Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (131 page)

Around 8 p.m., Schuschnigg addressed the Austrian people over the radio to explain the reasons for his resignation. He was yielding to violence, he said, and the army had been instructed to withdraw without resistance when the Wehrmacht marched in. A short time later, Seyss-Inquart took over the microphone to say that he was still in office as interior minister and would maintain security. Although Austrian National Socialists were preparing to take power all around the country, at 8:45 p.m. Hitler still issued an order to the Wehrmacht to enter Austria the following day. A short time later, Göring dictated to Keppler the text of a telegram that Seyss-Inquart was to send to Berlin. It contained a request by the “provisional Austrian government” to the German government to support it in its attempt to “restore calm and order in Austria” and to send troops “as soon as possible” to this end. But Seyss-Inquart hesitated, so Keppler saw to it himself that the fake cry for help was delivered to Berlin. “With that we have authorisation,” Goebbels commented.
¹⁴⁸
Late that evening Prince Philipp of Hesse passed on the reassuring news from Rome that Mussolini had “reacted quite calmly to the whole affair.” A visibly relieved Hitler responded: “Please tell Mussolini that I will never forget this…Never, never, never, come what may.”
¹⁴⁹
Moreover, Ribbentrop’s report, which Spitzy brought with him from London, left little doubt that Britain would remain inactive as well.
¹⁵⁰
By around midnight, when Miklas relented and named Seyss-Inquart Austrian chancellor, his action no longer had any influence on the course of events.

At 5:30 a.m. on 12 March, German troops marched into Austria. Nowhere did they encounter resistance. On the contrary, the soldiers were welcomed. At noon, Goebbels read out over the radio a proclamation of the Führer that justified the intervention as a response to an alleged violation of the Berchtesgaden agreement: “Summoned by the new National Socialist government in Vienna, [the Wehrmacht] will guarantee that within a short span of time the Austrian people will be given the opportunity in a genuine popular referendum to determine its future and shape its destiny.”
¹⁵¹
Hitler had flown to Munich that morning, where a motorcade of Mercedes was already waiting at Oberwiesenfeld Airport. Around 4 p.m., they crossed into Austria near Braunau, Hitler’s birthplace. The 120-kilometre drive to Linz took four hours, since the cars had trouble passing through the crowds of cheering onlookers. It was already dark when Hitler arrived in the city. Among the few people who had mixed feelings on this occasion was the 66-year-old doctor Eduard Bloch. “The weak boy whom I had treated so often and had not seen for thirty years stood in a car,” Bloch said in an interview in 1941, by which time he was in exile in New York. “He smiled, waved and gave the Nazi salute to the people who crowded the street. Then for a moment he glanced up at my window. I doubt that he saw me but he must have had a moment of reflection. Here was the home of the noble Jew who had diagnosed his mother’s fatal cancer…It was a brief moment.”
¹⁵²

From the balcony of the town hall, Hitler made a brief speech that was repeatedly interrupted by applause. In it, he invoked the Providence that had taken him “from this city to the leadership of the Reich” and charged him with “restoring his precious homeland to the German Reich.”
¹⁵³
Following that, he and his entourage decamped to the Weinzinger Hotel by the Danube, where people congregated in front of the building until early in the morning. Hitler repeatedly greeted these admirers until his security guards finally asked him to go to bed and get some rest.
¹⁵⁴
Originally Hitler had no plans to immediately complete the amalgamation of Austria. But in the night of 12–13 March, overwhelmed by his triumphal journey, he decided that he would not settle for any “half-measures.” State Secretary Wilhelm Stuckart was summoned to Linz to draw up the requisite legal ordinances. While the lawyers ironed out the details, Hitler travelled to Leonding and laid flowers upon his parents’ graves. That evening, he signed the Law on the Reunification of Austria with the German Reich. The first article declared unequivocally: “Austria is a territory of the German Reich.” Its second article set 10 April as the date for a “free and secret referendum open to all Austrian men and women of the age of twenty or older.”
¹⁵⁵

On the morning of 14 March, Hitler travelled on to Vienna, the city he had left twenty-five years earlier as a completely unknown “art painter” who despaired of his future. In the Austrian capital, too, an ecstatic reception awaited him. The city’s church bells rang when he entered Vienna from the direction of Schönbrunn. During his entire stay in the capital, Hitler “glowed,” to use Fritz Wiedemann’s phrase,
¹⁵⁶
and it is easy to imagine how satisfied he must have felt. The same scenes of hysterical enthusiasm as had taken place in Linz now played themselves out in front of the Hotel Imperial where he stayed.
¹⁵⁷
The next morning, hundreds of thousands of people converged on Heldenplatz in front of the Hofburg Palace for a “liberation celebration.” From the palace balcony, Hitler made what he described as the “greatest announcement of triumph” in his life: “As the Führer and chancellor of the German nation and empire, I announce to posterity the entry of my homeland into the German Reich.”
¹⁵⁸
The euphoria at the unification of Austria with Germany almost obscured the hatred and violence simultaneously being visited upon Vienna’s Jewish citizens. This was the dark side of the
Anschluss
, and it cast a shadow upon everything to come.

That afternoon, Hitler visited the grave of his niece Geli Raubal in Vienna’s central cemetery. He went alone ahead of his entourage and spent a long time at the grave, Nicolaus von Below reported.
¹⁵⁹
After the parade, Hitler received the Archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Theodor Innitzer, in the Hotel Imperial. The dictator bowed deeply—a calculated gesture that said nothing about his true religious disposition—and the cardinal offered a Nazi salute and assured the Führer that Austrian Catholics would work vigorously for “the project of German reconstruction.”
¹⁶⁰
Around 5 p.m., Hitler flew back to Munich, and when he returned to the German capital the following day, the people of Berlin treated him to a triumphant reception that, in the words of Goebbels, who was never at a loss for superlatives, “overshadowed everything previous.” The propaganda minister gushed: “[Hitler passed] through an immeasurable human guard of honour…The cries of celebration nearly burst your eardrums. You had it ringing in your ears for hours afterwards. It was a singing, jubilant city.”
¹⁶¹

—

This new foreign-policy triumph took Hitler to the peak of his popularity. People of all walks of life now admired him. The Wagner family was particularly enthusiastic. “How unique and unparalleled is this deed of our Führer,” gasped Winifred Wagner’s assistant Lieselotte Schmidt, adding: “He is more than a statesman…he is an executor of a higher will, a genius before whom everyone ultimately will have to bow.”
¹⁶²
Ernst von Weizsäcker, the state secretary designate in the Foreign Ministry, who travelled to Vienna with Ribbentrop on 14 March, saw that date “as the most significant since 18 January 1871”—the day on which the Wilhelmine Empire had been founded. He was especially impressed by Hitler’s ability “to seize an opportunity by the scruff of the neck.”
¹⁶³
The reaction of the conservative historian Gerhard Ritter was much the same, although he otherwise had a detached relationship to the Nazi regime. “I completely admire the mastery of the actor who knows how to stage everything,” Ritter wrote in a letter to his brother in April 1938. “It is the first time that my admiration is without reservation!”
¹⁶⁴

For the Hamburg teacher Luise Solmitz, the
Anschluss
was the fulfilment of “my old German dream,” made possible by “a man who fears nothing, knows no compromises, hindrances or difficulties.” She wrote this in her diary despite the fact that she was stigmatised by the regime for having married a Jewish husband. “One must recall that one is excluded from the people’s community oneself like a criminal or degraded person,” she wrote.
¹⁶⁵
Willy Cohn in Breslau, who personally suffered the many indignities inflicted upon Jews in Germany, likewise had ambiguous feelings. “It is hard to resist the sense of momentous events,” he wrote on 13 March, adding the next day: “You have to admire the energy with which all this has been carried out…We Jews in Germany are not supposed to share the exuberance of this national uprising, but we do nonetheless.”
¹⁶⁶
By contrast, Victor Klemperer in Dresden did not get caught up in the jubilations. “The monstrous act of violence represented by the annexation of Austria,” he noted, “the monstrous increase in power both domestically and abroad, the trembling defenceless fear of England and France. We won’t live to see the end of the Third Reich.”
¹⁶⁷
Thomas Mann, in March 1938 on a reading tour of the United States, also remained deaf to the patriotic hullaballoo. “The monster is speaking today in Vienna,” he wrote. “He won’t do that without ‘adeptness,’ and he will try to calm things.” But Mann was mistaken about the reaction of the Western powers: “At least apathy in Europe is not as hopeless as it seems. The consequences of this disgusting coup are unforeseeable. The shock is deep, and the lesson learned effective.”
¹⁶⁸
In fact, the British and French governments offered nothing more than verbal protests.

Reports by SPD-in-exile observers initially talked about widespread fears among the German population that a new war might be at hand. On the morning of 12 March, citizens of Munich panicked and began stockpiling goods. “There were queues in front of shops,” one observer wrote. “Bakeries were completely sold out and had to close early.”
¹⁶⁹
As it became clear that the Western powers were not going to intervene, and special radio reports relayed news of the enthusiastic receptions for Hitler in Linz and Vienna, the mood swung round: “At that point, you suddenly noticed a massive enthusiasm and joy over this triumph,” another observer reported from Saxony. “The jubilations no longer knew any bounds. Even sectors that had been reserved towards Hitler or rejected him got carried away and conceded that he was a fine and clever statesman who would restore Germany’s greatness and reputation after the defeat of 1918.”
¹⁷⁰
Among old and committed Social Democrats who remained immune to Nazi propaganda there was hopelessness and resignation. “Hitler succeeds at everything,” an observer from the Rhineland Palatinate wrote. “He can do what he wants because everyone gives in to him. His domestic deceptions have also proven effective abroad. Here, too, Hitler has found his Hugenbergs.”
¹⁷¹

Hitler remained in a state of euphoria for days after his most impressive coup to date. On the evening of 18 March, he gave a speech in the Kroll Opera House detailing the events that had led up to the Reich swallowing Austria. At the end, he declared the Reichstag dissolved and announced the election on 10 April of “new representatives for Greater Germany” in conjunction with the referendum in Austria.
¹⁷²
A few days later he paid a private visit to Bayreuth. “From two to six I had him all to myself, and everything was calm—it was all too nice since he could touch on very personal things with me that had moved his heart in Braunau and Linz,” Winifred Wagner wrote in a letter to a friend. Hitler gave Wagner a detailed account of how everything had come so “suddenly” and “unexpectedly,” and she happily noted “how fresh and well he looked,” adding “that it makes you glad about this triumph.”
¹⁷³

On 25 March, Hitler hit the campaign trail in Königsberg. He could hardly have suspected that the poll would be his last. Once again, he put himself through a demanding schedule. After Königsberg, he spoke in Leipzig, Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne, Frankfurt am Main, Stuttgart and Munich. From 3 to 9 April, he continued on to Graz, Klagenfurt, Innsbruck, Salzburg, Linz and Vienna in Austria. In the end he was exhausted, and his voice was completely hoarse and required treatment by his personal physician Morell.
¹⁷⁴
Hitler only anticipated getting 80 per cent of the Austrian vote, so he was surprised when 99.75 per cent voted for amalgamation into Germany—a better result than in the old parts of the Reich (99.08 per cent). “A great celebration for the nation,” Goebbels commented. “Germany has conquered an entire country by the ballot box.”
¹⁷⁵
Of course not everyone who voted yes was a committed Hitler supporter. Many Austrians cast their ballots opportunistically or out of fear. “No one believes that these were secret elections, and everyone is trembling,” wrote Klemperer.
¹⁷⁶
At the same time, the dictator’s prestige was bolstered even further. Never was the consensus about Hitler’s regime greater than in the spring of 1938.