Authors: Giles MacDonogh
There were three huge Jewish concerns that had eluded him to date: the empires of the Rothschild, Petschek, and Weinmann families. The acquisition of these was made all the more difficult for their international ramifications. Shortly before he left for Vienna, Göring had had a letter from Queen Mary of Great Britain asking him to intercede in favor of Louis Rothschild. Her appeal would fall on deaf ears: Göring was more interested in getting his hands on Rothschild’s money than anyone. The Rothschilds owned businesses in Austria, France, and Czechoslovakia, and the assets were divided up among branches of the family in Vienna, Prague, and Paris. Sensing danger, the Rothschilds had transferred ownership of their Witkowitz steelworks to London in 1937, together with its Swedish subsidiary. The company was now British. Baron Louis was being held as a hostage in the Hotel Metropole until a means could be found of giving the company to Göring. Nevertheless, Göring would not even get close until German troops occupied rump Czechoslovakia a year later, and only then by paying around a third of the asking price of £10 million. The Rothschilds agreed to the deal chiefly to liberate Louis and also because the Czech works were now effectively imprisoned too. The deal was still not tied up when war broke out, leaving the Germans with no claim to the Swedish subsidiary and in illegal possession of the Czech works.
Keppler’s time was taken up with the appropriation of Jewish big business. He had cut his teeth on the holdings of coal baron Ignaz Petschek. Old Ignaz had died in 1934, and the firm was in the hands of the founder’s heirs. Several non-Jewish firms were interested but were only prepared to pay a percentage of the company’s worth. In July Göring ordered the Aryanization of 200 million RM of Petschek property in Germany. The Petschek empire owed some 30 million RM in taxes, which proved the lever for the appropriation of the whole business. When Germany walked into the Sudetenland, the Nazis grabbed the firm’s headquarters in Aussig. The foreign minister of the rump Czech state, Frantisek Chvalkovsky, promised his help in tracking down the money. The business was eventually split between Göring and Flick.
In Austria, Keppler “Aryanized” the Hirtenberg weapons factory and the mammoth Bunzl & Biach paper concern. Göring’s problem was that he had come two weeks too late to catch the smaller fry. Many valuable Jewish possessions had already disappeared into other people’s pockets. The Viennese wanted the money for themselves and were even refusing to pay their debts to Jewish businesses, which led to a further shortfall in Göring’s expectations. It was important that the state itself should receive the Jewish businesses at the lowest price and have the ability to sell them to respectable interested parties at a profit.
In the event, the new Vermögensverkehrsstelle (Office for the Traffic of Assets) was helpless in the face of the Viennese desire to plunder their Jews. When the Office sought to find out what had happened to the fortunes of their victims, it discovered that the money had disappeared during the “wild” time, and there was no hope of relocating it. From now on the Nazi authorities had to make sure that they got there first. This put Göring’s plans on a collision course with Eichmann’s, who wanted the Jews out as quickly as possible and was prepared to use the money from the rich to finance the departure of the poor. Göring desired that money for himself. The result was a push-me, pull-me situation whereby the Jews were being held back from emigration until they could be proved to have turned over their assets. Their passports were therefore impounded until they had paid their dues to the conquerors.
The Jews were feeling the heat from Austria’s new masters. This is borne out by the figures: In January that year there had been 88 suicides, of whom 5 were Jews; in February 62 and 4 Jews; in March 213 of whom 79 Jews; in April 62 of the 138 suicides were Jews. Suicide among Viennese Gentiles was also a daily occurrence. An anti-Nazi Colonel Deloge had been offered the editorship of a pro-Nazi organ. He was found dead with a revolver in his hand and a note that read “I cannot serve the Godless.” A senior judge called Meyer poisoned himself and his wife and four children. Before he died he put up a sign in his window saying, “I cannot take responsibility for bringing up my family in the spirit of atheism and crime. God forgive me!”
Another package of measures introduced by Göring’s ministry was meant to cure the unemployment problem in Austria. Jobs were to be created on the German model: New fast roads, dams, and motorways were to be built; the mines were to be developed; there was to be a reform of agriculture with improvements to the soil; new cooperative dairies were to be created; new housing was to be made available. This was meant to lure the old Socialists over to the Nazi side. Giving them work would make them the new brooms superior to the “Blacks” (or Corporate State-ists) they had replaced.
WITH AUSTRIA in the bag, and no blood spilled on the German side at least, Hitler proceeded to his next territorial objective mentioned to the service chiefs: Czechoslovakia. A creation of Versailles, Czechoslovakia had begun life in the rosy light of the idealistic conception of its founder, Tomás Masaryk. The Allies had bundled a number of incoherent peoples together. In Yugoslavia there was an overwhelming Slavic majority in all its constituent parts (even if they didn’t necessarily get on with one another), but in Czechoslovakia the non-Slavic element was more than a third. For a while there was a small degree of accommodation, but matters changed after Masaryk’s retirement in 1935, when Edvard Beneš took over as head of state. Beneš was opposed to any accommodation with Germany over its non-Slavic minorities.
The Czechs and the Slovaks were both Slavs, but they had no previous history of cooperation. Prague had been ruled from Vienna, while Bratislava (Pressburg) was a Hungarian city, ruled from Budapest. In practice the Czechs looked down on their rustic cousins to the east. The two minorities that rocked the boat the most were the Germans in the Czech lands and the Magyars who had been stranded in the Slovak provinces. There were three and a half million Germans in western Czechoslovakia, living mostly in northern Bohemia (the so-called Sudetenland) and southern Moravia. There was also a small but prominent minority in Prague and Brno (Brünn) and a number of islands deep in the Czech-speaking core, such as Iglau, south of Prague.
The Hungarians were mostly to be found in southern Slovakia, disgruntled at their estrangement from their motherland and at the fact that Versailles had awarded Pressburg—the coronation capital of Hungary—to Czechoslovakia, henceforth to be known by its Slovak name of Bratislava. Ragbag it might have been, but Czechoslovakia had acquired considerable strengths since 1919: The French had guaranteed its borders in 1925 and the Soviet Union ten years later—although the Soviets required the French to act first. The Czech flirtation with the Soviet Union, however, sealed its fate in the eyes of some Western conservatives, who would rather have seen the Germans occupy the country than Bolshevism establish an outpost in Central Europe. Even without the promised Soviet aid, however, Czechoslovakia also had a powerful army, an exemplary chain of border defenses (all of them in the German-speaking regions in the north and none facing Austria in the south), and a thriving arms industry.
Hitler intended to intervene on behalf of the German-speaking minority in the Sudetenland. Though Goebbels had been let in on his plans, most of Hitler’s entourage did not learn of them until the end of May. Hitler had, however, already taken the trouble to square things with the Yugoslav minister Milan Stojadinovitsh on January 17. He did not want the Yugoslavs walking into Hungary if the latter came to his aid in Czechoslovakia. From Halifax he had learned that the British had already looked at the problem and decided—realistically enough—that military intervention on their part was practically meaningless. The most they could do was starve the Germans out with a naval blockade, which would require two to three years to take effect.
On March 28, Ribbentrop, Werner Lorenz (who was responsible for ethnic Germans), Hess, and an impressive bevy of diplomats met the Sudeten German leader Konrad Henlein, whom Germany had been subsidizing since 1935. This Czech “führer” was a gym teacher, scoffed at in SS circles for suspected homosexuality. Hitler had told Henlein to refuse all blandishments from Prague, for the Czechs were now becoming aware that what had previously been an annoying domestic matter had more serious implications. The Anschluss had also raised the Sudetenländers’ hopes of becoming part of Greater Germany, and there had been Nazi demonstrations in some of the smaller, German-speaking towns. The Nazis hoped for post hoc verbal protests of the sort delivered after March 12. Then on March 29 Goebbels flew to Vienna. From the aircraft he could just make out a large chunk of Czechoslovakia. “Just wait!” he wrote.
PROTEST OVER the treatment of General Fritsch had given birth to a new opposition within the old German elite, which would put pressure on army command to eliminate Hitler. The two most important dissenters were Admiral Canaris in military intelligence and Ernst von Weizsäcker in the German foreign office. Although Canaris had little questioned Hitler’s government at first, he became increasingly anti-Nazi with time. When he recruited the Austrian military intelligence man Erwin von Lahousen-Vivremont after the Anschluss, he warned him, “You may not, under any pretext, admit to this section . . . or take on your staff any member of the NSDAP, the Storm Troopers or the SS, or even an officer who sympathizes with the Party.”
Canaris communicated with the chief of staff, Ludwig Beck, through Colonel Hans Oster, a Christian monarchist who had fallen foul of the army after a bedroom scandal. He was outspoken in his opposition to Hitler, whom he referred to as “the pig,” and made no bones about the fact he needed to be slaughtered. It was Oster who had recruited Beck, probably as a direct result of the Fritsch affair. Many others rallied to the cause for similar reasons, even some who on the face of it seemed unlikely opponents to the regime, such as the Berlin police chief, Helldorf, a onetime antisemitic thug and playboy who now had access to all sorts of useful material from the police files.
Another of Oster’s key contacts was Hans von Dohnányi, a departmental chief in the Abwehr. Dohnányi was part of the legal team defending Fritsch at his “court of honor.” Dohnányi painstakingly assembled material on the crimes of the Nazi state, which he stored in an old filing cabinet in the corner of his office. Neither he nor Oster took much care to conceal their activities. Dohnányi was also instrumental in bringing in a host of like-minded contacts, starting with his own relatives by marriage, the Bonhoeffers.
Ernst von Weizsäcker was the permanent undersecretary of state at the Auswärtiges Amt, or German foreign office, in the Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin. His concern over Hitler’s aggressive foreign policy led him to secure appointments for like-minded persons in German embassies and legations and to maintain contacts with Canaris. Two of his most trusted diplomatic sources were the Kordt brothers (see chapter 2). Ulrich von Hassell, the sacked ambassador to Rome, was another foreign policy expert. He was sponsored by the industrial magnate Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach’s son-in-law, Thilo von Wilmowsky, and his position as advisor to a European economic think tank afforded the cover he needed to travel. Both Hassell and Beck were brought together by the venerable Mittwochsgesellschaft or Wednesday Society, together with other opponents to the regime such as the Prussian economics minister, Johannes Popitz, and the economist Jens Jessen.
That spring, the former mayor of Leipzig, Carl Goerdeler, went to London. Goerdeler had been suggested as a successor to Brüning as chancellor in the Weimar Republic and was a universally respected politician. He served the Third Reich as a commissar for price control and managed to tolerate the regime inasmuch as it furthered his own causes. He was not enamored of the Left and lived in profound fear of Soviet Russia. As a former deputy mayor of Königsberg, he wanted to see a revision of the Polish border drawn at Versailles and Danzig regain its place in the Reich. He had resigned from Leipzig town hall in 1937 at the removal of the statue of Mendelssohn and the failure to place a church at the center of a new housing estate. He was kept in funds by the Stuttgart industrialist Robert Bosch, which allowed him to carry out his work abroad. Goerdeler’s “grand tour” started in June 1937, taking in various parts of Europe and the Americas. In March and April 1938 he was off again, this time traveling only to France and Britain. In August he went on another trip, this time to Switzerland and the Balkans.
His problem, however, was discretion—or lack of it. He was distinctly verbose and insisted on writing extensive reports, which were copied to hosts of people. While he was in London, he revealed the fact that he had had some assurance from Brauchitsch that the general would confront Hitler over his failure to rehabilitate Fritsch after the court of honor dismissed the case as a pack of lies. The loose talk proved too much for the fickle Brauchitsch, who ran to Hitler to clear his name of involvement with the frondeurs. The gaffe threatened to blow Goerdeler’s cover too, as his mission was under the aegis of Canaris and Weizsäcker.
As it was, Goerdeler had made the trip with former Chancellor Brüning. Brüning had thought Chamberlain a nonstarter but was anxious to put Goerdeler together with Churchill, and a talk was arranged in Sussex on April 3 at the house of some English friends. At the last moment a suspicious telephone call scotched the meeting. It eventually transpired there was a Gestapo agent in the household. The lunch went ahead without Goerdeler. Brüning was able to fill Churchill in on recent events in Germany.
At the same time as Goerdeler emerged as the civilian leader of the opposition, Ludwig Beck moved into the position of military chief. Beck was opposed to Hitler’s military “adventures,” but he was probably less outraged by some of the border revisions that Hitler was to make. Few if any Germans believed that the Versailles settlement was just.