by James Longo
The address, just forty-eight hours before the scheduled election, caused many Austrians to suspect the worst. Panicked throngs made their way to the Viennese rail station to take the 11:15 train to Prague. A second train had to be added to keep the crowds from rioting. The Hohenbergs made their own plans. If Hitler moved against Austria, Ernst and his family would seek asylum in Vienna’s British Embassy. Maisie’s diplomat father offered them sanctuary there. Max arranged for an unmarked taxi to drive his family to Czechoslovakia. Bags were packed and the children sent to bed early.
The Chancellor began his broadcast from the same office where Engelbert Dollfuss had been assassinated. “Men and women of Austria, today we face a difficult and fateful situation.” Within minutes he yielded to all of Hitler’s demands, cancelled the election, and resigned his office. Austrians were urged to peacefully accept German annexation. “We are yielding to force, because we are resolved on no account to spill blood. We have ordered our armed forces, in the event of an invasion by the German Army, to offer no resistance.” Schuschnigg ended not with the traditional, “God Bless Austria,” but with the words, “God Protect Austria.” A recording of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony concluded the broadcast. Almost simultaneously swastikas and German flags appeared throughout Vienna, and in villages and towns across the country. For Austrian Nazis and their supporters, it was a time to celebrate. For anti-Nazi Austrians like the Hohenbergs, the speech seemed like a death sentence.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
WITCHES SABBATH
“The very thing we loved most, our common optimism, betrayed us, for everyone thought that everyone else would back down at the last minute.”
—STEFAN ZWEIG
“Tell Mussolini that I shall never, never, never forget this!”
—ADOLF HITLER
Sophie and her husband, Fritz, listened to Chancellor Schuschnigg’s address over Radio Prague. When it finished, the Czech newsreader urged calm. He denied that the Czechoslovakian army was mobilizing and appealed for national unity. As Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony played in the background, their telephone rang. It was Max calling from Austria. The conversation was brief. He told Sophie they were leaving for Prague at once hoping to reach the border before it closed. For most Europeans, the Second World War would begin a year and a half after the Austrian Anschluss. For the Hohenbergs and other opponents of Hitler, the war began that evening.
Time was running out for them and Austria. Maximilian and his family drove over winding, deserted roads in a car packed floor to roof with suitcases, a driver unfamiliar with the route, two anxious parents, and five sleepy children. They avoided familiar towns and villages where local Nazis celebrated, but each detour cost more time. As they raced to the border, a telephone call at 10:25 p.m. from Rome to Berlin promised Mussolini’s full support for the Anschluss. Hitler sent a return message. “Tell Mussolini I shall never, never, never forget this! If he should ever need any help or be in any danger, he can be convinced that I shall stick to him, whatever may happen, even if the whole world were against him.” Both scenarios came true, but the telephone call between the dictators sealed the fate of Austria, and of Benito Mussolini.
Shortly before dawn, Maximilian Hohenberg and his family arrived at the Czech border. It was open; but the regular border guards had been replaced with Nazi partisans drunk with power and beer. When he stepped out of the car, Max tried to appear as if he were taking his family, and over packed car, on a regularly scheduled holiday. He was certain he was about to be arrested. To his surprise, the Nazis drunkenly motioned their car through the checkpoint without asking to see their passports. He could barely believe their luck.
The Czech guards were less compliant. Taunting began immediately. “You wanted Hitler, now you have him! Go back to Austria. Go back to Hitler where you belong.” Freedom was inches away, but Max’s quiet pleas were loudly rejected. Max’s wife, Elisabeth, later remembered being unable to breathe as her husband confronted the Czech border patrol. They had escaped Austria, but Czechoslovakia had sealed its borders. They were not allowed to enter the country that had been their childhood home. When the insults grew louder, Elisabeth whispered to Max, “There is no possible escape. We must return to Artstetten.” It was a long, silent ride home.
At three minutes past midnight on March 12, 1938, the Germans entered Austria. When Max returned home with his exhausted family, he telephoned Sophie and whispered three simple French words. “Il est ici.” He is here. Then the phone went dead. It was their prearranged code. They had not escaped.
Hitler had flown from Berlin to Munich before being driven to Braunau am Inn, his Austrian birthplace. Church bells and cheering crowds greeted him. His next stop was to his childhood home of Linz. There he signed the “Bill of Reunification of Austria with the German Reich” and granted an exclusive interview to the London Daily Mail, telling the reporter, “Wait a little and see what I will do for Austria… you will see how much better off and happier the people of Austria will be.”
Hitler also addressed thousands of enthusiastic supporters: “If Providence once called me forth from this town to be the Führer of the German Reich, in so doing it must have charged me with a mission, and that mission could be only to restore my dear homeland to the German Reich.” Even those who could not hear his words, or those who knew him as a sullen youth, cheered.
Early on the morning of the German invasion of Austria, Ernst and his family arrived at Artstetten. Minutes after Schuschnigg’s address, an angry mob had surrounded their Radmer home. Neighbors whom Ernst had known for years, including men and women who worked for him, yelled Nazi salutes and fired guns in the air. Stones, threats, and oaths were thrown at the house. One of the leaders of the mob, the foreman of Ernst’s own estate, shouted, “We are the masters now! Today we are your boss!”
The scene was being repeated in towns, farms, and cities across Austria. Maids and field hands, waiters and waitresses, butlers and chauffeurs, even janitors who for years silently listened to their employers’ private conversations, had been gifted with unimaginable power. A few words to the country’s ascendant Nazi overseers could destroy a family overnight.
When the heckling outside the home failed to provoke a confrontation, the mob disappeared into the darkness to celebrate the new Austria. Ernst, fearful of what he might find in Vienna, decided to take backroads to Artstetten. There he and Max decided with their wives to travel together with their children to Vienna to seek the advice of Maisie’s British diplomat father. Hopefully he could help all of them safely escape the country.
The fifty-mile trip from Artstetten to Vienna was their second nightmarish journey in twenty-four hours. By the time they reached the city, they no longer recognized it. The day before, red and white flags of the Austrian Republic had hung from every flagpole and public building. Now every streetlight, tree, window, and balcony seemed covered by Nazi swastikas. Even police officers directing traffic wore swastikas armbands. American radio journalist William L. Shirer provided an eyewitness account of Vienna’s transformation:
When I emerged from the subway at Karlsplatz… I was amazed to find an abrupt change. A mob of several thousand shouting hysterical Nazi slogans was milling around the vast square… I found myself being swept by the riotous, yelling throng… past the Ring, past the Opera… to the offices of the German Tourism Office with its immense flower draped portrait of Adolf Hitler in the window… I had seen those faces at party rallies in Nuremberg: the fanatical popping eyes, the gaping mouths, the contorted expressions of hysteria and paranoia… screaming: Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Heil Hitler! Hang Schuschnigg! Hang Schuschnigg! Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer! [One people! One country! One leader!] The brown shirts at Nuremberg had never bellowed the Nazi slogans with such mania.
The Hohenbergs silently drove past Franz Joseph’s empty palace of Schönbrunn and the huge Hofburg palace in the city center. Some streets seemed deserted. Others were filled with jeering mobs drivi
ng Jews from their homes, shops, and businesses. Individuals and small groups of people were taunted as they were forced to scrub sidewalks clean of the pro-Schuschnigg graffiti written just days earlier. Edward R. Murrow, recently arrived from Berlin, reported the scene for CBS radio:
Young storm troopers are riding around in trucks and vehicles of all sorts singing and tossing oranges out to the crowd. Nearly every building has its armed guards. … There are still huge crowds along the Ringstrasse and people still stand outside the principle hotels… there is a certain air of expectancy about the city, everyone waiting and wondering where and at what time Herr Hitler will arrive.
Austrian writer Stephen Zweig described with disgust the horror of Vienna that day, “All the sickly, unclean fantasies of hate that had been conceived in many orgiastic nights found raging expression in broad daylight.” Carl Zuckerman, the exiled German screenwriter of the Marlene Dietrich film The Blue Angel, called the euphoria and unleashed hatred of the Viennese “an indescribable witches Sabbath.”
Cars bearing German license plates prompted cheers, Austrian plates indifference. The horrors taking place throughout the city focused the revelers’ attention away from the Hohenbergs, who silently drove past the Karlskirche where Ernst and Maisie were married and Belvedere Palace where Max had been born.
Once they reached the British Embassy, Ernst and his family quickly disappeared inside. Maximilian, Elisabeth, and their five sons, aged one to ten, crossed the street and climbed the steep stairs to the apartment of Ernst’s in-laws. Heavy curtains were drawn over the windows. Seventy years later, Georg Hohenberg, who was nine years old in 1938, could still remember silently staring at the closed curtains for hours waiting for some word from the Embassy.
In Prague, Sophie prayed for news about her brothers. Cascading bulletins reported events in Vienna, but she heard nothing from Max or Ernst. The reports only increased her anxiety. Kurt Schuschnigg had been placed under house arrest at Belvedere Palace. Austria’s new Chancellor, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, pledged allegiance to the Nazi Party. He served as puppet chancellor for only forty-eight hours, but that allowed him enough time to quickly move against the Hohenbergs.
The Belgian, French, and Hungarian embassies were granting political asylum to hundreds of refugees, helping spirit them out of the country. In the first chaotic hours of the German occupation, Seyss-Inquart journeyed to only one foreign embassy and spoke with only one Ambassador: Britain’s Michael Palairet. Telephone calls and telegrams were exchanged between Vienna and London. Prime Minister Chamberlain ordered no exit visa be issued for Prince Ernst Hohenberg and instructed the staff to immediately expel him and his family from the Embassy. Austria’s new government had labeled Ernst and Maximilian Hohenberg enemies of the state. The date was March 14, 1938. It was the first birthday of Ernst’s infant son who had been baptized Franz Ferdinand Maximilian Hohenberg.
Maisie’s stunned father silently watched Ernst and Maisie, with their toddler son, grimly cross the street to his apartment. They had nowhere else to go. The decision was a gamble. Their only hope was that the Gestapo might not arrest Ernst in the home of a British diplomat. Maximilian and Elisabeth had a bolder plan. They moved seven blocks away to the Ringstrasse’s most famous five-star luxury hotel. Max believed no one would dare arrest him in such a well-known landmark in the heart of Vienna. The building had once been the city palace of the Württemberg royal family, the Hohenbergs’ own cousins. The manager was a family friend. Max had no way to know the Hotel Imperial he selected was also Adolf Hitler’s Vienna destination. He and his family had barely unpacked when they learned Hitler would also be staying there. As the Nazi leader’s triumphant motorcade slowly approached Vienna, Max and his family fled to a less public location.
Hitler followed the same road to the city that the Hohenbergs had taken forty-eight hours earlier. Prague radio reported hundreds, then thousands, of Austrians greeting him with the Nazi salute. Leni Riefenstahl described the “delirious” scene. “They stretched their arms and hands towards Hitler in almost religious ecstasy. Elderly men and women were crying. The universal jubilation was simply beyond belief.”
Sophie and Fritz could not believe what they were hearing. With no news about her brothers, Sophie nervously retraced her steps back and forth between her home and the Lady of Victories church. At some point during those anxious hours as Franz Ferdinand’s sons hid in Vienna and his daughter prayed in Prague, Adolf Hitler passed Artstetten Castle where their assassinated parents were buried. Nicholas Horthy, Hungary’s dictator and infamous Nazi collaborator, later connected the dots in his memoirs: “Those two shots at Sarajevo were the first two shots of the First World War, from which sprang the yet more murderous Second World War.” Echoes of those Sarajevo bullets would soon be heard around the world. Millions would die, including many Austrians joyfully cheering the man they would have ignored or scorned if years earlier they had met on the same Viennese streets.
Hitler’s caravan finally reached the outskirts of Vienna and the Schönbrunn Palace. He knew the palace gardens well. It was on a Schönbrunn park bench that the young Hitler dreamed of the day the “racially superior” German people would destroy all remnants of the “mongrel” multicultural Habsburg Empire. A quarter of a century later, pealing church bells and thousands of cheering Viennese told him that day was near. Vienna’s Cardinal Archbishop Innitzer enthusiastically welcomed Hitler. In a published letter to his flock he wrote, “Catholics in the Vienna diocese are asked on Sunday to offer thanks to the Lord God for the bloodless course of the great political change.” He signed his letter “Heil Hitler” and soon traveled to the Hotel Imperial to pay his respects.
Shortly before Franz Ferdinand’s birth, Emperor Franz Joseph had removed the stone walls that for nearly six hundred years had protected Vienna from foreign invaders. The medieval fortifications were replaced by wide streets, green walkways, and miles of riding and hiking trails. Sun and winds swept through the old city bringing with them green parks, flowering gardens, and breathing space for its citizens. The city’s most famous boulevard, the tree-lined Ringstrasse, stood where ramparts once guarded the capital of the Habsburg Empire.
Hitler slowly rode along the Ringstrasse beneath a double row of tall Linden trees planted as saplings during the early days of Franz Joseph’s reign. Banners of red, white, and black swastikas transformed the exterior of the Hotel Imperial into a Nazi cathedral. After a few hours of sleep in the hotel, Hitler was driven the following morning to the city’s Heroes’ Square. There three quarters of a million Viennese waited impatiently to hear him speak from the Nazi-bannered balcony of the Hofburg Palace.
A few blocks to the south, a knock at the door interrupted the quiet meal Ernst was having with his wife and son. The Gestapo had come to arrest him. He was informed if he resisted or tried to escape, his brother would be hunted down and killed. Ernst left quietly. When Maximilian learned of the arrest, he immediately left the safety of his own refuge to surrender to the Gestapo. He knew Ernst would die rather than reveal their location. Elisabeth could barely hear his parting words as the sounds of hundreds of thousands of cheering Austrians shook the walls and windows where they hid. The Nazi leader was speaking from the Hofburg Palace’s balcony, built in 1913 for Franz Ferdinand but never used by him. Austria’s new Nazi Chancellor, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, spoke first, proudly surrendering himself and his country to Hitler:
As the last highest agent of the federal state of Austria I report to my Führer and Reich Chancellor the completion of the lawful degree according to the will of the German people and of its Führer. Austria is a province of the German Reich. … My Führer! Wherever the road leads we will follow! Heil my Führer!
Shortly before Hitler spoke to his fellow Austrians, he was presented with flowers by two small Czech boys holding a banner that read, “The Sudeten Germans of Czechoslovakia greet the Führer.” The gift generated one of the few smiles Hitler produced on that remarkable day.
<
br /> The Prague Radio newsreader failed to mention the banner or its implications when reporting the events, but few in or out of Czechoslovakia doubted that the country was Hitler’s next target. Three and a half million Czechs of German ancestry lived in its Sudetenland region; and Hitler had pledged to return all European Germans to his Reich.
Herman Goering, Hitler’s closest deputy, offered reassurances Czechoslovakia was in no danger. Within days of the Austrian Anschluss, a German plane entered Czech air space dropping leaflets that read, “Tell Everyone in Prague Hitler Says Hello.” That September Goering thundered in a public speech in Nuremberg:
A petty segment of Europe is harassing human beings. … This miserable pygmy race (the Czechs) without culture—no one knows where it came from—is oppressing a cultured people (the Sudeten Germans) and behind it is Moscow and the eternal mask of the Jew devil.
In the immediate aftermath of the Austrian Anschluss, American Ambassador Joseph Kennedy in England, a leading Roosevelt Democrat, wrote about the future position of Czechoslovakia: “Jan Masaryk, the Czech Foreign Minister here and son of the old President, gave me to understand that his country will make a deal with Germany, unpalatable as it may be… it does not consider… putting up resistance against Berlin.” Following a trip to Germany, the former American president Herbert Hoover, a Republican, received a rousing ovation at the Foreign Policy Association in New York. He declared to his enthusiastic audience, “The form of government which other people pass through in working out their destinies is not our business.” American politicians from both political parties were not interested in events in faraway Europe.