Hojer, Weber, Lessing

Hofer, Weber, Lessing

Hofer is a great name in the Tyrol. Bearded, barrel-chested Tyrolean Patriot Andreas Hofer, most faithful friend of the House of Habsburg, captured Innsbruck twice from French and Bavarian troops during the Napoleonic wars, was captured by Italian troops and executed at Mantua in 1810 under Napoleon's orders. His tomb is a shrine for Austrian patriotism. From the Tyrol too comes Franz Hofer, an Austrian Nazi. No friend of the Habsburgs, eager to see his country absorbed by Ger- many, Nazi Hofer unwittingly added 8,000 men to the little Austrian Army, and brought the active support of France and Britain to the struggling government of Engelbert Dollfuss.

At the beginning of last week Franz Hofer, Nazi leader for the Tyrol and Vorarlberg, was a political prisoner in Innsbruck jail. One midnight two men in the grey .Norfolk jackets of the anti-Nazi Heimwehr drove up to the jail with a prisoner handcuffed between them.

"Here is a dangerous Nazi who tried to escape over the border and shot a man!" they shouted.

The Austrian guard peered through the gate. A dangerous Nazi the prisoner certainly was. The guard recognized him as Siegfried Kustatcher, who had served a prison sentence only a few weeks before. He opened the gates. The fake Heimwehr men suddenly dropped the handcuffs, snapped out blackjacks and sponges soaked in chloroform. Chief Warden Ludwig rushed down to help, was overpowered too. At pistol-point they snatched the keys from the warden's terrified wife, rushed Leader Hofer to a waiting automobile. In ten minutes every frontier post was warned. Shrewdly the Nazis did not make for the heavily-guarded Bavarian border, but for Italy, 20 miles away. On the Brenner Pass road an Austrian gendarme tried to stop them, was nearly run down, fired at the car, struck Nazi Hofer in the knee. At 5 a. m. the car was found abandoned three miles from the Italian frontier at Gries. Alpine troops and gendarmes searched the mountainsides with bloodhounds, to no avail. Franz Hofer turned up safely over the border in Bolzano next morning. As soon as he was well enough to be moved he was lifted into a plane, flown back across Austria to safety in Bavaria.

Weber. Only slightly less than Austria has German Switzerland been bombarded with Nazi propaganda. Stolid German Swiss have been unmoved at offers to trade their dull commercial comfort for the hysterical frenzy of the Third Reich, but last week they got mad. At Ramsen on the German border three Nazi toughs crossed the Swiss frontier, beat off a Swiss customs guard before he could summon aid, seized a Czech citizen named Hermann Weber, dragged him screaming into Germany. There have been a series of similar incidents. Switzerland's unvarying foreign policy (MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS) has kept all Swiss papers from any overt criticisms of the Hitler Government but last week even the staid, conservative La Suisse rapped out:

"This truly indescribable incident must be the last. An energetic demarche is necessary if the facts are as related in this dispatch. There has been incident upon incident, and one does not know where they may lead us."

Lessing. At Marienbad, near the German border, lived bearded little Professor Theodor Lessing, an exile from Germany. A pacifist and a Jew, Professor Lessing had been converted to Christianity, but returned to Israel after students, enraged by his radical opinions, forced his resignation from Hanover Technical College and the Hitler Government confiscated his property. To Marienbad he fled, taking with him as his chief treasure the walking stick of the great philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. Last week while the 18th World Zionist Congress squab- bled hoarsely in Prague, someone raised a clumsy fire ladder to the third floor window of Professor Lessing's bedroom. Two men went up the ladder, two pistol bullets cracked through the window pane and into Professor Lessing's head. He died in his wife's arms on his way to the hospital.

Again bloodhounds were called out. Yelping mournfully, they led perspiring Czech police to the cabin of a notorious poacher, Max Epker, member of a Nazi trade union. When they got there the cabin was bare. Czech authorities had to content themselves with arresting eleven assorted Nazis and, like Austria, like Switzerland, doubling their frontier guards.

Assistance. Hofer, Weber and Lessing were just what the Dollfuss Government needed to point up the Hitler menace to the peace of Europe, and it used them to the hilt. Quickly came the little Chan- cellor's reward. Worried Italy, France, Britain gave Austria permission to increase her regular army of 22,000 men to 30,000, the full strength allowed under the Treaty of St. Germain, "as long as the special conditions exist." as long as Adolf Hitler is Chancellor of Germany. Permission included a good deal more than adding another 8,000 men to Austria's long-term volunteers. Excitable old General Karl Vaugoin, Minister of War, blurted out:

''A new army system will be adopted this week. ... A second army will be established which will give its members six months of compulsory training. We will call up every half-year from 8,000 to 10,000 men. ... A second body of troops will be set up, led by officers and under- officers of the army. ... It may be regarded as the first step toward universal military service."

Italy, France, Britain might be willing that such a thing should occur, but they certainly did not want it blurted out in this rude manner, for it meant the practical revision of one of the sacrosanct War treaties, and if Austria could win revision on a small point, here was an opening wedge for Germany! Loudly they insisted that they were not permitting compulsory service, that the new volunteers were to be admitted only for as long as the "special conditions" lasted. Chastened General Vaugoin subsided, knowing that in three years Austria will have not 30,000 men, but a trained reserve of 78,000 men and, if the Allies will only shut their eyes to forbidden siege guns and planes, a real army.

Nuremberg. Precariously clinging to the neck of the dragon he has created, little Adolf Hitler saw the world more unified against Germany than at any time since 1918, and preparing to do something about it. It was time for Hitlerism to pull its horns in once more, and that Hand- some Adolf proceeded to do with superlative skill. In medieval Nuremberg, home of Die Meistersinger and Albrecht Durer, scene of the first public Nazi review, yet another huge Nazi fiesta was under way. Bands blew their lungs out, flags fluttered from every housefront, tens of thousands of Nazis tramped their feet sore. Innsbruck's Franz Hofer was carried to the reviewing stand on a stretcher and fireworks were set off with such complete disregard of the consequences that 50 people were rushed to hospitals, hundreds fainted.

Two speeches had to be made, one to keep Nazi enthusiasm at the correct state of effervescence, another to pacify foreign opinion. To serve the first, Handsome Adolf made use of his old punching bag, Jewry, not so stupid a move in view of the active anti-Semitism in Austria, Czecho- slovakia, Poland, as it seemed to Britain and the U. S.

"If the great German historian Mommsen characterized Jewry as a ferment of decomposition in the life of nations," tie proclaimed, "then decomposition in Germany is far advanced. ... If, therefore, National Socialism with ferocious determination fought against the stealthy collapse of the Occident, it did so in recognition of the not yet destroyed values innate in civilized nations."

Next came the military retreat, couched in these shrewd words:

"The world should not see in our gathering here an expression of a wish to acquire new laurels on the battlefield. The German people are conscious of the fact that no war could come which could ever give us more honor than we acquired in the last one. For it was greater honor to hold off, bravely, courageously, valiantly, a superior force for four and one-half years, than it was an honor for 20 nations to conquer one nation.

"We do not need to rehabilitate the honor of our people on the battlefield. There nobody has taken it from us. Only one disgrace has befallen us. It was not in the West, not in the East, but back home. This disgrace [boring from within by Jews and Communists] we have made good again."

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