(7 of 10)
Schuschnigg surrendered and returned home. But President Wilhelm Miklas, who had not experienced Hitler's persuasion, refused to accept the deal. When Hitler heard that, he ordered the Wehrmacht to mobilize, as publicly as possible. Schuschnigg tried to defend his regime by announcing a plebiscite in four days, on March 13, to decide whether Austrians wanted "a free, independent, social, Christian and united Austria." Hitler, apoplectic, ordered the Wehrmacht to invade Austria on March 12 unless Schuschnigg called off the plebiscite. Once again Schuschnigg surrendered, but Hitler kept increasing his demands. Now he insisted that Schuschnigg resign and be replaced by Nazi leader Arthur Seyss-Inquart. Schuschnigg again surrendered, and resigned, but President Miklas refused to name Seyss-Inquart.
By now Nazi mobs had encircled the Chancellery, shrieking "Sieg Heil! Heil Hitler!" On the telephone from Berlin, Goring dictated a telegram to Seyss- Inquart in which "the provisional Austrian government" asked Germany to send troops to restore order. On March 12 the Wehrmacht came streaming across the border -- not only unopposed but warmly welcomed by thousands of Austrians who genuinely wanted union with Germany. Next day, Seyss-Inquart issued a decree that announced, "Austria is a province of the German Reich." Hitler returned in triumph to the Vienna where he had once lived as a virtual derelict. Papen described him as being "in a state of ecstasy."
Britain and France again protested but did nothing, so Hitler's aggressiveness had conquered a whole country without a shot being fired. And with that conquest came severe repression. When Hitler went to Vienna, Heinrich Himmler's police began to arrest 79,000 "unreliables." Schuschnigg was kept in a single room at police headquarters and assigned to cleaning toilets for 17 months, then shipped to Dachau. Jews were rounded up and made to get on their hands and knees and scrub away Schuschnigg campaign slogans.
In Germany too the treatment of Jews kept getting worse. The Nuremberg racial laws of 1935 deprived them of German citizenship and forbade them to marry or have sexual relations with "Aryans." In 1938 they were barred from practicing law or medicine or engaging in commerce. Along with such laws came all forms of discrimination -- signs barring them from grocery stores or drugstores or even whole towns -- and the constant threat of violence from any bad-tempered policeman, any unruly crowd.
In November 1938, after a Jewish student assassinated the Third Secretary at the German embassy in Paris, the Nazis staged a nationwide pogrom, burning Jewish homes and synagogues and smashing so many windows that the rampage became known as Kristallnacht (death toll: 91). Yet again the Western Allies protested but did nothing. London maintained its strict limits on Jews' going to British-ruled Palestine, and the U.S. resisted any increase in its immigration quotas.