Office of Strategic Services The close connection between Austrian and German
National Socialism continued until 1923. Hitler frequently
visited Austrian National Socialist meetings, as well as
Inter-State assemblies. His last appearance at an Inter-State
party meeting was in Salzburg in August. 1923. At this
meeting came his breach with Riehl. The question under
discussion was the attitude which the Austrian National
Socialist should adopt in the coming Austrian elections.
Riehl believed that the National Socialists should participate
at the elections and win their way to power though legal
means. Adolf Hitler was for abstention and an armed _Putsch_.
Hitler's ideology was accepted, and Riehl resigned on
September 15 both as Chairman of the Inter-State Office
of the National Socialists and as President of the Austrian D.N.S.A.P.
(Fodor, 165)
.....Riehl, the spiritual father of National Socialism,
is a practicing lawyer in Vienna. He lives in comparative
poverty because he still defends Nazis before the courts
more for idealistic
than for financial reasons. His political influence at
the moment is almost nil. He is disliked by Hitler,
who rarely forgives those who contradict him. (Ibid., 166)
If Hitler had been a more flexible and adaptable
politician, he certainly would have agreed to the
Italian terms. . . . . Nothing would have been easier
than to command the illegal Sturm Abteilung and
Schutzstaffl formations to join the Heinwehr
and Nazify it from within. But Hitler was a man of
fanatically fixed principles. This would have been,
in his eyes, a betrayal of the 'greatly-suffering and
well-tried old warriors,' who, since the days after
the war, had been rallying to his standards. It would
have meant sacrificing Theo Nebicht. This he could
not do. Hitler's mind is unfathomable. Sometimes he
is grateful to old comrades to the point of harming
himself; at other times, as on June 30, he shoots
them down in cold blood. This time he committed a
grave mistake. The refusal of the Italian offer was
flinging the gauntlet into the face of Italy; and
Mussolini accepted the challenge. (Ibid., 204)
...If the Nazis smeared on the walls, Heil Hitler, the
Socialists always corrected it to Heilt Hitler (cure Hitler).
Some of the jokes were made at the expense of the fact
that Hitler in the former Austrian parts was often the
name of Jews, too. An Austrian afternoon paper tried to
make it appear that Hitler was of Jewish extraction, but
the evidence was not only unconvincing, but based simply
on hearsay. (Ibid., 206)
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Hitler Source Book
Plot & Counterplot in Central Europe
M.W. Fodor