The Test of Courage: (A Biography of) Michel Thomas by Christopher Robbins Page B

politics, and I learned a lot.’
    To the north in Germany, Adolf Hitler dominated the nation, while Austria seemed drained of independent political will and floundered under weak, indecisive leadership. ‘As time went on one suspected that something might happen - an invasion by the German Army, perhaps - to make Austria a part of Nazi Germany. But when I discussed this with prominent leaders of the Jewish community - business people and industrialists - they rejected the idea. They felt that it could not happen, and that if it did happen it would not affect them. Whatever political upheaval occurred, the Nuremberg Laws would never be applied in Austria, and certainly not in Vienna. [30] They were integrated, accepted - they were Austrians. The Jews in Vienna felt as removed from Nazi Germany as the American Jews in the United States. “S’wrd schoin zan git” the Polish Jews in Lodz always said in Yiddish - “Everything will be all right”. And in Vienna it was repeated in German: “Alles wird schon gut werden”.’
    Michel felt that his psychological studies provided him with an insight into the Nazi mentality. Alfred Adler stressed a sense of inferiority, rather than the sexual drive, as the motivating force in human life. He believed that an inferiority complex acquired as a child, combined with excessive compensatory defence mechanisms created to overcome it, formed the basis of psychopathological behaviour. The function of the psychoanalyst was to discover and rationalise such feelings, and to break down the neurotic will to power and dominance they engendered - ranging in means from boasting and bullying to political tyranny. It was an interesting thesis to study in pre-war Vienna, and Adolf Hitler was a classic - if extreme - textbook case. [31]
    The roar of Hitler’s mechanised divisions massing on the border, however, drowned out all such psychological musings. Austrian-born, Hitler had written of the dream of incorporating Austria within a Greater Germany - Anschluss - in the opening pages of Mein Kampf and it had been Nazi party policy since 1920. [32] The idea found growing support inside Austria itself, and not just among Nazi sympathisers. There were many Austrians who accepted Anschluss as inevitable Realpolitik and sincerely believed that the country, since the loss of its Slav and Hungarian possessions in 1918, had no future without union with Germany.
    By early 1938, Hitler felt strong enough to chance his hand. As news spread of the German Army at the border, a massive crowd crammed into the centre of Vienna and surrounded the Chancellery. Inside, figures in swastika armbands were already saluting each other with outstretched hands. Throughout the country local Austrian Nazis seized town halls and government offices.
    German troops crossed the border unopposed at daybreak on Saturday, 12 March, and were enthusiastically greeted as saviours rather than invaders. Later the same day Hitler chose to cross the frontier in person at his birthplace, Braunau am Inn, and drove through cheering villages to Linz, the town of his childhood, where he received a hero’s welcome. Tears ran down his face as he was handed the text of a law stating: ‘Austria is a province of the German Reich.’ That night the round-up and arrest of tens of thousands of Hitler’s enemies began.
    An ecstatic crowd filled the Heldenplatz and the Ring and waited day and night for the Führer’s triumphant entry into the capital forty-eight hours later. Vienna had been the scene of Hitler’s unhappy, impoverished youth when he eked out a living as a hack artist and lived in a hostel frequented by tramps and drunks. It was the city that had rejected him - the Academy of Fine Arts had twice refused him for lack of talent - and now he was returning as a conquering hero, an Adlerian moment if ever there was one. [33]
    Michel went out on the streets to witness events and found the crowd in the grip of mass hysteria. ‘The Austrians