Farewell to Austria
I
HAT is Austria and who is she? . . . She is a miserable spittoon.’ Thus contemptuously did Mussolini, almost exactly ten years ago, refer to the tiny nation to his north which, periodically since the World War, has threatened the peace of Europe.
The occasion for his outburst at that time was an inflammatory speech by the Austrian Catholic Chancellor Seipel, protesting against the hard lot of the South Tyrol Germans. To-day Mussolini finds himself considering Austria anything but a ‘spittoon,’ for Hitler has carried out speedily and with appalling thoroughness two thirds of his boast, expressed unmistakably in his Reichstag address of February 20, 1938, that he would supervise the interests of the 10,000,000 Germans outside the Reich.
The Nazi procedure for capturing Austria followed a pattern remarkably like that employed in the Third Reich, and in Danzig. When Hitler was called to the chancellorship on January 30, 1933 by perplexed old President von Hindenburg, he was allowed but two minor cabinet posts, the ministries of the interior and of air. Yet within six months he had filled eight of the available fourteen posts with his own men and had succeeded in including in the cabinet three other favorably disposed and ardent nationalists. In the Free City of Danzig, so-called ‘parliamentary’ methods obtained for him control of the government and the end of formal opposition. In Austria his political reorganization of the country was facilitated by outright invasion.
But these are the spectacular and obvious first measures. Equally important — and certainly difficult — is the second phase in the dynamics of revolution: the settlement of all religious, cultural, and economic conflicts, and the enlistment of unified support. No one will ever know definitely the number of genuinely Nazi-minded Austrians. The last free elections in Austria were held in November 1930, and at that time, according to the New York Times, the Socialists polled 1,517,000 votes, the Christian Democrats 1,300,000; the combined Fascist and Nazi elements accounted for only 336,000 votes. Unquestionably the Nazi group increased considerably during the troubled régime of Chancellor Dollfuss, but after his assassination on July 25, 1934, by the handful of Nazis who stormed the Chancellery, domestic and foreign indignation mounted to such heights that his successor, Dr. Kurt von Schuschnigg, was able to impose his Fascist Catholic Corporative State (Austria is 90 per cent Catholic) with less opposition than might have been expected.
It is, of course, only natural that in a rigged plebiscite held under German auspices there should be an extraordinarily large Austrian Nazi vote supporting claims of Nazi predominance in Austria. But well may we ponder the possible outcome had Dr. Schuschnigg’s ill-fated and equally rigged plebiscite set for March 13, 1938, taken place. In this connection it may be recalled that the National Socialist Party was swept into power in Germany at a time when its influence was perceptibly waning; yet the consequent and understandable haste to join the Nazi bandwagon is now a matter of historical record.
Dr. Goebbels’s agents of propaganda have now to deal with a province that is German in sympathy and in language, but which, despite the political allegations of the Third Reich’s leaders, is decidedly un-German in its point of view about many things. For generations, and particularly since the war, North Germans have freely deprecated the easygoing Austrian: ‘ Why, during the war we were always having to shift German regiments to the Balkans and to the Italian frontier to bolster up Austrian morale.’ Moreover the Austrian, in turn, thinking back over a glittering imperial past of more than four centuries, — with Vienna a centre of culture when Germany, as we know it to-day, was still a disorganized group of feudal states, — has been inclined to disparage the abrupt, ‘uncivilized’ ways of the Northerner.
Both attitudes are familiar and have frequently been exaggerated; yet there is little doubt that Austrians consider themselves the inheritors of a justly famed diplomatic tradition. Not long ago the writer was the luncheon guest of a former Austrian secretary of state, an influential ‘nationalist’ but an avowed opponent of Naziism. The luncheon took place in Vienna’s Deutscher Klub, which once served as the meeting place of ‘old-school’ diplomats, nobles, and industrialists. ‘I think you will find that we Austrians,’ said my host, ‘will not be inclined to make the diplomatic blunders that Germany has made since Hitler came to power.’ Farther along the table the president of the club, General Karl von Bardolff, who was at one time reported to be Hitler’s choice for Minister of Defense, echoed this sentiment. But how well did these estimable gentlemen gauge the current of coming events? In Germany their aristocratic colleagues of corresponding rank and sympathy have long since been obliged to make way for the middle-class Nazi fire-eaters.
II
That Austria maintained her independence as long as she did was something of a miracle, considering the steady succession of financial and political crises through which the country passed. In 1921 there was the food shortage, when frenzied, half-starved mobs stormed shops and rioting was widespread; in 1922 the krone fell and inflation reared its ugly head; in 1924 leading banks and business houses failed; in 1927 still another revolt culminated in the burning of the Palace of Justice; in 1929 there were repeated and unsettling reports of a Putsch; in 1931 the disastrous collapse of the Credit Anstalt shocked financial quarters throughout the world; in 1933 an infamous terror campaign was inaugurated by Austrian Nazi hotheads; in 1934 the Vienna Socialists were ruthlessly suppressed by the Dollfuss government; finally there was the murder of Dollfuss by Nazis in July of the same year.
Austria’s entire post-war experience has furnished the world with indisputable proof of the folly enacted at Versailles — folly, that is, with the possible exception of the Versailles-inspired plebiscite of October 10, 1920, when lower Carinthia was saved for Austria. This tragic and nearly forgotten postscript to World War strife, when Jugoslavian troops prepared to incorporate within their own state portions of the Austrian province of Carinthia and clashed with Austrians, was fixed indelibly in the writer’s mind several years ago when on a tour of inspection of the camps set up by Austrian Nazi emigrants outside Munich, The head of one camp, a strapping young physician from Klagenfurt, with a brooding resentment that exploded violently at times, flung a battered military cross on the table. ‘Carinthian War for Freedom, 19181919 — For Bravery,’ it read. ‘I got a medal then for preserving my country for German culture,’ he said. ‘Now I have been deprived of my Austrian citizenship, jailed, and forced to flee to Germany because I tried to do the same thing again — only without shooting anybody this time.’
If the young physician is still alive — and he doubtless is — he has reëntered his native land as a conquering hero after five years of bitter exile. With him have gone 40,000 other Austrian exiles, and members of the Austrian Legion, who have been scattered throughout Germany and supported in labor camps and in industry. After five years of rigorous indoctrination into the Nazi Weltanschauung, with discipline and more discipline the keynote of their daily routine, these men are in the forefront of the battle to unify and coördinate dissident elements in Austrian national life. Aiding them are the 10,000 (Hitler’s figures) party members who languished in the Wöllersdorf concentration camp and in various Austrian prisons. Predominantly youthful, their numbers include the mild-mannered middle-aged as well as the fanatic twenty-year-olds.
No longer is there any necessity for the bombing campaign which shook the country in 1933 and 1934. In those days the Austrian Brown House in Munich, just across the street from German Nazi headquarters, guided the terror that prevailed in provincial towns and in Vienna alike. There Alfred Frauenfeld, then exiled head of Vienna’s Nazis, a man with a price on his head and proud of it, accorded the writer an interview, during the course of which he exhibited a list showing that nearly 500 explosions, including 130 in Vienna and 103 in Salzburg, had taken place in the preceding four weeks, ‘according to schedule,’ he said. ‘They will go on,’ was his grim parting word. And they did — until Dollfuss’s untimely end.
Frauenfeld has long since disappeared from the political scene, but, to illustrate how fortuitous has been the rise to power of some of Austria’s leading Nazis, consider the case of Dr. Hermann Neubachcr, a Viennese architect and economist of no mean repute. Known for years as one of the more level-headed Nazis, he was granted a restricted freedom — which involved reporting daily to police headquarters, submitting to exhaustive questioning regarding his activities, and undergoing frequent house searchings without warning. So well apprised was he of Nazi plans that he declared to the writer the approximate date of Dollfuss’s removal and named Anton Rintelen, Austrian Minister to Rome, as the Chancellor’s successor. Both forecasts were fulfilled in little more than a fortnight— although Rintelen was promptly jailed by Dr. von Schuschnigg’s forces soon after the Vienna radio announced Rintelen’s accession. To-day Dr. Neubacher is mayor of Vienna.
Not all of Austria’s Nazis were jailed or forced into exile for desperate undertakings: there were many whose crimes consisted of painting swastikas on walls; floating burning pyres, also in the form of swastikas, down rivers; drawing caricatures of Austrian government officials; picketing Jewish shops and taking the names and addresses of all who would enter such shops. These fell victim to Chancellor Schuschnigg’s stringent decrees, which, drawing increased strength from Catholic sources from 1934 on, were extended to such lengths that all forms of liberalism, socialism, and free thought were eradicated and the clergy was put in supreme control of the minds of the youth.
III
It is worth recording Nazi activities prior to March 11, 1938 and describing the typical Austrian Nazi — the harmless ‘little men’ of revolution, bomb throwers, incendiaries, and wily conspirators alike, because their recent background must be understood if one is to comprehend the frictions and party strife bound to occur in Austria, as has been the case in Germany, among the front-rank revolutionaries. How difficult it is to restrain the actions of such masters of the Nazi technique of persuasion, of men who are absolutely fearless and imbued with what they conceive to be a holy mission, is readily apparent.
In spite of their fervor and their understanding of Nazi theory, it is doubtful whether many of them realize that while Hitler was serving on the Western Front, during the war, a form of National Socialism which scorned the Church and castigated the Jewish influence was springing up in Austria, under the ægis of an Austrian lawyer named Walter Riehl. As the Vienna correspondent of the Manchester Guardian has pointed out, Hitler came into close contact with Dr. Riehl after the war, and the relation between the German and Austrian brands of National Socialism grew apace until 1923, when Hitler broke with Riehl over the question of an armed Putsch.
With the failure of Hitler’s attempt to seize power in Munich later in the year — the famous Beer Hall Putsch commemorated annually by those participants still living — the Austrian Nazi element subsided and remained relatively unimportant until 1930, when Hitler’s astonishing success at the polls was the signal for a revival of the Austrian movement, under the guidance of the popular Frauenfeld. Within three years the number of Nazis in Vienna was estimated at over 50,000, and Jewish correspondents— who, if they erred, would likely err on the negative side —judged that there were probably 1,500,000 to 2,000,000 Nazi-minded in Austria, many of whom were occupying key positions in provincial government administrations.
Growth of the Nazi movement in Vienna was slower than in the provinces, owing to the entrenched position of the Socialists. But the Austrian Government played into Nazi hands when it ordered the destruction of the Socialist ‘menace,’ resulting in a five-day civil war and the massacres of February 1934 in the Vienna suburbs of Floridsdorf, Simmering, and Ottakring. Never after could Dollfuss or his successor count upon the wholehearted support of labor, and when Dr. Schuschnigg, in his hour of need last March, made a desperate if ineffective bid for labor support at the polls, his plea for a united Christian Austria was recognized in Socialist quarters for what it was the last despairing gesture of a dictator who could no longer dictate.
As the sickening process of Gleichschaltung, coördination, proceeds, it is well to bear in mind some of the reasons why the Austrian Nazis encounter more resistance in Vienna and in other industrial centres than in agricultural districts. National Socialism in Austria, as in Germany, draws its greatest strength from the peasant and from the petty bourgeois in towns and cities. As the result of various agrarian reforms introduced since the war, the peasant found himself assured of sufficient land to feed himself and his family. Actually these reforms were instituted, as M. W. Fodor brilliantly reveals in his book, Plot and Counter-Plot in Central Europe, by Socialists aiming to relieve the downtrodden peasantry; yet agricultural elements, finding themselves proprietors, however small, tended to discourage any move by industrial workers that would seem to endanger their hard-won holdings. This explains in part the early success of the Austrian Nazis in winning over the provinces by means of catch phrases emphasizing the ‘Bolshevism’ of the Socialist element in the cities and the all-importance of ‘blood’ and ‘land.’ In Vienna, non-Nazis long outnumbered Nazis, — indeed, prior to Hitler’s coup the Nazis claimed no more than 20 per cent of Vienna’s votes, — and, no matter what the show of hands reveals to-day, it is easy to see why the sternest oppression has made itself evident there.
IV
In 1934 more than 200,000 Jews were registered as Austrian citizens, of whom a large percentage dwell in the Leopoldstadt district of Vienna. That this area will presently assume more and more the character of the mediæval ghetto appears a foregone conclusion, judging from the ‘mopping-up’ process of recent weeks. For years nationalist elements in Vienna have circulated news sheets caricaturing the Jewish nature and portraying the international Jew as the scourge of mankind; indeed it was in Vienna that Hitler bought his first anti-Semitic brochure, and, as he states in Mein Kampf, ‘wherever I went I saw only Jews, and the more I saw of them, the more I realized how different they were from other people.’
Those early years in Vienna encompassed some of the bitterest experiences of Hitler’s life; how different his entry into the city last March as a liberator and semi-divinity! And now once again must the world cope with the problem of political refugees, particularly those hapless Jewish residents of the business area north of the Danube Canal, now shuttered and dark.
Nonetheless, it is a fact that some quality inherent in the Austrian temperament prevents complete acceptance of the assorted ‘cure-alls’ contained in Mein Kampf. No nation had greater cause to rail at the provisions of the Versailles and St. Germain treaties than Austria, and Austrian Nazis have grown hoarse time and again from shouting down the injustices imposed by ‘Wilson, that idealist’; yet never have Austrians felt impelled to assert themselves in the sense that Germany has — that is, to overcome a crushing sense of inferiority. Germany’s plaint has long been, ‘Nobody loves us! ‘ But everybody loves the Austrian. He is unpretentious, friendly, humorous, athletic, an excellent, dancer and a welcome companion — virtues easy to come by, perhaps, but many a German would give a good deal to be credited with possessing them. As yet, fortunately, the world has no indisputable proof that the fundamental characteristics of a nation may be altered by repeated doses of Nazi discipline.
When relations between the two countries were particularly strained in 1933 and Germany imposed a 1000-mark fee for an Austrian visa, it was a lonely experience, except in festival times, to cross the German-Austrian frontier by train. Traveling from Munich to Salzburg, the train customarily rolled across the border with only two or three passengers aboard. In the opposite direction the same phenomenon was evident. In both frontier stations guards made a point of confiscating alien newspapers; tendentious news, and therefore dangerous, was the official explanation for this action. Now the ‘frontier,’ in its official sense, no longer exists, and increasing hordes of Germans are swarming into the ideal vacation land of the Austrian Tyrol, urged on by skillfully directed appeals to become acquainted with the farther limits of the new ‘German’ Reich. Mussolini is indeed well advised to ponder the future of the 300,000 Germans of the South Tyrol, now living on Italian soil.
Less interesting but more important are the heavily laden freight trains puffing their way northward from distributing points in what used to be the neighboring state of Austria. Iron ore from the Erzberg to feed the mighty Krupp furnaces and so to hasten Germany’s rearmament; lumber and dairy products, vital necessities to the German Four-Year Flan for self-sufficiency — these were not mentioned by Hitler as contributing factors in Germany’s eagerness to extend her frontier southward when he proclaimed the union on March 12, 1938.
In March 1931, Austrian Chancellor Shober concluded a customs-union pact with Germany, which through the intervention of France and Italy, and through pressure brought to bear upon the Austrian Chancellor and Chancellor Brüning by French Foreign Minister Paul-Boncour and Mussolini, came to naught. The outstanding reason advanced by the two nations for their action was that Austria’s independence had to be preserved. To-day France and Italy must contend with an enlarged Germany, 73,000,000 strong, and the shadow of Hitler over Europe grows ever more ominous. It is not inconceivable that the world may yet acknowledge the scuttling of the customs-union pact of 1931 as one of the great diplomatic blunders of the post-war period; for, had it been allowed to become effective, — who knows? — Austria might still be that same ‘miserable spittoon’ Mussolini was kicking around ten years ago.