THE GERMAN VOLK

    Hitler made the Germans once again feel good to be Germans. He defied the hated Versailles Treaty. He created employment. And he restored a sense of community and the idea of the Volk, or people.

The historian Joachim Fest has written, "Hitler's fundamental insight, acquired in the loneliness of his youth, was that people wanted to belong."

ANSCHLUSS

    On March 12, 1938, Hitler ordered German armed forces to seize and occupy his native Austria, a task he had set out for himself in the first paragraph of Mein Kampf. The German troops were greeted by flowers strewn at their feet, giving the bloodless conquest the sobriquet of the "flower war." The Jews of Vienna were treated to a different kind of war. The Jewish writer Stefan Zweig wrote,

"All the morbidly filthy hate fantasies orgiastically conceived in the course of many nights were released in broad daylight."

    In Vienna, life changed overnight. Local Nazis seized Jews in the former imperial capital and forced them to scrub the streets and walls with toothbrushes. Crowds gathered, hissed, and spat abuse at the helpless and often elderly Jews. The American journalist William Shirer witnessed the abuse and humiliation meted out to the Jews of Vienna and described it as "an orgy of sadism." Jewish stores were plundered by SA men who sometimes (cynically but with a pretense of legality)) left a receipt. Hundreds of Jews committed suicide. The Nazis listed the deaths in the newspapers under the title of "Traffic accidents." Jewish businesses were Aryanized, that is, Jewish owners were forced to sell their businesses to Germans, or Aryans, in a transaction that was decidedly one sided and invariably a big financial loss to the Jew. In Vienna, an estimated thirty-five hundred Nazis, completely untrained for the job, grabbed Jewish businesses and acted as commissars, or managers, of the establishments. The greed in Vienna ran out of control as the Nazis stepped on one another to get at Jewish wealth. In an ominous development, the SS officer Adolf Eichmann established the Reich Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna, at the Rothchild's palace, whereby Jews, alarmed by the terror, found their emigration out of the country much facilitated by Eichmann's diligent bureaucrats. This was one of Eichmann's contributions to Jewish annihilation: an assembly line process through which the forsaken Jew passed in a day's time, relinquishing one document (and piece of property) at every step of the way until the end when he and his loved ones had the prized possession: a visa, the ticket of life. Eichmann also employed the services of the local Jewish leadership to facilitate the emigration, as he would later to facilitate the destruction. Eichmann later became the SS officer in charge of organizing the "evacuation" of Jews by trains to the death camps in Poland. It was an easy switch for he and his team of experts, virtually all of whom were Austrians. The demands of forced emigration were not so different from the demands of mass murder: terror; identification; collaboration; expropriation; concentration; expulsion, or, after 1941, extermination. Extermination, like emigration, was a logistical problem and nothing more. Actually, extermination was a logistical and an industrial problem.

THE EVIAN CONFERENCE

    The events in Austria and the subsequent pressures for immigration led the Roosevelt administration to call for an international conference to deal with the refugee situation.

The American invitation to the foreign governments was cautiously worded. "No country," the invitation read, "would be expected or asked to receive a greater number of immigrants than is permitted by its existing legislation."

    The U. S. refused to send a high ranking delegation to Evian. Its representative was the president's friend Myron C. Taylor. At the opening of the conference, Taylor said, "The time had come when governments...must act and act promptly." At the end of the conference, reporting on its results, a reporter for Newsweek answered Taylor's call with bitter sarcasm: "Most of the governments represented acted promptly by slamming their doors against Jewish refugees." Indeed, the U. S. ominously noted in its invitation that no country would be called upon to change its existing quota system to admit Jews.

    The conference was held in July 1938. Its ostensible purpose was to facilitate the flow of Jewish emigration from Nazi Germany and Nazi-occupied Austria, and to put pressure on the German government to permit the Jews to take with them a reasonable amount of property and wealth. No foreign country was interested in taking on impoverished Jews. However, the U. S. government called the Evian Conference with a different purpose in mind. A 1938 memorandum from the State Department referred to the increasing pressure on the U. S. government to assume the leadership of world efforts to deal with the refugee question. The pressure, the memorandum stated, emanated from journalist Dorothy Thompson and "certain Congressmen with metropolitan constituencies." As a result, U. S. Secretary of State Cornell Hull and Under Secretary Sumner Welles concluded that a strategy far preferable to trying to hold off this pressure would be "to get out in front and attempt to guide" the pressure, mainly in order to forestall moves for more liberal immigration legislation. In other words, the State Department felt that the best way to handle the refugee crisis would be to seize the initiative before pressure built and to spread the responsibility among the thirty-two nations instead of upon the U. S. With this rationale, the State Department recommended that President Roosevelt call the Evian Conference.

    At the Evian Conference, U. S. representative Myron Taylor stated that the U. S. would make the German and Austrian quota fully available. Delegates from other countries despaired of admitting more refugees than currently allowed. The British delegate did not mention the prospect of British controlled Palestine (present-day Israel), the most logical place for the Jewish refugees. Instead, he asserted that the British Commonwealth was largely unavailable because it was already overcrowded and, in any event, the climate was too severe. Britain itself, the delegate continued, was completely out of the question as a place for refugees because of the high rate of unemployment. The other countries uttered similar pleas for understanding of their difficulties. The chief concierge at the Hotel Evian reflected on the proceedings:

"Very important people were here and all the delegates had a nice time. They took pleasure cruises on the lake. They gambled at night at the casino. They took mineral baths and massages at the Esablissement Thermal. Some of them took the excursion to Chamonix to go summer skiing. Some went riding; we have, you know, one of the finest stables in France. But, of course, it is difficult to sit indoors hearing speeches when all the pleasures that Evian offers are outside."

MUNICH CONFERENCE

    Throughout the summer of 1938 Hitler demanded that Germany be ceded the Sudetenland, the frontier territory of Czechoslovakia. The republic of Czechoslovakia was a creation of the Treaty of Versailles, and was by 1938 the sole remaining democracy in Central Europe. The Sudetenland was heavily populated by ethnic Germans who (orchestrated by local Nazis acting on orders from Berlin) clamored for a "return" to the Reich. Hitler deftly used this emotional issue to give his naked aggression a cover of self-determination. The Treaty of Versailles, Hitler piously observed, had emphasized the principle of "self-determination." What Hitler wanted, truth be told, was not the Sudetenland but all of Czechoslovakia. Hitler had learned to despise the Czechs during his unhappy sojourn many years before as a failed artist in Vienna. The Sudetenland was merely the wedge in Hitler's shrewd scheme (its German inhabitants would pay for their love of the fuehrer after the war, in 1945-'46, when they were expelled by the Czech authorities to the neighboring Germany, a bitter "return" to the Reich). The western democracies, France and England, were allied to Czechoslovakia through a series of treaties, but the leaders of these countries, representing the will of their people, did not want to go to war against Nazi Germany, least of all over the issue of Czechoslovakia. On September 29-30, 1938, in the third of his trips to negotiate with Hitler, the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, with the French premier Eduourd Daladier, flew to Munich, the birthplace of the Nazi Party. Here they met Hitler and Mussolini, the fascist leader of Italy, and here the two western leaders, without consulting their ally Czechoslovkia, which was mobilized for war, agreed to Hitler's demand for the Sudetenland. Chamberlain and Daladier used their alliance with Czechoslovakia to force that nation, the one democratic nation in Central Europe, to comply with Hitler's demands. The Sudetenland, not coincidentally, comprised the frontier of Czechoslovakia and an intricate system of fortifications had painstakingly been built there precisely in anticipation of war with Germany. These fortifications were lost as a result of the Munich Conference. Chamberlain flew back to London and with a copy of the Munich agreement in his hand. He addressed those gathered on the tarmac with the immortal words, "I believe this is peace in our times." It must be emphasized that Chamberlain and Daladier were widely hailed by their respective countrymen (with the exception of Winston Churchill, who was then in the political wilderness and thought a quack by sensible people). No one, except small, brave Czechoslovkia, wanted to fight the Nazis. The term "Munich" has come to symbolize "appeasement," giving in to force in order to have peace. In fact, Hitler was furious with the Munich settlement. He was astonished that Britain and France would give in to his demands. He wanted them to refuse his demands so that he could attack Czechoslovakia and start the war in 1938 (and not in 1939) when German rearmament was far ahead of the west's puny efforts to date. As for Chamberlain and Daladier, Hitler later remarked, "I have seen our enemies at Munich. They are worms." A year later, when Britain and France threatened to go to war over Poland, Hitler refused to believe them.

    German troops occupied the Sudetenland on October 5, 1938. The Jews and Czechs were brutally expelled from their homes and sent to the rump state of Czechoslovakia. Speaking to the British government, a lonely Churchill intoned: "You had a choice between shame and war. You have chosen shame and you will get war."

    Despite Hitler's promises that the Sudentenland was his "last territorial demand" in Europe, the German leader ordered his troops to occupy the rump state of Czechoslovakia on March 15, 1939. In response, Chamberlain and Daladier, against their desires but in response to the national outrage in their respective countries, extended a unilateral guarantee to that country next on Hitler's list: Poland.
 
 

CASE STUDY #2: MUNICH CONFERENCE

    On September 29-30, 1938, the prime minister of Great Britain, Neville Chamberlain, and the premier of France, Edouard Daladier, journeyed to Munich, Germany, to discuss with Hitler (and Mussolini) the fate of Czechoslovkia, an ally of France and (by extension) Britain. In hopes of appeasing Hitler, the western leaders acquiesced in his demand for the Czechoslovak territory known as the Sudetenland. Hitler disregarded the Munich settlement when he occupied the rump state of Czechoslovakia five months later, on March 15, 1939. 

1. Jan Wiener, who is Jewish, was a school boy when the first Nazi SS troops marched down St. Wenceslas Square in Prague on March 15, 1939, in a snow storm. He immediately made plans to leave Czechoslovakia and to join his father in Yugoslavia, but this required a number of trips to obtain documents at various offices, including one office where Jan had to deal with a Czech bureaucrat who was working for the Nazis. 
 
 
 
 

2. On May 27, 1942, the Nazi SS general Reinhard Heydrich was fatally wounded by a Czechoslovak commando team (parachuted from Britain) that had lain in wait for him at a turn in the road outside of Prague. In retaliation, the Nazis executed hundreds of Czech intellectuals and suspected resistance fighters, leveled the Czech town of Lidice, shooting its male inhabitants, deporting the women to a concentration camp, gassing most of the children, and sending a select few to German families for adoption. 
 
 
 
 

3. Jan Wiener tells the story of a Czech resistance fighter, fleeing the Gestapo, who sought refuge with a man named Vaclav Horek, the janitor in the high school the resistance fighter and Wiener had attended before the war. 
 
 
 
 

4. Radomir Luza, a Czech resistance fighter, describes his unveiling of a Czech traitor and, separately, the qualities of those who resisted the Nazis. 
 
 
 
 

5. At the end of the war, Jan Wiener returned to Prague a decorated war veteran, having served with the Czech air force flying bombing raids on Germany from England. In Prague Wiener returned to office of the Czech bureaucrat he had met five years before when trying to leave the country. 
 

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