Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

Horstenau, along with Himmler and other leading Nazis, had long been waiting for him.¹¹⁰ So had an enormous crowd, gathered on the marketplace. The cars could go no further. Hitler’s bodyguards pushed a way through the crowd so that he could go the last few yards to the town hall on foot.¹¹¹ Peals of bells rang out; the ecstatic crowd was screaming ‘Heil’; Sey?-Inquart could hardly make himself heard in his introductory remarks. Hitler looked deeply moved.¹¹² Tears ran down his cheeks.¹¹³ In his speech on the balcony of the Linz town hall, he told the masses, constantly interrupting him with their wild cheering, that Providence must have singled him out to return his homeland to the German Reich. They were witnesses that he had now fulfilled his mission. ‘I don’t know on which day you will be called,’ he added. ‘I hope it is not far off.’ This somewhat mystical remark seemed to indicate that even up to this point, he was not intending within hours to end Austria’s identity by incorporating the country into Germany.¹¹⁴

Once more, plans were rapidly altered. He had meant to go straight on to Vienna. But he decided to stay in Linz throughout the next day, Sunday the 13th, and enter Vienna on the Monday.¹¹⁵ To the accompaniment of unending cries of ‘One people, one Reich, one Leader’ (‘ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer’), his party took up rooms in the Hotel Weinzinger on the banks of the Danube. Beds were hastily allocated. The restaurant could not cope with the food requirements. The single telephone in the hotel had to be reserved solely for Hitler’s use.¹¹⁶ The extraordinary reception had made a huge impact on him. He was told that foreign newspapers were already speaking of the ‘Anschlu?’ of Austria to Germany as a fait accompli. It was in this atmosphere that the idea rapidly took shape of annexing Austria immediately.

In an excited mood, Hitler was heard to say that he wanted no half-measures. Stuckart, from the Reich Ministry of the Interior, was hurriedly summoned to Linz to draft legislation.¹¹⁷ In an interview he gave to the British journalist Ward Price in the Hotel Weinzinger, Hitler hinted that Austria would become a German province ‘like Bavaria or Saxony’.¹¹⁸ He evidently pondered the matter further during the night.¹¹⁹ The next day, 13 March — the day originally scheduled for Schuschnigg’s referendum on Austrian independence — the Anschlu?, not intended before the previous evening, was completed.¹²⁰ Hitler’s visit to Leonding, where he laid flowers on his parents’ grave and returned to the house where the family had lived, meeting some acquaintances he had not seen for thirty years, perhaps reinforced the belief, stimulated the previous evening by his reception in Linz, that Providence had predestined him to reunite his homeland (Heimat) with the Reich.¹²¹

At some point during the day Hitler contacted Mussolini to assure himself of the Duce’s acceptance of the final move to full Anschlu?. On hearing the news he wanted, he dispatched an effusive telegram, in the same vein as his telephone message two days earlier: ‘Mussolini, I will never forget you for this!’¹²² The Duce’s reply the following day, addressed simply to ‘Hitler. Vienna’, was less emotional: ‘My stance is determined by the friendship between our two countries sealed in the axis,’ he wrote.¹²³

Stuckart had meanwhile arrived overnight and sat in the Hotel Weinzinger on the morning of the 13th drafting the ‘Law for the Reunion of Austria with the German Reich’.¹²⁴ This was put together in all haste through much toing and froing between Stuckart in Linz and Keppler in Vienna.¹²⁵ Hitler told a group of surprised and jubilant Austrian Nazi leaders, invited to lunch in the Hotel Weinzinger, around 3p.m. that ‘an important law’ announcing Austria’s incorporation within the German Reich was about to appear.¹²⁶ Around 5p.m. the Austrian Ministerial Council — a body by now bearing scant resemblance to the cabinet under Schuschnigg — unanimously accepted Stuckart’s draft with one or two minor reformulations. The meeting lasted a mere five minutes and ended with the members of the Council rising to their feet to give the ‘German Greeting’. The Austrian President, Wilhelm Miklas, laid down his office at about the same time, refusing to sign the reunion law and handing his powers over to Sey?-Inquart. That evening, Sey?-Inquart and Keppler drove to Linz to confirm that the law had been accepted. Hitler signed the law before the evening was out.¹²⁷ Austria had become a German province.¹²⁸ Goring, who before the events triggered by the Berchtesgaden meeting had, as we have seen, been the one most strongly pressing for the union of the two countries, was taken by surprise — astonished at the manner in which the actual Anschlu? had come about.¹²⁹

Immediately, the Austrian army was sworn in to Hitler. In a surprise move, Gauleiter Josef Burckel, a trusted ‘old fighter’ of the Movement but with no connections with Austria, was brought in from the Saar to reorganize the NSDAP.¹³⁰ Hitler was well aware of the need to bring the Party in Austria fully into line as quickly as possible, and not to leave it in the hands of the turbulent, ill-disciplined, and unpredictable Austrian leadership.

In mid-morning on 14 March, Hitler left Linz for Vienna. Cheering crowds greeted the cavalcade of limousines — thirteen police cars accompanied Hitler’s Mercedes — all the way to the capital, where he arrived, again delayed, in the late afternoon.¹³¹ On the orders of Cardinal Innitzer, Archbishop of Vienna, all the Catholic churches in the city pealed their bells in Hitler’s honour and flew swastika banners from their steeples — an extraordinary gesture given the ‘Church struggle’ which had raged in the Reich itself over the previous years.¹³² The scenes of enthusiasm, according to a Swiss reporter who witnessed them, ‘defied all description’.¹³³ An English observer of the scene commented: ‘To say that the crowds which greeted [Hitler] along the Ringstra?e were delirious with joy is an understatement.’¹³⁴ Hitler had to appear repeatedly on the balcony of the Hotel Imperial in response to the crowd’s continual shouts of ‘We want to see our Fuhrer.’¹³⁵ Keitel, whose room faced the front of the hotel, found it impossible to sleep for the clamour.¹³⁶

The next day, 15 March, in beautiful spring weather, Hitler addressed a vast, delirious crowd, estimated at a quarter of a million people, in Vienna’s Heldenplatz. The Viennese Nazi Party had been impatiently expecting him to come to the capital for three days.¹³⁷ They had had time to ensure the preparations were complete. Work-places were ordered to be closed (though employees were still to be paid — some compensation for the hours spent standing and waiting for Hitler’s speech); many factories and offices had marched their employees as a group to hear the historic speech; schools had not been open since the Saturday; Hitler Youth and girls from the Bund Deutscher Madel were bussed in from all parts of Austria; party formations had turned out in force.¹³⁸ But for all the organization, the wild enthusiasm of the immense crowd was undeniable — and infectious. Those less enthusiastic had already been cowed into submission by the open brutality of the Nazi hordes, exploiting their triumph since the weekend to inflict fearful beatings or to rob and plunder at will, and by the first waves of mass arrests (already numbering between 10,000 and 20,000 in the early days) orchestrated by Himmler and Heydrich, who had arrived in Vienna on 12 March.¹³⁹

Ominous in Hitler’s speech was his reference to the ‘new mission’ of the ‘Eastern Marches (Ostmark) of the German People’ (as the once independent country of Austria was now to be known) as the ‘bulwark’ against the ‘storms of the east’.¹⁴⁰ He ended, to tumultuous cheering lasting for minutes, by declaring ‘before history the entry of my homeland into the German Reich’.¹⁴¹

After attending a military parade in the afternoon, Hitler had a short but important audience, arranged by Papen, with the Austrian primate, Cardinal Innitzer.¹⁴² The Cardinal assured Hitler of the loyalty of Austria’s Catholics, the overwhelming body of the population.¹⁴³ Three days later, along with six other Austrian bishops and archbishops, he put his signature to a declaration of their full support and blessing for the new regime in Austria and their conviction ‘that through the actions of the National Socialist Movement the danger of godless Bolshevism, which would destroy everything, would be fended off’.¹⁴⁴ Cardinal Innitzer added in his own hand: ‘Heil Hitler.’¹⁴⁵

In the early evening, Hitler left Vienna and flew to Munich, before returning next day to Berlin to another ‘hero’s welcome’.¹⁴⁶ Two days later, on 18 March, a hastily summoned Reichstag heard his account of the events leading up to what he described as the ‘fulfilment of the supreme historical commission’.¹⁴⁷ He then dissolved the Reichstag and set new elections for 10 April. On 25 March, in Konigsberg, he began what was to prove his last ‘election’ campaign, holding six out of fourteen major speeches in the former Austria.¹⁴⁸ In both parts of the extended Reich, the propaganda machine once more went into overdrive. Newspapers were prohibited from using the word ‘ja’ in any context other than in connection with the plebiscite.¹⁴⁹ When the results were announced on 10 April, 99.08 per cent in the ‘Old Reich’, and 99.75 per cent in ‘Austria’ voted ‘yes’ to the Anschlu? and to the ‘list of the Fuhrer’.¹⁵⁰ Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry congratulated itself. ‘Such an almost 100 per cent election result is at the same time a badge of honour for all election propagandists,’ it concluded.¹⁵¹

From Hitler’s perspective, it was a near-perfect result. Whatever the undoubted manipulative methods, ballot-rigging, and pressure to conform which helped produce it, genuine support for Hitler’s action had