"The Modern Caesar" was the title conferred on Adolf Hitler last week by the world press, which always ennobles with a cliche. This Caesar's chariot of triumph was his usual big black Mercedes-Benz, and as usual he rode beside his chauffeur, entering his native Austria amid a two-mile long procession of German Army & Storm Troops, with six tanks leading the way, and German bombers blacking out the sky.
Austrians screamed "We See Our Leader!'', "One Führer, One Reich!" Many went down on their knees as the Mercedes passed, and after it had gone by some groveled in Hitler's wheel tracks, scooping up handfuls of the Austrian earth into which had bitten the sharp treads of his German tires.
Meanwhile in many factory districts throughout Austria stalwart Nazis, mostly Austrians, were busy stripping to the waist workmen known for their Communist or Socialist views, giving them the cat-o'-nine-tails. In the Jewish quarter of Vienna boys were flogged, the eyes of old men watered as their beards were jerked. Nazis spat in the faces of Jewesses, and almost everyone whether Jew or Aryan was soon wearing a swastika. Later Jews were forbidden to wear them. The arrest by Nazi pagans of Theodor Cardinal Innitzer was incessantly rumored, but his Palace ran up the Nazi flag, and His Eminence exclaimed: "Thank God there has been no bloodshed!"
Adolf Hitler paused briefly to inspect the three-story building in one flat of which he was born at Braunau on the River Inn. A janitor of a school once attended by Hitler as a boy fired one shot, not at Hitler who was nowhere near, but over the heads of some Storm Troops. They took his gun, and flogged him. The mothers of three babies just born at Vienna were announced to have named each "Adolf." As Adolf approached the provincial capital at Linz, Austrian crowds were cheering everyone they could think of, even bellowing "Hell Ward Price!" since this British journalist is pro-Nazi and works for Lord Rothermere who is always received by Hitler when in Berlin. A schoolmaster of Hitler's boyhood, now nearly 80, had come tottering to see his pupil, the Führer, enter Linz, and a rollicking song rose with the chorus: "Today Germany is ours! Tomorrow the whole World!"
To Linz had hurried from Vienna the Nazi Arthur Seyss-Inquart whom Hitler by ultimatum had forced in last week as Chancellor of Austria (see p. 19). This stooge came only to hand over his country to the German Dictator, did so by officially declaring: "From today the Austrian people consider null and void Paragraph 88 of the Treaty of St. Germain which proclaims Austria's independence."
"Picture my feeling of emotion!" gasped Orator Hitler, almost suffocating with joy, and U. S. listeners heard him, via short wave, broadcast a triumphant reference to his "divine commission." Benito Mussolini had already received a gushing letter Friend Hitler had dispatched by air to Rome, and now the Führer telegraphed to the Duce, "I shall never forget this!"