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!
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