Company Otto

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Enterprise Otto was the code name chosen by Adolf Hitler for “The military instruction for the march into Austria of March 11, 1938” for the “Anschluss” of Austria .

background

Special case Otto

In an instruction from the German Minister of War and Commander-in-Chief of the Wehrmacht , Werner von Blomberg, dated June 24, 1937, various cases were listed for which the Wehrmacht had to be kept ready for war, be it to be able to counter attacks or to “for example In the special case of Otto, it says: “Armed intervention against Austria in the event that it should restore the monarchy.” The aim of this intervention should be to force Austria to renounce a restoration by force of arms . For this purpose, taking advantage of the internal political division of the Austrian people, invade Vienna in a general direction and break all resistance. Parts of the air force were supposed to support the army. Whether party associations should be used in addition to the armed power would be left to the decision of the Supreme Commander of the Wehrmacht.

Naming for expansion companies

Standard cover names for the warlike ventures in the “ Third Reich ” were: “ Fall Grün ” for the attack on Czechoslovakia, “ Fall Weiß ” for the attack on Poland, “ Fall Gelb ” for the war against the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, “ Fall Red ”for the attack on France,“ Operation Weser Exercise ”for the occupation of Norway and Denmark and“ Operation Sea Lion ”for preparations for landing in England. Only "Enterprise Otto" and " Case / Enterprise Barbarossa " fall out of this framework, whereas "Barbarossa" has a different clarity than "Otto".

"Otto" could mean Otto I (the Great) , given the Ottonians , which were booming in the German Empire at the time, following the role that he played in the Austrian version of German national historiography. After Charlemagne, Otto I was the new founder of the south-eastern border march of the empire. His victory over the Hungarians in the Battle of Lechfeld (955 ) enabled the Bavarians to gradually settle the “ marcha orientalis ” (documented for the first time under Otto II. 976; cf. “Ostmark”), from which the later Austria developed (" Ostarrîchi " first documented under Otto III. 996).

Because Hitler, as he wrote in Mein Kampf (Vol. 2, pp. 733-742.), Only recognized two notable foreign policy achievements in Germany's thousand-year history, namely “the colonization of the Ostmark, mainly operated by Bavarians” and “the acquisition and Penetration of the area east of the Elbe ”, the first goal of his foreign policy was that“ the old Ostmark of the Reich ”(Mein Kampf, vol. 1, p. 9) should be reunited with the“ motherland ”(see also Sybel-Ficker dispute ). One day after the “Anschluss” in Le Temps, an anonymous voice was played in the Wiener Funkhaus on March 12, 1938: “After a thousand years of history, the day has finally come when a few German people have risen again.”

Two months later, on May 25, 1938, Austria was renamed "Ostmark". With the completion of the “Anschluss”, Austria had the same prerequisites as those created by the “ Law on the Rebuilding of the Reich ” of January 30 , 1934, bringing the various federal states into line and abolishing their statehood and the common naturalization of Austrians in 1938 had been.

However, Austrian legitimists in particular still take the view today that Otto primarily meant Otto von Habsburg . Although in Austria in the corporate state tendencies to return to the Habsburg monarchy were to recognize parts of the political elite, and probably also the people on the restoration of the imperial hoped -time and before the invasion still Otto von Habsburg brought into play even as chancellor candidate, seems this interpretation absurd: On July 1, 1937, the German ambassador Franz von Papen confirmed that "the restoration of the House of Habsburg ... had been put aside completely". The symbolic political presence of the Ottonians in Austria at that time is evident in the fact that, at the same time as the "Anschluss", there was a student resistance group called the "Ottonen" for a short time until it was quickly dissolved.

The social democrat Norbert Leser and some journalists are of the opinion that there was a connection between Otto Habsburg and the term "Operation Otto".

Renaming of the Ostmark

On March 15, 1938, Hitler had declared their task to his new compatriots from the balcony of the Hofburg in Vienna: "From now on, the oldest Ostmark of the German people is to be the youngest bulwark of the German nation and thus of the German Empire." "Most recent bulwark" was occupied differently, on January 19, 1942, Hitler ordered the Reich ministries to replace the term "Ostmark" with " Danube and Alpine Reichsgaue ", especially since Bohemia and Moravia had been transformed into a protectorate of the "German Reich" and Hungary and Romania, as satellites, had long supported the National Socialist policy of expansion towards the Soviet Union .

According to Andreas Hillgruber , the renaming was due to the advancement of the eastern border of the " Greater German Empire " in Eastern Europe and the emptying of the term "Mark" (ahd. For "border", "border area"). After the “connection” to his home country, Hitler “only ever saw one stage or one function in his wide-ranging expansion 'program'”. Following the etymological logic, the term “Mark” was now reserved for the “Germanic settlement marks” to be developed in Eastern Europe after the “ General Plan East ” which came into force in 1942 . Gauleiter Erich Koch (official seat: Rowno , Ukraine ) strove to convert Ukraine into a "German Ostmark" as an object of economic exploitation. In 1942, the so-called “ Gau Bayerische Ostmark ”, which had been known since 1933 because of its border location with Czechoslovakia , was renamed to “Gau Bayreuth” on instructions from Berlin, since the Gau was not a peripheral location, but now a central location due to the war in what was then the territory of the German Empire ”.

From the Austrian side - Emmerich Tálos and Karl Vocelka - the following explanations are given for the renaming of "Ostmark" in " Donau- und Alpenreichsgaue ": Vocelka sees a further expression in it for 1940 (sic !; he can actually only mean 1942) The rulers endeavor to eradicate any indication of Austria's historical independence, while Tálos only means that he can conclude that "undesirable associations" have been suppressed that are not further explained.

Commentary in contemporary history

Two well-known medieval historians commented on the first imperialist expansions in 1938 to Austria and the Sudetenland as follows: “The past year,” explained Friedrich Baethgen in 1939, “brought us an experience of a magnitude that was only granted to a few generations of the German people. [...] A demand was realized that had arisen with inner necessity from the entire course of our history. ”In doing so, he saw the shadow of the medieval empire rise behind the“ Greater German Reich ”.

The medievalist Hermann Heimpel wrote in the same context: “How free and happy, however, our gaze rests on the First Reich of the Germans. The strength from which Adolf Hitler elevated the Germans to their empire is not borrowed from him, but newly evoked. [...] Austria found home - the crown of kings is guarded in the Great German Empire. The 'newer' times of the weakened Germany are over. But what was fought for was the order of the First Kingdom: the peace of the peoples from the strength of their midst. "

"Rebuilding the Empire"

These statements agree with the fact that historians oriented towards national history generally viewed the “ Third Reich ” until the early 1940s as the realization and completion of what they saw as being laid out in the medieval Empire. This mainly referred to the law on the rebuilding of the Reich of February 5, 1934, supplemented by the " Reich Citizenship Law ", which was passed on September 15, 1935 at the " Reich Party Congress of Freedom" in Nuremberg.

Robert Holtzmann dedicated his Otto monograph from 1936 to “Dem Deutschen Volke” and intoned the following notes: “Emperor Otto the Great gave direction and victory to a bold desire and deep longing of the German people. [...] That is precisely why we owe it to his work, both internally and externally, that the various German tribes, which until then had stood side by side and unfortunately all too often against each other, came together to form a unit and became aware of their commonality and togetherness . How we became one people : that is the delicious and immortal content of the story of Otto the Great. ”It is obvious that Holtzmann was thinking of Hitler when he wrote about Otto, because he, like the majority of Germans, was happy about his new ID card as a German citizen and Reich citizen. With an ordinance of July 3, 1938, the Austrians were then collectively naturalized and were given German citizenship , which happened to the Sudeten Germans on November 20, 1938.

In a speech at the SS Junker School in Bad Tölz on November 23, 1942, Himmler recalled these events under the heading “Colony today, settlement area tomorrow, Reich the day after tomorrow!”: “Ten years ago, Germans experienced the transition to German Prussia, Bavaria or Württemberg became Germans. And again after 5 years the German had to go through another change in his historical awakening: Austria returned home, the borders between Germans with the same language and the same customs ceased to exist, the Greater German Reich had become a reality. "

Similar naming

The name "Otto" reappeared on July 25, 1940 in an order from the OKW, as a keyword for a "preferred Wehrmacht program" for the expansion of rails and roads in the occupied part of Poland . On December 5, 1940, Franz Halder submitted all the plans for an attack on Russia summarized under "Otto" to Hitler. Halder was not involved in "Enterprise Otto", so could not have known that the code name had already been given for the connection of Austria. On December 18, 1940, Hitler issued directive No. 21 , in which the war plan was now referred to as the " Barbarossa case ". Friedrich I. Barbarossa was already praised by Hitler in July 1937 "as the German ruler who was the first to express the Germanic cultural concept and to carry it out as part of his imperial mission".

What "Otto" / "Operation Barbarossa" was for the Wehrmacht was " Program Heinrich " for the SS and Himmler . Himmler thus claimed Otto I's father Heinrich I as patron of everything that the SS in Eastern Europe was considering in parallel to “Operation Barbarossa”.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Instruction of the Supreme Commander of the Wehrmacht Adolf Hitler for the armed invasion of the Wehrmacht in Austria (March 11, 1938), in: documentArchiv.de (Ed.)
  2. ↑ documents . In: Documentation archive of the Austrian resistance (ed.): "Anschluss" 1938. A documentation . Österreichischer Bundesverlag, Vienna 1988, ISBN 3-215-06898-2 , p. 99 f . (Document of the International Military Tribunal Nuremberg, Vol. XXXIV, Doc. 175-C).
  3. ↑ Gernot Heiss, The “Viennese School of History” in National Socialism: “Science fighting harmony and science recognizing Rankescher”? , P. 409 f. In: Mitchell G. Ash / Wolfram Nieß / Ramon Pils (eds.), Humanities in National Socialism. The example of the University of Vienna , Göttingen 2010, pp. 397–426.
  4. ↑ Benoist-Méchin, 1966, p. 265.
  5. ↑ Schausberger, 1978, p. 401.
  6. ^ Neugebauer / Steiner, 1981, p. 107.
  7. ^ Scheidl, A rollercoaster for patriots, Die Presse, March 2, 2013 p. 11 (contemporary history).
  8. ↑ Norbert readers: bizarre encounters. Mosaics on Austrian intellectual history. Böhlau, Vienna 2011, ISBN 978-3-205-78658-0 , p. 223.
  9. ↑ Speeches of the Führer. Politics and Propaganda Adolf Hitler 1922–1945 , ed. v. Erhard Klöss, Munich 1967, p. 85.
  10. ↑ Andreas Hillgruber : "The attempted erasure of the name 'Austria' and its replacement first by 'Ostmark', then (when the eastern border of the Greater German Reich was pushed further and further east by the advancing front) by the confusing name 'Donau- und Alpengaue' , superficially marked the path to supposedly complete integration. ” In: The connection problem (1918–1945) - From a German perspective , p. 175. In: Germany and Austria. A bilateral history book , ed. by Robert A. Kann and Friedrich E. Prinz, Vienna-Munich 1980.
  11. ↑ The General Plan East v. May 28, 1942 .
  12. ^ Reichskommissariate "Ostland" and "Ukraine" , in: Lexikon der deutschen Geschichte. People, events, institutions. From the turning point to the end of World War II , ed. by Gerhard Taddey, Stuttgart: Kröner 1979.
  13. ↑ Bavarian East Mark .
  14. ↑ Emmerich Tálos : From the liquidation of statehood to the establishment of the Reichsgaue of the "Ostmark". On the restructuring of the political administrative structure , p. 69 in: E. Tálos / E. Hanisch / W. Neugebauer / R. Sieder (ed.): Nazi rule in Austria. A manual , öbv & hpt. Vienna 2002. ISBN 3-209-03179-7 , pp. 55–72.
  15. ^ Karl Vocelka : When Austria did not exist (p. 300), in: History of Austria . Heyne / Styria. Graz, Vienna, Cologne 2002. ISBN 3-453-21622-9 .
  16. ↑ Schönwälder, 1999, p. 141.
  17. ^ Hermann Heimpel: German Middle Ages. Leipzig 1941, p. 207.
  18. ↑ Robert Holtzmann: Emperor Otto the Great. Berlin 1936, p. 7 (emphasis in the original).
  19. ↑ Arno J. Mayer : The war as a crusade. The German Reich, Hitler's Wehrmacht and the “Final Solution”. Reinbek near Hamburg, p. 340.

literature

  • J. Benoist-Méchin: Grab over the borders 1938. The Anschluss of Austria and its prehistory. Oldenburg / Hamburg 1966.
  • Carl Dirks, Karl-Heinz Janssen : The war of the generals. Hitler as a tool of the Wehrmacht. Berlin 1999.
  • Wolfgang Neugebauer , Herbert Steiner: Resistance and persecution in Austria (in the period from February 12, 1938 to April 10, 1938). In: Anschluss 1938: Minutes of the symposium in Vienna on March 14 and 15, 1978. Munich 1981, pp. 86–108.
  • Norbert Schausberger : The reach for Austria. The connection. Vienna-Munich 1978.
  • Karen Schönwälder : "Teacher of the peoples and the youth". Historians as political commentators 1933 to 1945. in: Peter Schöttler (Hrsg.): Historschreibung als Legitimationswissenschaft 1918–1945. Frankfurt am Main 1999, pp. 128-165.
  • Emmerich Tálos , E. Hanisch et al. (Ed.): Nazi rule in Austria. A manual. Vienna 2000.