Hitler

with cold, dirty water, and subjecting them to every conceivable form of merciless humiliation.
    Thousands tried to flee. Masses packed the railway stations, trying to get out to Prague. They had the few possessions they could carry with them ransacked by the squads of men with swastika armbands who had assembled at the stations, ‘confiscating’ property at will, entering compartments on the trains and dragging out arbitrarily selected victims for further mishandling and internment. Those who left on the 1 1.1 5 p.m. night express thought they had escaped. But they were turned back at the Czech border. Their ordeal was only just beginning. Others tried to flee by road. Soon, the roads to the Czech border were jammed. They became littered with abandoned cars as their occupants, realizingthat the Czech authorities were turning back refugees at the borders, headed into the woods to try to cross the frontier illegally on foot.
    For many, there was only one way out. Suicide among the Viennese Jewish community became commonplace in these terrible days.
    The quest to root out ‘enemies of the people’, which in Germany had subsided in the mid-1930s and had begun to gather new pace in 1937, was revitalized through the new ‘opportunities’ that had opened up in Austria. The radicalized campaign would very quickly be reimported to the ‘Old Reich’, both in the new and horrifying wave of antisemitism in the summer of 1938, and – behind the scenes but ultimately even more sinister – in the rapid expansion of the SS’s involvement in looking for solutions to the ‘Jewish Question’.
    After the tremors of the Blomberg – Fritsch affair, Hitler’s internal position was now stronger than ever. The vast majority of officers were, as regards the Anschluß, of one mind with the people: they could only approve and – if sometimes begrudgingly – admire Hitler’s latest triumph. Among the mass of the population, ‘the German miracle’ brought about by Hitler released what was described as ‘an elemental frenzy of enthusiasm’ – once it was clear that the western powers would again stand by and do nothing, and that ‘our Führer has pulled it off without bloodshed’. It would be the last time that the German people – now with the addition of their cousins to the east whose rapid disillusionment soon dissipated the wild euphoria with which many of them had greeted Hitler – would feel the threat of war lifted so rapidly from them through a foreign-policy coup completed within days and presented as a fait accompli. The next crisis, over the Sudetenland, would drag over months and have them in near-panic over the likelihood of war. And if Hitler had had his way, there would have been war.
    II
    Down to the Anschluß, the major triumphs in foreign policy had been in line with the revisionist and nationalist expectations of all powerful interests in the Reich, and quite especially those of the army. The methods – on which the army, the Foreign Office, and others often looked askance – were Hitlerian. The timing had been determined by Hitler. The decisions to act were his alone. But in each case there hadbeen powerful backing, as well as some hesitancy, among his advisers. And in each case, he was reflecting diverse currents of revisionist expression. The immense popularity of his triumphs in all sections of the political élite and among the masses of the population testified to the underlying consensus behind the revisionism. The earlier crises had also all been of brief duration. The tension had in each case been short-lived, the success rapidly attained. And in each case, the popular jubilation was in part an expression of relief that the western powers had not intervened, that the threat of another war – something which sent shivers of horror down the spines of most ordinary people – had been averted. The resulting popularity and prestige that accrued to Hitler drew heavily upon his ‘triumphs without bloodshed’. The weakness and divisions of the western powers had in each case been the platform for Hitler’s bloodless coups.
    For the first time, in the summer of 1938, Hitler’s foreign policy went beyond revisionism and national integration, even if the western powers did not grasp this. Whatever his public veneer of concern about the treatment of the Sudeten Germans, there was no doubt at all to the ruling groups in Germany aware of Hitler’s thinking that he was aiming not just at the