Hitler's
Vienna
A dictator's apprencticeship
by Brigitte Hamann
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Czechs in Vienna
August Kubizek relates
about young Hitler: "When we walked home through the districts of,
say, Rudolfsheim, Fünfhaus, or Ottakring and workers passed
us returning from work, it would happen that Adolf tightly grabbed
my arm: "Did you hear, Gustl? - Czech! Another time we went all
the way to the Spinnerin am Kreuz (spinner on the cross),
because Adolf wanted to see this old Viennese landmark. We encountered
brick workers who loudly spoke Italian, wildly gesticulating. "There
you have your German Vienna!" he shouted indignantly."
Apart from this remark, no
other anti-Czech utterances are documented from Hitler's Vienna
years. None of the eyewitnesses, for example, mentions any bad experiences
Hitler had with Czechs, but no friendships, either-contrary to Hitler's
manifold relationships with Jews in Vienna. There is only one documentable
personal relationship between young Hitler and a Czech: Maria Zakreys,
his first landlady in Vienna, an immigrant from Moravia with a thick
Czech accent and, as far as her writing abilities were concerned,
a poor knowledge of German. Young Hitler got along exceptionally
well with her. According to Kubizek, in 1908, Mrs. Zakreys, a Czech,
was even "the only human being in this city of millions of people
with whom we would associate."
Hitler would hardly have been
aware of a slight Czech-Viennese touch: when he called Eva Braun
his "Tschapperl," this-coming from the Czech word "capek," awkward
person-something like "awkward child" with the connotation of "silly
little one."
Hitler's later remarks about
"the Czechs" had hardly anything to do with personal experiences
but were clearly only repetitions of old Viennese clichés,
for instance, when he said in 1942 : Every Czech is a born nationalist
who subjugates his interests to all other obligations. One
must not let oneself be deceived, the more he bends, the more
dangerous he becomes.
...Of all the Slavs,
the Czech is the most dangerous one, because he is diligent. He
has discipline, is orderly, he is more Mongoloid than Slavic.
He knows how to hide his plans behind a certain loyalty.
...I don't despise them , it is a battle
of destinies. An alien racial splinter has penetrated our
folkdom, and one must yield, he or we. ...That's one of the reasons
why the Hapsburgs perished. They believed they could solve the problem
through kindness.
Another catch phrase often employed in Vienna
was that the Czechs were apple-polishers ...who are subservient
to their superiors but kick their inferiors. Both Poles and
Czechs, he said, knew from the experience of a half thousand
years. ..how best to act like vassals without arousing suspicion
. How many Czechs, he said, were gadding about in Vienna
when I was young, quickly learned the Viennese accent, and
then deftly maneuvered themselves into important positions in
Government, the economy, and so forth.
We can also detect the old
Viennese condescension toward the "diligent" Czech who was fit to
be a vassal, when in 1942 Hitler told his guest, Reich Leader SS
Heinrich Himmler: The Czechs were better than the Hungarians,
the Romanians, and the Poles. A diligent petty bourgeoisie
had formed which was keenly aware of its boundaries. Even today
they will look up to us with both anger and boundless admiration:
We Bohemians are not meant to rule!
Hitler considered Lueger's
system of "Germanizing" the Czechs via the language not resolute
enough. Nationality or rather race does not happen to lie
in language but in the blood. Hitler said that I remember
how in my youth Germanization led to incredibly false conceptions
.Even in Pan-German circles the opinion could then be heard that
the Austrian-Germans, with the promotion and aid of the government,
might well succeed in a Germanization of the Austrian Slavs;
these circles never even began to realize that Germanization
can only be applied to soil and never to people. For
what was generally understood under this word was only the forced
outward acceptance of the German language. Yet it was a scarcely
conceivable fallacy of thought to believe that a Negro or
a Chinese, let us say, will turn into a German because he learns
German and is willing to speak the German language and perhaps even
give his vote to a German political party .That was a de-Germanization
and the beginning of a bastardization and a destruction
of the Germanic element.
In any case, Hitler planned
"to resettle all elements that are racially of no value from Bohemia
to the East" after the war. "The individual Czech, he said, was
diligent, and if they were spread over the occupied Eastern territories,
they might be quite good as supervisors. The Fuhrer stressed again
and again that he personally knew the Czechs extremely well." On
the other hand, he found the resettling of the Czechs and the aimed
- for "Germanization" of Bohemia and Moravia too slow, which is
why later on he believed a Germanization was possible, but only
if merciless strictness was exercised toward rebels.
When in 1939 he moved his
troops not only into the Sudetenland but also into the clearly non-German
"rest of Czechoslovakia," this was hardly in line with his slogan
"One people, one Reich, one Fuhrer." He used flimsy excuses and
referred to the Hapsburgs' tradition, for instance, in 1942 : Czechoslovakia,
he said, just wasn't a structure that had internally grown into
an independent state ; rather it had remained a former Austrian
nation state beyond its modeling itself after German culture. Hitler
said that even Czech president of state Dr. Emil Hacha had told
him that the Czechs were not a people of masters. And Tomàs
G. Masaryk, with whom Hitler was well acquainted from his Vienna
years, Czechoslovakia's first president of state and "father of
the fatherland," who died in 1937, had written somewhere that
no one had been respected in his family who had spoken Czech. In
1942 Hitler remarked that with firm direction it should be
possible to force the Czech language back to the significance
of a dialect twenty years from now.
And not least, Czechs, like
Jews, signified for Reich chancellor Hitler Viennese self-confidence,
which refused to meet his demand for subjecting itself to the German
unified state. In 1941 he said, grumblings of [Vienna's]
population was a consequence of the strong Jewish-Czech mix. And
after the celebration of the "Jew-free Vienna festival," Hitler
said in a monologue in a small circle on June 25, 1943 : I've
managed to get the Jews out of Vienna, now I also want to get the
Czechs out of there.
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