German Club (Association)

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The German Club was a club founded by Pan-Germans in Vienna in 1908 , with great political importance. In the First Republic it became a center of the German national movement with members in the highest political, scientific and cultural offices and participants in the July coup 1934 against the corporate state government and the most important parapolitical association in connection with the " connection " of Austria to the German Reich . He was also strongly networked with the similarly oriented anti - Semitic networks Academic Section and German Association as well as with the conspiratorial clique of professors “ Bärenhöhle ” at the University of Vienna .

history

German national reservoir

On February 21, 1908, the German Club was founded by the then Chamber of Commerce secretary and later envoy of Austria in Berlin , the economic politician Richard Riedl , in order to reduce tensions primarily between German national fraternities and student associations , whereby the conflicts between these organizations focus on the use of weapons and on the scale focused. It initially acted as a collecting basin for German national connections and organizations and became radicalized after the end of the First World War .

Radicalization to National Socialism

In 1923 the German Club was housed in eight representative rooms in the Leopoldine wing of the Hofburg , which is now the seat of the Federal President . From December 1928, the club organized a series of lectures lasting several months on the Home Guard , during which their federal leader Richard Steidle also appeared as a speaker. By 1930 at the latest, the German Club drifted further and further to the right , where it increasingly offered itself to National Socialism. In that year many of the "emphatically national" members of the abandoned German Community , a secret society founded in 1919 by German national and Catholic sympathizers, transferred to the German Club.

With the end of the civic bloc governments and the elimination of parliament by Engelbert Dollfuss on March 4, 1933, the conservative and right-wing political spectrum in Austria was reconfigured . The tensions between the now authoritarian ruling Christian Socials and the “Emphasized Nationalists” increased. The increasingly powerful National Socialist NSDAP was banned on June 19, 1933. The German Club, which had acted in conformity with the government in the 1920s, now represented the agenda of the “Emphatically National” and, under its chairman Carl Bardolff, actively sought rapprochement with the National Socialists even before the NSDAP was banned.

After the attempted putsch on July 25, 1934 against the corporate state government , in which Otto Wächter , a club board member, and other club members such as Hanns Blaschke and Otto Persch were involved, the club was forcibly dissolved on August 31, also because it was “a foster home for the National Socialist opposition " has been. The then chairman Carl Bardolff, an ennobled kuk professional officer and Nazi sympathizer, succeeded, however, with the help of club advocates in the highest circles of politics and the executive, that the German Club was allowed to reopen after ten weeks.

On March 11, 1938, 200 members of the German Club finally took part in the SA march in front of the Federal Chancellery, where Kurt Schuschnigg resigned under pressure from Adolf Hitler and Arthur Seyß-Inquart with four other association members (Minister of Commerce Hans Fischböck , Minister of Justice Franz Hueber , Minister of Social Affairs Hugo Jury and Minister of Education Oswald Menghin ) had the majority in the new government.

"Connection" and dissolution of the association

With the "Anschluss" of Austria , one of the greatest goals of the German Club, on March 13, 1938, the Seyß-Inquart federal government became obsolete, but members of the German Club took on numerous important management positions in institutions of the aligned Austria over the next few days and weeks . For example, the Nazi mayor of the city of Vienna, Hermann Neubacher , belonged to the club as well as the rector, the prorector and three deans of the University of Vienna . Even Otto Antonius , Director of the Schönbrunn Zoo was a member of the German club.

However, the club was officially dissolved with the enactment of the Ostmark Act on May 1, 1939 and the disempowerment of Seyß-Inquart in Vienna in September 1939 on October 21, 1939, as the National Socialist regime regarded it as too powerful and a dangerous subsidiary government. This year there were almost 30 percent NSDAP members in the club. This liquidation of the club made it easy to distance oneself from the Nazi regime after 1945.

Successor club New Club

The former members of the German Club and the NSDAP, Erich Fuehrer , Franz Hueber , he was Minister of Justice in the "Anschlusskabinett" Seyß-Inquart, and Karl Anton Rohan , together with Taras Borodajkewycz, founded the New Club in Vienna and Salzburg in 1957 .

The club, whose members were described by the campaign for political renewal cooperating with the VdU as the "elite of political, intellectual, economic and cultural life, insofar as they profess German nationality", sees itself as a non-partisan association , with various guest speakers such as Erhard Busek , Franz Olah or Jörg Haider is referred. However, the homepage of the New Club is part of the website of the Freedom Academic Association of Salzburg .

On the homepage of the New Club, the article phase plan for a sustainable return policy until 2015 could be found, which brought the author Wolfgang Caspart a complaint for incitement to hatred, since labor camps for ID cards and deportees were proposed here. However, in 2016 he was acquitted of suspicion of hate speech.

Political orientation and membership structure

At the beginning of the club, the old men of the fraternities, the German national corporations, the Kyffhäuser Association , the singers and the academic gymnastics club came together. In addition to the German national sentiment, they were linked by a more or less strong anti-Semitism , which was only introduced in 1934 with the addition of “and Aryan descent” to the statutes of the, according to its own definition, “non-political association” for the “care of the German Volkstums "was recorded. Although party political issues were not officially discussed, topics such as the influence of Judaism on the Austrian economy or racial hygiene were discussed in the association. The association was also extremely positive about the connection between Austria and Germany . Arthur Seyß-Inquart used the association to plead for cooperation between the Heimwehr and the NSDAP . Under Carl Bardolff, who headed the German Club between 1932 and 1937 and 1938/1939, the club tried to prevent efforts by the Dollfuss government to distance themselves from Germany.

Comparatively little can be said about the individual members in the first few years, as a list of names is only available from March 1919. The German Club had a little more than the informally determined 1,000 members, who were primarily recruited from the upper middle class and the former nobility . Throughout its thirty years of existence, the club had a total of around 2,000 members. Senior civil servants and administrative lawyers (19%), merchants and manufacturers (16%, including many large industrialists) and university teachers (11%) were particularly well represented. The majority (79%) of these thousand men - women were excluded from membership - lived in Vienna, a further twelve percent in the federal states and six percent in the territory of Czechoslovakia, which had recently been founded . The remaining members were spread across the German Empire and other areas of the former Habsburg monarchy . According to the professional positions, the proportion of academics in the club was very high and was at least 62 percent.

Influential positions

The German Club differed from other civic associations in German-speaking countries in that its members were present in the highest political offices. In addition to serving as a personnel reservoir for the Greater German People's Party , its ranks included President Michael Hainisch, who was in office from 1920 to 1928, and at least ten members of the First Republic who were there: Emil Kraft (trade and commerce, industry and buildings 1922-1923), Walter Rodler (traffic 1921–1922), Hans Schürff (trade and traffic 1923–1929, justice 1930–1931, 1931–1932), Friedrich Schuster (trade and traffic 1930), Franz Slama (justice 1928–1930), Heinrich Srbik (teaching 1929–1930), Leopold Waber (Interior and Teaching 1921–1922, Justice 1922–1923, Vice Chancellor 1924–1926) and Josef Wächter (Army 1921–1922).

In the field of science, the German Club provided 26 percent of the full professors at the University of Vienna in 1932 and half of the rectors in office from 1908 to 1939 , who were Anton Weichselbaum (1912/13), Richard Wettstein (1913/14), and Friedrich Johann Becke (1918/19), Ernst Schwind (1919/20), Alfons Dopsch (1920/21), Hans Sperl (1925/26), Karl Luick (1925/26), Hans Molisch (1926/27), Wenzel Gleispach (1929 / 30), Hans Übersberger (1930/31), Othenio Abel (1932/33), Alexander Hold-Ferneck (1934/35), Oswald Menghin (1935/36) and Fritz Knoll . A large number of the participants in the university's anti-Semitic professor cartels - the faculty of university teachers of the German Community and the Bärenhöhle - were organized in the club, as was Heinrich Srbik, who was President of the Austrian Academy of Sciences from 1938 to 1945 .

There were also high-ranking police officers such as the heads of the state police Heinrich Tandler and Franz Brandl , the latter also serving as the Vienna Police President from 1932 to 1933.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c German Club in the Vienna History Wiki of the City of Vienna
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t Linda Erker, Andreas Huber and Klaus Taschwer : From the "foster home of the National Socialist opposition" to the "extremely threatening secondary government". The German Club before and after the "Anschluss" in 1938. 2017, accessed on July 25, 2017 .
  3. ^ Mitchell G. Ash: The university as a place of politics since 1848. In: University - Politics - Society . V&R unipress, 2015, p. 84–86 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
  4. ↑ Walter Wiltschegg: The Heimwehr: an irresistible popular movement? Ed .: Rudolf Neck, Adam Wandruszka (=  studies and sources on Austrian contemporary history . No. 7 ). Verlag für Geschichte und Politik, Vienna 1985, ISBN 978-3-7028-0221-9 , pp. 48 .
  5. ↑ Federal Government Schuschnigg IV
  6. ^ Federal Government of Seyß-Inquart
  7. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k Linda Erker , Andreas Huber , Klaus Taschwer : Austro-Nazis in the Hofburg. derstandard.at, accessed on July 23, 2017 .
  8. ↑ a b Neues Forum - Volume 26, Issue 301-312, p. 93, 1979.
  9. ↑ The Story of the New Club. Freedom Academic Association Salzburg, accessed on July 23, 2017 .
  10. ↑ a b The activities of the New Club. Freedom Academic Association Salzburg, accessed on July 25, 2017 .
  11. ^ Freedom academic from Salzburg accused of "incitement to hatred". Salzburger Nachrichten , accessed on July 25, 2017 .
  12. ↑ Tamara Ehs, Thomas Olechowski, Kamila Staudigl-Ciechowicz: The Vienna Law and Political Science Faculty, 1918-1938 . V&R unipress, 2014, ISBN 978-3-89971-985-7 , p. 71 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  13. ^ Franz Graf-Stuhlhofer: The Academy of Sciences in Vienna in the Third Reich. In: Christoph J. Scriba (ed.): The elite of the nation in the Third Reich. The relationship of academies and their scientific environment to National Socialism (= Acta historica Leopoldina 22). Halle ad Saale 1995, pp. 133-159.