Anschluss. Before he left, he received a letter from Sir Nevile
Henderson, acting on Queen Mary’s behalf, asking him to inter-
cede for certain Austrians and monarchists, and in particular for
Baron Louis de Rothschild, the Jewish banker whom the Nazis
had now detained as an economic hostage.
It was his first visit to Austria for many years. At Castle
Mauterndorf he called on his godfather’s aged widow, Lily von
Epenstein. In a string of orations he appealed to the Austrian
voters’ endemic nationalism and anti-Semitism, and he prom-
ised social reforms, power stations, and superhighways Hitler
would turn the first shovel of earth for the new Salzburg auto-
bahn three days before polling day. On that day, April , ,
the vote went so overwhelmingly in Hitler’s favor with .
percent of the forty-nine million voters between the North Sea
and the Alps openly affirming their faith in him that a British
government official sadly commented that their ambassador in
Vienna had obviously totally deceived them about the mood in
Austria.
At Carinhall, Göring was filling a bookcase with morocco-
bound albums portraying his growing industrial empire. At
Linz in Austria the Hermann Göring Works began erecting a
steel mill to exploit the Styrian iron-ore reserves. On January ,
, H.G.W. would purchase percent of the Vienna-based
Alpine Montan Corporation, controlling strings of iron-ore
mines, ironworks, and heavy engineering firms. It is worth not-
ing that Göring privately authorized that proper severance
payments and pensions should be paid for the three outgoing
Jewish directors and eight Jewish employees who were dis-
charged, and that these were paid until . He also found a job
for Arthur Schuschnigg, brother of the arrested chancellor, at
the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum in Berlin, remarking to Mühl-
mann, his art adviser, at the time, “I suppose your party bigwigs