| CSP/VF | NSDAP | |
|---|---|---|
| Otto Ender | Arthur Seyss-Inquart | |
| Karl Buresch | Tobias Portschy | |
| Engelbert Dollfuss | Alois Brunner | |
| Kurt von Schuschnigg | Österreichische Legion |
I have taken only Nazis from Austria. One of which had the name of Legion. Now, Austrian Legion and Tobias Portschy are two articles I link to in German. Because there are no articles in English. Or French.
Why so, might you ask?
Well, it seems English and French wikipedians (admins, perhaps?) do not like the idea of exonerating Austrofascism (Christlich Soziale Partei and Vaterländische Front) from being a kind of "Nazism light". It was not.
Portschy was in prison for Nazi propaganda. Seyß-Inquart was not, but only because he had been Austrofascist up to recently before Anschluß. Alois Brunner was not, but then during the time of Austrofascist Dictatorship (Austrofascism having a Parlamentarian past) he was outside Austria in ... Austrian Legion. Which had training camps in Bavaria, not in Austria.
Now, if Nazis from Austria can make up a legion and that one training outside Austria, perhaps it is because Nazis were having a rough time in Austria under the Austrofascist era?
It is very odd, considering the prominence of Gipsies among anti-Nazism, that Tobias Portschy, their principal enemy, has no article outside the German wikipedia, no article in the other languages.
Now, where exactly were MY sympathies in all this?
Once upon a time, when I was very early in my teens, I admired Hitler with a reservation. What exact reservation? Well, obviously his persecution of Jews. Not as if I were OK with his persecuting Gipsies, but I had given more thought to Jews than to Gipsies. Not as if I were OK with his persecution of Poles, but I knew so little of them, that changed a few years later when I read about Father Maximilian Kolbe. Not as if I were OK with euthanasia, but I thought it less disgusting than psychiatry as I could observe it working and destroying a life slowly. I want neither of them. These things were not things I was OK with, but things which had not crossed my mind very much, things I preferred not to think of.
And very little later, I came across other Fascists worthier of my admiration : Falange Española and later still Austrofascism.
So, if you think I am the kind of person who agrees to admire Seyß-Inquart, Portschy, Brunner, no, I am not. I am glad that Seyß-Inquart RETURNED to Catholicism "on the scaffold."
Which means that he was not practising during his active time as a Nazi.
OK, not technically on the scaffold, but very shortly before.
Portschy was a Protestant, in all probability, since while it was easy to check on wiki what religion a city has, his birthtown was majority Protestant, "evangelisch". Or perhaps, Unterstuetzen was a smaller town with Catholics where the nearby larger town was majority Protestant. That situation was the one of Brunner's origins. And though Brunner was a Catholic (he has a relative also called Alois, who is a Catholic Novus Ordo priest), he very certainly saw school and probably too electric lights in the nearby larger town that was majority Protestant.
Since Unterschuetzen is now part of the communality of Oberschuetzen, let's look at the Churches:
| Oberschützen ist - wie auch Unterschützen, Willersdorf, Jormannsdorf und Sulzriegel - eine Filiale der katholischen Pfarrgemeinde Bad Tatzmannsdorf. Bereits seit 1942 ist Bad Tatzmannsdorf eine selbständige Lokalseelsorgestelle, 1987 wurde es zur Pfarre erhoben. | Oberschuetzen is - like also Unterschuetzn, Willersdorf, Jormansdorf and Sulzriegel - a Filial of the Catholic Parish Bad Taztmannsdorf. Already since 1942, Bad Tatzmannsdorf is an independent local pastoral place, 1987 it was erected into a parish. | |
| OK, so neither Unterschuetzen where Portschy was born, nor nearby larger Oberschuetzen, with communes having merged since then, are independent parishes in the Catholic Church. And the possibility of seeing a priest and hearing Holy Mass came to Bad Tazmannsdorf only during WW-II, not earlier. Could it be because Catholics are a minority in Austria not overall but in that particular corner, which used to belong to Hungary, before it became Austrian after WW-I, because its population spoke German? Let's continue! | ||
| Der Pfarrbereich erstreckt sich über zwei politische Gemeinden (Bad Tatzmannsdorf und Oberschuetzen) und über drei evangelische Pfarren. Die Katholiken machen mit ca. 1.000 Personen ungefähr ein Drittel der Gesamtbevölkerung aus, was eine Diasporasituation für unsere Pfarre bedeutet. | The [Catholic] parish involves the area of two Political Communes (Bad tazmannsdorf and Oberschuetzen) and more than that of three "Evangelisch" Parishes. Since Catholics are about 1000 persons and constitute a third of the total population, our Parish is in the diaspora. | |
Now, I did not translate "Evangelisch" as Evangelical. Since Evangelisch is closer to United Church of Canada than to Evangelicals.
Evangelisch was a unions of lukewarm Lutherans with not totally fervent Calvinists, originating in the 1830's (I think) in the Kingdom of Prussia. The infamous Adolf von Harnack who described Jesus as "an Aryan" (in the Nazi-like racial sense) and who was probably himself "an Arian" (in the sense that was condemned by the Council of Nice in 325) as well as generally a Modernist, he was Evangelisch. In the Catholic Church he would have been outed as quickly as Loisy was. If he wasn't on the Index, it would be because the Index had ceased trying to cover Protestant publications anyway. But as Evangelisch, von Harnack could publish and publish without real inhibitions from his "superiors" or pastors. Now, whether Portschy was one or not, they were clearly the majority where he was born, are still so in same place and were probably even more so when he was born there.
I have here to insert a certain doubt.
The Evangelische Parish has no Church mentioned in Unterschuetzen. Here are the sites: Römisch-katholische Pfarrgemeinde, Evangelische Pfarrgemeinde A. B. Oberschützen. As you may notice, these pages are on the municipal city page of Oberschuetzen. Logo with city name and then Dou tuit si wos! [= standard German "da tut sich was", English "there, something is getting done", word for word, without being sure of meaning being the exact same one, probably "something is happening there", like "da ist was los"]. Austria is not secularised. Catholicism and - due to precisely Burgenland - Evangelisch Protestantism are officially recognised religions. On birth certificates the religion of parents are noted. My mother's religion being Church of Sweden and active in Salvation Army, back then, it was not noted "Heilsarmé", since it is/was registered as a sect (Catholic rather than socialogical sense), not as an officially recognised religion, but it was noted "Lutherisch-evangelisch", which is not quite the same thing as simply "Evangelisch". "Lutherisch-evangelisch" and "Alt-Lutheraner" both mean Lutheran, but "Alt-Lutheraner" implies less ecumenism with Calvinism.
So, as Unterschuetzen was a filial to the Catholic Parish, but nothing is noted of Unterschuetzen at all on the Evangelisch Parish, perhaps Unterschutzen was after all Catholic. But if so, it was a besieged Catholic and Portschy was as much discontinuing its practise as certain on "openly secular" are from homes that are in the other and American sense "Evangelical".
Portschy's words in 1992 "Schmarotzer sind Schmarotzer" [I had better leave those uncharitable words untranslated!] seem to indicate an mentality of Calvinist Work Ethic and not a mentality of Catholic Alms Giving. England first locked its paupers into poor houses a few decades after Reformation, on pretext of making sure alms were not abused. Not a Catholic mentality at all. It crept into Christendom from Classic Paganism (and not even from Odyssey, but rather from things like Cicero or Seneca, perhaps even Plato or Aristotle) during the Renaissance and was expressed in the comment of Calvin on II Thessalonians 3:rd chapter.
For Brunner, the certainty is, by age 11 he left his Catholic little home town to attend school in the neighbouring majority Evangelisch city. In other words, certainly a man formed by a sentiment of Catholic inferiority, not at all a man proud to be Papist.
To return to another Catholic Nazi, Seyss-Inquart. He was hanged as a war criminal. So was Fritz Sauckel. Same night. Sauckel pleaded "I am innocent". Seyss-Inquart wrote him that the fact that they acted on orders of the Fuehrer nowise meant they were free from personal responsibility. Now, the charge against Sauckel was not gas chambers. It is irrelevant to it whether Leuchter was right or wrong. It was this:
He worked directly under Goering through the Four-Year Plan Office, directing and controlling German labour. In response to increased demands, he met the requirement for manpower with people from the occupied territories. Voluntary numbers were insufficient and forced recruitment was introduced within a few months. Of the 5 million foreign workers brought to Germany, around 200,000 came voluntarily according to Sauckel himself in his testimony at Nuremberg. The majority of the acquired workers originated from the Eastern territories, especially Poland and the Soviet Union where the methods used to gain workers were very harsh. The Wehrmacht was used to pressgang local people, and most were taken by force to the Reich. Conditions of work were extremely poor, and discipline severe, especially for concentration camp prisoners. All the latter were unpaid and provided with starvation rations, barely keeping those workers alive. Such slave labour was widely used by swathes of German industry, coal mining, steel making, armaments manufacture and so on. It was to be one of the main accusations against Sauckel when he was brought before the Nuremberg trials for his crimes. The use of forced and slave labour increased throughout the war, especially when Albert Speer came to power in February 1942 to replace Fritz Todt in charge of armaments production, and he demanded much more labour from Sauckel as a result.
Sauckel may have been Catholic, but he was raised as a Proletarian. Look here:
Sauckel was educated at local schools and left early when his mother fell ill. He joined the merchant marine of Norway and Sweden when he was 15, first on a Norwegian three-masted schooner, and later on Swedish and German vessels. He went on to sail throughout the world, rising to the rank of Vollmatrose. At the outbreak of World War I, he was on a German vessel en route to Australia when the vessel was captured. He was subsequently interned in France from August 1914 until November 1919.
He returned to Germany, found factory work in Schweinfurt, and studied engineering in Ilmenau from 1922 to 1923. He joined the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) in 1923 (member 1,395).
So, the proletariat is not the hero of human morality. It is sometimes a victim, sometimes not, but certainly not universally the hero.
Now, Seyss-Inquart and Sauckel before the hanging look a good deal like St Dismas the Good Robber and the bad robber who hung on both sides of Christ on Calvary.
But who or what was Christ in that hanging? Jesus from Nazareth or Holocaust Victims? The English wiki on Seyss-Inquart provides us with a very good answer, I think:
Before his execution, Seyss-Inquart had returned to Catholicism, receiving absolution in the sacrament of confession from prison chaplain Father Bruno Spitzl.
While wishing that this Nazi and penitent went to Heaven, I also wish to note that I hold with the Austrofascists, not with the Nazis.
As for the guys who wish to equate the two, well, the less they have to say in my life, the less one needs to speak of them, the better.
Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
St Catherine of Siena
30-IV-2015
