As promised, here are some excerpts from Tony Judt’s great book on how Austria managed to avoid taking responsibility for Nazism:
Indeed, so widespread was the view that ultimate blame for the horrors of World War Two must fall on German shoulders alone that even Austria was held exempt. Under an Allied agreement of 1943, Austria had been officially declared Hitler’s ‘first victim’ and was thus assured different treatment from Germany at the war’s end. This appealed to Winston Churchill’s insistence on the Prussian origins of Nazism, a view driven by his generation’s obsession with the emergence of the Prussian threat to European stability in the course of the last third of the nineteenth century. But it also suited the other Allies—Austria’s pivotal geographical position and the uncertainty over central Europe’s political future made it seem prudent to detach her fate from that of Germany.
Before reading this book, I never even wondered what the situation was in Austria in terms of support for Nazism. I guess, this means that the post-war propaganda worked on me. I had no idea about the following, for instance:
Austrians had been disproportionately represented in the SS and in concentration camp administrations. Austrian public life and high culture were saturated with Nazi sympathizers—45 out of 117 members of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra were Nazis (whereas the Berlin Philharmonic had just 8 Nazi Party members out of 110 musicians).
As a result, Austria engaged in collective forgetfulness:
Austrians simply forgot about their involvement with Hitler altogether. One reason for the ease with which Austria emerged from its dalliance with Nazism is that it suited all local interests to adjust the recent past to their advantage: the conservative People’s Party, heir to the pre-war Christian Social Party, had every reason to burnish its own and Austria’s ‘un-German’ credentials so as to divert attention from the corporatist regime they had imposed by force in 1934.
When efforts were made to engage in extensive de-Nazification policies in Germany, Austria fell through the cracks:
The Americans in particular. . . immediately initiated a programme of re-education and denazification in their zone, whose objective was to abolish the Nazi Party, tear up its roots and plant the seeds of democracy and liberty in German public life. The US Army in Germany was accompanied by a host of psychologists and other specialists, whose assigned task was to discover just why the Germans had strayed so far. The British undertook similar projects, though with greater skepticism and fewer resources.
I don’t even have much to say here because all this is very new to me. Now it will be interesting to see how these divergent post-Nazi paths impacted Germany and Austria in their further development.
Stay tuned!
Clarissa's Blog 
Walter Rudin, a noted mathematician whom I knew slightly, said or wrote somewhere, that after the War, anyone in Germany who was asked “Were you a Nazi?” would answer simply “No.” However, anyone from Austria who was asked this would say “No, but my neighbour, XXX, he was.” I am not sure whether I heard him say this or read it in his autobiography or read it somewhere else.
I am also not sure what this means or suggests.
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Germany represents two paths. The Soviet sector that became East Germany was probably the most thoroughly de-Nazified area in the immediate post-war period, mostly because the former Nazis were terrified of the Soviets and fled to the west where they anticipated better treatment. The East German school system linked the evils of the Nazis to the evils of capitalism rather than to militarism and the failure of democracy as was done in the west. Those who grew up in the East German system do not have the sense of collective guilt about the Nazi era that is common in those who grew up in the West. In the 1990s, the former East German states were a hot bed of neo-Nazi activity. That has subsided a bit, but far-right parties have done better in local and regional elections in the East than they ever did in the West.
If you would like a glimpse into the immediate post-war German mindset, I highly recommend”Die Mörder sind unter uns”/”The Murders are among us”, the very first film produced in Germany after the war.
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I read in some memoir that Russian Germans treated Jewish prisoners even worse in a camp than German Germans since they felt having to prove something. May be, Austrians also felt second sort and tried “vuslyzitsya” by being more German than Germans.
I don’t know Austrian history to think of other reasons.
Today also read in lj that in modern Germany Russian Germans still live in a separate sphere from German Germans. Don’t know why and whether it is really so.
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Few Russian Germans avoided deportation to special settlements and mobilization in the labor army in 1941-1942. Only about 350,000 out of 1.4 million came under Nazi rule. The only place where Russian-German collaboration with the Nazis was of any scale to be noted was in Transniestria. There was one camp in the region where the SS Sonderkommando R formed from Russian-Germans participated along with a much greater number of Romanians and Ukrainians in shooting Jews. The camp was Bogdanovka. But, this is really a Romanian not a Russian-German atrocity. Bucharest held ultimate authority over the camps in the territory.
http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/this_month/resources/transnistria.asp
On the other hand far more Russian-Germans fought in the Red Army and in various partisan units against the Nazis during WWII. The 30,000 plus Russian-Germans in the Soviet military were removed from their posts and sent to labor camps in 1941, leaving them three months to fight against the Nazis in places like Brest.
http://www.academia.edu/4762680/Hewers_of_Wood_and_Drawers_of_Water_The_Russian-Germans_in_the_Labour_Army
http://jpohl.blogspot.com/2012/10/russian-germans-in-red-army.html
http://jpohl.blogspot.com/2012/10/russian-germans-in-anti-nazi-partisan.html
Many Russian-Germans live separately in Germany because they have mixed and largely Russian speaking families. Not to mention many of them prefer to speak Russian to German themselves. In fact many of them can not speak German, see the figures below. Natsional’nost in the USSR referred to biological ancestry or race not to actually practiced language and culture. The Germans have also not completely integrated the more than 2 million Russian-German Aussiedler. Not only do they maintain strong cultural markers including language as a result of their almost 250 years in the Russian Empire and USSR, but over 70 years of repression and discrimination have greatly damaged the group. By 1989 only 40.2% of Germans in Kazakhstan born between 1969-1978 even claimed German as their mother tongue compared to over 90% for almost all other Soviet nationalities. In Novosibirsk Oblast the percentage was only 23.9% They were the only Soviet nationality in which literacy actually decreased between 1917-1989 and their relative position in terms of education plummeted from number two after Jews in 1926 to number 18 in 1989, lower than Kalmyks, Yakuts, Uzbeks, Tadzhiks, Chuvash, Mordvins, and Chechens not to mention all of the European nationalities. Their lack of education, Soviet upbringing, lack of German language skills, and history of marginalization all contribute to their continued low social economic status in Germany.
https://www.academia.edu/4433903/Volk_auf_dem_Weg_Transnational_Migration_of_the_Russian-Germans_from_1763_to_Present_Day
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My original comment got stuck in moderation for too many links. So I am taking them out here.
Few Russian Germans avoided deportation to special settlements and mobilization in the labor army in 1941-1942. Only about 350,000 out of 1.4 million came under Nazi rule. The only place where Russian-German collaboration with the Nazis was of any scale to be noted was in Transniestria. There was one camp in the region where the SS Sonderkommando R formed from Russian-Germans participated along with a much greater number of Romanians and Ukrainians in shooting Jews. The camp was Bogdanovka. But, this is really a Romanian not a Russian-German atrocity. Bucharest held ultimate authority over the camps in the territory.
On the other hand far more Russian-Germans fought in the Red Army and in various partisan units against the Nazis during WWII. The 30,000 plus Russian-Germans in the Soviet military were removed from their posts and sent to labor camps in 1941, leaving them three months to fight against the Nazis in places like Brest.
Many Russian-Germans live separately in Germany because they have mixed and largely Russian speaking families. Not to mention many of them prefer to speak Russian to German themselves. In fact many of them can not speak German, see the figures below. Natsional’nost in the USSR referred to biological ancestry or race not to actually practiced language and culture. The Germans have also not completely integrated the more than 2 million Russian-German Aussiedler. Not only do they maintain strong cultural markers including language as a result of their almost 250 years in the Russian Empire and USSR, but over 70 years of repression and discrimination have greatly damaged the group. By 1989 only 40.2% of Germans in Kazakhstan born between 1969-1978 even claimed German as their mother tongue compared to over 90% for almost all other Soviet nationalities. In Novosibirsk Oblast the percentage was only 23.9% They were the only Soviet nationality in which literacy actually decreased between 1917-1989 and their relative position in terms of education plummeted from number two after Jews in 1926 to number 18 in 1989, lower than Kalmyks, Yakuts, Uzbeks, Tadzhiks, Chuvash, Mordvins, and Chechens not to mention all of the European nationalities. Their lack of education, Soviet upbringing, lack of German language skills, and history of marginalization all contribute to their continued low social economic status in Germany.
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// Many Russian-Germans live separately in Germany because they have mixed
Have mixed with whom? With Russians, while they still lived in USSR?
// and largely Russian speaking families. Not to mention many of them prefer to speak Russian to German themselves. In fact many of them can not speak German, see the figures below.
*Still* can’t speak German?! WW2 was more than 60 years ago.
In Israel, Russian speaking Jews marry with Jews from other countries. I speak mainly about the second generation, those born in Israel or brought here at a young age, since the first generation of adult immigrants is different. But Russian Germans, who marry today, are second generation and are supposed to have German as a mother tongue. I see it in Israel: even though inside a family parents may speak only Russian, the moment a child goes to a kindergarten or school, Hebrew becomes the mother tongue fast.
Hasn’t German government done anything to help other (Russian) Germans?
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Yes, most of them married Russians since the German population was dispersed across Siberia and Kazakhstan.
There was almost no effective German language instruction for ethnic Germans in the USSR after 1941. They had no autonomous territory to provide schools or other infrastructure to support maintaining the German language. With each passing generation the group became more and more Russified linguistically.
The Russian-Germans in Germany were almost all born and spent their childhood in the USSR and post-Soviet states, mainly Kazakhstan. The mass emigration took place during the 1990s. The second generation such as it is in Germany is quite young. The largest outmigration was in 1994 so those born of these Aussiedler in Germany would still be less than 20 years old.
The German government never expected to receive 2 million very Russified Germans in the space of less than a decade. The Right of Return was meant mainly as a political weapon against the USSR and its allies and could realistically only rapidly integrate the still largely German by culture early Aussiedler of the 1970s who numbered less than 70,000 people. Go check out the last link in my now liberated earlier post.
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This echoes what my Austrian friends are telling me. Austria more or less was forgotten and left to his own. It was a side show for all that matters. An Austrian friend who studied political studies says that in many cases the people in power, be they mayors or generals just put their Hakenkreuz-adorned uniforms down and kept their position.
Austrians also maintained a victim ideology in the post-war episode, powered by all the nazis and soldiers that came home. Their loss was conceived as very very unfair and undeserved. They were also often commemorating their fallen Landsleute and lay down one flower bouqet after another at quite a few memorials dedicated to their dead soldiers while ignoriing everyone else who had died.
This also lead to today’s Austria as being quite “right” again.
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I remember in the 1980’s there was some uproad in the American media about Austria’s head of government at the time, Kurt Waldheim, who apparently had been a Nazi collaborator.
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