Alone against Hitler by Jack Bray

Author:Jack Bray
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Prometheus
Published: 2020-03-12T00:00:00+00:00

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CONFRONTATION

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Ambush at Berchtesgaden

“Perhaps you will wake up one morning in Vienna to find us there—just like a spring storm.”

—Adolf Hitler

As dawn broke on the bleak, midwinter morning of February 12, 1938, an overnight train screeched to its stop at Salzburg’s Hauptbahnhof. An inconspicuous sleeper car concealed a handful of men on a desperate mission. The chancellor of Austria and his small entourage had traveled nearly 200 miles under cover of darkness hoping to save their country from being swallowed whole by Nazi Germany.1

Before stepping off the train to head by car toward the German frontier, the Austrian chancellor left ominous instructions with a small cadre of personal staff remaining in Salzburg, a sign that he was well aware what might become of him that day after he crossed the border into Hitler’s Germany. Five years of the most ruthless, sometimes violent coexistence with Nazi Germany could come unglued that day. On that morning, Schuschnigg was filled with concern that his beloved nation, barely hanging by a thread and subject to Hitler’s mood of the moment, could fall to the mercurial Führer. He shared his own feeling of foreboding by the message he left behind. He warned his contingent in Salzburg that if they did not hear from him by six that evening, they should assume the worst and raise the alarm with Austria’s armed forces.2 The chancellor’s directions, more fitting for a hostage negotiation than a meeting of heads of government in the twentieth century, were not alarmist. This “proof of life” contingency acknowledged what the chancellor saw as a very real possibility—that Austria was being lured into a trap, and he may be taken prisoner or, like Dollfuss, shot dead before the day ended.

For more than five years, Hitler’s designs had been clear to careful observers, especially those who had read his testament, Mein Kampf. They also could have learned from a close reading of his book that he believed there was singular value in striking physical terror in individuals and in the masses.3

Schuschnigg had never laid eyes on his German host, but he had a personal taste of the sudden cold-blooded murders Hitler had ordered in Germany and Austria during the last several years. Nothing had occurred to dispel the strong suspicion that Schuschnigg’s wife was one of Hitler’s victims. He had ample reason not merely to fear and distrust but also to despise Adolf Hitler. Added to the revulsion of having to meet and speak with this killer was the anxiety that Hitler appeared ready to drag many decent Austrians into a living hell as captives of Nazi Germany.

Entering the car that would carry them across the border, Schuschnigg struggled to muzzle the nagging voice in his head about this mission.4 Despite the years of Nazi duplicity and scores of Nazi murders in Austria and despite all the warning signs, he still could not fully comprehend the Führer. Hitler’s twisted plans and motives were foreign to everything about the proper Schuschnigg, a man with a

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