Footage of life in Nazi Austria, thanks to a new video archive

The modern Austrian will be the first to tell you that Austria was the first victim of Nazi aggression .. and ignore the welcome that was put out by a majority of the Austrian populace for Hitler, but there really is a deeper truth that the reason they are telling you that Austria was a victim is that the de-Nazi'fication of Austria after the war required the then-growing generations to discard the culture of their parents, which did indeed welcome Nazi ideology with open arms. Austrians' have been programmed to think that their country was the first victim in the war - lest they perpetuate the ideologies that allowed such an easy victory for the Nazi's in the first place.

No Austrian wants to admit the long-standing cultural roots of imperialism and fascism that took hold of their country - and still reflect in its darker depths. Authoritarianism is still the mode of the day; group-think and the mob mind very much still grips the Austrian zeitgeist, as it has for centuries.

Austria did not exist a nation state before 1918, it was a piece of the Habsburg monarchy/empire. After the empire got split up, it was clear for the populace that it could not survive on its own, surrounded by former "colonies" and under threat from Russia, Italy and others.

But then you have the rise of Adolf Hitler - an Austrian from Upper Austria - in Germany, focusing on race and heritage.

Add civil war in 1934, austro-fascism under Dollfuss (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engelbert_Dollfuss) - quite a time. Dollfuss tried to ban the Nazis, got murdered, fini.

Keep also in mind that even the German nation state was net new, before that it was Prussia plus a lot of smaller "states". Austria had less business of being a nation than Bavaria.

1945 saw Austria being separated out again, 1955 forced movement into a neutral statehood. At all times it was closely coupled to Western-Germany, as exemplified by tieing the national currency (Schilling) to the German D-Mark.

To this day you have a strong element of German-Nationalism within the far-right movement in Austria. Late populist Jörg Haider of the Freedom Party went on record calling Austria a ideological miscarriage in 1988.

> A manipulated plebiscite administered a month later indicated that over 99 percent of Austrians were in favor of the situation.

The vote was manipulated but it would not have mattered. I can tell you from stories of my grandfather of how dire his childhood and the one of everybody in the area was. They were ready to rally behind anyone who would take them out of starvation and suffering. Hitler came with popular support because he found an enemy who is to blame and he managed to unite people to be motivated to move themselves out of misery.

There is a fine line behind a populist approach that motivates people to do something and overstepping the line and doing a lot of damage in the process.

>the annexation of Austria was not a Nazi invention at all and had much more historic roots.

like many things attributed to Nazi. Even fascism itself wasn't a Nazi invention. Or "Drang nach Osten" - since and even before Teutonic Knights ...

Well, up until 1815 there was only the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, which covered mostly the German-speaking parts of Central Europe and some historically aligned places; in reality, several dozen mostly sovereign nations under control of noblemen. But there has never been anything resembling Germany, rather Germany and Germans were defined by culture and by language. That's why Kafka could have had this mixed identity of being German (he wrote in German after all), Jewish and Czech.

Following the napoleonic wars, nationalistic movements started to emerge in Europe, which, naturally, were opposed by the individual rulers of all the small states within the cultural area of Germany. Two separate ideas were discussed: the "kleindeutsche" or small solution and the "großdeutsche" or large solution, the latter including also the Austrian empire. There were two issues with the latter. Prussia and Austria were the two dominant states within the German cultural area. Austria, however, was a giant multicultural and multiethnic state with its own separatist movements. So when Bismarck pushed for unification, his aim was mostly to have Prussia gain power, not to cater to romantic ideas of pan-germanism. To achieve this, he had to keep his main potential rivals, the Austrians, at bay, and actually even fought the Austrians in the second of three unification wars (in 1866). So in a sense, the Anschluss was a step back to the "großdeutsche" solution, not some inconceivable invasion of a militarily inferior power.

In the 140 years since the first German unification, Austrians and contemporary Germany have separated culturally quite a lot; but still, at least in the sphere of culture such as literature, music and the arts, Germany, Austria and German-speaking Switzerland are treated similarly.

Disclaimer: IANAH and wrote it up in less than ten mminutes

You can really read the entire history of Europe from roughly 1800 to today as one long struggle to answer the "German question" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Question): should there be a unified state for German people, instead of having them scattered across lots of tiny, independent principalities? And if the answer to that is "yes," where do you draw the lines of that state's borders?

It was a central question to the politics of the age, for the simple reason that it was always obvious that by gathering so much of the continent's population under a single flag a unified German state would immediately become one of Europe's most powerful. Until the rise of German nationalism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_nationalism), the largest and most powerful state in Europe had been France, and Napoleon had tapped that power to make the French the masters of the continent. A unified German state would be large enough to be a counterweight to French power, or even eclipse it altogether. So the German question became the fulcrum on which power politics in Europe balanced.

Obviously the French, along with the rest of Germany's neighbors, had an interest in keeping the boundaries of a German state as limited as it could be. But there were divisions of opinion within the Germanic world about how big a German state should be as well. The maximalist position was the "big German solution" (Großdeutsche Lösung), which advocated pulling all German-speaking people, including those in Austria, into the new state. Advocates of the competing "little German solution" (Kleindeutsche Lösung) were more modest; they simply proposed unifying the northern German states.

This argument reflected the division of power in the Germanic world itself, which was split between Prussia in the north and Austria in the south. Austria then was much larger than it is today, part of the enormous kingdom of the House of Hapsburg (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habsburg_Monarchy), so the Austrians tended to support the "big solution", since it was assumed that if Austria was part of the German coalition it would dominate its smaller partners. For the same reason, the Prussians favored the "little solution"; they wanted to dominate the united Germany, and the only way they could do so was by keeping the Austrians out.

All of this got worked out in a series of wars and revolutions between 1848 and 1871, during which Prussia beat first Austria and then France soundly on the battlefield. These victories put the Prussians in the driver's seat in terms of determining what a unified Germany would look like, and since the Prussians supported the "little solution," that was the shape the new German Empire took.

As they had hoped, once Germany took the form they wanted, the Prussians more or less ran the Empire. But then came World War I, and Germany's bloodletting and defeat in that war knocked the Prussians off their pedestal. That created a power vacuum, which was eventually filled by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi state. And unlike the Prussians, Hitler was very much a believer in the "big German solution" -- so much so that his "Greater Germany" encompassed more people than even the most strident 19th century German nationalists imagined.

One of the arguments for the "little solution" had always been that making Germany too big would unite the rest of Europe in an effort to cut it down to size, as had happened to the French during the Napoleonic era; and Hitler's wild expansion proved that was the case. And once the war was over and "Greater Germany" had been conclusively defeated, those nations (or rather the United States and Soviet Union, who had been drawn into the issue because Hitler's ambitions were so large that they had spilled over the boundaries of Europe altogether) moved conclusively to split Germany into two states so it could not amass enough power to threaten the peace again.

That was how things were until 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed and with it its East German puppet government. West and East Germany then moved to reunite, and since nobody in the NATO coalition had any objections, the modern German state was born. This was a "little solution" Germany; the war and its aftermath had taken the shine off the idea of bringing all Germans everywhere together by force of arms. But when the European Union began to come together, this "little Germany" was still plenty big enough to dominate that confederation, especially with the UK staying out. So we reach the modern age, in which Germany is the unquestioned leader in European politics -- though only as long as the EU remains the form in which those politics are expressed, which isn't anything like a sure thing.

In general, you want to search for the German Question [1]. Germans have been populating central/eastern european territories for a long time, both as colonists (think Katherina/Kasachstan/Siebenbuergen-Rumania) and as remainders of the Holy Roman Empire of German Nation.

The French Revolution [2] and the coming of the Spring of Nations [3] brought the question back on the table. Throughout this period, but especially around 1848, it was heavily debated among Germans.

Europe, dispite its small size, has a very exiting and thrilling history. A pity what happened to it in the last century. Mais c'est la vie, so to say.

But back to Austria - of course many an Austrian loved to be unified into the new German Empire, a technologically moderns society, the Third Reich, that was prophesized to last for a thousand years. After the scars of defeat of WWI, and Entente dictation, people looked for a savior.

He came in the form of a failed Austrian artist. History has its ironies..

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Question [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1848

My grandmother was a 'mischling' (mongrel), half Jewish on her father's side (a doctor who converted to christianity for convenience), and a gentile mother. Both died before the war, and she was orphaned, interrogated by the Gestapo, imprisoned (for listening to the BBC), and survived through begging for her life.

Though half her family were wiped out in the Holocaust, she still casually said to me in her old age that 'the Jews must have done something' to provoke such a response.

I don't hold with that, but it does give some indication of how brutal the world view was, and how everyone bought into the anti-semitism - even Semites. If you think she was a one-off, then read up on Wittgenstein, who wrote about the 'dirty Jew' inside him.

There have always been a number of german speaking states with close cultural ties. The german identity goes back to the battle of Varus [1], they say. This is 8-9 centuries before the formation of the holy roman empire (aka "First Reich"). The holy roman empire reached a huge size, but ultimately fell apart after French intervention. The two strongest parties within this empire were Austria in the south and Prussia in the north. There was, at most times, a sense of rivalry. This empire falling apart did of course not mean that these parts of the world suddenly stopped being inhabited by people who called themselves "Germans". Imagine the US breaking up today. You got lots of them in what is now northern Italy and in Eastern Europe (now Czech Republic, Poland, ..). Notably, after the 'First Reich' falling apart, Austria under the Habsburg monarchy and its complicated alliance with Prussia stayed intact.

Soon, Prussia asserted its dominance over Austria (see the battle of Koniggratz [2]) and the result was an alliance under Prussias benevolent control. This battle is also interesting for how military technology (the Prussians had more modern rifles) can alter world history IMO.

What was next was the 'Second Reich', Imperial Germany -- still in alliance with the austrian monarchy. This ended in WW1. After WW1, the winning nations imposed a set of restrictions on the loosing nations (concerning the armament they are allowed and demanding huge reparation payments) and they also lost further land. The austrian monarchy was no more and Austria entered the period of Austro-Fascism as the tiny nation that it is today.

In this historical context, I believe that it is not at all surprising that Austrians wanted back to former power: Europe has been a war-torn continent in all of recorded history before then. Austria having old enemies (as a former super power does), being set in a geographical location that is in everyone's way must have seemed like a scary prospect - especially given the disadvantage after loosing WW1. The conditions imposed by the winning nations must have been causing a lot of issues and bad spirit. I think it's important to note that (IMO) you wouldn't have needed to be a fascist to want the Anschluss! Putting myself into these peoples shoes, only knowing what I believe they knew -- I could imagine myself being in favour, too!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Teutoburg_Forest [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_K%C3%B6niggr%C3%A4tz

No trick left unused.

This is really cool to watch. I tried to find this video for a long time.

A lot of totalitarian propaganda has that attractive, simple but striking design; it's not hard to understand how it can sway people. And hand painted signage always looks classy, even when it isn't hate speech...

I was working with a vendor from Austria for the last two weeks and he said sometimes people arrive there by mistake instead of Australia.

It would be an extension or cousin of the BBC "World At War" series from the mid 70s, episode 16 which covered life in germany or 18 which covered occupied territory life. I guess better added as an appendix to ep 18.

WaW is a truly excellent documentary, however be prepared that it not a new wave American style documentary ... there will be no historical re-enactments, no computer graphics, no nostalgic soundtrack, no camera panning across photographs ... I wish we had more "real" documentaries like WaW, its almost a completely separate genre from the modern american style.

There are a lot of much better documentaries with proper comments available. Many intellectual Austrians have the DVD set of Hugo Portisch' TV documentaries about Austrians History (Oesterreich I + II), and most have seen it on TV.

I have seen most of the pictures from this Smithsonian collection already. Maybe because the Austrian Film Archive worked with them. Esp. the pictures with the huge Swastica flags all over the streets are very well known. But I as Austrian I enjoyed their German wartime video and picture archive, which I haven't seen before.

Use an iPhone...

It's not images but videos wrapped in an old flash player.

Still, they should have alternatives by now.