Anschluss and Emigration
A profound emotional shock came in the critical moments of the destruction of Austria. I would have left Vienna long before 1938 if I had not assumed that Austria was safe in its defense against National Socialism. On the basis of my historically founded political knowledge, I considered it impossible that the Western democracies would permit the annexation of Austria by Hitler, because the event obviously would be the first of a series that would culminate in a world war. The German occupation of Austria would create a strategic situation that made the conquest of Czechoslovakia possible; and the conquest of Czechoslovakia would consolidate a Central European position that made a war with the Western powers potentially victorious. It came as a great surprise to me that the Western powers did nothing. From a friend who was at the time working in Rome and had friends in the Italian foreign ministry, I learned that on the night of the invasion Mussolini was engaged in frantic telephone conversations with the English government pleading for common action, which, however, was rejected. I remember that the events caused in me a state of unlimited fury. In the wake of the Austrian occupation by Hitler, I even for a moment contemplated joining the National Socialists, because those rotten swine who called themselves democrats—meaning the Western democracies—certainly deserved to be conquered and destroyed if they were capable of such criminal idiocy. But the character development of the past would not permit this extreme step. Reason got the better after several hours of such fury, and I prepared my emigration. That was necessary, because I had never made any secret of my anti–National Socialist attitude, and of course I was immediately fired from my position at the university.
Preparing to emigrate brought the usual odd details that are connected with such an enterprise. Above all, I had to acquire some money outside Austria, because the export of money was prohibited. I had a Swiss friend who was a journalist in Vienna, reporting for Swiss newspapers, with whom I arranged to pay his income in Austria while he left the equivalent value in Swiss francs with his lawyer in Zurich. The money accumulated and became the basis for living a number of months in Zurich before I could get my immigration visa from the American consulate.
The emigration plan almost miscarried. Though I was politically an entirely unimportant figure, and the important ones had to be caught first, my turn came at last. Just when we had nearly finished our preparations and my passport was with the police in order to get the exit visa, the Gestapo appeared at my apartment to confiscate the passport. Fortunately, I was not at home, and my wife [Lissy Onken Voegelin] was delighted to tell them that the passport was with the police for the purpose of getting the exit visa, which satisfied the Gestapo. We were able, through friends, to get the passport, including the exit visa, from the police before the Gestapo got it—that all in one day. On the same day, in the evening, with two bags, I caught a train to Zurich, trembling on the way that the Gestapo after all would find out about me and arrest me at the border. But apparently even the Gestapo was not as efficient as my wife and I in these matters, and I got through unarrested. My wife stayed with her parents, with a Gestapo guard in front of the apartment waiting for me to show up again. My wife knew that I had escaped when the Gestapo guard was withdrawn, and about twenty minutes later my telegram arrived from Zurich telling her that I had arrived there.
But that was only the beginning of odd events. In Zurich, I had to wait for a nonquota immigration visa extended to scholars who had been offered a job in the United States. My friends at Harvard—Haberler, Schumpeter, and, in a very decisive function as head of the Department of Government, Arthur Holcombe—had provided a part-time instructorship. But I had not yet received the official letter, and I had to wait for that in order to get the American visa. In waiting for the visa, I had dealings with the American vice-consul in Zurich, a very nice Harvard boy who had grave suspicions about me. He explained that, since I was neither a Communist nor a Catholic nor a Jew, I therefore had no reason whatsoever not to be in favor of National Socialism and to be a National Socialist myself. Hence, if I was in flight the only reason must be some criminal record, and he did not want to give me a visa before the matter of my criminality was cleared up. Fortunately, in due course Holcombe’s letter arrived, advising me of my appointment as a part-time instructor, and with his signature on the letter the Harvard boy in the consulate was convinced that I was in the fold, so I got my visa.
I am telling this incident not in order to be critical of this particular vice-consul, who was as innocent of political problems, and especially human problems, as such people happen to be. Let me tell, therefore, a similar incident that occurred more than twenty years later, in the 1960s. The occasion was a meeting in Salzburg where Ernst Bloch, the Marxist philosopher, and I were invited to lecture. Our wives were there, too. At a dinner party the ladies got into conversation, and Mrs. Bloch inquired cautiously why we happened to have come to America, too, because after all we were not Jews; and she asked whether I had been a Communist. My wife explained that I had not been a Communist either. Whereupon Mrs. Bloch asked her, “Well then, why couldn’t he stay in Austria?” That anybody could be anti–National Socialist without being motivated by an ideological counterposition or because he was a Jew is indeed, so far as my experience goes, inconceivable to most people whom I know in the academic world.