his exuberant speeches he missed no opportunity to vilify Schuschnigg or to peddle the by now shopworn lies about how the Anschluss was achieved. In his address to the Reichstag on March 18 he asserted that Schuschnigg had “broken his word” by his “election forgery,” adding that “only a crazy, blinded man” could have behaved in such a manner. On March 25 at Koenigsberg the “election forgery” had become in Hitler’s mind “this ridiculous comedy.” Letters had been found, Hitler claimed, proving that Schuschnigg had deliberately double-crossed him by seeking delays in augmenting the Berchtesgaden agreement until “a more propitious hour to stir up foreign countries against Germany.”

  In Koenigsberg Hitler also answered the taunts of the foreign press at his use of brutal force and his trickery in having proclaimed the Anschluss without even waiting for the decision of the plebiscite:

  Certain foreign newspapers have said that we fell on Austria with brutal methods. I can only say: even in death they cannot stop lying. I have in the course of my political struggle won much love from my people, but when I crossed the former frontier [into Austria] there met me such a stream of love as I have never experienced. Not as tyrants have we come, but as liberators … Under the force of this impression I decided not to wait until April tenth but to effect the unification forthwith …

  If this sounded less than logical—or honest—to foreign ears, there is no doubt that it made a great impression on the Germans. When at the conclusion of his Reichstag speech Hitler implored, in a voice choked with emotion, “German people, give me another four years so that I can now exploit the accomplished union for the benefit of all!” he received an ovation so overwhelming that it dwarfed all his former triumphs at this tribune.

  The Fuehrer wound up his election campaign in Vienna on April 9, on the eve of the polling. The man who had once tramped the pavements of this city as a vagabond, unwashed and empty-bellied, who but four years before had assumed in Germany the powers of the Hohenzollern kings and had now taken upon himself those of the Hapsburg emperors, was full of a sense of God-given mission.

  I believe that it was God’s will to send a youth from here into the Reich, to let him grow up, to raise him to be the leader of the nation so as to enable him to lead back his homeland into the Reich.

  There is a higher ordering and we all are nothing else than its agents. When on March 9 Herr Schuschnigg broke his agreement, then in that second I felt that now the call of Providence had come to me. And that which then took place in three days was only conceivable as the fulfillment of the wish and the will of this Providence.

  In three days the Lord has smitten them! … And to me the grace was given on the day of the betrayal to be able to unite my homeland with the Reich! …

  I would now give thanks to Him who let me return to my homeland in order that I might now lead it into my German Reich! Tomorrow may every German recognize the hour and measure its import and bow in humility before the Almighty, who in a few weeks has wrought a miracle upon us!

  That a majority of Austrians, who undoubtedly would have said Ja to Schuschnigg on March 13, would say the same to Hitler on April 10 was a foregone conclusion. Many of them sincerely believed that ultimate union with any kind of Germany, even a Nazi Germany, was a desirable and inevitable end, that Austria, cut off from its vast Slavic and Hungarian hinterland in 1918, could not in the long run exist decently by itself, that it could only survive as part of the German Reich. In addition to these Austrians were the fanatical Nazis whose ranks were swelling rapidly with jobseekers and jobholders attracted by success and anxious to improve their position. Many Catholics in this overwhelmingly Catholic country were undoubtedly swayed by a widely publicized statement of Cardinal Innitzer welcoming Nazism to Austria and urging a Ja vote. *

  In a fair and honest election in which the Social Democrats and Schuschnigg’s Christian Socials would have had freedom to campaign openly the plebiscite, in my opinion, might have been close. As it was, it took a very brave Austrian to vote No. As in Germany, and not without reason, the voters feared that their failure to cast an affirmative ballot might be found out. In the polling station which I visited in Vienna that Sunday afternoon, wide slits in the corner of the polling booths gave the Nazi election committee sitting a few feet away a good view of how one voted. In the country districts few bothered—or dared—to cast their ballots in the secrecy of the booth; they voted openly for all to see. I happened to broadcast at seven-thirty that evening, a half hour after the polls had closed, when few votes had yet been counted. A Nazi official assured me before the broadcast that the Austrians were voting 99 per cent Ja. That was the figure officially given later—99.08 per cent in Greater Germany, 99.75 in Austria.

  And so Austria, as Austria, passed for a moment out of history, its very name suppressed by the revengeful Austrian who had now joined it to Germany. The ancient German word for Austria, Oesterreich, was abolished. Austria became the Ostmark and soon even that name was dropped and Berlin administered the country by Gaue (districts) which corresponded roughly to the historic Laender such as Tyrol, Salzburg, Styria and Carinthia. Vienna became just another city of the Reich, a provincial district administrative center, withering away. The former Austrian tramp become dictator had wiped his native land off the map and deprived its once glittering capital of its last shred of glory and importance. Disillusionment among the Austrians was inevitable.

  For the first few weeks the behavior of the Vienna Nazis was worse than anything I had seen in Germany. There was an orgy of sadism. Day after day large numbers of Jewish men and women could be seen scrubbing Schuschnigg signs off the sidewalk and cleaning the gutters. While they worked on their hands and knees with jeering storm troopers standing over them, crowds gathered to taunt them. Hundreds of Jews, men and women, were picked off the streets and put to work cleaning public latrines and the toilets of the barracks where the S.A. and the S.S. were quartered. Tens of thousands more were jailed. Their worldly possessions were confiscated or stolen. I myself, from our apartment in the Plosslgasse, watched squads of S.S. men carting off silver, tapestries, paintings and other loot from the Rothschild palace next door. Baron Louis de Rothschild himself was later able to buy his way out of Vienna by turning over his steel mills to the Hermann Goering Works. Perhaps half of the city’s 180,000 Jews managed, by the time the war started, to purchase their freedom to emigrate by handing over what they owned to the Nazis.

  This lucrative trade in human freedom was handled by a special organization set up under the S.S. by Heydrich, the “Office for Jewish Emigration,” which became the sole Nazi agency authorized to issue permits to Jews to leave the country. Administered from the beginning to the end by an Austrian Nazi, a native of Hitler’s home town of Linz by the name of Karl Adolf Eichmann, it was to become eventually an agency not of emigration but of extermination and to organize the slaughter of more than four million persons, mostly Jews. Himmler and Heydrich also took advantage of their stay in Austria during the first weeks of the Anschluss to set up a huge concentration camp at Mauthausen, on the north bank of the Danube near Enns. It was too much trouble to continue to transport thousands of Austrians to the concentration camps of Germany. Austria, Himmler decided, needed one of its own. Before the Third Reich tumbled to its fall the non-Austrian prisoners were to outnumber the local inmates and Mauthausen was to achieve the dubious record as the German concentration camp (the extermination camps in the East were something else) with the largest number of officially listed executions—35,318 in the six and a half years of its existence.

  Despite the Gestapo terror led by Himmler and Heydrich after the Anschluss Germans flocked by the hundreds of thousands to Austria, where they could pay with their marks for sumptuous meals not available in Germany for years and for bargain-priced vacations amid Austr
ia’s matchless mountains and lakes. German businessmen and bankers poured in to buy up the concerns of dispossessed Jews and anti-Nazis at a fraction of their value. Among the smiling visitors was the inimitable Dr. Schacht, who, despite his quarrels with Hitler, was still a minister (without portfolio) in the Reich cabinet, still the president of the Reichsbank, and who was overjoyed with the Anschluss. Arriving to take over the Austrian National Bank on behalf of the Reichsbank even before the plebiscite, he addressed the staff of the Austrian bank on March 21. Ridiculing the foreign press for criticizing Hitler’s methods of effecting the union, Dr. Schacht stoutly defended the methods, arguing that the Anschluss was “the consequence of countless perfidies and brutal acts of violence which foreign countries have practiced against us.

  “Thank God … Adolf Hitler has created a communion of German will and German thought. He bolstered it up with the newly strengthened Wehrmacht and he then finally gave the external form to the inner union between Germany and Austria….

  “Not a single person will find a future with us who is not wholeheartedly for Adolf Hitler … The Reichsbank will always be nothing but National Socialist or I shall cease to be its manager.”

  Whereupon Dr. Schacht administered to the Austrian staff an oath to be “faithful and obedient to the Fuehrer.”

  “A scoundrel he who breaks it!” Dr. Schacht cried, and then led his audience in the bellowing of a triple “Sieg Heil!”42

  In the meantime Dr. Schuschnigg had been arrested and subjected to treatment so degrading that it is difficult to believe that it was not prescribed by Hitler himself. Kept under house arrest from March 12 until May 28, during which time the Gestapo contrived to prevent him from getting any sleep by the most petty devices, he was then taken to Gestapo headquarters at the Hotel Metropole in Vienna, where he was incarcerated in a tiny room on the fifth floor for the next seventeen months. There, with the towel issued to him for his personal use, he was forced to clean the quarters, washbasins, slop buckets and latrines of the S.S. guards and perform other various menial tasks thought up by the Gestapo. By March 11, the first anniversary of his fall, he had lost fifty-eight pounds, but the S.S. doctor reported that his condition was excellent. The years of solitary confinement and then of life “among the living dead” in some of the worst of the German concentration camps such as Dachau and Sachsenhausen that followed have been described by Dr. Schuschnigg in his book.*

  Shortly after his arrest he was allowed to marry by proxy the former Countess Vera Czernin, whose marriage had been annulled by an ecclesiastical court,† and in the last war years she was permitted to share his existence in the concentration camps along with their child, who was born in 1941. How they survived the nightmare of imprisonment is a miracle. Toward the end they were joined by a number of other distinguished victims of Hitler’s wrath such as Dr. Schacht, Léon Blum, the former French Premier, and Madame Blum, Pastor Niemoeller, a host of high-ranking generals and Prince Philip of Hesse, whose wife, Princess Mafalda, the daughter of the King of Italy, had been done to death by the S.S. at Buchenwald in 1944 as part of the Fuehrer’s revenge for Victor Emmanuel’s desertion to the Allied side.

  On May 1, 1945, the eminent group of prisoners, who had been hastily evacuated from Dachau and transported southward to keep them from being liberated by the Americans advancing from the West, arrived at a village high in the mountains of southern Tyrol. The Gestapo officers showed Schuschnigg a list of those who, on Himmler’s orders, were to be done away with before they fell into the hands of the Allies. Schuschnigg noted his own name and that of his wife, “neatly printed.” His spirits fell. To have survived so much so long—and then to be bumped off at the last minute!

  On May 4, however, Schuschnigg was able to write in his diary:

  At two o’clock this afternoon, alarm! The Americans! An American detachment takes over the hotel. We are free!

  Without firing a shot and without interference from Great Britain, France and Russia, whose military forces could have overwhelmed him, Hitler had added seven million subjects to the Reich and gained a strategic position of immense value to his future plans. Not only did his armies flank Czechoslovakia on three sides but he now possessed in Vienna the gateway to Southeast Europe. As the capital of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, Vienna had long stood at the center of the communications and the trading systems of Central and Southeast Europe. Now that nerve center was in German hands.

  Perhaps most important to Hitler was the demonstration again that neither Britain nor France would lift a finger to stop him. On March 14 Chamberlain had addressed the Commons on Hitler’s fait accompli in Austria, and the German Embassy in London had got off to Berlin a succession of urgent telegrams on the course of the debate. There was not much for Hitler to fear. “The hard fact is,” Chamberlain declared, “that nothing could have arrested what actually has happened [in Austria]—unless this country and other countries had been prepared to use force.”

  The British Prime Minister, it became clear to Hitler, was unwilling not only to employ force but even to concert with the other Big Powers about halting Germany’s future moves. On March 17 the Soviet government had proposed a conference of powers, within or without the League of Nations, to consider means of seeing that there was no further German aggression. Chamberlain took a chilly view of any such meeting and on March 24, in the House of Commons, publicly rejected it. “The inevitable consequence of any such action,” he said, “would be to aggravate the tendency towards the establishment of exclusive groups of nations which must … be inimical to the prospects of European peace.” Apparently he overlooked, or did not take seriously, the Rome–Berlin Axis or the tripartite Anti-Comintern Pact of Germany, Italy and Japan.

  In the same speech Chamberlain announced a decision of his government which must have been even more pleasing to Hitler. He bluntly rejected the suggestion not only that Britain should give a guarantee to come to the aid of Czechoslovakia in case she were attacked but also that Britain should support France if the French were called upon to implement their obligations under the Franco–Czech pact. This forthright statement eased Hitler’s problems considerably. He now knew that Britain would also stand by when he took on his next victim. If Britain held back would not France also? As his secret papers of the next few months make clear, he was sure of it. And he knew that, by the terms of the Russian pacts with France and Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union was not obliged to come to the aid of the Czechs until the French moved first. Such knowledge was all that he needed to enable him to go ahead at once with his plans.

  The reluctant German generals, Hitler could assume after the success of the Anschluss, would no longer stand in his way. If he had any doubts at all on this, they were removed by the denouement of the Fritsch affair.

  As we have seen,* General von Fritsch’s trial before a military court of honor on charges of homosexualism had been abruptly suspended on its opening day, March 10, when Field Marshal Goering and the commanders of the Army and Navy were convoked by Hitler to handle more urgent affairs in connection with Austria. The trial resumed on March 17, but in view of what had happened in the interval it was bound to be anti-climactic. A few weeks before, the senior generals had been confident that when the military court exposed the unbelievable machinations of Himmler and Heydrich against Fritsch not only would their fallen Commander in Chief be restored to his post in the Army but the S.S., perhaps even the Third Reich, possibly even Adolf Hitler, would be shaken to a fall. Vain and empty hope! On February 4, as has been recounted, Hitler had smashed the dreams of the old officer corps by taking over command of the armed forces himself and cashiering Fritsch and most of the high-ranking generals around him. Now he had conquered Austria without a shot. After this astounding triumph, nobody in Germany, not even the old generals, had much thought for General von Fritsch.

  True, he was quickly cleared. After some browbeating from Goering, who could now pose as the fairest of judges, the blackmailing ex-convict, Schmidt, br
oke down in court and confessed that the Gestapo had threatened his life unless he implicated General von Fritsch—a threat, incidentally, which was carried out anyway a few days later—and that the similarity of names between Fritsch and Rittmeister von Frisch, whom he had actually blackmailed for homosexualism, had led to the frame-up. No attempt was made by Fritsch or the Army to expose the Gestapo’s real role, nor the personal guilt of Himmler and Heydrich in cooking up the false charges. On the second day, March 18, the trial was concluded with the inevitable verdict: “Proven not guilty as charged, and acquitted.”

  It was a personal exoneration for General von Fritsch but it did not restore him to his command, nor the Army to its former position of some independence in the Third Reich. Since the trial was held in camera, the public knew nothing of it or of the issues involved. On March 25 Hitler sent a telegram to Fritsch congratulating him on his “recovery of health.” That was all.

  The deposed General, who had declined to point an accusing finger at Himmler in court, now made a final futile gesture. He challenged the Gestapo chief to a duel. The challenge, drawn up in strict accordance with the old military code of honor by General Beck himself, was given to General von Rundstedt, as the senior ranking Army officer, to deliver to the head of the S.S. But Rundstedt got cold feet, carried it around in his pocket for weeks and in the end forgot it.