Anti-Reich

By Mayo Mohs

COUNTRY WITHOUT A NAME by Walter B. Maass Ungar; 178 pages; $12.50

EXPLODING STAR: A YOUNG AUSTRIAN AGAINST HITLER by Fritz Molden Morrow; 280 pages; $10

A NOBLE TREASON by Richard Hanser Putnam; 319 pages; $12.50

The question will not go away. When the cattle cars with their human cargoes rumbled off for Auschwitz, where were the righteous in the Third Reich? Each of these three books seeks answers, and in sum they are heartening. Fritz Molden, himself a fighter in the Austrian resistance, puts it best in Exploding Star: "Where there are people who disrupt, destroy and torture there are also, beyond all doubt, others who help, heal and support."

Austria's role is puzzling. The graven newsreel image of the Anschluss--the day that Hitler forcibly joined Austria to the Reich-- is one of jubilation: jackbooted, goose-stepping infantry welcomed by cascades of flowers and the joyous peal of church bells'. Vienna-born Walter Maass, who specializes in wartime history (The Netherlands at War, Assassination in Vienna), strives to explain the complexities behind that event, and Austria's increasingly reluctant role during the seven years of Nazi rule (1938-45) that followed. Country Without a Name (Austria was absorbed into Germany as an assemblage of Nazi-run districts) is a bleak, sad story.

As with Germany, Austria's troubles after World War I stemmed from Versailles, specifically the 1919 Treaty of Saint-Germain that broke up the old Austro-Hungarian Empire of the Habsburgs and reduced the country to a small republic. A political standoff between Roman Catholic right and Socialist left hobbled the new democracy, bringing it several times to violence. Then the Great Depression hit. When Hitler came to power in 1933, more than 300,000 Austrians were unemployed in a nation of only 6 million. For a time, a doughty little home-grown dictator named Engelbert Dollfuss opposed Hitler, but he was assassinated by Nazis in 1934. When Anschluss finally came in 1938, the tired Austrians seemed ready to accept the Nazi embrace.

Their infatuation was short-lived. Maass details the lightning arrests--76,000 political undesirables jailed even before Hitler entered Vienna. He charts the merciless Aryanization of businesses and the swift disappearance of Jews from public life. He records the beginnings of a resistance that would grow through the war: 13 young Austrians refusing to take an oath of allegiance to Hitler; Socialist Otto Haas, building his network of anti-Nazi information; Father Roman Karl Scholz founding his Austrian Freedom Movement. All were caught and executed.

But with some heroic exceptions -- Maass mentions a country priest imprisoned for speaking out against anti-Semitism -- there were too few voices to protest the dispossession and the expulsion of the Jews. "The greater majority of the population," writes Maass candidly, "were either too indifferent or too scared to act with defiance." There were about 200,000 Jews in Vienna at the time who were, explains Molden in Exploding Star, "a powerful concentration of gifted, ambitious . . . hard-working people." Their domination of the press, the theater, medicine and law "materially contributed to the spread of anti-Semitism in Austria."

Despite such serious insights (Molden himself was to lose a part-Jewish relative), Molden's tale is a zesty autobiography of a man possessed of outrageous luck. The son of a liberal, Catholic, newspaper editor, he is a resister from the beginning. Caught by the Gestapo after an abortive attempt to get to England, he is jailed, then released as a recruit for the Russian front. There, a minor wound and a heart condition send him to more peaceful duties. He winds up in Paris, where he unashamedly lives "like a lord" through what he calls the most enjoyable months of his youth. Posted to Berlin, he makes contact with the German resistance movement. In the odyssey that follows -- to Italy, Switzerland, back to crumbling Austria with an American OSS team -- he seems to encounter an entire civilization of good people eager to help him oppose the Nazi cause.

There is a similar, if more low-keyed love of life and action in A Noble Treason, the most moving of these books. In it Richard Hanser, an American writer, unfolds with compassion and craft the story of the White Rose conspiracy in Germany, whose name was a symbol of purity and whose work one of the most selfless acts of resistance in the entire war. The heroes and heroines are no prototype Baader-Meinhof gang. They come from loving families and cherish Munich's bourgeois pleasures. Nearly all are ardent Christians. The two ringleaders, Hans and Sophie Scholl, are early converts to the Nazi youth movement, and just as early defectors. From their father, they soon learn about the first victims of Dachau, and they are stunned.

At first the conspiracy is just talk among carefully chosen friends, then action: "Leaflets of the White Rose," carrying bitter attacks against the regime and its supporters. "We are your bad conscience," say the leaflets. "Everyone wants to exonerate himself from his share of the blame . . . But it cannot be done: everyone is guilty! guilty! guilty! Eventually the two Scholls are caught, in a moment of grand drama at the University of Munich, with the condemning leaflets fluttering all about them. Within days, in February 1943, they are sentenced and almost immediately guillotined, along with their fellow conspirator Christoph Probst.

Sophie Scholl speaks for the resisters in all three histories with her echoing explanation before the People's Court in Munich: "Somebody, after all, had to make a start. "

-- Mayo Mohs

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