On March 12, 1938, German troops crossed the Austrian border without resistance. By morning, armored columns were moving through the streets of Vienna, greeted by cheering crowds throwing flowers. Swastikas appeared on buildings overnight, and independent Austria ceased to exist, absorbed into the German Reich in what Adolf Hitler and Nazi propaganda called the Anschluss.
Austrian Jews were forced to scrub pavements on their knees while crowds watched and laughed. Political opponents were arrested within hours, and the Mauthausen concentration camp was soon created for opponents of Nazi Germany. The Catholic Church, which had shaped Austrian public life for centuries, faced a moment of irreversible choice: silence, resistance, or accommodation.
The most powerful churchman in the country, the Archbishop of Vienna and Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, chose accommodation. Three days later, he met Hitler personally at the Hotel Imperial in Vienna. Within a week he would sign a declaration welcoming the annexation, adding beneath his own signature the words "Heil Hitler." History would remember him by the nickname those two words earned him: the Heil Hitler Cardinal. His real name was Theodor Innitzer.
Theodor Innitzer was born on December 25, 1875, in Neuger Schrey, now the Czech settlement of Nové Světlo nad Jihlavou, near the town of Weipert in Bohemia, then part of Austria-Hungary. His father, Wilhelm, worked in a textile factory, and his mother, Maria, took care of the household and young Theodor. The family had little money, and after completing the minimum required schooling, young Theodor was sent to work as an apprentice in a textile factory.
His life might have remained there had a local parish dean not recognized his intelligence and supported him in attending the gymnasium in the town of Kaaden, now the Czech town of Kadaň. That intervention by a churchman set the course of Innitzer's entire life. In 1898 he entered a seminary in Vienna, then the capital of Austria-Hungary, and he was ordained as a Catholic priest in 1902.
Innitzer proved to be an exceptional scholar. He earned his doctorate in theology in 1906 and pursued an academic career at the University of Vienna, where from 1913 he lectured on the New Testament. He rose through the university's ranks, became head of the theological faculty, and was elected rector of the university in 1928.
His years as rector were not without difficulty. During this time, the activities of the National Socialist German Student Union intensified sharply on Viennese campuses. Innitzer banned a commemorative event at the university marking the fifth anniversary of Hitler's failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, an event that was to have been attended by leader Ernst Strasser, one of the most prominent Nazis at the time.
Months later, after violent clashes broke out between Nazi students and Jewish students, Innitzer banned the wearing of the brown shirt on university premises. The Nazis responded by launching a campaign against him, accusing him of being a servant of what they called Jewish terror. It was a charge that revealed how clearly they saw him as an obstacle at that time.
In September 1929, Innitzer was appointed Federal Minister of Social Affairs in the Austrian government of Chancellor Johann Schober, a position he held for a year. He worked on reducing unemployment and improving conditions for the poorest Austrians. His commitment to social issues was genuine and rooted in Catholic teaching on the dignity of working people.
In September 1932, he was consecrated Archbishop of Vienna, the most senior position in the Austrian Catholic Church, and in March 1933 he was elevated to cardinal. With this title and position, he became one of the most influential men in the country.
In the 1930s, he was one of the few Western figures to protest against the Holodomor, a famine in Ukraine orchestrated by the Soviets with the goal of destroying Ukrainians. As a result, Innitzer launched an international relief effort for the victims of the famine. On August 20, 1933, Innitzer published a powerful appeal on the front page of the newspaper Die Reichspost, which said Cardinal Innitzer calls on the world to act against starvation in Russia.
Innitzer was unable to change the murderous Soviet campaign, but the attempt to sound the alarm reflected a man willing, at that point in his life, to speak uncomfortable truths to those who did not want to hear them. During the years of the Austrian authoritarian government of Engelbert Dollfuss and later Kurt Schuschnigg, Innitzer supported an Austrian regime that bypassed parliament and governed without democratic legitimacy. It presented itself as a Catholic and patriotic bulwark against both Nazism and Communism.
When Germany occupied Austria on March 12, 1938, and that bulwark collapsed overnight, Innitzer had no plan prepared for what came next. The speed of the collapse was total. Within a few hours after German troops entered Vienna, the structures of Austrian independence had ceased to function.
On March 15, 1938, three days after the German troops entered Vienna, Innitzer met Adolf Hitler at the Hotel Imperial. Hitler made vague promises about respecting the position of the Catholic Church in the newly annexed Austria, and Innitzer appears to have believed that an accommodation was possible. On March 18, Innitzer and the other Austrian Catholic bishops signed a formal declaration endorsing the Anschluss.
The declaration was organized by Gauleiter Josef Bürckel, the Nazi official responsible for incorporating Austria into the Reich. Innitzer signed it with the words "Heil Hitler" written in his own hand beneath his name. The Nazi regime then distributed the declaration across the entire German Reich as propaganda without the bishops having consented to this use.
The endorsement carried enormous weight, as Austria was an overwhelmingly Catholic country. The highest representatives of its church had just blessed the annexation by Nazi Germany. The reaction from Rome was swift and furious. Vatican Radio broadcast a vehement denunciation of the Anschluss.
Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the Vatican's Secretary of State, who less than a year later, on March 2, 1939, would become Pope Pius XII, summoned Innitzer to Rome and made clear that his declaration had been a catastrophic error. Pacelli had been outraged by the statement. He made Innitzer sign a retraction issued on behalf of all the Austrian bishops, which stated that the earlier declaration had clearly not been intended as an approval of anything incompatible with God's law.
The Vatican's newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, reported pointedly that the bishops' original statement had been issued without the approval of the Holy See. The retraction was formally correct, but the damage was done. The image of the Heil Hitler cardinal blessing Hitler's seizure of Austria had already spread across Europe.
What followed in the months after the Anschluss made Innitzer's initial accommodation look not only morally wrong, but also politically deluded. The Nazi regime had no intention of honoring any promises made to Austrian churchmen. Despite the criticism from the Vatican, in April 1938 Innitzer ordered all Austrian churches to fly the swastika flag, ring their bells, and pray for Hitler in honor of the Führer's birthday.
Even these acts did not help. The Nazis closed Catholic schools and institutions, suppressed Catholic newspapers, and even arrested members of the clergy. The church that Innitzer had hoped to protect by welcoming the new rulers was being systematically dismantled around him.
By the autumn of 1938, Innitzer's position had shifted decisively. He had watched the new regime strip away everything he had hoped his cooperation might protect, and he had drawn conclusions from this experience. On October 7, 1938, he called a day of prayer at the Cathedral of St. Stephen in Vienna. Almost 9,000 people attended, the vast majority of them young.
In his sermon, Innitzer spoke with a clarity that he had entirely lacked in the spring. He told his packed congregation that in the last few months they had lost everything, and declared that there is just one Führer, Jesus Christ. The British newspaper The Catholic Herald reported that his sermon had marked the definitive end of the cardinal's attempt to establish a religious peace with the Nazis.
The regime's response came the following day. A mob of approximately 100 Nazis, among them older members of the Hitler Youth, attacked the Archbishop's Palace on St. Stephen's Square. They smashed furniture, hurled documents and files through windows, and set them on fire in the street below. The mob outside shouted, "Down with the clergy. Send the cardinal to a concentration camp. Traitor bishop."
The man they had celebrated in March as the churchman who had welcomed the new Germany was now being called a traitor by the same movement. In the end, Innitzer was not sent to a concentration camp. He survived the attack on his residence and continued in his position.
He became increasingly critical of Nazi racial policy, offering what protection he could to Jews facing deportation and to the Catholic Roma of rural Austria. During the Second World War, which started on September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany attacked Poland, Innitzer's palace became a place where people in danger could seek help. He wrote letters to authorities and made quiet representations on behalf of individuals. His interventions even saved some lives.
Although he was, in a sense, opposed to the Nazis, he openly supported the war against the Soviet Union, which began in June 1941 and was accompanied by the mass murder of civilians. The end of the war, which in the case of anti-Bolshevism was supported also by the cardinal, brought destruction to Vienna. When Soviet forces captured the city in April 1945, the Cathedral of St. Stephen was severely damaged by fire in the last days of fighting. The building that was the physical center of Innitzer's authority and of Catholic life in Vienna lay partially in ruins.
He devoted much of his energy in the post-war years to its restoration, and the cathedral was reopened in 1952. After the war, he worked to rebuild the church institutions that had been stripped, closed, and suppressed under years of Nazi rule.
Theodor Innitzer came from nothing and built, through genuine intelligence and decades of devoted work, one of the most significant positions in Austrian public life. At the moment when his authority and his courage mattered most, in the spring of 1938, when the question of how the church would respond to the annexation of his country could still shape what followed, he misjudged catastrophically. He signed a declaration with "Heil Hitler" and gave the Nazi regime the Catholic blessing it had no right to expect.
The later courage of the October sermon, the shelter offered in his palace, and the quiet intercessions on behalf of the persecuted were all real, but none of it was enough to undo what those two words beneath his signature had done. The Heil Hitler cardinal died on October 9, 1955, in his own bed. He was 79 years old.