Hitler Comes Home

"The Modern Caesar" was the title conferred on Adolf Hitler last week by the world press, which always ennobles with a cliche. This Caesar's chariot of triumph was his usual big black Mercedes-Benz, and as usual he rode beside his chauffeur, entering his native Austria amid a two-mile long procession of German Army & Storm Troops, with six tanks leading the way, and German bombers blacking out the sky.

Austrians screamed "We See Our Leader!'', "One Fuehrer, One Reich!" Many went down on their knees as the Mercedes passed, and after it had gone by some groveled in Hitler's wheel tracks, scooping up handfuls of the Austrian earth into which had bitten the sharp treads of his German tires.

Meanwhile in many factory districts throughout Austria stalwart Nazis, mostly Austrians, were busy stripping to the waist workmen known for their Communist or Socialist views, giving them the cat-o'-nine-tails. In the Jewish quarter of Vienna boys were flogged, the eyes of old men watered as their beards were jerked. Nazis spat in the faces of Jewesses, and almost everyone whether Jew or Aryan was soon wearing a swastika. Later Jews were forbidden to wear them. The arrest by Nazi pagans of Theodor Cardinal Innitzer was incessantly rumored, but his Palace ran up the Nazi flag, and His Eminence exclaimed: "Thank God there has been no bloodshed!"

Adolf Hitler paused briefly to inspect the three-story building in one flat of which he was born at Braunau on the River Inn. A janitor of a school once attended by Hitler as a boy fired one shot, not at Hitler who was nowhere near, but over the heads of some Storm Troops. They took his gun, and flogged him. The mothers of three babies just born at Vienna were announced to have named each "Adolf." As Adolf approached the provincial capital at Linz, Austrian crowds were cheering everyone they could think of, even bellowing "Hell Ward Price!" since this British journalist is pro-Nazi and works for Lord Rothermere who is always received by Hitler when in Berlin. A schoolmaster of Hitler's boyhood, now nearly 80, had come tottering to see his pupil, the Fuehrer, enter Linz, and a rollicking song rose with the chorus: "Today Germany is ours! Tomorrow the whole World!"

To Linz had hurried from Vienna the Nazi Arthur Seyss-Inquart whom Hitler by ultimatum had forced in last week as Chancellor of Austria (see p. 19). This stooge came only to hand over his country to the German Dictator, did so by officially declaring: "From today the Austrian people consider null and void Paragraph 88 of the Treaty of St. Germain which proclaims Austria's independence."

"Picture my feeling of emotion!" gasped Orator Hitler, almost suffocating with joy, and U. S. listeners heard him, via short wave, broadcast a triumphant reference to his "divine commission." Benito Mussolini had already received a gushing letter Friend Hitler had dispatched by air to Rome, and now the Fuehrer telegraphed to the Duce, "I shall never forget this!"

"Forget what?" celebrating German-Austrians asked each other. Suddenly crowds got the crazy idea that Premier Mussolini had presented the Italian Tyrol (pop. 613,000, of whom 230,000 are racially German) to Chancellor Hitler. Soon the big-boned, blue-eyed German troops swinging through German-Austria were greeted with shouts of "Tyrol is Free! Tyrol is Free!"

Berlin's Caesar had just explicitly promised Rome's Caesar by air message that he will "never" seek to obtain any soil which is Italian today, and the Fuehrer's entourage quickly denied the "Tyrol is Free" rumor, also started half-hourly broadcasts warning Nazis significantly not to make unauthorized arrests or seizures of property. Nazi boys & girls at this time were swarming aboard railway trains at every stop, importantly demanding to be shown everyone's passport, but travelers who refused these Nazi moppets were not harmed, though fists were shaken in their faces.

Adolf Hitler, to everyone's surprise, was still at Linz, seemed in no hurry to enter Vienna. "Perhaps Der Fuehrer is embarrassed by the fact that Miklas is still President," came as an electric suggestion, and Chancellor Seyss-Inquart promptly announced: "President Miklas has laid down his functions at the request of the Federal Chancellor." Hitler at Linz decreed himself Chief of State and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, and to the question "Does the Austrian Government exist or not?" a new official press spokesman (see p. 19) answered in Vienna: "I really don't know. I have just arrived by air from Berlin."

Decrees, proclamations, orders followed by scores as Adolf Hitler finally left Linz at 10:45 a.m. Monday in a six-wheeled military automobile, making slowly for Vienna which Nazis hoped they had made safe by locking up hundreds, including the Duke of Windsor's Jewish ear specialist, Professor Heinrich Neumann and Vienna's Aryan Mayor Richard Schmitz. New laws on all sorts of subjects, including complicated economic regulations, were being promulgated by simply reading them over the radio. Frantic Viennese businessmen strained to catch each word. What had been the Austro-German frontier was swept away, thus abolishing customs duties; German-Austrians learned the economy of their country had been meshed with the Goering Four-Year Plan (TIME, Nov. 2, 1936); and April 10 was set as the date on which "the German men and women of Austria" will vote in a "free and secret plebiscite" whether they approve what Adolf Hitler has done by then.

Thus the Jews will be excluded from the plebiscite ("because they are not German in blood"), and according to Jewish figures there are proportionately ten times more Jews in German-Austria than there were in Germany when the Nazis took power. Says Hitler in Mein Kampf: "Vienna is full up with Jews." By the time the Fuehrer reached the outskirts of Vienna, decrees had deprived of their profession the 70% of Austrian lawyers who are Jews, and the 55% of Austrian doctors who are Jews were next.

The six-wheeled car of the Dictator, having covered the 100 miles from Linz in about six hours, halted on the outskirts of Vienna at 4:25 p.m. and Herr Hitler shook hands for several minutes with everyone who approached. In Germany he uses the greeting "Heil Hitler!" like everyone else, but, tactful to sensitive Viennese, Herr Hitler greeted them again and again with "Gruess Gott!"

About 500,000 Viennese pack-jammed the streets, Imperial Schoenbrunn Palace was a mass of swastika flags, and Hitler rode along standing at salute in his car, which never stopped, to the Imperial Hotel, from which all guests had been ejected. "Comrades, Der Fuehrer is with us!" cried the official broadcaster and burst into loud sobs: "Comrades! I--am --un--able--to--continue--speaking-- because--of--my--emotion."

All the stops of German emotion had now been pulled out as far as they would go. Sobbing, blubbering, thousands of Viennese alternately laughed, cried, cheered and were all broken up outside the Imperial Hotel as they clamored for Adolf Hitler. Said a Prussian officer of the Guard, surveying the Viennese through his icy monocle: "Such transports! Berlin itself has never gone as wild as this. Munich perhaps, ja Munich!"

Orator Hitler came out on a balcony, could not make himself heard, retired, emerged and again could not outroar his welcome. At the third trial the Modern Caesar was heard to cry: "German compatriots! Seventy-five million people in one nation [huzzahs, shrieks] are stirred to the depths of feeling which you are now demonstrating! [pandemonium]. You will all fulfill your oath! (Ja! Ja! Heil! Sieg Heil!) You will ALL fulfill your oath--all of you, from Koenigsberg to Hamburg and down to Vienna! You do so in deepest emotion. German compatriots-- NO FORCE ON EARTH CAN SHAKE US!!"

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