• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1003 0

greatest extent, under Emperor Charles V in the early sixteenth century, the Hapsburg Empire ruled all of the German states, Hungary and part of the Danube Valley, the Low Countries, Spain, Spain’s territories in southern Italy, and the Spanish empire in the New World. By Napoleon’s day it had considerably shrunk, and the ruling Hapsburg at the time ended up as emperor of Austria-Hungary, an ethnic hodgepodge in the Danube Basin and the Balkans. During the 1848 revolutions and after, even this was transformed, becoming the Dual Monarchy, Empire of Austria and Kingdom of Hungary, with the intriguing title prefix, Kaiserlich und Koniglich—Imperial and Royal. The Austrian part of it was German, and the Hungarian part was essentially Slavic, though the Hungarians were Magyars.

Through the mid-nineteenth century, Austria was too weak to unify Germany under her leadership, but too strong to let anyone else do it in spite of her. This dilemma was resolved by Bismarck, who defeated Austria in 1866 and went on to pull Germany together under Prussian domination. At the end of World War I the Dual Monarchy collapsed; all the ethnic minorities seceded, then Hungary broke away, and finally, in a sort of ultimate revulsion, the Austrians seceded from their own empire. Thus there was a small German state to the south of Germany proper. The peace treaties after World War I saddled Austria with all the sins of the old empire before the war and further declared that Austria and Germany should never be united.

Adolf Hitler had been born an Austrian, and it was part of his policy right from the beginning to incorporate Austria in the Greater Reich. Through the Depression the same currents ran in Austria as elsewhere—the crash that set off the Depression actually occurred there—and there was an Austrian branch of the Nazi party, just as there were branches in other neighbors with German-speaking portions in their populations. In 1932, the League of Nations gave Austria a loan of several million dollars in return for an agreement that the country would not enter any political or economic union with Germany until 1952. The government, led by Chancellor Englebert Dollfuss, was faced with riots and violence caused chiefly by the Austrian Nazis, but by other extremist groups as well. By early 1934, Dollfuss was ruling by decree, and had dissolved all the political parties except his own, permanently alienating especially the Socialists, the last, because the strongest, group that might have withstood a Nazi takeover.

In July, there was an attempted Nazi coup, badly bungled, in which a group of Nazis seized the radio station in Vienna. Before being rounded up all they really managed to do was assassinate Chancellor Dollfuss. His place was taken by a supporter, Kurt von Schuschnigg, who continued the same policies and may well have been working toward a restoration of the exiled Hapsburgs. For a couple of years, largely under the tutelage of Mussolini, who did not want the European boat rocked while he was busy in Ethiopia, Austria and Germany got along, but by 1937, as Schuschnigg became more overtly pro-Hapsburg, Hitler reapplied the pressure, and affairs heated up again.

In February of 1938, Hitler summoned Schuschnigg to his private retreat at Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps. Under pressure the Austrian succumbed to Hitler’s demands for better treatment for the Austrian Nazis and agreed to take one of their leaders, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, into the cabinet. Through the rest of the month Hitler kept up an intense form of psychological warfare, and the situation inside Austria became increasingly tense. The Nazis demanded union with Germany. In desperation, Schuschnigg called for a plebiscite on the question of Austrian independence, whereupon Hitler lost what little patience he possessed, delivered an ultimatum, and began concentrating his troops on the frontier. Austria was in chaos, with riots everywhere and the government completely unable to preserve order. On March 11, Schuschnigg resigned, Seyss-Inquart replaced him as Chancellor, and