Both Himmler and Heydrich were far too preoccupied establishing a reign of terror in Austria with the aid of their allies, the Austrian Nazis, to be in attendance at the Court during 17 and 18 March. They left their Gestapo agents to survive as best they could. But both of them had been deeply concerned during January and February; Heydrich’s wife has testified to her husband’s tension during this time, and Schellenberg has told the story of how Heydrich, in a fit of nerves, asked him to dine at his office and came armed because he expected the Army to ‘start marching from Potsdam’. Himmler’s reactions were even more extraordinary. Describing Himmler during the earlier stages of the enquiry, Schellenberg wrote:
‘I witnessed for the first time some of the rather strange practices resorted to by Himmler through his inclination towards mysticism. He assembled twelve of his most trusted S.S. leaders in a room next to the one in which von Fritsch was being questioned and ordered them all to concentrate their minds on exerting a suggestive influence over the general that would induce him to tell the truth. I happened to come into the room by accident, and to see these twelve S.S. leaders sitting in a circle, all sunk in deep and silent contemplation, was indeed a remarkable sight.’25
Himmler was sufficiently prepared for the Austrian putsch to have ready a new and special uniform of field grey in which to invade Austria. Accompanied by his staff and S.S. bodyguards, all heavily armed, he flew south to Aspern aerodrome, near Vienna. With him was his adjutant Wolff, Walter Schellenberg, who had been in charge of co-ordinating intelligence reports from Austria, and the Austrian official in the S.D., Adolf Eichmann, now a specialist in Jewish affairs, who had prepared lists of the large number of Austrian Jews Himmler was determined should be given no chance to cause trouble.26
The weather was bad and made the flight to Vienna in the overloaded plane unpleasant, and Schellenberg records that Himmler discussed with him the administration of the new state of Ostmark, as Austria was now to be called. They were standing in the rear of the plane when Schellenberg noticed Himmler was leaning against the aircraft door and that the safety-catch was undone. He grasped him by his coat and flung him aside. When Himmler had recovered from the shock, he thanked Schellenberg and said he would be happy to do the same and protect his life for him some day.
Himmler and his entourage arrived at Aspern aerodrome before daybreak. They were uncertain of their reception in Vienna, but by the time they had arrived the struggle for Austria was already over. Hitler’s troops had crossed the frontier overnight and on behalf of the provisional government orders had been given by Seyss-Inquart to the Austrian Army that they were to offer no resistance to the invaders. Himmler, who was Hitler’s most senior representative in Austria, was met by the Austrian Chief of Police, Michael Skubl, whose feelings at having this duty to perform must have been bitter, since he had been appointed by Dollfuss on the very day of his murder by the Nazis. Himmler hurried by car to the Chancellery in Vienna to confer with Kaltenbrunner, the head of the Austrian S.S. Following exactly the procedure he had originated for himself in Germany, Himmler dismissed Skubl and put the police in the charge of Kaltenbrunner. Leaving the immediate control of Vienna in this man’s hands, Himmler left by air for Linz to supervise the reception to be given Hitler that afternoon in the town where he had lived as a child. With him went Seyss-Inquart, now the new Nazi Chancellor of Austria. On the same day Heydrich joined Kaltenbrunner in Vienna, and the Austrian capital began to experience the savagery of Nazi control.
The hysteria of Hitler’s reception in Austria — he had arrived on Saturday, and on Sunday with tears in his eyes had become President of Austria, which was created ‘a province of the German Reich’ by a legal enactment hurriedly put together — did not stop Himmler from warning the Führer against entering Vienna until every security precaution had been taken. He had himself returned there from Linz and set up his headquarters in the Imperial Hotel, while Heydrich commandeered the Metropole for the S.S. and S.D. headquarters. Together the unholy team went to work, Himmler and Heydrich of Germany, Kaltenbrunner and his colleague Odilo Globocnik of Austria.
Kaltenbrunner, who was in 1943 to be appointed successor to Heydrich by Himmler and who after the war was to stand trial at Nuremberg, was a lawyer who had turned to political intrigue. He was a huge man, coarse and tough, with small, penetrating eyes set in a wooden, expressionless face. He was excitable, and would slap the table with his hard, clumsy hands, which were discoloured with nicotine and reminded Schellenberg of the hands of a gorilla. He had joined the S.S. in 1932 and had been imprisoned by the Dollfuss Government for his activities. His associate Globocnik came from Trieste; he had been involved in robbery with violence and he continued to mix his criminal activities with politics even after Hitler had appointed him Gauleiter of Vienna.
The campaign of terror launched by these two men and the Austrian S.S. on behalf of Heydrich and Himmler was more fearful than anything that had yet happened in Germany; Seyss-Inquart himself was to admit after the war that 79,000 arrests took place in Vienna within a matter of weeks. Jews were evicted, humiliated and forced to scrub the streets. Many men of distinction among those opposed to the Nazis, both Jews and non-Jews, were to be sent to Dachau and other camps in Germany; the freight trains transporting prisoners crushed together in wagons became a regular service from Austria.
Schuschnigg and Baron Louis de Rothschild, the two most eminent men held in custody, were temporarily confined by Kaltenbrunner in the servants’ quarters on the fifth floor of the Metropole Hotel, and they were inspected there by Himmler. Baron Rothschild, who realized that Himmler was planning to ransom him, spoke with ironic reserve when the Reichsführer S.S. enquired after his welfare, while Himmler showed off his authority by taking Schuschnigg with him to inspect the attic lavatories and command in his presence that the ancient fitments should be replaced by something more modern and hygienic for his distinguished prisoners. Nevertheless, he refused to let Schuschnigg, who like himself was short-sighted, have the use of his spectacles, which had been confiscated.
This oppression was the immediate outcome of Hitler’s annexation of Austria. The Führer had come eventually from Linz to Vienna on Monday 14 March, staying one night only at the Imperial Hotel, where Himmler was also lodged; those Austrians prepared to be ecstatic were so: ‘never… have I seen such tremendous, enthusiastic and joyous crowds’, wrote Schellenberg. Nevertheless, he had to rush ahead of Hitler’s procession of cars touring the city in order to supervise the dismantling of explosive charges attached to a bridge on the route. Himmler had been right to be cautious.
The Jewish population of Austria was about 200,000, and their organized persecution and removal became a major undertaking. Himmler went in person to search for a site for a local prison camp, and found a suitable place near Mauthausen on the Danube, where a camp was built on the wooded slopes above a quarry by slave-labour brought from Dachau. Himmler decorated the wooden guard-house set on the granite walls with curling roofs in imitation of the guardhouses on the Great Wall of China.
The importance of Adolf Eichmann as the agent of Himmler and Heydrich in the organization of Jewish affairs dates from the Anschluss. This man was lifted out of the obscurity to which he had almost always clung when he was abducted from the Argentine in 1960 and put on trial in Israel. He had escaped from an American internment camp after the war. When he stood under the glare of the lights in his bullet-proof box, he was revealed as a small-minded, if able and energetic, administrator and he shared a bureaucratic urge for tidiness in his fulfilment of the orders he had been given to organize the extermination of the Jews in his power; an overriding sense of duty compelled him to carry out whatever he was required to do. He had begun his S.S. career in the Death’s Head Unit at Dachau, so he had few qualms about the spectacle of suffering in the camps, and it has been suggested that he was not averse to accompanying Heydrich on his frequent excusions into the city’s brothels. He travelled all over Europe to threaten, to harry or to cajole the inefficient or the reluctant agents of the S.S. to get their Jews destroyed. His concern was with the transport of the victims and the statistics of death, which in his enthusiasm he was prepared to exaggerate in his reports to his superiors. Only when hard-pressed at his trial did he admit that he hated the work he had been given to do.