Now listen closely: The important thing now is for Inquart to take possession of the entire government, keep the radio and everything else occupied…. Seyss-Inquart is to send the following telegram. Write this down:
“The provisional Austrian Government, which after the resignation of the Schuschnigg Government regards its task as the restoration of peace and order in Austria, addresses to the German Government an urgent appeal to support it in its task and to help it to prevent bloodshed. For this purpose it requests the German Government to dispatch German troops as soon as possible.”
After a brief dialogue, Goring said in conclusion: “Now then, our troops are crossing the frontier today…. And see to it that he sends the telegram as soon as possible…. Present the telegram to him and tell him we are asking—he doesn’t even have to send the telegram, you know; all he needs to say is: Agreed.” And while the Nazis throughout the country began to occupy the public buildings, Hitler at last issued the marching order at 8:45 P.M. —even before Seyss-Inquart had been informed of his own appeal for help. Hitler rejected a later request from Seyss-Inquart to stop the German troops. A bare two hours later, the impatiently awaited word from Rome arrived: at half-past ten Philip of Hesse telephoned, and Hitler’s reaction revealed how much tension he had been under:
Hesse: I have just come back from the Palazzo Venezia. The Duce accepted the whole affair in a very, very friendly manner. He sends you his cordial regards.
Hitler: Then please tell Mussolini I shall never forget him for this.
Hesse: Very well, sir.
Hitler: Never, never, never, whatever happens…. As soon as the Austrian affair is settled, I shall be ready to go through thick and thin with him, no matter what happens…. You may tell him that I thank him ever so much; never, never shall I forget.
Hesse: Yes, my Fuhrer.
Hitler: I will never forget, whatever may happen. If he should ever need any help or be in any danger, he can be convinced that I shall stick to him, whatever may happen, even if the whole world were against him.73
On the afternoon of March 12, to the peal of bells, Hitler crossed the border at his birthplace, Braunau. Four hours later, he passed flower-decked villages and hundreds of thousands of persons lining the streets to enter Linz. Just outside the city line the Austrian ministers Seyss-Inquart and Glaise-Horstenau awaited him; with them was Heinrich Himmler, who had gone to Vienna the previous night to begin purging the country of “traitors to the people and other enemies of the State.” With palpable emotion Hitler delivered a brief address from the balcony of the town hall to a crowd waiting in the darkness below him. In the speech he evoked once more the idea of his special mission:
If Providence once called me from this city to assume the leadership of the Reich, it must have charged me with a mission, and that mission can only have been to restore my dear homeland to the German Reich. I have believed in this mission, have lived and fought for it, and I believe I have now fulfilled it.
Next morning he laid a wreath on the grave of his parents in Leonding.
Everything seems to indicate that up to this time Hitler had as yet made no specific decisions about the future of Austria. Presumably he wanted to wait to the last to see what the foreign reaction would be, to test out the chances, repercussions, and accidents of the new situation, confident that he could exploit them more rapidly than his antagonists. It would appear that he decided upon immediate Anschluss only under the impact of the triumphal ride from Braunau to Linz, the cheers, the flowers and the flags. This elemental delirium seemed to permit no alternatives. Late on the evening of March 13, in the Hotel Weinzinger in Linz, he signed the “law concerning the reunion of Austria with the German Reich.” One of those present reports that he was deeply moved. For a long time he remained quiet and motionless. Tears trickled down his cheeks. Finally he said, “Yes, the right political action saves blood.”74
On this and the following day, when Hitler entered Vienna from the direction of Schonbrunn Palace amid cheering and the tolling of bells, he was enjoying the realization of his earliest dream. The two cities that had witnessed his failures, had disdained and humiliated him, at last lay at his feet in admiration, shame, and fear. All the aimlessness and impotence of those years were now vindicated, all his furious craving for compensation at last satisfied, when he stood on the balcony of the Hofburg and announced to hundreds of thousands in the Heldenplatz the “greatest report of a mission accomplished” in his life: “As Fuhrer and Chancellor of the German Nation and of the Reich I hereupon report to History the entrance of my homeland into the German Reich.”
The scenes of enthusiasm amid which this “reunion” took place “mocked all description,” a Swiss newspaper wrote.75 And although it is hard to determine how much of this clamor, how much of the flowers, the screaming and the tears, sprang from organized or spontaneous passion, there can be no doubt that the event stirred the deepest emotions of the nation. For the people who lined the streets for hours in Linz, Vienna, or Salzburg, this was the consummation of a longing for unity that had outlasted, as an elemental need, all the ancient dissensions, divisions and fraternal wars of the Germans. And it was out of this feeling that the people hailed Hitler as the man who had superseded Bismarck and brought his work to completion. The cry of “One People, One Reich, One Leader” was more than a clever slogan. That alone explains how not only the churches but also socialists like Karl Renner could let themselves be carried along by the euphoria of union.76 The hope for an end of domestic political strife arose out of the same state of mind, though also from the existential anxiety of a nonviable republic. Added to such longings was the desire to have the powerful united Reich regain something of that brilliance that had dimmed since the end of the monarchy. Old Austria seemed to be returning in this prodigal son of Austria, however illegitimate and vulgar he might be.
In this aura of consummation and bliss the physical force that accompanied the event went unnoticed. “The Army was joined by standards of the SS detached units, 40,000 men of the police, and Death’s Head Formation Upper Bavaria as second wave,” the official journal of the High Command of the armed forces noted. These units instantly set up a system of rigorous repression. It would be mistaking Hitler’s psychology to imagine that his resentments were forgotten for any length of time in the euphoria of triumph. And in fact the uninhibited savagery with which his squads now openly fell upon opponents and so-called racial enemies betrays something of his unforgotten hatred for Vienna. The sometimes ferocious excesses, particularly of the Austrian Legion, which had just returned from Germany, nakedly revealed what might be called the “Oriental” element that Hitler had introduced into German anti-Semitism; now he was unleashing it in followers of his own origin and his own emotional structure. “With bare hands,” Stefan Zweig wrote, “university professors were compelled to scrub the streets. Devout, white-bearded Jews were dragged into the temple and forced by yowling youths to do knee bends and shout ‘Heil Hitler’ in chorus. Innocent persons were caught en masse in the streets like rabbits and dragged off to sweep out the latrines of the SA barracks. All the morbidly filthy hate fantasies orgiastically conceived in the course of many nights were released in broad daylight.”77 A wave of refugees poured into non- German Europe. Stefan Zweig, Sigmund Freud, Walter Mehring, Carl Zuckmayer, and many others fled from Austria. The writer Egon Friedell threw himself out of his window. Nazi terror manifested itself in all openness. But these circumstances did not weigh heavily in the outside world. The impression of rejoicing was too strong, the German reference to the Wilsonian principle of self-determination too irrefutable. That principle was confirmed triumphantly with the predictable 99 per cent of the votes in the regime’s fifth and last plebiscite on March 16. The Western powers indicated that they were disturbed; but France was deeply embroiled in her domestic problems, and England refused to give France or Czechoslovakia any guarantees. England also rejected a proposal by the Soviet Union for a conference to prevent further aggression on the part of Hitler. Chamberlain and the European conservatives continued to regard Hitler as the commandant of their anti-Communist bulwark, who must be won over by generosity and simultaneously tamed. The Left, meanwhile, reassured itself with the thought that Schuschnigg was nothing but the representative of a clerico-Fascist regime ripe for overthrow, and one that had formerly fired upon workers. The League of Nations did not even hold a meeting on the question; the world by now was not bothering about mere gestures of indignation. Its conscience, as Stefan Zweig wrote bitterly, “only
