47: Anschluss

Hitler told Goebbels in the late summer of 1937 that eventually Austria would have to be taken "by force". On 5 November 1937, Hitler called a meeting with the Foreign Minister Konstantin von Neurath, the War Minister Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg, the Army commander General Werner von Fritsch, the Kriegsmarine commander Admiral Erich Raeder and the Luftwaffe commander Hermann Göring recorded in the Hossbach Memorandum. At the conference, Hitler stated that economic problems were causing Germany to fall behind in the arms race with Britain and France, and that the only solution was to launch in the near-future a series of wars to seize Austria and Czechoslovakia, whose economies would be plundered to give Germany the lead in the arms race.

Robert Leckie writes:

"The year 1938 was fateful for Europe and the world. Only nineteen year previously Prime Minister David Lloyd George of Britain had warned his Versailles colleagues of the folly of ringing Germany with small buffer states, some of them with no experience of self-government, all of them containing large masses of Germans. Here was the racial tie, like an unseverable umbilical cord, with which Hitler might draw these states inside his Third Reich, and in 1938 he began to seize it to launch his program of Anschluss, or annexation.

"The techniques would become familiar. Nazi agents inside the target countries were to excite the Anschluss aspirations of the German communities, to undermine the existing government, with no small assistance from German radio broadcasts, and to create the crisis that would give Hitler his excuse for the takeover.

"Hitler had tried a coup in Austria three years earlier, when about 150 Austrian Nazis in army uniforms invaded the Chancellery, murdered Chancellor Engelbert Dolfuss and tried to proclaim a Nazi state. They were captured, eleven were hanged and most of the rest given long prison sentences. In February 1938, however, Hitler relied more upon himself than foreign agents. First he secured from Benito Mussolini a promise that he would not interfere in the subversion of his norther neighbor. Next, Austrian Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg was treated like a captive, bullied, made to fear for his life and forced to sign a document tantamount to the surrender of his country to Germany. German troops then streamed over the border, and with Austria firmly in Hitler's fist, the people voted almost 100 percent for Anschluss.

"Hitler now cast his covetous eye on the Sudetenland of western Czechoslovakia, an area inhabited by Germans. He announced that he would 'protect' the Sudeten Germans against the 'atrocities' of the Czech government. And here, at last, it seemed that the democracies had awakened to the danger."

Ian Kershaw adds:

"The vast majority of officers were, as regards to the Anschluss, 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 Führer has pulled it off without bloodshed.'

"It would be the last time that the German people -- now with the addition of their cousins to the east whose rapid disillusionment soon dissipated the wild euphoria with which many of them had greeted Hitler -- would feel the threat of war lifted so rapidly from them through a foreign-policy coup completed within days and presented as a fait accompli. The next crisis, over the Sudetenland, would drag over months and have them in near-panic over the likelihood of war. And if Hitler had had his way, there would have been war. . . .

"Until 1938, Hitler's moves in foreign policy had been bold, but not reckless. He had shown shrewd awareness of the weakness of his opponents, a sure instinct for exploiting divisions and uncertainty. His sense of timing had been excellent, his combination of bluff and blackmail effective, his manipulation of propaganda to back his coups masterly. He had gone further and faster than anyone could have expected in revising the terms of Versailles and upturning the post-war diplomatic settlement. From the point of view of the western powers, his methods were, to say the least, unconventional diplomacy -- raw, brutal, unpalatable; but his aims were recognizably in accord with traditional German nationalist clamor.

"Down to and including the Anschluss, Hitler had proved a consummate nationalist politician. During the Sudeten crisis, some sympathy for demands to incorporate the German-speaking areas in the Reich -- for another Anschluss of sorts -- still existed among those ready to swallow Goebbels's propaganda about the maltreatment of the Sudeten Germans by the Czechs, or at any rate prepared to accept that a further nationality problem was in need of resolution. It took the crisis and its outcome to expose the realization that Hitler would stop at nothing.

"The spring of 1938 marked the phase in which Hitler's obsession with accomplishing his 'mission' in his own lifetime started to overtake cold political calculation. The sense of his own infallibility, massively boosted by the triumph of the Anschluss, underscored his increased reliance on his own will, matched by his diminished readiness to listen to countervailing counsel. That he had invariably been proved right in his assessment of the weakness of the western powers in the past, usually in the teeth of the caution of his advisers in the army and Foreign Office, convinced him that his current evaluation was unerringly correct.

The Anschluss had other effects as Kershaw explains:

"The Anschluss did not just set the roller-coaster of foreign expansion moving. It gave massive impetus to the assault on 'internal enemies.' The repression was ferocious -- worse even that it had been in Germany following the Nazi takeover in 1933. 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.'

"Many other Jews were manhandled, beaten, and tortured in horrific ordeals by Nazi thugs, looting and rampaging. Jewish shops were plundered as will. Individual Jews were robbed on the open streets of their money, jewelry, 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.

"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 11:15 p.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 border, headed into the woods to try to cross the frontier illegally on foot.

"The quest to root out the '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 likely 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.'"

Then there was the impact on Hitler:

"Once again, a foreign-policy triumph had strengthened [Hitler's] hand at home and abroad. For the mass of 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. 'Czechia comes first now,' the Propaganda Minister recorded. '. . . And drastically, at the next opportunity. . . . The Führer is wonderful. . . . A true genius. Now he sits for ours over the map and broods. Moving, when he says he wants to experience the great German Reich of the Teutons himself.'

"The Anschluss was a watershed for Hitler, and for the Third Reich. The intoxication of the crowds made him feel like a god. The rapid improvisation of the Anschluss there and then 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 feeble. The doubters and skeptics at home were, as always, revealed as weak and wrong. There was no one to stand in his way.

"Hitler had, with the Anschluss, created 'Greater Germany,' now incorporating his homeland. He was impatient for more. The Anschluss suggested to him that the Great Germanic Reich, embracing all Germans and dominating the Continent of Europe, did not have to be a long-term project, as he had once imagined. He could create it himself. But it had to be soon. The incorporation of Austria had serious weakened the defenses 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."

Sources:

Kershaw, I. (2008). Hitler: A Biography. London: W. W. Norton and Company.

Leckie, R. (1987). Delivered From Evil: The Saga of World War II. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.