Black Earth(34)

—

Warsaw’s political vision reached as far as the idea of a State of Israel. If a European crisis was coming, perhaps Jewish rebels such as Avraham Stern would be able to organize a revolt—one that would lead to a Jewish state that would welcome millions of Polish Jews. Polish officers had already begun to train the rebels of Irgun who were to lead such a revolt, and the young men of Betar who were to be its soldiers. As Hitler and Ribbentrop were pressing their “comprehensive solution” in December 1938, Drymmer issued instructions that made explicit the final purpose of Polish policy toward Betar and Irgun. Warsaw was supporting Irgun and Betar so that they would be ready to press forward with violence to Jewish statehood when the crisis came.

Over the course of 1938, European states were already collapsing under Nazi pressure. As the year came to an end, the crisis seemed to be coming.





4


The State Destroyers


“Overnight! This was all overnight.” Years later, Erika M. still could not hide her astonishment at the collapse of Austria, at the end of her country, on the night of the eleventh of March, in the pivotal year of 1938.

The Austria where Erika had spent a very happy Jewish childhood, “the most wonderful existence a child can have,” was perhaps an unlikely creation. In 1914, when the First World War began, “Austria” was simply the informal name of some German-speaking regions of the great power known as the Habsburg monarchy. When that war came to an end with the defeat of that empire, Austria was created as a new republic and the new homeland of those German-speaking people—including about 200,000 Jews, most of them inhabitants of the capital, Vienna. In the beginning, few believed that the small alpine country could survive. Lebensunf?hig—incapable of life—was the verdict of economists and politicians alike. The population was only seven million, by comparison with the fifty-three million of the Habsburg domains. The richest lands of the old monarchy had fallen to the new state of Czechoslovakia. The separation of Austria from territories that fell to Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Romania destroyed a large and vibrant internal market. Most Austrians either had little sense of national identity or thought of themselves as Germans.

The leaders of the new country tried to found it as “German-Austria,” including in its constitution a promise to seek unification with the larger German state to its north. This was exactly what the victors in the First World War—the Americans, the British, and, above all, the French—wished to prevent. It had been precisely an alliance between Vienna and Berlin that had begun, as Paris and London saw matters, the bloodiest war in the history of the world. More than a million French soldiers had not fallen so that Germany could end the war holding Austrian territories it had not possessed at the beginning. Thus the peace treaties applied to Germany and Austria, signed at Versailles and Saint-Germain in 1919, explicitly forbade each country from uniting with the other. This was, of course, a resented violation of the principle of national self-determination, the moral cause that the American president Woodrow Wilson had brought to the western allies when the United States joined the war on the western front in 1917.

The contradictory Austria of the early twentieth century was frozen in the mind of Hitler and many other Europeans throughout the succeeding two decades. Hitler had no sympathy for the Habsburg monarchy, the land of his birth, nor for cosmopolitan Vienna, where he had failed as a painter. He saw the city as an unhealthy mixture of races, held together only by the iniquitous plans of the Jews, who held true power. When he moved from Vienna to Munich in 1912, he believed that he had left a non-German city for a German one. It seems that he went to Germany to avoid mandatory military service in the Habsburg army, but in 1914 he volunteered for the German one, and served in the trenches as a messenger during the First World War. A German by choice, he shared the view of many German soldiers and politicians that the old multinational monarchy was doomed by its very nature. For Hitler, Austria had a past that was unworthy of Germans and a future that was unworthy of mention. He was an Austrian who had joined Germany; at some point all of the others (except the Jews, of course) would follow.

Although Hitler did not place Austria at the center of his concerns in the 1920s and 1930s—that place was always held by the Soviet Union—he took for granted that Austria and Germany would one day be united. His National Socialist Party, including its paramilitary arms, the SA and SS, were active in Austria as well as in Germany. In Austria especially, it was obvious that the work of these racial organizations was directed towards something more ambitious than an internal transformation of Germany; after all, Austria and Germany had never in history been united in a single national state. The prospect of their unification—Anschluss—was the part of the Nazi program that was most relevant to Austrians.