Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

unquestionably been massive.¹⁵² Once again, a foreign-policy triumph had strengthened his hand at home and abroad. For the mass of the German people, Hitler once more seemed a statesman of extraordinary virtuoso talents. For the leaders of the western democracies, anxieties about the mounting instability of central Europe were further magnified.

The Austrian adventure was over. Hitler’s attentions were already moving elsewhere. Within days of returning from Vienna, he was poring over maps together with Goebbels. ‘First comes now Czechia (Tschechei),’ the Propaganda Minister recorded. ‘… And drastically (rigoros), at the next opportunity… The Fuhrer is wonderful… A true genius. Now he sits for hours over the map and broods. Moving, when he says he wants to experience the great German Reich of the Teutons (Germanen) himself.’¹⁵³

The Anschlu? was a watershed for Hitler, and for the Third Reich. The backcloth to it had been one of domestic crisis. Yet almost overnight any lingering threat in the Blomberg–Fritsch affair had been defused by a triumph greater than any that Hitler had enjoyed before. The overwhelming reception he had encountered on his grandiose procession to Vienna, above all his return to Linz, had made a strong impression on the German Dictator. The intoxication of the crowds made him feel like a god. The rapid improvisation of the Anschlu? there and then, fulfilling a dream he had entertained as a young Schonerer supporter all those years earlier, proved once more — so it seemed to him — that he could do anything he wanted. His instincts were, it seemed, always right. The western ‘powers’ were powerless. The doubters and sceptics at home were, as always, revealed as weak and wrong. There was no one to stand in his way. As Papen later put it: ‘Hitler had brought about the Anschlu? by force; in spite of all warnings and prophecies, his own methods had proved the most direct and successful. Not only had there been no armed conflict between the two countries, but no foreign power had seen fit to intervene. They adopted the same passive attitude as they had shown towards the reintroduction of conscription in Germany and the reoccupation of the Rhineland. The result was that Hitler became impervious to the advice of all those who wished him to exercise moderation in his foreign policy.’¹⁵⁴

Hitler had, with the Anschlu?, created ‘Greater Germany’ (‘Gro?deutschland’), now incorporating his homeland. As Goebbels’s diary entry, just noted, indicates, he was impatient for more. He had once seen himself as the ‘drummer’, paving the way for the ‘great leader’ to follow. He had then come to see himself as that ‘great leader’, rebuilding Germany, ‘nationalizing’ the masses for the great future conflict. Would he live to see the creation of the Great Germanic Reich, embracing all Germans and dominating the continent of Europe, himself? He had doubted it. Perhaps a later ‘great leader’ would be needed to complete the task. But from 1936 onwards, he was sure, Europe was ‘on the move’; the conflict would not be long delayed. By late 1937 he was envisaging expansion in the foreseeable future. The Anschlu? now suggested to him that the Great Germanic Reich did not have to be a long-term project. He could create it himself. But it had to be soon. The incorporation of Austria had seriously weakened the defences of Czechoslovakia — the Slav state he had detested since its foundation, and one allied with the Bolshevik arch-enemy and with France. The next step to German dominance on the European continent beckoned.

The Anschlu? did not just set the roller-coaster of foreign expansion moving. It gave massive impetus to the assault on ‘internal enemies’. Early arrivals in Vienna had been Himmler and Heydrich. The repression was ferocious — worse even than it had been in Germany following the Nazi takeover in 1933. The Austrian police records fell immediately into the Gestapo’s hands. Supporters of the fallen regime, but especially Socialists, Communists, and Jews — rounded up under the aegis of the rising star in the SD’s ‘Jewish Department’, Adolf Eichmann — were taken in their thousands into ‘protective custody’.¹⁵⁵

Many other Jews were manhandled, beaten, and tortured in horrific ordeals by Nazi thugs, looting and rampaging. Jewish shops were plundered at will. Individual Jews were robbed on the open streets of their money, jewellery, and fur coats. Groups of Jews, men and women, young and old, were dragged from offices, shops, or homes and forced to scrub the pavements in ‘cleaning squads’, their tormentors standing over them and, watched by crowds of onlookers screaming ‘Work for the Jews at last,’ kicking them, drenching them with cold, dirty water, and subjecting them to every conceivable form of merciless humiliation.¹⁵⁶

The pent-up fury of the Nazi mobs threatened to explode into a full-scale pogrom. The Daily Telegraph’s long-standing correspondent in Vienna, G.E.R. Gedye, described the menacing atmosphere: ‘As I crossed the Graben [one of the main streets in the centre of Vienna] to my office, the Brown flood was sweeping through the streets. It was an indescribable witches’ sabbath — stormtroopers, lots of them barely out of the schoolroom, with cartridge belts and carbines, the only other evidence of authority being swastika brassards, were marching side by side with police turncoats, men and women shrieking or crying hysterically the name of their leader, embracing the police and dragging them along in the swirling stream of humanity, motor- lorries filled with stormtroopers clutching their long-concealed weapons, hooting furiously, trying to make themselves heard above the din, men and women leaping, shouting, and dancing in the light of the smoking torches which soon began to make their appearance, the air filled with a pandemonium of sound in which intermingled screams of: “Down with the Jews! Heil Hitler! Heil Hitler! Sieg Heil! Perish the Jews!…”’¹⁵⁷

‘Hades had opened its gates and released its basest, most despicable, most unpure spirits,’ was how the esteemed playwright and writer Carl Zuckmayer, his own works banned in Germany since 1933, described the scene. Vienna had transformed itself, in his eyes, ‘into a nightmare painting of Hieronymus Bosch’.¹⁵⁸

One seventeen-year-old Jew later recalled his own experience, only a short few weeks after being part of a fun-loving crowd enjoying the dancing, drinking, and merriment of the Viennese carnival: ‘I rushed to the window and looked out into Nu?dorferstra?e… Then the first lorry came into sight. It was packed with shouting, screaming men. A huge swastika flag fluttered over their heads… Now we could hear clearly what they were shouting: “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer!” they were chanting in chorus, followed by “Ju-da verr-rrecke! Ju-da verr-rrecke!” (“Per-rish Judah!”)… I was still looking out into Nu?dorferstra?e when I suddenly heard a muffled shout from right below our window. I craned my neck and saw an Austrian policeman, a swastika brassard already over his dark green uniform sleeve, his truncheon in his fist, lashing out with berserk fury at a man writhing at his feet. I immediately recognized that policeman. I had known him all my life…’¹⁵⁹

Thousands tried to flee. Masses packed the railway stations, trying to get out to Prague. They had the few possessions they could carry with them ransacked by the squads of men with swastika armbands who had assembled at the stations, ‘confiscating’ property at will, entering compartments on the trains and dragging out arbitrarily selected victims for further mishandling and internment. Those who left on the 11.15p.m. night express thought they had escaped. But they were turned back at the Czech border. Their ordeal was only just beginning. Others tried to flee by road. Soon, the roads to the Czech border were jammed. They became littered with abandoned cars as their occupants, realizing that the Czech authorities were turning back refugees at the borders, headed into the woods to try to cross the frontier illegally on foot.¹⁶⁰

For many, there was only one way out. Suicide among the Viennese Jewish community became commonplace in these terrible days.¹⁶¹

The quest to root out ‘enemies of the people’, which in Germany had subsided in the mid-1930s and had begun to gather new pace in 1937, was revitalized through the new ‘opportunities’ that had opened up in Austria. The radicalized campaign would very quickly be reimported to the ‘Old Reich’, both in the new and horrifying wave of antisemitism in the summer of 1938, and — behind the scenes but ultimately even more sinister — in the rapid expansion of the SS’s involvement in looking for solutions to the ‘Jewish Question’.¹⁶²

After the tremors of the Blomberg–Fritsch affair, Hitler’s internal position was now stronger than ever. His leadership was absolute. The officer corps of the army, deeply angered at the treatment of Fritsch, had had the wind taken out of their sails by the Anschlu? triumph. For a small number of officers, the seeds of resistance had been sown which would eventually germinate into a conspiracy that would nearly take Hitler’s life on 20 July 1944. But at this stage the bitter animosity was directed largely against Himmler, Heydrich, and Goring, not Hitler. And they recognized that there were no forces capable of carrying through a putsch since, as Major-General Friedrich Olbricht put it, ‘the people are behind Hitler’.¹⁶³ Nor was the reception accorded to the German troops on the Austrian roads lost on them. The vast majority of officers were, as regards the Anschlu?, of one mind with the people: they could only approve and — if sometimes begrudgingly — admire Hitler’s latest triumph.

Among the mass of the population, ‘the German miracle’ brought about by Hitler released what was described as ‘an elemental frenzy of enthusiasm’ — once it was clear that the western powers would again stand by and do nothing, and that ‘our Fuhrer has pulled it off without bloodshed’.¹⁶⁴ It would be the last time