Free Hitler and the Forgotten Nazis by Bruce F. Pauley Page A

and Austrian Nazi parties. For the Germans the year was climaxed by the disastrous Beer Hall Putsch in November. The uprising failed miserably; Hitler was arrested and imprisoned, and the German NSDAP had to start virtually anew fifteen months later. For the Austrian Nazis, 1923 marked the beginning of an endless series of leadership disputes and factional strife. The quarrels amounted to a veritable civil war.

     
    The year also witnessed the efforts by older and more moderate Austrian Nazis to preserve their party’s autonomy against Hitler’s drive for dictatorial power, not only over the Nazis of Germany, but those of Austria and the Sudetenland as well. The attack on Austrian Nazi independence in 1923 and again in 1926 proved only a prelude to the whole national dilemma in 1938.
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    The Resignation of Walter Riehl
    In the early postwar years the Austrian Nazis, who assumed that the German Nazi party, though younger, had the same goals as themselves, took pleasure in the Germans’ success. Only years later would the more moderate Austrian Nazis deny that the two groups had anything more in common than their name. 1
    Although Riehl and his compatriots were proud of their association with the German Nazis, the feeling was by no means mutual. The Germans contributed nothing to the operation of the Interstate Bureau in Vienna, and Hitler did not even bother to answer many of Riehl’s letters. 2 By the middle of 1922 the German Nazis had grown far larger than their Austrian and Sudeten cousins; and Hitler no longer had any need for his poor relations.
    The Nazi Civil War, 1923-1930 • 37
    Hitler’s attitude toward the Austrians became arrogant at the fifth and, as it turned out, last interstate National Socialist convention held in Salzburg in August 1923. By that time, as Riehl himself admitted, “The name of the powerful speaker and leader Adolf Hitler [had] grown far beyond the importance of other party leaders.” 3 Having already established his dictatorial control over the German Nazis, Hitler was in no mood to see his policies contradicted by the smaller Austrian and Sudeten parties.
    The main issue at the Salzburg gathering revolved around the party’s policy toward future elections. The bourgeois Greater German People’s party (GVP) had offered to form a coalition with the Austrian Nazis, an offer that Dr. Riehl was eager to accept. Riehl, who was reelected chairman of the Austrian party at the start of the convention, saw a coalition as the only hope of the Austrian Nazis’ winning representation in the federal Parliament. With a voice in that assembly, the party would have a new and far more effective forum for its propaganda. 4 Hitler, who would himself adopt a similar philosophy in later years, rejected it in 1923 in favor of armed revolution. But Riehl believed that without a Nazi-GVP partnership, every anti-Marxist would have to vote for the Christian Social party of the Catholic prelate, Ignaz Seipel. On the other hand, a right-wing coalition could induce the Seipel government to protect the forthcoming Munich Putsch. 5
    Dr. Riehl was outvoted by the delegates at the conference and also by the Leaders’ Council chaired by Hitler. Rudolf Jung, the representative of the Sudeten DNSAP, favored Riehl’s proposal before the meeting, but only briefly. More solid support came from the leader of the Austro-Nazi Trade Union, Walter Gattermayer (who, however, was noton the Leaders’ Council). Karl Schulz, on the other hand, even though he was Riehl’s deputy (and the Gauleiter of Vienna), voted against the proposed coalition. He did so not as a matter of principle, however, but because he felt the party was too poor to campaign. Its meager resources could be more usefully spent on the paramilitary Ordnertruppen 6 and the party’s press. 7 Riehl thus found himself in an embarrassing seven-to-one minority. 8
    Although Karl Schulz, who now rcplaccd Walter Richl as chairman of the Austrian Nazi