1938 (8 page)

When around midnight, Göring heard that Miklas had given in, he collected Goebbels from his table, and together they drove to Hitler at the Chancellery to listen to the first broadcast of the “Horst Wessel-Lied” from Vienna. Only one thing marred Göring’s enjoyment of the evening: the news that Himmler was already on his way to Vienna. Göring called Seyss to tell him that he did not want the wire-tapping services to fall into the hands of his rival. He alone held the bugging monopoly for the Reich.

EXPATRIATES AND German Jews were also tuning into Austrian wireless to learn of the country’s fate. Schuschnigg’s broadcast had ended with the Austrian national anthem followed by some Austrian classical music. When listeners heard the “Horst Wessel-Lied,” they realized Austrian freedom was dead. Naturally Goebbels thought otherwise: “The bells of freedom have struck for this land too.” In Nuremberg, Julius Streicher’s
Stürmer
exulted in the emergence of “Greater Germany” and the end of “Jewish rule.”

In the luxurious Zu den drei Husaren, that evening’s atmosphere was jubilant. A Mr. and Mrs. Friedrich Frankau of Montreal, Canada, signed the restaurant’s golden book: “We are both very happy to have been in Vienna the very day Austria became a part of the greatest country in the world. God be forever with the Austrians.” Over the next few weeks others would make their way to Vienna’s best (and still Jewish-owned) restaurant. On the 15th Edmund Veesenmayer, who achieved fame later for his role in deporting Hungary’s Jews to Auschwitz, praised the day when “our Führer’s homeland returned to our great, ethnic-German Reich. After a hard struggle the finest day of my life and at the same time the day of commitment towards our Sudeten-German brothers.” A table full of German railway officials decorated the restaurant’s book with a swastika.

The next day, March 12, an excited Göring called his friend Prince Philip of Hesse in Rome. He wanted to make sure that Mussolini was happy. Prince Philip told him that a swastika was already flying from the Austrian consulate—an indication that pro-Nazi elements had overpowered anyone loyal to the Austrian republic. The king of Italy (Philip’s father-in-law) had informed him that Colonel Beck—the Polish foreign minister—had relayed the news that 25,000 Viennese Jews had asked for passports. “The view is here that it’s best to open the frontiers for a while so that the whole scum gets out.”

Göring made no secret of what he wanted in his reply: “All right, but not with any foreign currency. The Jews can go, but they will kindly leave behind their money, which they have only stolen.”

The Anschluss not only scattered the political elite of the Corporate State; it struck terror into the hearts of the Jews. Up until 1938, Austria’s Jews could be broadly divided into Zionists and assimilators. Once Hitler arrived, assimilation was to prove a dead letter, while, for Zionists, the dream of a Palestinian homeland was still a possibility. The assimilated Jews, on the other hand, realized that their Gentile manners availed them of nothing. The Nazis hated them even more than they despised the Zionists. Some Jewish Communists headed for the Soviet Union, joining those who had left for fear of imprisonment by the Corporate State in 1934. This was nevertheless risky, as there was every chance that they might end up in the gulag.

A. R. Penn, the British secretary of the Church Mission to the Jews, arrived in Vienna from Romania and Poland on March 11 to find the city in a state of overexcitement about Sunday’s plebiscite. When he woke the next morning, Schuschnigg had resigned, and the SA had occupied the political vacuum. The air rang out with cries of “
Heil Hitler!
” At midday on March 12, Penn heard Hitler proclaim the Anschluss while he sat talking to Hugh Grimes, the philo-Semitic British embassy chaplain. Before he left, a Jewish friend took him up to the hills that overlook the city. She told him, “I feel as if I were looking at my beloved Vienna for the last time.”

VIENNA WAS the largest Jewish city in the German-speaking world. As of March 11, 1938, there were 185,028 Jews in Austria, of whom 176,034 lived in Vienna—just under 10 percent of the city’s population or 2.8 percent of Austrians. Vienna had a hefty Jewish infrastructure with ninety-four synagogues and 120 welfare organizations under the umbrella of the IKG, an organization dominated by Zionists since the twenties: Both the president, Friedmann, and the vice president, Dr. Josef Löwenherz, were Zionists. Another significant Jewish body was the 8,000-strong Bund Jüdischer Frontsoldaten, or Jewish Old Soldiers’ League, founded in 1932 and led by Captain Siegfried Edler von Friedmann. In addition there were those who no longer admitted to Judaism, and many who were “racially” Jewish but had converted to Christianity or were simply agnostic or atheist.

Hitler’s antisemitic policies were bound to find favor in Austria, as they had been developed there in the first place. Young Adolf had come up from the provincial city of Linz and was appalled by Vienna’s Jews. The party behind the Corporate State—the Christlichsozialen or Christian Socials—had been founded by the same Mayor Karl Lueger who coined the phrase “I decide who’s a Jew.” He meant that in a few cases Jews could aspire to social acceptability.

When Austria became a republic in 1918, Vienna’s Jewish population filled the social and political vacuum created by degradation of the imperial nobility. There was a large influx of so-called Ostjuden from Poland and Russia. To the Austrians, they appeared as strange apparitions with their beards and kaftans. Their lives had been wrecked by pogroms and war, and now they were heading west to seek their fortunes. They were greatly resented in Germany and Austria, not only by the Gentiles but by the assimilated Jews, who found them primitive and felt they held up a grubby mirror to their more refined selves.

In 1921 there was a three-day meeting arranged for antisemites in Vienna, and in 1923 between 50,000 and 100,000 marched around the Ringstrasse protesting against the Jewish “dictatorship.” By the time the Corporate State arrived in 1934, some Jews were already able to see the writing on the wall. Stefan Zweig’s house on the Kapuzinerberg near Salzburg was searched for weapons in 1934. The writer was so scandalized that he turned his back on Austria and went to live in England.

A year later, on September 16, 1935, Austria introduced racial law under the
Blutschutzgesetz
(law for the protection of blood)
.
It was no longer permitted to enter the description
konfessionslos
, or nondenominational, on a birth certificate. Any Jews who had lost their religion without gaining another were obliged to list themselves as Jewish. The law was more in keeping with Catholic thinking than Nuremberg, but it was undoubtedly prompted by the latter.

Although the Corporate State was not officially antipathetic to Jews, its policies exhibited a cold persecution, squeezing Jewish citizens out of public life. There were now very few Jewish members of the National Council, as the legislative body was called. Contracts in Viennese hospitals were not renewed with Jewish doctors, publishing houses refused to print books by Jews, and newspapers were increasingly reluctant to employ Jewish journalists. The
Neue Freie Presse
was purged of Jewish staff by 1937. Film production companies did not employ Jewish actors and actresses, as they needed to be able to sell their films across the border in Germany, and Jewish sportsmen could not compete in events if there were Germans about. It was believed that Schuschnigg intended to reduce the percentage of Jews in the professions to reflect their share of the population.

Many of Vienna’s assimilated Jews were virtually indistinguishable from the German elite: They read their Goethe, Schiller, and Nestroy and went to concerts to listen to Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, and Franz Schmidt. Believing themselves to be good “Germans” (people spoke little of being Austrian at that time), they had no desire to leave, only to assimilate. The Ostjuden, lately come from the shtetls, were more likely to be attracted to the idea of Zionism and the establishment of a Jewish state, preferably in Palestine.

Baptism was a way around the various
numerus clausus
that limited Jewish entry into branches of public life. With the
Taufschein
or baptismal certificate, the Jewish
Taufjude
could become a judge, a professor, or a high-ranking civil servant with far greater ease. A measure of how many members of the Jewish elite were Christians is evident in the fact that a third of the Jews in Dachau were baptized, and not only for political reasons—many of them had a Christian grandparent or two. The British chaplain Grimes reported on the success of the Swedish pastor Tarrel at the beginning of 1937, who carried out thirty to forty conversions every year: “He [Tarrel] thinks there would be many more if it were not for the pressure exercised by the Jews themselves who will not employ Christian Jews.” Tarrel had converted a hundred Jews in 1934, possibly because of the creation of the rigidly Catholic Corporate State.

After the Anschluss, it was calculated that 20 percent of potential refugees were non-Aryan Christians—ethnic Jews who had been baptized. The Quaker Emma Cadbury, who was based in Vienna, estimated their numbers at 60,000 Catholics and 10,000 Protestants, although the official figure was a comparatively lowly 24,000. The philosopher Karl Popper, for example, had been baptized a Protestant in infancy. Conversion was gaining popularity among Jews. The arrival of Hitler in power across the border in Germany seems to have provided a further spur: There were 42 baptisms in 1932 and 102 in 1933. In the first half of 1934 there were 152.

The birth pangs and infancy of the First Austrian Republic had been aggravated by chronic unemployment. Where Germany had been able to create jobs after the Nazis came to power, up to 300,000 chiefly young Viennese were out of work at the time of the Anschluss. They gravitated toward extremist organizations that purported to be able to solve the problem. One of the promises delivered by the Nazis was the 100 percent elimination of unemployment (it was one of the messages in Göring’s speech at the Northwest Station on March 26). As one contemporary put it, “Hunger drove millions into the arms of the Nazis.” The Jews were, as ever, considered to be the principal enemy; they were seen as idle and rich, feeding off human misery.

On March 11 the Hitlerites were already out and about in the largely Jewish Second District, shouting slogans and flailing fists hours before the German army had reached Vienna. Hitler Youth members between the ages of ten and sixteen were chanting against Schuschnigg, the Jews, and priests. Schuschnigg’s resignation was the signal for the revolution to begin. Illegal Nazis donned swastika armbands or SA uniforms and took over key offices. Jews were immediately dismissed from their jobs or sent on extended leave. That same day Emma Cadbury wrote to Alice Nike in London: “The Jews here are very much worried and there has been an increase of antisemitic propaganda, but I hope this may quiet down.”

The London
Morning Chronicle
’s reporter in Vienna, Eric Gedye, recorded disgusting scenes in which the Viennese showed the Jews the pent-up hatred seething within them:

It is the heartless, grinning, soberly dressed crowds on the Graben and the Kärntnerstrasse . . . fluffy Viennese blondes, fighting to get closer to the elevating spectacle of an ashen-faced Jewish surgeon on his hands and knees before half a dozen young hooligans with Swastika armlets and dog-whips that sticks in my mind. His delicate fingers, which must have made the swift and confident incisions that had saved the lives of many Viennese, held a scrubbing brush. A storm trooper was pouring some acid solution over the brush—and his fingers. Another sluiced the pavement from a bucket, taking care to drench the surgeon’s striped trousers as he did so. And the Viennese—not uniformed Nazis or a raging mob, but the Viennese Little Man and his wife—just grinned approval at the glorious fun.

The Czechs prudently sealed their borders to prevent an influx of Jews; only those with the appropriate entry visas could pass. The Vienna-Prague train left Vienna at the usual time (11:15 AM), and it was due to reach Czech soil forty minutes later. It arrived in the capital with no Austrians on board. The numbers on board were progressively whittled down by a succession of brutal searches. The few who made it to the border at Breclav were crushed to learn that the Czechs would not let them in. The Czechs were not unhappy about the Anschluss: They were happier to see the Germans in Vienna than face a Habsburg restoration.