Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Staatsarchivs 52. (2007)

FRIED, Marvin Benjamin: Feldmarschall Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf: A Memoir Analysis

of having “collaborated”185 in “pushing an unsuspecting, trusting, industrious, and so able and brave German people into the abyss.”186 Conrad’s similarity to Hitler is striking as he fuses the “destruction of the old Arian culture of Europe”187 with the “beginning of a race-conflict.”188 He argues that Slavs and Gypsies are “murderous assassins”189 and have proven it many times, adding that “no German should blemish himself with such behavior.”190 Finally, he calls on the Austrian youth to decide between the “slavery of foreign national states”191 or being German and to fight for it. At such times, Conrad’s work begins to resemble an incoherent manifesto with ideas and statements surprisingly similar to Mein Kampf. Like Hitler, Conrad believes in a leader (although he uses aristocratic terms such as “Fürst [Prince]”192 or “Regent”193 more often than ‘Führer’), who has “one national sense with the peoples.” Conrad’s primary accusation against the civilian leadership of the First World War was that there were many people with different critical positions. Hitler would later rectify the ‘mistakes’ of a civilian government by creating, as Conrad put it, a country in which the “regent, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, and the Chief of Staff is unified in one person.”194 Mein Kampf was completed in 1924, the same year or after most of Conrad’s essentially fascist ideas were put to paper. While he professes to be a monarchist, he demands the people “release the utopia of the resurrection of the old Austro-Hungarian monarchy”195 yet simultaneously makes clear that he is as much opposed to the “Italian-oriented fascism”196 as he is to communism. His views, though clearly identified as nonfascist, are with hindsight still easily characterized as National Socialist. Finally, Conrad adds a hint that the “strange phenomenon of the Jewry”197 had something to do with the economic interests behind the Great War, a belief very close to Hitler’s own.

(iii) As many Germans of the era, Conrad was obsessed with the supposed wrongs of the Versailles order and what he saw as its attempt to “prevent the re-blossoming

Feldmarschall Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf

185 Conrad von Hötzendorf, Franz: Private Aufzeichnungen, Pg. 218.

186 Ibid, Pg. 218.

187 Ibid, Pg. 151.

188 Ibid, Pg. 151.

189 Ibid, Pg. 183.

190 Ibid, Pg. 183.

191 Ibid, Pg. 176.

192 Ibid, Pg. 177.

193 Ibid, Pg. 182.

194 Ibid, Pg. 213.

195 Ibid, Pg. 175.

196 Ibid, Pg. 169.

197 Ibid, Pg. 153.

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