The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (72 page)
Read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany Online
Authors: William L. Shirer
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, broke 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.
General von Fritsch, and all he stood for, soon faded out of German life. But what did he stand for in the end? In December he was writing his friend Baroness Margot von Schutzbar a letter which indicated the pathetic confusion into which he, like so many of the other generals, had fallen.
It is really strange that so many people should regard the future with increasing fears, in spite of the Fuehrer’s indisputable successes during the past years …
Soon after the war I came to the conclusion that we should have to be victorious in three battles if Germany were to become powerful again:
The battle against the working class—Hitler has won this.
Against the Catholic Church, perhaps better expressed against Ultramontanism, and
Against the
Jews
.
We are in the midst of these battles and the one against the Jews is the most difficult. I hope everyone realizes the intricacies of this campaign.
43
On August 7, 1939, as the war clouds darkened, he wrote the Baroness: “For me there is, neither in peace nor in war, any part in Herr Hitler’s Germany. I shall accompany my regiment only as a target, because I cannot stay at home.”
That is what he did. On August 11, 1938, he had been named colonel in chief of his old regiment, the 12th Artillery Regiment, a purely honorary title. On September 22, 1939, he was the target of a Polish machine gunner before beleaguered
Warsaw
, and four days later he was buried with full military honors in Berlin on a cold, rainy, dark morning, one of the dreariest days, according to my diary, I ever lived through in the capital.
With Fritsch’s discharge as Commander in Chief of the German Army twenty months before, Hitler had won, as we have seen, a complete victory over the last citadel of possible opposition in Germany, the old, traditional Army officer caste. Now, in the spring of 1938, by his clever coup in Austria, he had further established his hold on the Army, demonstrating his bold leadership and emphasizing that he alone would make the
decisions in foreign policy and that it was the Army’s role merely to supply the force, or the threat of force. Moreover, he had given the Army, without the sacrifice of a man, a strategic position which rendered
Czechoslovakia
militarily indefensible. There was no time to lose in taking advantage of it.
On April 21, eleven days after the Nazi plebiscite on Austria, Hitler called in General Keitel, Chief of the High Command of the Armed Forces, to discuss Case Green.
*
Which happened to be the fourth anniversary of the slaughter of the Austrian Social Democrats by the Dollfuss government, of which Schuschnigg was a member. On February 12, 1934, seventeen thousand government troops and fascist militia had turned artillery on the workers’ flats in Vienna, killing a thousand men, women and children and wounding three or four thousand more. Democratic political freedom was stamped out and Austria thereafter was ruled first by Dollfuss and then by Schuschnigg as a clerical-fascist dictatorship. It was certainly milder than the Nazi variety, as those of us who worked in both Berlin and Vienna in those days can testify. Nevertheless it deprived the Austrian people of their political freedom and subjected them to more repression than they had known under the Hapsburgs in the last decades of the monarchy. The author has discussed this more fully in
Midcentury Journey
.
*
Later Dr. Schuschnigg wrote down from memory an account of what he calls the “significant passages” of the one-sided conversation, and though it is therefore not a verbatim record it rings true to anyone who has heard and studied Hitler’s countless utterances and its substance is verified not only by all that happened subsequently but by others who were present at the Berghof that day, notably Papen, Jodl and Guido Schmidt. I have followed Schuschnigg’s account given in his book
Austrian Requiem
and in his Nuremberg affidavit on the meeting.
4
†
It is evident that Hitler’s warped version of Austro–German history, which, as we have seen in earlier chapters, was picked up in his youth at Linz and Vienna, remained unchanged.
*
Papen’s version (see his
Memoirs
, p. 420) is somewhat different, but that of Schuschnigg rings more true.
*
Wilhelm Canaris was head of the Intelligence Bureau (Abwehr) of OKW.
*
According to the testimony of President Miklas during a trial of an Austrian Nazi in Vienna after the war, the plebiscite was suggested to Schuschnigg by France. Papen in his memoirs suggests that the French minister in Vienna, M. Puaux, a close personal friend of the Chancellor, was the “father of the plebiscite idea.” He concedes, however, that Schuschnigg certainly adopted it on his own responsibility.
18
*
The stricken passages were found after the war in the archives of the Italian Foreign Ministry.
*
Drawing the frontier at the Brenner was a sop to Mussolini. It meant that Hitler would not be asking for the return of the southern Tyrol, which was taken from Austria and awarded to Italy at Versailles.
†
In all fairness, it should be pointed out that Schuschnigg’s plebiscite was scarcely more free or democratic than those perpetrated by Hitler in Germany. Since there had been no free elections in Austria since 1933, there were no up-to-date polling lists. Only those persons above twenty-four were eligible to vote. Only four days’ notice of the plebiscite had been given to the public, so there was no time for campaigning even if the opposition groups, the Nazis and the Social Democrats, had been free to do so. The Social Democrats undoubtedly would have voted
Ja
, since they regarded Schuschnigg as a lesser evil than Hitler and moreover had been promised the restoration of political freedom. There is no question that their vote would have given Schuschnigg a victory.
*
In his postwar testimony already referred to, Miklas denied that he asked Schuschnigg to say any such thing or that he even agreed that the broadcast should be made. Contrary to what the retiring Chancellor said, the President was not yet ready to yield to force. “Things have not gone so far that we must capitulate,” he says he told Schuschnigg. He had just turned down the second German ultimatum. He was standing firm. But Schuschnigg’s broadcast did help to undermine his position and force his hand. As we shall see, the obstinate old President held out for several hours more before capitulating. On March 13, he refused to sign the Anschluss law snuffing out Austria’s independent existence which Seyss-Inquart, at Hitler’s insistence, promulgated. Though he surrendered the functions of his office to the Nazi Chancellor for as long as he was prevented from carrying them out, he maintained that he never formally resigned as President. “It would have been too cowardly,” he later explained to a Vienna court. This did not prevent Seyss-Inquart from announcing officially on March 13 that “the President, upon request of the Chancellor,” had “resigned from his office” and that his “affairs” were transferred to the Chancellor.
28
*
Marked “Top Secret” and identified as Directive No. 2 of Operation Otto, it read in part: “The demands of the German ultimatum to the Austrian government have not been fulfilled … To avoid further bloodshed in Austrian cities, the entry of the German armed forces into Austria will commence, according to Directive No. 1, at daybreak of March 12. I expect the set objectives to be reached by exerting all forces to the full as quickly as possible. (Signed) Adolf Hitler.”
29
†
Actually, Seyss-Inquart tried until long after midnight to get Hitler to call off the German invasion. A German Foreign Office memorandum reveals that at 2:10
A.M
. on March 12 General Muff telephoned Berlin and stated that on the instructions of Chancellor Seyss-Inquart he was requesting that “the alerted troops should remain on, but not cross, the border.” Keppler also came on the telephone to support the request. General Muff, a decent man and an officer of the old school, seems to have been embarrassed by his role in Vienna. When he was informed by Berlin that Hitler declined to halt his troops he replied that he “regretted this message.”
30
*
In his testimony at Nuremberg Guido Schmidt swore that both he and Schuschnigg informed the envoys of the “Big Powers” of Hitler’s ultimatum “in detail.”
32
Moreover, the Vienna correspondents of the
Times
and the
Daily Telegraph
of London, to my knowledge, also telephoned their respective newspapers a full and accurate report.
*
Churchill has given an amusing description of this luncheon in
The Gathering Storm
(pp. 271–72).
†
The lies were repeated in a circular telegram dispatched by Baron von Weizsaecker of the Foreign Office March 12 to German envoys abroad for “information and orientation of your conversations.” Weizsaecker stated that Schuschnigg’s declaration concerning a German ultimatum “was sheer fabrication” and went on to inform his diplomats abroad: “The truth was that the question of sending military forces … was first raised in the well-known telegram of the newly formed Austrian government. In view of the imminent danger of civil war, the Reich government decided to comply with this appeal.”
37
Thus the German Foreign Office lied not only to foreign diplomats but to its own. In a long and ineffectual book written after the war Weizsaecker, like so many other Germans who served Hitler, maintained that he was anti-Nazi all along.
‡
In his testimony at Nuremberg on August 9, 1946, Field Marshal von Manstein emphasized that “at the time when Hitler gave us the orders for Austria his chief worry was not so much that there might be interference on the part of the Western Powers, but his only worry was as to how Italy would behave, because it appeared that Italy always sided with Austria and the Hapsburgs.”
38
*
Yet underneath the ecstasy, and unnoticed by the shallow Papen, there may have burned in Hitler a feeling of revenge for a city and a people which had not appreciated him as a young man and which at heart he despised. This in part may have accounted for his brief stay. Though a few weeks later he would publicly say to the burgomaster of Vienna, “Be assured that this city is in my eyes a pearl—I will bring it into a setting which is worthy of it,” this was probably more electioneering propaganda than an expression of his inner feelings. These feelings were revealed to Baldur von Schirach, the Nazi Governor and Gauleiter of Vienna during the war, at a heated meeting at the Berghof in 1943. Describing it during his testimony at Nuremberg, Schirach said:
Then the Fuehrer began with, I might say, incredible and unlimited hatred to speak against the people of Vienna…. At four o’clock in the morning Hitler suddenly said something which I should now like to repeat for historical reasons. He said: “Vienna should never have been admitted into the Union of the Greater Germany.” Hitler never loved Vienna. He hated its people.
41
Papen’s own festive spirits on March 14 were spoiled that same day when he learned that Wilhelm von Ketteler, his close friend and aide at the German Legation, had disappeared under circumstances which indicated foul play by the Gestapo. Three years before, another friend and collaborator at the legation, Baron Tschirschky, had fled to England to escape certain death from the S.S. At the end of April Ketteler’s body was fished out of the Danube, where Gestapo thugs in Vienna had thrown it after murdering him.
*
A few months later, on October 8, the cardinal’s palace opposite St. Stephen’s Cathedral was sacked by Nazi hooligans. Too late Innitzer had learned what National Socialism was, and had spoken out in a sermon against the Nazi persecution of his Church.
*
Austrian Requiem.
†
At this time Schuschnigg was a widower.
*
See previous chapter.
