Hitler's Austria

Popular Sentiment in the Nazi Era, 1938-1945

Evan Burr Bukey

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780807853634, 9780807825167
• eBook ISBN: 9781469650357
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Although Austrians comprised only 8 percent of the population of Hitler's Reich, they made up 14 percent of SS members and 40 percent of those involved in the Nazis' killing operations. This was no coincidence. Popular anti-Semitism was so powerful in Austria that once deportations of Jews began in 1941, the streets of Vienna were frequently lined with crowds of bystanders shouting their approval. Such scenes did not occur in Berlin.

Exploring the convictions behind these phenomena, Evan Bukey offers a detailed examination of popular opinion in Hitler's native country after the Anschluss (annexation) of 1938. He uses evidence gathered in Europe and the United States--including highly confidential reports of the Nazi Security Service--to dissect the reactions, views, and conduct of disparate political and social groups, most notably the Austrian Nazi Party, the industrial working class, the Catholic Church, and the farming community.

Sketching a nuanced and complex portrait of Austrian attitudes and behavior in the Nazi era, Bukey demonstrates that despite widespread dissent, discontent, and noncompliance, a majority of the Austrian populace supported the Anschluss regime until the bitter end, particularly in its economic and social policies and its actions against Jews.

I

The Road to Greater Germany

MAP I. Austria, 1938

1	BEFORE THE OSTMARK

THE COUNTER-REFORMATION TRADITION IN AUSTRIA The attitudinal terrain of modern Austria owes much to the state-building process that began in the seventeenth century, an endeavor that left a legacy of myths, customs, and composite feelings that continue to shape popular sentiment. At the heart of the campaign was a crusade against the foreign and domestic enemies of the Habsburgs: the Turks and the Protestants. While the dynasty fought the Ottomans on the field of battle, it entrusted the Roman Catholic Church with the task of imposing religious and cultural unity throughout the family’s far-flung domains, including Bohemia, Moravia, and the Habsburg Hereditary Lands. This entailed what Charles Ingrao has aptly called a “graduated process of persecution.”¹ It included the expropriation of Protestant churches and assets; the expulsion of Protestant preachers and educators; the burning of heretical books and literature; and the indoctrination of the populace by militant religious orders. The Roman Church also sought to awe the masses by giving art and architecture symbolic representation in grandiose new basilicas, monasteries, and palaces. In addition, it encouraged devotional rituals, promoted sacramental pilgrimages, and placed renewed emphasis on the cult of the Blessed Virgin.²

As entire provinces of what is now the Republic of Austria had been Lutheran or Calvinist for over a century, the emotional impact of the Counter-Reformation on the lives of countless individuals was devastating. In the eyes of the authorities everyone was suspect, everyone subject to the inquisition of the confessional booth. At least 40,000 persons fled the Habsburg Hereditary Lands, among them 754 noble families. As for the rest, many remained clandestine Protestants, living in secluded Alpine valleys—particularly in Styria and Carinthia—or conforming outwardly to the dictates of the Roman Church. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of the Austrian populace embraced the restoration of Catholicism.³

There is no exact way of measuring the effect of the Counter-Reformation on the attitudes and behavior of subsequent generations of Austrians, but recent scholarship has demonstrated that the psychic legacy was both substantial and abiding.⁴ Re-Catholicization reinforced a Manichaean view of the world in which an unforgiving God sanctioned violence against clearly defined enemies: Protestants, Turks—and Jews. It imposed a dogma so uncompromising and rigid that it encouraged split-minded thinking and evasive discourse, qualities that persist to this day in Viennese conversation and behavior. The Counter-Reformation both stirred and bureaucratized spiritual life. It placed emphasis on ornamentation, color, and sensuality. It exalted hierarchy, ceremony, and splendor.⁵

These and other numinous elements added distinctive features to Austrian political culture. Among them were a predilection for florid language and ritual; an emphasis on the theatrical and aesthetic; a premium on personal relationships for protection, patronage, and advancement. All in all, the legacy of the Counter-Reformation weighed heavily on the “minds of the living” well into the twentieth century. During the First World War Friedrich Adler justified his murder of Prime Minister Karl von Stürgkh as an act of revenge against a “state made Catholic by fire and sword during the Counter-Reformation,” an order perpetually contemptuous of the thinking individual and his personal convictions.⁶ Viewed dispassionately, Robert Kann, the foremost historian of the Habsburg monarchy, concludes “the chief and far-reaching consequences of the reformatory process consisted not so much in the memories of the injuries done but in those to be avoided by a cultivation of conformism and expediency.”⁷

THE THERESIAN-JOSEPHINE LEGACY

In 1740 the self-confidence of the Habsburgs was severely shaken by Prussia’s conquest of Silesia. The challenge of an upstart Protestant power compelled the Habsburgs to undertake reforms aimed at transforming their inheritance into a uniform and efficient society, a process that both exposed their subjects to the rationalist ideas of the Enlightenment and modified the entrenched values of the Counter-Reformation. The reforms were numerous and varied. They included curtailing the labor services of the peasantry or replacing serfdom with free labor, taxing the domanial assets of the nobility, and introducing standards of merit in the armed forces and the civil service. Significant changes in education also established a tripartite system of public schooling.⁸

At the heart of the reform movement lay a recognition of the need to reassess the relationship of the Habsburgs to their subjects.⁹ This meant that Maria Theresa (1740-80) and her son Joseph II (1780-90) sponsored measures to favor manufacturers, tradesmen, and bankers and to improve the lot of the rural masses. Joseph II also sought to stanch the emigration of Protestants from the monarchy and to channel the Roman Church’s activities into ventures useful to the state. Beginning in 1781 he issued a series of decrees emancipating non-Catholics and granting a measure of civic equality to the Jews. Thereafter, the impetuous emperor quarreled with the pope, secularized one-third of the monarchy’s “utterly useless” monasteries, and directed the clergy to assume the tasks of social workers and teachers.¹⁰

If the psychic legacy of the Counter-Reformation was one of conformity, that of the Theresian-Josephist reform movement was one of ambiguity.¹¹ On the one hand, the effort indisputably stimulated education, self-improvement, and even individual thinking; it also widened opportunities and bettered the lives of the poor. Joseph II’s creation of a civil service based on merit brought government and people closer together. On the other hand, the Theresian-Josephist system meant benevolent despotism; it connoted an “enlightened police state” dominated by a monarch who ruled on behalf of the people but insisted on their active cooperation. Maria Theresa and Joseph II left a legacy of reform from above, not below.¹²

During the nineteenth century the political concept of Josephinism mingled with notions of representative government to constitute an “autocratic theory of the Liberal state.”¹³ Central European liberals identified with the enlightened emperor as an exemplar of their own reform program. They placed particular emphasis on his nationalization of the church, misrepresenting imperial measures curtailing papal prerogative as initial steps toward the establishment of a secular, anticlerical state.¹⁴

Even more consequential was their invocation of Joseph’s Germanization program, an attempt to standardize the language of the monarchy by making German the official tongue of government and commerce. When the emperor issued his linguistic decree of 1784, he was driven primarily by expediency; his argument was that German was spoken in more provinces than any other dialect or idiom and that it was more up-to-date than Latin, the official language of Hungary.¹⁵ While Joseph II may have deemed German culture superior to others of his realm, he was by no means an ethnic German nationalist. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, both German and Austrian liberals claimed to be fulfilling his mandate by demanding a unitary state in Central Europe, a constitutional German empire that would transform or supplant the polyglot Habsburg monarchy. For the German-speaking inhabitants of Austria these demands marked the beginning of an identity crisis that would bedevil them and their descendants for a century to come.¹⁶

GERMANIC NATIONALISM IN THE HABSBURG MONARCHY

Before the revolutions of 1848 the German-speaking inhabitants of the multinational Habsburg monarchy saw no contradiction in feeling both German and Austrian. During that tumultuous year students and liberal bourgeoisie enthusiastically supported the efforts of the Frankfurt Parliament to unify Germany into a nation-state. Thereafter, German nationalist feeling moderated only slighdy. This was partly because of the near success of the Frankfurt Parliament, partly because other Austro-Germans had been jolted into awareness of their own minority status by the unexpected aspirations of Italians, Czechs, and Hungarians. Suddenly, the German subjects of the emperor felt both isolated and threatened by the nationalistic aims of others. A subsequent influx of large numbers of Jewish immigrants to Vienna further irritated xenophobic sensibilities. Still, it was not until Otto von Bismarck expelled Austria from German affairs after the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 that Austro-Germans suffered a real crisis of identity. Thereafter, both public and private life would be suffused by what the Social Democratic leader Otto Bauer called “the conflict between our Austrian and German character.”¹⁷

The most influential exponent of Germanic nationalism in the Austrian monarchy was Georg Ritter von Schönerer. He founded a Pan-German movement that was at once anti-Habsburg, antiliberal, anti-Catholic, anticapitalist, antisocialist, and, above all, anti-Semitic. Resorting to fiery rhetoric and extremist behavior, he attracted large numbers of university students as well as members of the preindustrial middle strata (Mittelstand) of artisans and shopkeepers who felt threatened by Jewish competition or technological modernization or both. Under Schönerer’s influence anti-Semitism became much more central to German nationalism in Austria, especially because it seemed to provide a scientific explanation of societal woes to a generation already steeped in Darwinian and Wagnerian ideas.¹⁸

At the same time, Schönerer failed to expand his political base to mobilize peasants and industrial workers, although in Upper Austria and the Wald-viertel there was some success among farmers. His failure was due partly to the persistence of the restricted franchise until 1907. It was due also to his own autocratic, intemperate character, a personality that tended to alienate close associates and outrage potential voters, most notably in 1888 when he stormed into the offices of the Neues Wiener Tagblatt to assault the editor with a walking stick—an incident that cost Schönerer both a jail sentence and the loss of his parliamentary seat.¹⁹

By 1901 the Pan-German movement had largely faded into oblivion, able to garner only 40,000 votes in the parliamentary elections of that year. All the same, Schönerer had left a lasting impact in German-speaking Austria, exalting a vituperative “sharper tone” in politics and giving respectability to antipatriotic ideas of populist nationalism and ethnic hatred. He also inspired a generation of devoted followers who achieved success as attorneys, civil servants, politicians, and businessmen, especially in the provinces.²⁰ For nearly a quarter of century they and other German Nationalist notables dominated the municipal life of cities such as Innsbruck, Graz, and Linz, where they both exploited and molded popular attitudes.²¹ That Hitler derived many of his ideas from Schönerer is well known by scholars; that in Linz he grew up under the auspices of patrician elites espousing similar views is less well known although absolutely essential in understanding part of the mental world of his homeland.²²

Schönerer’s teachings also survived in the clubby associational subculture of urban Austria, particularly in fashionable athletic clubs like the Deutscher Turnerbund and Deutsche Turnschaft, organizations whose statutes promoted martial values and excluded Jews. Much the same was true of more specialized sporting groups and mountaineering societies such as the Austrian Alpenverein. Nor was the cult of Germanic nationalism confined to the playing fields and locker rooms of the small-town bourgeoisie; choral societies, literary circles, and civic-minded groups also paid homage to the German Reich and German race. In mixed-ethnic areas or border regions, where German speakers had good reason to feel besieged, school boards and teachers associations were particularly outspoken and shrill in their hostility to outsiders, particularly Jews.²³

THE GERMAN WORKERS PARTY

Invariably, Schönerer’s gospel of prejudice and ethnic hatred trickled down to nonsocialist elements of the working classes. In the 1880s the sudden migration of desperately poor Czech workers into the rapidly developing towns of northern Bohemia led to the spontaneous founding of unions of German-speaking miners, textile workers, typesetters, and railwaymen. Adopting “Aryan” paragraphs, they demanded protective legislation against “unskilled” Czech labor and the nationalization of certain key industries. In 1904 representatives of these unions met in Trautenau (Trut-nou) on the Bohemian-Sile...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations and Glossary
• PART I. THE ROAD TO GREATER GERMANY
• PART II. FROM ANSCHLUSS TO WAR
• PART III. THE AUSTRIAN PEOPLE AND HITLER’S WAR
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index