1938 (38 page)

Goebbels did not want the foreign press to make too much of the story, and played it down. However, as much as Goebbels might have hoped to conceal the new persecution of the Church in Austria, Bürckel answered Innitzer in his speech on the Heldenplatz in Vienna on the 13th. He denounced the Church, and the crowd carried banners with the legend “String up the priests!” At 10 PM that same day a mob of twenty or thirty people attacked the Cistercians in Lilienfeld, breaking 487 panes of glass while they claimed to be searching for weapons. One of the men told the monks, “You have Innitzer to thank for this.” On October 17 all religious schools were closed, including Austria’s oldest academy—the monastic
Gymnasium
in Kremsmünster. In rural Württemberg there was still confusion as to the level of participation in business life allowed to the Jews. Since February it had been unclear as to whether the Jews were allowed to trade in local markets. As far as farmers were concerned, as long as they came to market, they were happy to carry on doing business with them. A formal prohibition was only issued in October.

Hitler’s anger over Munich had not abated. At the opening of the Westmark Gau’s new theater, Hitler made what Hassell called an “incomprehensibly rude” speech in Saarbrücken on the 9th. He attacked Duff Cooper—who had resigned from the cabinet over Munich—Eden, and Churchill as warmongers and expressed his resentment at Munich and foreign interference in the question of the German Jews. He accused his British critics of behaving like “governesses” and reveled in their problems in Palestine. The speech was concluded with a performance of
The Flying Dutchman
.

Outside Germany it was thought that the speech was a signal he would soon be on the march again. Goebbels had been present and found the reaction to the speech in the foreign press hard to understand: “It wasn’t at all aggressive and most of it was given off the cuff.” He reported that his master had arrived “tired and weary” and full of his impressions of the Sudetenland. Hitler told his minister that having seen the Czech bunkers, he now realized that they would have cost much blood, and he believed he had done the right thing, “and we will swallow this Czecho one day. We have to free the road to the Balkans.”

The one consolation for Hitler was the new theater, a representative Nazi-style building designed by Paul Baumgarten, and he promptly decided that Baumgarten should draw up the designs for the theater in his city of Linz. Hitler retired to Bad Godesberg, where he met up with the RAM on the 12th. The German Foreign Office was to issue a statement that that the country had no further territorial demands in Bohemia and Moravia.

He traveled from there to the Berghof. Goebbels was still in the doghouse, and Hitler was arbitrating between him and Magda. On the 23rd he was summoned to his master, where the couple’s heads were knocked together. Goebbels resigned himself to his fate like a chastened cur: “I submit and arrange my personal wellbeing and happiness in the interests of the state and the people.” It was the Führer who “remade the marriage” and ordered the photographs to be taken for the press of the happy reconciliation rather than his humiliated propaganda chief. A picture on the front page of the
Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung
showed the three of them together. Only Hitler was smiling.

When he wasn’t too cross with Goebbels, he spoke to him about future plans. “In the distant future he sees a really difficult fight ahead, probably with England [
sic
].” At a birthday party Hitler told guests that all Germans were behind him. “Only the ten thousand in the upper stratum have any doubts.” The French ambassador, François-Poncet, went to Berchtesgaden to say farewell to Hitler on the 17th. The French had been alarmed by the Saarbrücken speech and were now seeking a Franco-German declaration that would tie Hitler’s hands. There must have been a worry in the Quai d’Orsay that Hitler would snatch Alsace-Lorraine. From the German side, it was thought that the moment might be ripe to split the French from the British. Saarbrücken had been rude about the latter; the French had been let off the hook. François-Poncet was very impressed by the setting and the amazing piece of engineering that was the so-called Eagle’s Nest—Hitler’s tea room 1,900 meters up, which put the Frenchman in mind of knights of the Holy Grail at Monsalvat. François-Poncet was struck by what a baffling person Hitler was. Goebbels held the diplomat in high esteem and regretted his going to Rome.

Hitler returned to Austria on October 20, slipping back across the old border into his new Moravian territories, where Groscurth listened to a speech he described as “dangerous” made to a small circle of acolytes. “It was peppered with attacks on the English [
sic
], French, and above all the Hungarians, whom he characterised as cowards and wet rags.” He did imitations of the Hungarian minister and heaped praise on the Poles and Yugoslavs. The Polish were “a great people,” Ambassador Lipski “a statesman and towering intellect.” Stojadinovitsch was also “acclaimed.” Hitler was back on form.

Maximilian Reich was released from Dachau on October 12 after six months and more of servitude. His wife in Vienna had learned that six was standard for Jewish journalists with exit papers. As a Gentile reminded him before he left, there was no such hope for the many Communists; they were there until the bitter end. A guard showed him the way to Weimar and respectfully called him
Sie
. He had time to kill at the station but was not prepared to be seduced into the buffet by well-wishers who recognized him as a former inmate. One man enquired whether he had money; another called him
Kumpel
(mate, buddy) and wondered whether he needed help. He realized that it was true what they said in the camp: There were human beings out there. He arrived at the East Station in Vienna. The family had been alerted by telegram, but his wife failed to recognize her husband. He was wearing a worn-out suit that had been lent to him; his head had been shaved and he had lost his moustache; he was also emaciated. The second time she entered the station she spotted him. She had a shirt and a suit in a case for him to change into; they had to buy a hat in the Mariahilferstrasse on the way home. At least some of his dignity had been restored.

ON OCTOBER 14 there was a significant meeting chaired by Reichsmarschall Göring at the Air Ministry in Berlin, in the course of which the minister intimated that Hitler had big plans—almost certainly war. The economy was in a parlous state. Foreign currency reserves had been used up, and work performance had dwindled; he (Göring) was now going to produce some radical solutions. Once again it was Henry VIII’s technique he was suggesting: Rob the richest part of the community. In good King Harry’s time it had been the Church, but Göring was going to get the money from the Jews by “eliminating them from the German economy.” The next day all Jewish passports were rescinded in the Altreich. This meant that they had to apply anew. It was a further measure to prevent their money from leaving the country, and it provided an opportunity for the police to make a little money on the side.

There were also changes in the administration of the Ostmark. Vienna was to be reduced to a purely administrative entity. New areas to the south were made part of a “Greater Vienna,” a city of 2 million souls. A minor pogrom also took place on October 14. The windows of seven synagogues were broken. The next day seven more were profaned in the then-Jewish Second District. On the 16th a synagogue was torched in the Tempelgasse. On the 17th two prayer houses were destroyed in the Second District. The destruction continued until the 19th.

Later that year, the IKG in Vienna produced figures for emigration up until October 15. Of the 165,000 members before March 11, 40,000 or so had already left. The largest number (2,000) had reached the United States, followed by Palestine (1,384) and Britain (1,321); 681 had gone to Switzerland and 480 to Czechoslovakia. A total of 444 had reached Argentina, 155 Australia, 136 Greece, 88 Cyprus (these last two were stage posts for Palestine), 47 Bolivia, and 9 Canada. On October 22 the
Times
reported that there were 5,000 illegal Jewish immigrants in Belgium without visible means of support. The Belgian government had decided to intern 1,400 rather than expelling them. The British were having considerable problems with Palestine at the time, with the Arabs rioting and striking against the increasing numbers of Jews. Not only were many of Germany and Austria’s Jews knocking on the door, but measures against them introduced by the Second Republic in Czechoslovakia meant that Czech Jews were also looking for asylum.

It wasn’t only the Jews who were suffering as outlaws. Germany was now doing away with most vestiges of the rule of law. On the same October 22 Hitler spoke to proclaim that “Every means adopted for carrying out the will of the Leader is considered legal, even though it may conflict with existing statutes and precedents.” In June that year all security police—the Gestapo and the Kripo (criminal police)—were enrolled in the SS and therefore became subservient to the Party through the SD. It was a process that reached its inevitable end when the police were taken away from the Ministry of the Interior and placed under the control of the SS. There were now no legal controls on the police, and divergent political opinion was ipso facto a crime.

Meanwhile, other parts of Central Europe were playing games with their Jewish citizens. Responding to the pressure exerted by its neighbors, Germany made moves to expel all its Ostjuden—generally Russian Jews who had settled as a result of the pogroms and the Russian Revolution. At the beginning of 1938 they were given weeks to get out or face imprisonment and the confiscation of their belongings. The next move was against the Romanian Jews. After the Germans moved into Austria and the Sudetenland, it was the moment to oust Czech and Slovak Jews. Camps were established for them in no-man’s-land, as their countries of origin were very reluctant to take them back.

Mutual antipathy to Jews led to the end of the state of “benevolent neutrality” that existed between Germany and Poland. There were around 3.1 million Jews in Poland—just under 10 percent of the population. Their movements were restricted, and antisemitism was endemic. Earlier that year Ciano had defined the relationship between the two countries that managed to coexist despite the fact that Poland had been re-created out of the rib of Prussia: “The Polish Corridor is accepted for an indefinite period by Germany, which actually desires to see the power of Poland increased as a means of strengthening the anti-Bolshevik barrier.”

The sticking point was the large number of Polish Jews living in Germany and smaller groups in Austria. Despite Polish citizenship, the Poles refused to readmit them, nor did they want to return, as many of them had fled to Germany in the first place to escape pogroms and persecution in Poland or the Ukraine. In 1936, the Poles had produced plans to make all Jews emigrate, and on March 31, 1938, they rescinded the citizenship of all Polish Jews who had lived abroad for more than five years. Nearly 40 percent of these expatriate Polish Jews had been born in Germany.

Such policies found favor in Poland, where successive governments had been trying to steal a march on the National Democratic or Endek Party, with its antisemitic policies and calls for ghettoes and boycotts of Jewish businesses. There was a certain rapport between Göring and Jozef Beck, the Polish foreign minister. Beck had served in the German cavalry in the First World War and liked the Germans, disliking both the French and the Russians. His policy was anti-Bolshevik, intending to maintain an equal distance between Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. The timing of the Polish move was clumsy, however, as Göring was still trying to woo the Poles into approving an alliance directed against Russia, where Germany later intended to create its empire, and was dangling the Ukraine at Poland as compensation for border changes in the west.