Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis полностью

Hitler had, with the Anschluß, created ‘Greater Germany’ (‘Großdeutschland’), now incorporating his homeland. As Goebbels’s diary entry, just noted, indicates, he was impatient for more. He had once seen himself as the ‘drummer’, paving the way for the ‘great leader’ to follow. He had then come to see himself as that ‘great leader’, rebuilding Germany, ‘nationalizing’ the masses for the great future conflict. Would he live to see the creation of the Great Germanic Reich, embracing all Germans and dominating the continent of Europe, himself? He had doubted it. Perhaps a later ‘great leader’ would be needed to complete the task. But from 1936 onwards, he was sure, Europe was ‘on the move’; the conflict would not be long delayed. By late 1937 he was envisaging expansion in the foreseeable future. The Anschluß now suggested to him that the Great Germanic Reich did not have to be a long-term project. He could create it himself. But it had to be soon. The incorporation of Austria had seriously weakened the defences 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.

The Anschluß did not just set the roller-coaster of foreign expansion moving. It gave massive impetus to the assault on ‘internal enemies’. Early arrivals in Vienna had been Himmler and Heydrich. The repression was ferocious — worse even than it had been in Germany following the Nazi takeover in 1933. The Austrian police records fell immediately into the Gestapo’s hands. 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’.¹⁵⁵

Many other Jews were manhandled, beaten, and tortured in horrific ordeals by Nazi thugs, looting and rampaging. Jewish shops were plundered at will. Individual Jews were robbed on the open streets of their money, jewellery, 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.¹⁵⁶

The pent-up fury of the Nazi mobs threatened to explode into a full-scale pogrom. The Daily Telegraph’s long-standing correspondent in Vienna, G.E.R. Gedye, described the menacing atmosphere: ‘As I crossed the Graben [one of the main streets in the centre of Vienna] to my office, the Brown flood was sweeping through the streets. It was an indescribable witches’ sabbath — stormtroopers, lots of them barely out of the schoolroom, with cartridge belts and carbines, the only other evidence of authority being swastika brassards, were marching side by side with police turncoats, men and women shrieking or crying hysterically the name of their leader, embracing the police and dragging them along in the swirling stream of humanity, motor-lorries filled with stormtroopers clutching their long-concealed weapons, hooting furiously, trying to make themselves heard above the din, men and women leaping, shouting, and dancing in the light of the smoking torches which soon began to make their appearance, the air filled with a pandemonium of sound in which intermingled screams of: “Down with the Jews! Heil Hitler! Heil Hitler! Sieg Heil! Perish the Jews!…”’¹⁵⁷

‘Hades had opened its gates and released its basest, most despicable, most unpure spirits,’ was how the esteemed playwright and writer Carl Zuckmayer, his own works banned in Germany since 1933, described the scene. Vienna had transformed itself, in his eyes, ‘into a nightmare painting of Hieronymus Bosch’.¹⁵⁸

One seventeen-year-old Jew later recalled his own experience, only a short few weeks after being part of a fun-loving crowd enjoying the dancing, drinking, and merriment of the Viennese carnival: ‘I rushed to the window and looked out into Nußdorferstraße… Then the first lorry came into sight. It was packed with shouting, screaming men. A huge swastika flag fluttered over their heads… Now we could hear clearly what they were shouting: “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer!” they were chanting in chorus, followed by “Ju-da verr-rrecke! Ju-da verr-rrecke!” (“Per-rish Judah!”)… I was still looking out into Nußdorferstraße when I suddenly heard a muffled shout from right below our window. I craned my neck and saw an Austrian policeman, a swastika brassard already over his dark green uniform sleeve, his truncheon in his fist, lashing out with berserk fury at a man writhing at his feet. I immediately recognized that policeman. I had known him all my life…’¹⁵⁹