rise-and-fall-of-the-third-reich-william-shirer-pdf

394 THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICHthe President of Czechoslovakia, dismissed the autonomous Ruthenian governmentfrom office, and on the night of March 9-10 the autonomous Slovakiangovernment. The next day he ordered the arrest of Monsignor Tiso, the SlovakPremier, Dr. Tuka and Durcansky and proclaimed martial law in Slovakia. Theone courageous move of this government, which had become so servile to Berlin,quickly turned into a disaster which destroyed it.The swift action by the tottering Prague government caught Berlin by surprise.Goering had gone off to sunny San Remo for a vacation. Hitler was onthe point of leaving for Vienna to celebrate the first anniversary of the Anschluss.But now the master improviser went feverishly to work. On March 11,he decided to take Bohemia and Moravia by ultimatum. The text was draftedthat day on Hitler’s orders by General Keitel and sent to the German ForeignOffice. It called upon the Czechs to submit to military occupation withoutresistance. 445 For the moment, however, it remained a ”top military secret.”It was now time for Hitler to ”liberate” Slovakia. Karol Sidor, who hadrepresented the autonomous Slovak government at Prague, was named by PresidentHacha to be the new Premier of it in place of Monsignor Tiso. Returningto Bratislava, the Slovak seat of government, on Saturday, March 11, Sidorcalled a meeting of his new cabinet. At ten o’clock in the evening the sessionof the Slovak government was interrupted by strange and unexpected visitors.Seyss-Inquart, the quisling Nazi Governor of Austria, and Josef Buerckel, theNazi Gauleiter of Austria, accompanied by five German generals, pushed theirway into the meeting and told the cabinet ministers to proclaim the independenceof Slovakia at once. Unless they did, Hitler, who had decided to settle thequestion of Slovakia definitely and now, would disinterest himself in the fate ofSlovakia. 446Sidor, who opposed severing all links with the Czechs, stalled for time, butthe next morning Monsignor Tiso, who had escaped from a monastery wherehe supposedly was under house arrest, demanded a cabinet meeting, though hewas no longer himself in the cabinet. To forestall further interruptions by highGerman officials and generals, Sidor called the meeting in his own apartment,and when this became unsafe – for German storm troopers were taking overthe town – he adjourned it to the offices of a local newspaper. There Tisoinformed him that he had just received a telegram from Buerckel inviting himto go at once to see the Fuehrer in Berlin. If he refused the invitation, Buerckelthreatened, two German divisions across the Danube from Bratislava wouldmarch in and Slovakia would be divided up between Germany and Hungary.Arriving in Vienna the next morning, Monday, March 13, with the intention ofproceeding to Berlin by train, the chubby little prelate ∗ was packed into a planeby the Germans and flown to the presence of Hitler. For the Fuehrer, there wasno time to waste.When Tiso and Durcansky arrived at the Chancellery in Berlin at 7:40 onthe evening of March 13, they found Hitler flanked not only by Ribbentropbut by his two top generals, Brauchitsch, Commander in Chief of the German∗ Monsignor Tiso, as this writer recalls him, was almost as broad as he was high. He was anenormous eater. ”When I get worked up,” he once told Dr. Paul Schmidt, ”I eat half a poundof ham, and that soothes my nerves.” He was to die on the gallows. Arrested by AmericanArmy authorities on June 8, 1945, and turned over to ihe newly restored Czechoslovakia, hewas condemned to death on April 15, 1947, after a trial lasting four months, and was executedon April 18.