Authors: Giles MacDonogh
A
razzia
mopped up Austria’s Jewish journalists on the 17th, when Maximilian Reich was arrested. The Black Maria went on to pick up the others, and one of them evidently refused to come. Reich heard a shot. When the Gestapo men returned to the car, they told the driver, “The chap didn’t want to come with us. Now he can stay at home.” They laughed. Reich was taken to the Liesl, the police prison on the Elisabeth Promenade, where he found his friend the amateur boxer Willy Kurtz, the mayor, and numerous prominent Viennese.
The carnage continued unabated. On Tuesday, March 15, the critic and cultural historian Egon Friedell hurled himself from the fourth floor of his apartment block as the Nazis came to claim their game. He apparently told the Gestapo men to wait, went into his study, and shouted down to the people in the street to clear a space. It is possible they had only come in the tradition of good
Adabeis
to enjoy the spectacle of Friedell’s arrest. He had refused to flee, feeling that he would cut an absurd figure as an exile. In one account, the Gestapo men had not come for Friedell at all but to visit a maid with whom one of them was dallying. Friedell had jumped to conclusions and then to his death.
The Gestapo arrived at 19 Berggasse, the home and surgery of Sigmund Freud, and proceeded to search the flat. His daughter, Anna, was taken away for interrogation a few days later. Freud was powerful enough to be able to take his family and most of his possessions into exile when he left in June. The building Freud lived and worked in for forty years was eventually turned into a
Sammelwohnung
—a Jewish collection point—from which Jews were deported to their deaths. Freud’s four sisters were all murdered in the east.
ZUCKMAYER FINALLY left Vienna on the 15th. Wilhelm von Ketteler at the German embassy had told him that he would be safe, that the Austrian version of National Socialism would be gentle. Ketteler was almost certainly a decent man, and an opponent of National Socialism who had been involved in a plot to kill Hitler. He was murdered by the SS man Horst Böhme on Heydrich’s orders and fished out of the Danube two weeks later.
Zuckmayer reckoned his chances of escape at fifty-fifty. Everything went smoothly until he reached Salzburg. He was even able to see his own bathing hut at Henndorf and thought he could hear his dogs barking. They stopped while a troop train passed. The Austrians lowered the windows and obsequiously shouted “
Heil Hitler!
” at the conquerors. The soldiers reminded the writer of himself in 1914. They looked embarrassed at this effusion and carried on eating their soup.
Salzburg station resembled an armed camp. The cigarette woman, who had provided for Zuckmayer’s needs for years, was running after the soldiers, squawking ecstatically “
Daitsche Brieder
” (“German brothers”) and sticking cigarettes in their pockets. It was a repellent vision that made it easier for him to accept the need to quit his adoptive land. There was no passport inspection until the train stopped in Innsbruck, some three hours from the Swiss frontier, at which point a fat man in plain clothes and a swastika armband, with a police badge in his lapel, came in accompanied by two brownshirts with revolvers in their belts.
All went well until he saw Zuckmayer’s profession: writer. “Get off the train, and take your luggage.” Zuckmayer wanted to know why.
“Our Führer does not like the press.”
“I am not from the press.”
Attempts to argue with the man availed him of nothing: Zuckmayer and other “delinquents” left the train and were taken to the police station, where they sat and waited. He was angry by the time his turn came to face the interrogators, and he barked at them in military German. He threw down his German passport and continued to perform his version of an offended member of the master race. He showed them a telegram from Alexander Korda, indicating the time he was due to be in London, and noted that they were unable to construe the English. The man who had taken him from the train insisted that Zuckmayer was a writer: “That is suspicious. . . . Our Führer does not like the press.”
“But I am a screenwriter. . . . The Führer likes films.”
The man at the desk agreed that Hitler was a film fan, and he admitted that he knew Zuckmayer’s house and had swum in the lake there. “A lovely spot,” he said. Zuckmayer agreed: “What more do you need from me?”
The official rose from his desk. “In times like this errors occur, but we try to do our job. Go quickly, but through the back door. Those people out there,” he said, gesturing toward the line outside, “they won’t escape so easily. They’re all Yids.”
Zuckmayer had not got far before he heard one of the brownshirts coming up behind him. A hand was placed on his shoulder. His body went cold. The Nazi drew a small book from his pocket. Zuckmayer recognized it as the novella he had published the previous year. It was called
Ein Sommer in Österreich
(A Summer in Austria). “I have just read this. . . . Would you sign it for me?” Zuckmayer did this with the fountain pen provided. The brownshirt was standing close and leaned over him: “There will be no more ‘Summers in Austria.’ . . . Goodbye, and make sure you don’t come back. Take care at the border.” With that he clicked his heals and disappeared.
Zuckmayer got on the next train. It was stuffed to the gills with people trying to leave. He was bathed in sweat and, as he opened a carriage door, unbuttoned his coat for the first time. There was a sudden silence. A man of Jewish appearance jumped up and offered him his seat. “But that is your seat; please sit down again,” said Zuckmayer. The others moved up to create some room. Then Zuckmayer caught on: They were staring at his buttonhole. He had bought a swastika at a newsagent in Vienna. Only Party members wore swastikas in Germany, but in Austria they were on sale everywhere, and people put them on simply to tell the thugs they were not Jews. On March 11 they had cost thirty-five groschen, but the price had risen since. It was a simple device to ensure a modicum of peace, but he had done more: He had also put on his war medals, including his EK1. The combination of a Nazi and a war hero was not easy for the Jews in the carriage to decipher, but they offered him schnapps and told him of their fears at the approach of the border.
The closer they came to the frontier, the more the carriage panicked. There were constant patrols in the corridor. The doors were opened, and they were asked over and over again about how much money they had on them. They were allowed ten RM or twenty Austrian schillings, the precise sum Zuckmayer had brought with him. The playwright studied those around him: There was an Aryan soccer player with his Jewish fiancée, and a supposed general’s son—the one who had offered him schnapps—who, just before the train reached the border, literally threw all his money out of the window. A Polish woman recognized Zuckmayer and wanted to ask him about forthcoming theatrical events.
Then the train arrived in Feldkirch, and Zuckmayer’s hopes all but vanished when he saw the spotlights outside. He concentrated his mind on survival. “Everyone out with their suitcases. The train is to be evacuated.”
The station was teeming with men in black and brown uniforms. There were tables onto which the contents of suitcases were being poured out and pored over, while cases were tested for false bottoms. Everything was examined with a fine-tooth comb. Some of the passengers were being strip-searched. Zuckmayer recalled that his case contained a number of autographs by fellow writers—most of them “degenerate.” He feared the worst.
The official looked at his name for a long time, then tossed his head back as if he had been suddenly struck by lightning: “Zuckmayer? . . .
The
Zuckmayer.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean the notorious.”
“I don’t know if I am notorious, but there is certainly no other writer with my name.”
“Come with me.”
“I must stay with my luggage.”
“You don’t have to do that.” And he laughed a mocking laugh as if to say: You won’t need any luggage anymore where you are going. Zuckmayer was led away to a hut at the end of the platform. Another man was being taken away into custody. Behind the desk sat an SS man with steel-rimmed spectacles. “Carl Zuckmayer, ah ha!”
He examined his passport. It was valid for five years. Jews received theirs for six months. The SS man was vaguely aware that Zuckmayer was “racially” Jewish—his mother’s family were converts—but the passport appeared to contradict this. He reached for a printed list but could not find Zuckmayer’s name on it. “Funny. . . . I had heard something about you once, but I can’t remember now what it was. So you are not a Jew at all.”
He laughed, and Zuckmayer permitted himself a smile. He did not feel it was incumbent upon him to tell the official that his mother was born Goldschmidt. The Nazi read from the passport: “Catholic . . .
na ja.
We are going to deal with those priests too.” He became chatty and looked as if he might be going to give him back his passport. They talked about his screenplays. The Nazi had seen his latest film. Then he asked Zuckmayer if he were a member of the Party. Zuckmayer said no. Then the tone changed: “German writer and not in the Party?” Nor was he a member of the Nazi writers’ organization. Zuckmayer admitted that his works were actually banned in Germany, and then regretted it.
The SS man reacted queerly: He reached out his hand and shook Zuckmayer’s. He said he was impressed by Zuckmayer’s honesty—most of the people who came before him lied. He volunteered to smooth his way into the Party. The writer thanked him but said that would not be necessary. Zuckmayer took the opportunity to snatch his passport back and asked if he might have his luggage now.
The SS man offered to come with him, expressing the hope that there would be no difficulties occasioned by the search. Zuckmayer envisaged problems for all that: the manuscript, the autographs. He decided to open his coat again and pretend he was looking for something in his pocket. It did the trick: The Nazi wanted to know if he had been at the front, if he had held a commission. He stared at the EK1. “Then you must be a hero,” he said, staring wide-eyed at him. Zuckmayer played down his heroism but told the SS man that medals could not be bought for small change on the streets all the same. He was alluding to the price he had paid for the swastika in his buttonhole.
The SS man was now eating out of his hands. Not only did he understand the reference to the “opportunists,” he relished Zuckmayer’s wit. He bellowed out to the SS and SA men around him: They were to honor a hero with a rousing cry of “
Heil Hitler!
” They did just that, “as if I were the Führer himself.” Zuckmayer admitted to feeling like Captain von Köpenick from his own play. The SS man told his soldiers to take Zuckmayer’s cases on to the train. They had not even been examined. He countermanded the strip-search as well. He was the only person on his train to be exempted.
As the SS man took him to the station buffet to wait for the rest to pass or fail the examination, an acquaintance of Zuckmayer’s wife came up to him and identified himself. His Jewish wife was on the other train waiting in the station. She had a broken leg. Zuckmayer now chanced his luck again. Omitting to tell the SS man she was a Jewess, he said she was not able to come to the interrogation: “If you testify for these people, then it is all right,” the Nazi said. The couple were placed on the Swiss train.
There were agonizing moments before the train left. He sat in the buffet with the SS man, and they drank their way through Zuckmayer’s last twenty schillings. The Nazi told him he wanted to prove himself in the field. Zuckmayer comforted him: There would be a new war soon. He did not hate the Nazi; he pitied him. He saw him as he had seen so many, lying ashen-faced in a pool of blood. Every now and then an SA man interrupted their drinking to report a big haul in marks or valuables. Dawn was breaking when Zuckmayer’s train finally began to move, and he was able to quit his sinister companion. Only when Swiss guards entered his carriage did he know for certain: He was not going to Dachau.
Not just the Jews but all the Corporate State’s elite had been enemies of the Third Reich. Zuckmayer records that aristocrats were forced to scrub the streets because they, too, had stuck up for an independent Austria. Both the former vice chancellor and head of the Fatherland Front, Emil Fey, and the Minister of War, General Wilhelm Zehner, apparently “committed suicide.” Fey allegedly killed his wife and son first. Their bodies were removed from his flat in sealed tubes and taken to the anatomical institute. His corpse was reported to contain twenty-three bullet holes.
Göring saved the foreign minister Guido Schmidt by sending his own aircraft to collect him. Schmidt was later appointed to the board of the Hermann Göring Works. Around 15 percent of the judges were dismissed; both the minister of justice, Robert Georg Winterstein, and the senior judge Alois Osio perished in the camps. Other victims of the new broom were monarchists. Otto von Habsburg was still perceived as a threat. They naturally had no time for the upstart Hitler. Many of them were arrested and dispatched to Dachau.
THERE WERE only tiny pockets of Jews outside Vienna: some 2,000 in Styria, in the Vorarlberg just 18. There was a significant community in Burgenland, however, where 3,632 Jews inhabited seven acknowledged, protected old communities: Eisenstadt, Matersburg, Kobersdorf, Lackenbach, Deutschkreuz, Frauenkirchen, and Kittsee. They amounted to a little more than 1 percent of the population in Austria’s easternmost state, but they had lived there for several centuries, whereas many Austrian Jews had only quit the shtetls of the east a generation before.
Until 1921 the region had been a part of Hungary, and the older Jews were often in possession of Hungarian papers. The Nazis wanted to assert Burgenland’s “Germanity” before all else, and the violence against the Burgenland Jews began as soon as Schuschnigg announced his resignation. It frequently took the form of rounding them up and driving them over the nearest frontier. The Czechs, Hungarians, and Yugoslavs responded by closing the crossings. The leader of the Frauenkirchen Jews, Ahron Ernst Weis, managed to escape on a tourist visa to Palestine, while his dentist brother committed suicide. Most of those expelled found refuge in Vienna. Lauterbach and Sir Wyndham Deedes visited three families from the dusty border town of Deutschkreuz who had been expelled “with a few trifles” by the local gendarmerie. In Rechnitz there were brutal murders. Whole villages were cleared. In one, three hundred were driven from their homes. An American Quaker who witnessed the expulsions recorded: “We have never seen anything as bad as that in Germany.” The sentiment was echoed at the monthly meeting of the British Board of Deputies: “The Situation in Austria is even worse than the situation in the German Reich. What took the Nazis five years to accomplish in the Reich has been done in five weeks in Austria.”