would mean the end of his career. The situation was so tense that this case to determine whether or not a man was a homosexual became one of those rarer moments in the history of the Nazi regime when the pressures of resistance to Hitler might well have erupted on a scale sufficient to shatter the foundations on which his tyranny was based.
No one, however, had reckoned on what actually did happen. On 10 March, the day before the Court of Honour, after a month of growing political crisis in Vienna, Hitler gave orders for the Army to be prepared to invade Austria two days later. At the very moment the Court began its session Hitler was using Seyss-Inquart and other Nazi leaders in Austria to force Schuschnigg, the Austrian Chancellor, into an impossible position so that the Army should have an excuse to invade. Schuschnigg was proving intractable, and before noon Hitler ordered Goring, Brauchitsch and Raeder to abandon their proceedings and come at once to the Chancellery. Himmler, Heydrich and the Gestapo had won a temporary reprieve. That afternoon Goring began his celebrated conquest of Austria by telephone, and by the following day Austria was in Nazi hands and Himmler was in Linz supervising security arrangements for Hitler’s arrival that afternoon. Fritsch was forgotten in this hour of national triumph.
When the Court was reconvened a week later on 17 March, the whole political atmosphere had changed. Hitler was once more the hero, the great leader, and there was no longer any heart in the military opposition to make a stand against him. It is unlikely, in any event, that Fritsch would have had either the stamina or the effrontery to press his attack home until the Gestapo witnesses were discredited; all he was concerned about was the formal recognition of his innocence. In the end it was Goring himself who decided on the tactics to adopt to protect the Gestapo. He determined to sacrifice Schmidt, whom nobody was concerned to protect, and, by using his authority to bully and threaten him, forced admissions from him which, had they been used to charge the Gestapo with dishonourable treatment of its witness, could have put the case in its proper perspective. But having at least achieved, on the second day of the examination, an admission from Schmidt that he had been lying about Fritsch, Goring hastily called on Fritsch to make a closing statement in his defence, following which he was acquitted.
Both Himmler and Heydrich were far too preoccupied establishing a reign of terror in Austria with the aid of their allies, the Austrian Nazis, to be in attendance at the Court during 17 and 18 March. They left their Gestapo agents to survive as best they could. But both of them had been deeply concerned during January and February; Heydrich’s wife has testified to her husband’s tension during this time, and Schellenberg has told the story of how Heydrich, in a fit of nerves, asked him to dine at his office and came armed because he expected the Army to ‘start marching from Potsdam’. Himmler’s reactions were even more extraordinary. Describing Himmler during the earlier stages of the enquiry, Schellenberg wrote:
‘I witnessed for the first time some of the rather strange practices resorted to by Himmler through his inclination towards mysticism. He assembled twelve of his most trusted S.S. leaders in a room next to the one in which von Fritsch was being questioned and ordered them all to concentrate their minds on exerting a suggestive influence over the general that would induce him to tell the truth. I happened to come into the room by accident, and to see these twelve S.S. leaders sitting in a circle, all sunk in deep and silent contemplation, was indeed a remarkable sight.’25
Himmler was sufficiently prepared for the Austrian
The weather was bad and made the flight to Vienna in the overloaded plane unpleasant, and Schellenberg records that Himmler discussed with him the administration of the new state of Ostmark, as Austria was now to be called. They were standing in the rear of the plane when Schellenberg noticed Himmler was leaning against the aircraft door and that the safety-catch was undone. He grasped him by his coat and flung him aside. When Himmler had recovered from the shock, he thanked Schellenberg and said he would be happy to do the same and protect his life for him some day.
Himmler and his entourage arrived at Aspern aerodrome before daybreak. They were uncertain of their reception in Vienna, but by the time they had arrived the struggle for Austria was already over. Hitler’s troops had crossed the frontier overnight and on behalf of the provisional government orders had been given by Seyss-Inquart to the Austrian Army that they were to offer no resistance to the invaders. Himmler, who was Hitler’s most senior representative in Austria, was met by the Austrian Chief of Police, Michael Skubl, whose feelings at having this duty to perform must have been bitter, since he had been appointed by Dollfuss on the very day of his murder by the Nazis. Himmler hurried by car to the Chancellery in Vienna to confer with Kaltenbrunner, the head of the Austrian S.S. Following exactly the procedure he had originated for himself in Germany, Himmler dismissed Skubl and put the police in the charge of Kaltenbrunner. Leaving the immediate control of Vienna in this man’s hands, Himmler left by air for Linz to supervise the reception to be given Hitler that afternoon in the town where he had lived as a child. With him went Seyss-Inquart, now the new Nazi Chancellor of Austria. On the same day Heydrich joined Kaltenbrunner in Vienna, and the Austrian capital began to experience the savagery of Nazi control.
The hysteria of Hitler’s reception in Austria — he had arrived on Saturday, and on Sunday with tears in his eyes had become President of Austria, which was created ‘a province of the German Reich’ by a legal enactment hurriedly put together — did not stop Himmler from warning the Fuhrer against entering Vienna until every security precaution had been taken. He had himself returned there from Linz and set up his headquarters in the Imperial Hotel, while Heydrich commandeered the Metropole for the S.S. and S.D. headquarters. Together the unholy team went to work, Himmler and Heydrich of Germany, Kaltenbrunner and his colleague Odilo Globocnik of Austria.
Kaltenbrunner, who was in 1943 to be appointed successor to Heydrich by Himmler and who after the war was to stand trial at Nuremberg, was a lawyer who had turned to political intrigue. He was a huge man, coarse and tough, with small, penetrating eyes set in a wooden, expressionless face. He was excitable, and would slap the table with his hard, clumsy hands, which were discoloured with nicotine and reminded Schellenberg of the hands of a gorilla. He had joined the S.S. in 1932 and had been imprisoned by the Dollfuss Government for his activities. His associate Globocnik came from Trieste; he had been involved in robbery with violence and he continued to mix his criminal activities with politics even after Hitler had appointed him Gauleiter of Vienna.
The campaign of terror launched by these two men and the Austrian S.S. on behalf of Heydrich and Himmler was more fearful than anything that had yet happened in Germany; Seyss-Inquart himself was to admit after the war that 79,000 arrests took place in Vienna within a matter of weeks. Jews were evicted, humiliated and forced to scrub the streets. Many men of distinction among those opposed to the Nazis, both Jews and non-Jews, were to be sent to Dachau and other camps in Germany; the freight trains transporting prisoners crushed together in wagons became a regular service from Austria.
Schuschnigg and Baron Louis de Rothschild, the two most eminent men held in custody, were temporarily confined by Kaltenbrunner in the servants’ quarters on the fifth floor of the Metropole Hotel, and they were inspected there by Himmler. Baron Rothschild, who realized that Himmler was planning to ransom him, spoke with ironic reserve when the Reichsfuhrer S.S. enquired after his welfare, while Himmler showed off his authority by taking Schuschnigg with him to inspect the attic lavatories and command in his presence that the ancient fitments should be replaced by something more modern and hygienic for his distinguished prisoners. Nevertheless, he refused to let Schuschnigg, who like himself was short-sighted, have the use of his spectacles, which had been confiscated.
This oppression was the immediate outcome of Hitler’s annexation of Austria. The Fuhrer had come eventually from Linz to Vienna on Monday 14 March, staying one night only at the Imperial Hotel, where Himmler was also lodged; those Austrians prepared to be ecstatic were so: ‘never… have I seen such tremendous, enthusiastic and joyous crowds’, wrote Schellenberg. Nevertheless, he had to rush ahead of Hitler’s procession of cars touring the city in order to supervise the dismantling of explosive charges attached to a bridge on the route. Himmler had been right to be cautious.
The Jewish population of Austria was about 200,000, and their organized persecution and removal became a major undertaking. Himmler went in person to search for a site for a local prison camp, and found a suitable place near Mauthausen on the Danube, where a camp was built on the wooded slopes above a quarry by slave-labour brought from Dachau. Himmler decorated the wooden guard-house set on the granite walls with curling roofs in
