THE RAPE OF AUSTRIA
By DAVID THOMSON
T is five years ago this week-end since Hitler made his first armed conquest of a foreign country, and that country was Austria. The Austrian people have suffered Nazi domination longer than any other people in Europe except the Germans themselves. The Jews of Austria were the first Jews in Europe, after those of Germany, to know the terror of the S.S. thugs. Yet because of the largely fortuitous fact that Austria was incorporated into the greater German Reich in time of nominal peace in Europe, her nationals abroad are still classed as enemy aliens, she has no exiled government to take its seat at the council-tables of the United Nations, no armed forces to take a proud place in the front rank of the Allied armies. Little is popularly known of the activities of her "underground front," which certainly exists, because she has no official organisation for disseminating information abroad. The lights went out in Austria five years ago, and the pall of darkness which shrouded her frontiers then has not been lifted since. Let us, on this tragic anniversary, recall and sympathise with the fate of six million people. Behind the course of the present war can be traced the distorted skeleton of Hitler's ambitious plans for world domination: the isola- tion and encirclement of France by the end of 1939; the end of the war in the West by the close of 1940; the annihilation of Russian power by 1941; the isolation of the United States by 1942. Things have not gone according to plan, and his pattern of conquest has been dislocated ; but it can be traced, like the shadowy outline of an X-ray plate. And the preliminaries of the programme are sharply defined, because they did succeed and had been stated with brutal frankness in Mein Kampf. He there considered how "by a sudden stroke Germany could free herself from an unfavourable strategical position." This meant, in the territorial conditions of post- war Europe, seizing first the Rhineland so as to make possible the Siegfried Line for defence and the Rhenish springboard for attack, and secondly Austria, so as to open up the road to the Balkans. Strategic considerations dictated this two-pronged attack in the South-West and the South-East, and personal wade reinforced his decision. Hitler never made any secret of his determination to incorporate Austria at the earliest chance. "Fate decided," he boasted, "that Brannan on the Inn should be my birthplace. This little town lies on the frontier between the two German States, the reunion of which we younger men at any rate regard as our life's work, to be accomplished by every means in our power." He tried without success in 1934, but Britain, France and Italy affirmed their intention to preserve Article 80 of the Treaty of Versailles, and to maintain "Austria's independence and integrity in accordance with the relevant treaties." Mussolini's troops on the Brenner proved a strong enough deterrent in 1934.
But two years later he was back on the attack, and made an agree- ment with Austria whereby he recognised "the full sovereignty of the Austrian Federal State" and renounced any designs of internal interference. The Austrian Government allowed, in return, a limited freedom of action to Nazi organisations, and that sold the pass. By January, 1937, Hitler was planning, through his agent Dr. Tavs, another attack on the life of the victim. Again he was foiled, for Dr. Schuschnigg arrested Tavs in time to forestall the plot of a
coup d'etat. Hitler bided his time until the winter of 1938. Schuschnigg was browbeaten at Berchtesgaden into admitting
Seyss-Inquart to the Ministry of the Interior. The Trojan horse
was within the gates, and soon many armed men appcared, ready to conduct that internal putsch which should coincide with the armed
threat from without. Schuschnigg made the fateful decision to hold a plebiscite on the issue of Austrian independence. The complete answer to the contention that the Austrian people as a whole
wanted the Anschluss was provided by Hider himself in his urgent demand that the plebiscite should be withheld. In the hope of preventing armed invasion Schuschnigg resigned. Seyss-Inquart opened the gates to the troops of the Reich. The day before the plebiscite was to have been held Nazi troops had reached Vienna, and Hider entered Linz, where in the pre-war years he had failed his school-certificate examination.
It is only necessary to recall these events to dispel any superstition that the people of Austria have chosen the Anschluss. They have never been given the chance to refuse it. That chance must surely be given them when the liberation of their soil becomes possible. The restoration of Austrian independence cannot lapse by default, and by persistence in regarding Hitler's earliest victims as enemy aliens on a par with the peoples of Hungary or Bulgaria. Seyss-Inquart is the prototype of all later Quislings. The recurrent complaints and threats of Baldur von Schirach and the other Nazi Gauleiter of Austria are eloquent testimony to the persistent sabotage and go- slow activities of Austrian workers and peasants. The Prime Minister has promised that "in the victory of the Allies free Austria shall find her honoured place." A year ago the State Department in Washington announced that "Austrians will not be treated as enemies, even if they have not become American citizens. . . . Austria is not being treated as National-Socialist territory, but as a State which, like Czechoslovakia, Poland or Norway has been con- quered by the Third Reich." Britain has not yet taken that logical step, and British opinion remains little concerned for the future of Austria.
There are inevitable difficulties in definite Allied commitments given to any exiled Government. It is, in the nature of things, impossible to know how representative of national opinion such Governments may be after three or more years of separation. But Austria has no Government in exile. There are only Austrians in exile. In some ways this simplifies the problem. They can have no claim whatever to speak for the Austrian people as a whole, and no such claim should be admitted. But they have the natural claim of all human refugees from Nazi persecution not to be treated as enemies of the United Nations. There would seem to be small obstacle to the fullest official recognition of this claim at an early date. It would be an earnest of the important principle that in Britain's eyes, Nazi crimes do not diminish in damnability as they recede in time.
Previous page
