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"Forget what?" celebrating German-Austrians asked each other. Suddenly crowds got the crazy idea that Premier Mussolini had presented the Italian Tyrol (pop. 613,000, of whom 230,000 are racially German) to Chancellor Hitler. Soon the big-boned, blue-eyed German troops swinging through German-Austria were greeted with shouts of "Tyrol is Free! Tyrol is Free!"
Berlin's Caesar had just explicitly promised Rome's Caesar by air message that he will "never" seek to obtain any soil which is Italian today, and the Führer's entourage quickly denied the "Tyrol is Free" rumor, also started half-hourly broadcasts warning Nazis significantly not to make unauthorized arrests or seizures of property. Nazi boys & girls at this time were swarming aboard railway trains at every stop, importantly demanding to be shown everyone's passport, but travelers who refused these Nazi moppets were not harmed, though fists were shaken in their faces.
Adolf Hitler, to everyone's surprise, was still at Linz, seemed in no hurry to enter Vienna. "Perhaps Der Führer is embarrassed by the fact that Miklas is still President," came as an electric suggestion, and Chancellor Seyss-Inquart promptly announced: "President Miklas has laid down his functions at the request of the Federal Chancellor." Hitler at Linz decreed himself Chief of State and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, and to the question "Does the Austrian Government exist or not?" a new official press spokesman (see p. 19) answered in Vienna: "I really don't know. I have just arrived by air from Berlin."
Decrees, proclamations, orders followed by scores as Adolf Hitler finally left Linz at 10:45 a.m. Monday in a six-wheeled military automobile, making slowly for Vienna which Nazis hoped they had made safe by locking up hundreds, including the Duke of Windsor's Jewish ear specialist, Professor Heinrich Neumann and Vienna's Aryan Mayor Richard Schmitz. New laws on all sorts of subjects, including complicated economic regulations, were being promulgated by simply reading them over the radio. Frantic Viennese businessmen strained to catch each word. What had been the Austro-German frontier was swept away, thus abolishing customs duties; German-Austrians learned the economy of their country had been meshed with the Göring Four-Year Plan (TIME, Nov. 2, 1936); and April 10 was set as the date on which "the German men and women of Austria" will vote in a "free and secret plebiscite" whether they approve what Adolf Hitler has done by then.
Thus the Jews will be excluded from the plebiscite ("because they are not German in blood"), and according to Jewish figures there are proportionately ten times more Jews in German-Austria than there were in Germany when the Nazis took power. Says Hitler in Mein Kampf: "Vienna is full up with Jews." By the time the Führer reached the outskirts of Vienna, decrees had deprived of their profession the 70% of Austrian lawyers who are Jews, and the 55% of Austrian doctors who are Jews were next.