The Last Five Hours Of Austria

By Eugene Lennhoff

A fascinating and in-depth history of the final days of Austria before the German invasion in 1938.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: May 31, 2013
• ISBN: 9781473386082

Book preview

1938.

The Last Five Hours of Austria

CHAPTER I

THE road from Vienna to Bratislava, the old Hungarian coronation city, now the first large town across the Czechoslovak frontier, is only thirty-five miles long, but on the evening of March 11th it seemed endless. Constant stopping; then a move on, then another stop, wedged in between cars that were carrying others on our own dangerous journey.

We were in flight—the proprietor of the paper, Herr Karl Franz Bondy, my colleague, Count Curt von Strachwitz and myself. We had no luggage and not a penny more money than was allowed under the strict Austrian currency regulations. We had left Vienna by taxi at 9 P.M. A few minutes earlier a detachment of Nazis, one of many such which appeared suddenly from nowhere, had marched up to the publishing office, intending to take over the premises and arrest the editorial staff. As we left by the side-entrance, the leader of the troop, preceded by the swastika flag, was already entering at the front.

The direct road through the city was blocked by Nazi processions. The driver of our taxi, a Viennese of the old school, realized the danger we were in without being told and kept to the side streets, avoiding the groups of Nazis yelling and singing the Horst Wessel, who had been mobilized and brought out into the street not only in Vienna, but in all the villages on our route. At last we struck a clear road, but it was two hours and a half before, in pouring rain, we reached the frontier post at Berg.

An hour earlier all had been quiet here, but now the frontier guards had slung their rifles across their shoulders. Each car, as it approached, was hailed with a shout of Dim the lights. Stay in the car.

A queue of cars collected. Despite the new and unfamiliar severity, the frontier at this moment was still part of old easy-going, good-natured Austria. True, all lights were instantly dimmed, but nobody obeyed the order to remain in their cars. We too got out and, in the dark, I stumbled against frightened, shivering people, who only that afternoon had left happy homes and were now possessed with the one desperate wish to cross the frontier. Shall we get through? was the question on all lips. What are they going to do with us?

No one could get into the customs office, which was surrounded by a phalanx of armed men. The dark line of cars, growing longer every minute, did not advance a yard in half an hour. Were the usual customs formalities not being discharged? I walked up to the group of armed officials: What’s up? I asked. Why can’t we get on?

We don’t know ourselves.

One man asked ironically: Who’s boss in Vienna now?

At that moment a gleaming white car came tearing up from the direction of Vienna, hooting shrilly and with headlights full on in defiance of regulations. An enormous swastika flag was attached to the radiator. The car drew up in front of the customs house and two young civilians leaped out, with swastika bands on their arms and rifles across their shoulders. One of them cried out: I’m taking over here. A frontier guard beside us, said scornfully: Now we know who’s boss in Vienna! The two young men had already disappeared into the office. Five minutes later one of them came out. He passed from car to car, shouting into each: The frontier is closed. All cars must return to Vienna.

The peaceful lights of Bratislava looked temptingly near, but at that moment they seemed to mock us. Had our attempt at escape failed?

We returned to our seats in the car. It’s all up, Herr Bondy said, they’ll catch us. Then, recovering himself, he told the driver not to turn back, but to park along the side of the road.

One after another the cars turned around. Only one, a diplomatic car, remained. The lamps of the Nazi car threw a harsh light into its interior. In it was seated a white-faced woman with a child beside her. The two front seats were occupied by a stretcher, on which a boy lay asleep. The woman’s pale face, seen in the flickering light, was familiar, but I could not at once place it. Then suddenly I saw in memory the face of Frau Alwine Dollfuss as she bent over the coffin of her murdered husband on July 25th, 1934. The pale lady in the car was the widow of the Chancellor who had died for Austria’s independence. She was trying to escape from the country with a false passport for the sake of her children.

At that very moment howling mobs in Vienna and other Austrian towns were tearing down the inscription Dollfussplatz from the walls of buildings and smashing statues and tablets to his memory.

On the morning of March 11th not a soul in Austria had been thinking of flight. On the contrary, the great majority of the people were more hopeful than they had been for a long time. After February 12th, the day of the meeting at Berchtesgaden between Hitler and Schuschnigg, depression lay heavy on the non-Nazi elements of the population, but gloom had been dispelled on March 9th, when Doctor von Schuschnigg decreed the plebiscite. In his home town of Innsbruck the Chancellor had addressed a rousing appeal to all Austrians and called on them to vote for Austria’s independence on Sunday, March 13th. He said in that fine speech: I stand or fall by your confession of faith. Nazi threats arising from the Berchtesgaden Agreement cannot intimidate me.

Schuschnigg wanted by this plebiscite to prove to all the world that the overwhelming majority of the Austrian people were, with him, in favor of Austrian independence and that the Nazis, for all their vociferous demonstrations, really represented only a minority.

Schuschnigg’s refusal to be intimidated had had a powerful effect upon the whole people. Timid souls who after the Berchtesgaden meeting had transferred their homes to Czechoslovakia or Hungary, came hurrying back. Many business men, who should have been attending the Prague Fair, remained in Vienna to record their vote for Schuschnigg and Austria’s independence. For the past twenty-four hours the whole city had seemed on the move. Whenever I looked up from my work in the office, I saw an unbroken procession of demonstrators marching along the wide avenue that leads past the University—one of the rallying points of Nazi youth—to the government offices and the interior of the city. The Nazis too were afoot. You could pick them out afar by the large swastikas in their buttonholes—a concession wrung from the Chancellor by Seyss-Inquart, Minister for the Interior, after three days of pressure, it is said—and by their rhythmical shouts in unison, the fruit of long training and practice. Above all else, their soldierly marching betrayed them, their military bearing, showing evidence of hard drill carried on secretly, and despite police prohibitions, by these illegal formations. Even without their uniforms these young men could only be S.A. and S.S. men.

The Nazi processions were especially remarkable, however, for their small numbers, compared with the columns of the Patriotic Front, the Legitimists, the Catholics and the workers. The men who were demonstrating for Schuschnigg and against union with a Nazi Germany, were, in the great majority, fully grown men. Among the Nazis were many boys of school age or little over. Many of their leaders, marching erect at the head of the column, had only a month since been under arrest for engaging in dangerous and illegal activities. These conspirators, not a few of whom had manufactured explosives, thrown bombs into railway trains and shed blood, owed their liberty solely to the amnesty granted by Schuschnigg after the visit to Berchtesgaden. They had been released on giving an oath to abstain from all illegal political activity. Not for one day had they kept their word.

And what about their supreme chief in Austria, Herr von Seyss-Inquart? Had he received any authority from Doctor von Schuschnigg to allow his followers, even with reservations, the use of the party symbol, the Hitler greeting? Moreover, such reservations meant nothing in practice to any Nazi. Seyss-Inquart behaved as if he were loyally carrying out the orders of his superior. The latter had not personally declared the contrary, but his semi-official organ Das Neuigkeitsweltblatt stated more or less officially: Foreign parties, foreign party badges, forms of greeting, songs, flags and all activity on behalf of a prohibited party, are illegal and forbidden.

The Nazis clung to what Seyss-Inquart had allowed them. Schuschnigg’s semi-official statement was ignored. The difference of opinion between the Chancellor and the Minister for the Interior at length became so great that Seyss-Inquart was moved to expressions of pleasure when, on his arrival at Linz, the illegal S.A. and S.S. formations hung out the forbidden swastika ribbons in his honor.

For five years our papers, the Telegraph and the Echo, despite persecution of all sorts, had fought for the cause of Austria’s independence, freedom and integrity. I was proud to be editing the two newspapers most violently hated by the Nazis in Austria. They thought to insult us by referring to them as penny-a-liners, but it was their popular character that served us best, for how else could they come into the hands of the mass of the people? Four times every day their names were cried by more than a thousand newsvendors and hardly an issue appeared that did not publicly denounce the underground campaign of illegality that was being carried on against the government. A large part of our morning mail had long consisted of threatening letters from Nazis, aimed at each of us individually and at the newspaper concern as such. These threats were of the most diverse kind; our enemies even went to the expense of sending us printed cards on which we were kindly invited to notice certain trees in the Ringstrasse on which we should one day hang.

The editorial staff comprised all the different shades of political opinion which were supporting Doctor von Schuschnigg in his defense of Austrian independence, though the members did not necessarily subscribe to the whole of his program. It included personal friends of the Chancellor, strong Catholics, leading Legitimist writers and acknowledged representatives of the working class. It was a fighting force of mixed Conservatives and Liberals, whose constant aim it was to warn the public of the danger that National Socialism spelled for Austria and the whole of Europe.

For instance, Count Curt von Strachwitz, my companion in flight, had ever since 1933 been fighting National Socialism as a member of the Austrian aristocracy, and was an intimate friend of Gerlich, the Munich publicist, who was assassinated on June 30th of that year. Von Strachwitz spent ten months in Bavarian jails.

It should here be emphasized that at no time did our papers attack either the German Reich or Germanism as such. Our campaign was directed against National Socialism and, especially, against its aggressive and illegal representatives in Austria.

During the last days of Austrian independence the Telegraph and the Echo placed themselves at the service of the plebiscite. Other matters ceased for the time being to exist for us and at our editorial meetings, held twice a day, the one important international question was the attitude which the great European Powers would adopt towards the plebiscite. We wanted to know, and we wanted our readers to know, whether London, Paris and Rome intended to strengthen Schuschnigg’s hand and help him in a crisis. Most of the reports that came in encouraged this view.

Throughout a large part of the night of Thursday-Friday (March 10th-11th) I had been discussing the foreign aspects of the plebiscite with politicians of all shades and with friends and colleagues. At half past seven in the morning a call came through from our correspondent in London. This is what I