Stalin полностью

France, for its part, lacked a government on the day Hitler invaded Austria; the coalition cabinet had just resigned—again. (France would have sixteen governments over the eight years beginning in 1932.) British prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s special envoy to Hitler, Edward Wood, First Earl of Halifax, leader of the House of Lords, had conveyed (back on November 19, 1937) that London would not stand in his way over Austria—or the ethnic-German-majority provinces of Czechoslovakia and Danzig—provided such revisions to the Versailles Treaty came through “peaceful evolution.” In the conversation it had been Halifax, not Hitler, who first mentioned these other territories coveted by Nazi Germany.¹⁹ Chamberlain (b. 1869) did publicly warn Germany not to attack Czechoslovakia, but he privately informed Paris that London would not join a military counteraction should Hitler repeat his aggression.²⁰ France wanted it both ways as well: it publicly affirmed its resolve to defend Czechoslovakia while privately wanting British pusillanimity as an excuse not to have to live up to its own treaty obligations.²¹

Rationalizations were to hand. The Versailles peace had been pummeled by pundits as unjust and self-defeating, while state borders in Eastern Europe were widely viewed as arbitrary, including by the East Europeans themselves. What would the powers be shedding blood to defend? All true, but Austria’s disappearance should have and could have been stopped. Germany’s mobilization was so sudden, ordered by the Führer at 7:00 p.m. on March 10, 1938, that it nearly collapsed. “Nothing had been done, nothing at all,” chief of staff General Ludwig Beck fumed of the planning.²² Only the long lists of Austrian Jews had been meticulously prepared. Once across the frontier, the German army had to purchase gasoline at private Austrian petrol stations; lucky for them, it was for sale. The Austrian leader, Kurt von Schuschnigg, had decided not to resist militarily, and yet, even without resistance, and in perfect weather, nearly one in six German tanks broke down before reaching Vienna. Many of the Wehrmacht’s horses, meanwhile, lacked shoes: German farmers, forced to remit horses by quota, had turned over their most decrepit.²³ Fatefully, however, the improvised chaos of the German invasion was not immediately recognized as such. The French did not even have a military attaché on the ground to observe the near disaster.²⁴

What outsiders did see was that much of the Austrian population greeted Hitler’s show of force with euphoria: Nazi banners, Hitler salutes, flowers. By March 13, Austria was already officially a province of Germany, and the Austrian army had sworn an oath to Hitler personally. The Führer issued a decree banning all parties save the National Socialists on what had been Austrian territory. Many Jews were rounded up in Vienna, whose 176,000 citizens of that extraction (10 percent of the urban population) made it the largest Jewish city in the German-speaking world. The Gestapo arrived at Berggasse 19, the offices of Sigmund Freud, who possessed the wherewithal to get himself and some of his possessions out, to London, but others were not so lucky (his four sisters would all be murdered farther east). Much of the Austrian political class was deported to Dachau or an Austrian camp soon opened at the quarries in Mauthausen. Austrian gold and foreign currency reserves, including private holdings, were looted—780 million reichsmarks’ worth, more than Germany’s own.²⁵ On March 14, Hitler entered Vienna as conqueror, staying at the Imperial Hotel, near whose entrance he had shoveled snow many years earlier to earn a few Habsburg crowns.

For two days, Soviet newspapers did not even comment on the Nazi seizure of Austria: Pravda and Izvestiya were consumed with blaring the death sentences for Bukharin and other accused “war provocateurs.”²⁶ When Hitler delivered a rousing speech before a quarter million people on Vienna’s Heroes’ Square on March 15, 1938, in Moscow Bukharin was made to watch as the other defendants from his “trial” were shot, and then he, too, was executed. Stalin took his colored pencils to the transcript of Bukharin’s last statement in court, before it was published in the Soviet press, and crossed out several passages, including: “I accept responsibility even for those crimes about which I did not know or about which I did not have the slightest idea”; “I deny most of all the prosecutor’s charge that I belonged to the group sitting on the court bench with me, because such a group never existed!”²⁷