Hofer, Weber, Lessing
Hofer is a great name in the Tyrol. Bearded, barrel-chested Tyrolean Patriot Andreas Hofer, most faithful friend of the House of Habsburg, captured Innsbruck twice from French and Bavarian troops during the Napoleonic wars, was captured by Italian troops and executed at Mantua in 1810 under Napoleon's orders. His tomb is a shrine for Austrian patriotism. From the Tyrol too comes Franz Hofer, an Austrian Nazi. No friend of the Habsburgs, eager to see his country absorbed by Ger- many, Nazi Hofer unwittingly added 8,000 men to the little Austrian Army, and brought the active support of France and Britain to the struggling government of Engelbert Dollfuss.
At the beginning of last week Franz Hofer, Nazi leader for the Tyrol and Vorarlberg, was a political prisoner in Innsbruck jail. One midnight two men in the grey .Norfolk jackets of the anti-Nazi Heimwehr drove up to the jail with a prisoner handcuffed between them.
"Here is a dangerous Nazi who tried to escape over the border and shot a man!" they shouted.
The Austrian guard peered through the gate. A dangerous Nazi the prisoner certainly was. The guard recognized him as Siegfried Kustatcher, who had served a prison sentence only a few weeks before. He opened the gates. The fake Heimwehr men suddenly dropped the handcuffs, snapped out blackjacks and sponges soaked in chloroform. Chief Warden Ludwig rushed down to help, was overpowered too. At pistol-point they snatched the keys from the warden's terrified wife, rushed Leader Hofer to a waiting automobile. In ten minutes every frontier post was warned. Shrewdly the Nazis did not make for the heavily-guarded Bavarian border, but for Italy, 20 miles away. On the Brenner Pass road an Austrian gendarme tried to stop them, was nearly run down, fired at the car, struck Nazi Hofer in the knee. At 5 a. m. the car was found abandoned three miles from the Italian frontier at Gries. Alpine troops and gendarmes searched the mountainsides with bloodhounds, to no avail. Franz Hofer turned up safely over the border in Bolzano next morning. As soon as he was well enough to be moved he was lifted into a plane, flown back across Austria to safety in Bavaria.
Weber. Only slightly less than Austria has German Switzerland been bombarded with Nazi propaganda. Stolid German Swiss have been unmoved at offers to trade their dull commercial comfort for the hysterical frenzy of the Third Reich, but last week they got mad. At Ramsen on the German border three Nazi toughs crossed the Swiss frontier, beat off a Swiss customs guard before he could summon aid, seized a Czech citizen named Hermann Weber, dragged him screaming into Germany. There have been a series of similar incidents. Switzerland's unvarying foreign policy (MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS) has kept all Swiss papers from any overt criticisms of the Hitler Government but last week even the staid, conservative La Suisse rapped out:
"This truly indescribable incident must be the last. An energetic démarche is necessary if the facts are as related in this dispatch. There has been incident upon incident, and one does not know where they may lead us."