The annexation of Austria enters Dr B’s account as the turning point that made his quiet professional world vulnerable to the Nazi state. On the eve of the German entry into Vienna, he was arrested after years of his legal practice’s discreet work for monasteries and members of the imperial family had come under surveillance. His recollection connects the political seizure of Austria to a system of information gathering, asset recovery, and coercive interrogation.

A Discreet Practice Drawn into Politics

Before the annexation, Dr B had run a legal practice first with his father and then alone. It avoided newspaper attention and new clients, concentrating instead on advising and managing the assets of large monasteries. The family’s connections to the court and clergy reached back two generations: one uncle had been the Kaiser’s personal physician, another an abbot at Seitenstetten. Dr B described the work as an inherited trust that depended on discretion and dependability.

The practice’s responsibilities became more politically exposed after Adolf Hitler took power in Germany and began targeting Church and monastery property. Dr B and his father handled cross-border negotiations intended to move portable assets beyond confiscation. Their work also brought them into contact with secret political dealings involving the Roman Curia and the imperial family. Yet the office’s inconspicuousness was part of its protection: it had no plaque on its door, and its principals outwardly avoided monarchist circles. Unknown to Austrian ministries, imperial couriers used the fourth-floor office to collect and deliver important messages.

Surveillance and Arrest

The National Socialists had built networks of supporters and informers in neighboring countries, including cells inside ministries and businesses. An unremarkable clerk in Dr B’s office, hired on a priest’s recommendation to make the firm look like a normal business, became an informer. He handled the telephone and harmless messages but was excluded from important correspondence and files. Dr B typed significant letters without copies, took essential files home, and moved confidential discussions to a priory or his uncle’s consulting room.

Those safeguards concealed the substance of the practice’s work, but Dr B suspected that the clerk had noticed his exclusion and arranged for surveillance. Only after his imprisonment did he recall that the clerk’s earlier laxity had given way to sudden eagerness, including insistent offers to post correspondence. Dr B could not establish exactly how the informer had exposed the office, but learned that the Gestapo had been watching him for some time.

The immediate crisis came when Schuschnigg announced his resignation. Dr B burned important papers after hearing the farewell speech on the radio, then sent indispensable records concerning monastery assets and two archdukes’ funds abroad to his uncle. His reliable housekeeper carried them in a laundry basket, and the documents were dispatched just before the arresting men broke down his door. Dr B was arrested by the SS on the evening of the resignation announcement, one day before Adolf Hitler marched into Vienna.

The Occupation’s Purpose in Detaining Him

Dr B distinguished his fate from that of people sent to concentration camps for their loyalty to the old Austria. The Gestapo placed him in a different category: a person from whom it hoped to extract money or information. His individual importance, he said, was modest; what mattered was his position as an administrator and confidant of the monasteries and imperial family, whom the new authorities regarded as enemies.

The authorities wanted evidence that monasteries had moved assets fraudulently and sought information about the imperial family and its supporters. They also suspected that funds handled by Dr B remained beyond their reach. He was therefore detained for questioning rather than sent to a camp. Like other prisoners considered valuable for information or money, including the Chancellor and Baron Rothschild, he was taken to the Hotel Metropole, Gestapo headquarters, and given a room of his own. The apparently preferential accommodation served an interrogation strategy rather than offering humane treatment.

Interrogation and the Burden of Uncertainty

After fourteen days in isolation, Dr B was summoned for interrogations. He was brought through corridors without knowing whether it was day or night, then questioned by uniformed officials whose papers and records he could not inspect. The uncertainty was central to the pressure: he could not tell what the Gestapo already knew about the office, whether his uncle had received the documents, how much the clerk had disclosed, or whether intercepted letters or pressured associates had revealed further information.

Questions concerned which bonds he had bought for particular monasteries and which banks he had dealt with, as well as named contacts and correspondence from Switzerland or Steenookerzeel. Each answer carried a risk. Admitting information that the interrogators did not already possess could endanger others; denying too much could incriminate Dr B himself. The interrogation thus exploited the gap between what the authorities knew and what he could know about their knowledge, making even truthful answers difficult to judge safely.

The questioning did not end when he returned to his room. Dr B repeatedly reviewed his answers and tried to anticipate what he might be asked next, while knowing that he could not discover what the interrogators had recorded. The account presents the annexation not only as a change of government but as the beginning of a coercive system that turned professional trust, confidential records, and uncertainty into instruments of political control. It ends this episode with Dr B describing the strain of that isolation and his attempts to occupy his mind by reconstructing what he had learned by heart.