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In-Depth Information
gradually being outlawed and the workers' movements weakened. In 1933, police forced
their way into the headquarters of the (left-wing) paramilitary Schutzbund, triggering an
uprising in Linz, Vienna and other industrial centres that virtually led to civil war. The
army quashed the uprising. Leading social democrats were executed and the social demo-
cratic movement declared illegal, turning the fight against fascism into an underground
movement.
In 1934 Dollfuss - a deeply religious man who was backed by the Italian dictator
Benito Mussolini - was murdered in a failed putsch staged by Austrian Nazis, who he
had also banned.
While Hitler was seizing power in Germany in 1933 and subsequently closing down
all opposition, across the border in Austria, an Austro-Fascist government lifted the ban
on local chapters of Hitler's Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National So-
cialist Democratic Workers' Party; NSDAP), which was neither democratic, sympathetic
to workers' nor socialist. This was done under pressure from Hitler, allowing Austrian
Nazis to make a power grab at home. On 12 March 1938, Hitler's troops crossed the bor-
der and occupied Austria, in the so-called Anschluss (annexation), according to which
Austria became part of a greater Germany. This ended a a period of contradiction in
which Austria's leaders had virtually set themselves up as dictators, but did not like the
idea of becoming part of Hitler's Nazi Germany. A few days later, Hitler held his famous
speech to a cheering crowd of tens of thousands on Vienna's Heldenplatz, declaring Aus-
tria part of the German nation.
Hella Pick's
Guilty Victim: Austria from the Holocaust to Haider
is an excellent analysis of modern-day Austria.
The Holocaust
The events of the Nazi era, culminating in the Holocaust, are etched in the collective
memory of Jews everywhere: the prohibitive Nuremberg Laws, the forced sale and theft
of Jewish property, and Reichspogromnacht (also known as 'The Night of Broken Glass')
on 9 and 10 November 1939 when synagogues and Jewish businesses were burnt and
Jews were attacked openly on the streets.
The arrival of Hitler in Vienna in March 1938 raised the stakes among those Jews who
had not yet managed to flee the country. Vienna's 'father' of modern psychoanalysis,
Sigmund Freud, had not wanted to read the signs for a long time; in June that year,
