Anschluss
Based on Wikipedia: Anschluss
The Day Austria Vanished
On the morning of March 12, 1938, German soldiers crossed into Austria. Not a single shot was fired. By nightfall, a nation that had existed for centuries had simply ceased to be.
The Anschluss—a German word meaning "joining" or "connection"—sounds almost gentle. It wasn't. It was the annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany, the erasure of an independent state, and a dress rehearsal for the catastrophic expansion that would soon engulf Europe in the deadliest war in human history.
But here's what makes this story truly unsettling: many Austrians welcomed it. Some cheered in the streets. When a plebiscite was held a month later, the official results showed 99.7% approval. How does a nation vote itself out of existence? And why would anyone celebrate their country's disappearance?
To understand this, we need to go back seventy years before the tanks rolled in.
The Problem of Being German But Not Germany
In 1871, when the German states finally unified into a single nation, they faced an awkward question: what counts as Germany?
The obvious answer might seem to be "wherever Germans live." But politics is rarely obvious. Two major powers competed for leadership of the German-speaking world: Prussia in the north and Austria in the south. Prussia was Protestant, militaristic, and increasingly industrial. Austria was Catholic, imperial, and ruled over a sprawling patchwork of peoples—Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, Croats, Slovenes, Italians, and many others—with Germans as merely the dominant minority.
Austria wanted what historians call the Greater Germany Solution. Under this plan, all German states would unite under Austrian leadership, specifically under the Habsburg dynasty that had ruled Austria for centuries. But this would have meant including all of Austria's non-German territories too, and it would have reduced Prussia to a junior partner.
Prussia had a different idea.
In 1866, Prussia and Austria went to war. Prussia won decisively. The Prussian chancellor, Otto von Bismarck—one of history's most cunning political operators—then did something clever. He united the German states under Prussian leadership but deliberately excluded Austria. This "Lesser Germany" solution gave Prussia control while avoiding the complications of Austria's multi-ethnic empire.
The new German Empire, proclaimed in 1871, was Protestant-majority, Prussian-dominated, and pointedly Austrian-free.
Austria-Hungary limped on for another half-century as a dual monarchy—essentially two kingdoms sharing one emperor. Franz Joseph I ruled as both Austrian Emperor and King of Hungary, presiding over an empire that grew increasingly unstable as its various ethnic groups demanded independence or autonomy.
Then came World War I, and everything shattered.
A Country That Wasn't Supposed to Exist
When the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed in 1918, it didn't just fall apart—it exploded into pieces. Hungary became independent. Czechoslovakia was born. Poland reclaimed territories. Italy grabbed land in the south. Yugoslavia absorbed the Slavic regions.
What remained was a rump state. A German-speaking core centered on Vienna, stripped of its imperial possessions, its economy, its purpose.
The new republic initially called itself "German-Austria" and its provisional constitution declared bluntly: "German Austria is a component of the German Republic." The Austrians wanted to join Germany. This wasn't Nazi ideology—the Nazis barely existed yet. It was simple pragmatism. The new Austria seemed economically unviable, a head without a body. Vienna had been the capital of an empire of 52 million people. Now it governed maybe 6 million.
The victorious Allied powers said no.
The Treaty of Saint-Germain in 1919 explicitly forbade Austria from uniting with Germany. The Treaty of Versailles contained the same prohibition from the German side. Even the name "German-Austria" was banned. The Allies feared that adding Austria's population to Germany would make their defeated enemy even larger and more powerful than before the war.
This created a bitter irony. The American president, Woodrow Wilson, had championed national self-determination as a founding principle of the post-war order. Peoples should govern themselves. Nations should determine their own fates. But when the German Austrians tried to determine their fate by joining their fellow Germans, they were told: not you.
Hugo Preuss, who drafted Germany's new democratic constitution, called it a blatant contradiction. How could the Allies champion self-determination while denying it to Germans?
This grievance would fester for two decades.
The Myth of Universal Support
Later Nazi propaganda—and even some post-war historical accounts—portrayed Austrian support for union with Germany as overwhelming and unanimous. The reality was more complicated.
Yes, there was genuine support for Anschluss in the early years of the Austrian Republic. The Social Democrats, who represented Austria's working class, generally favored it. Their leader, Otto Bauer, served as Foreign Minister and pushed hard for union. Plebiscites in the border provinces of Tyrol and Salzburg showed 98% and 99% support for joining Germany.
But those plebiscites were deeply flawed.
Pre-printed "Yes" ballots were provided at polling stations. Voters had to hand their ballots to election officials rather than depositing them secretly. Anyone who registered as living in Tyrol within two weeks of the vote could participate—even if they actually lived in Germany. A special train was chartered from Bavaria to bring "Tyrolean" voters across the border.
Historians examining the evidence suggest that genuine support for Anschluss probably never exceeded half the Austrian population. Even Bauer admitted that both the middle class and the peasantry preferred independence. The Socialist leadership didn't dare call a nationwide referendum in 1919 precisely because they feared losing it.
Regional identity mattered more than pan-German sentiment. Under the old empire, each province had its own government and traditions. People identified as Tyrolean or Viennese or Styrian first, Austrian second, German-speaking third. The idea of merging with Protestant, Prussian-dominated Germany held limited appeal in Catholic, Habsburg-loyal Austria.
But support for Anschluss ebbed and flowed with economic conditions. When things went badly—and in interwar Austria, things often went badly—the idea of joining a larger, potentially more prosperous Germany gained traction.
The Rise of Austrian Fascism
Austria in the 1930s faced the same economic catastrophe as the rest of the world. The Great Depression brought mass unemployment, bank failures, and political chaos. Extremism flourished on both left and right.
But Austria's path to authoritarianism took a distinctive form. Rather than falling to the Nazis—as Germany did in 1933—Austria developed its own homegrown fascism, one explicitly designed to resist Nazi influence.
Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, a devout Catholic and fierce anti-Nazi, dissolved parliament in 1933 and established what he called the Fatherland Front. This was a corporatist, one-party state modeled on Mussolini's Italy rather than Hitler's Germany. Dollfuss banned the Austrian Nazi Party along with the Social Democrats and other rivals. He emphasized Austria's Catholic identity as distinct from Protestant Germany.
Dollfuss sought protection from Benito Mussolini, and initially it worked. Mussolini had no desire to see a powerful Germany on Italy's northern border. He guaranteed Austrian independence.
In July 1934, Austrian Nazis attempted a coup. They stormed the chancellery and shot Dollfuss, who bled to death over several hours after the plotters refused to let a doctor or priest attend him. But the coup failed. Mussolini mobilized Italian troops on the Austrian border as a warning to Hitler. Germany backed down.
The surviving Austrian Nazi leaders fled to Germany, where they continued plotting from exile.
Hitler's Obsession
Adolf Hitler was born in Austria. Not in Vienna, but in Braunau am Inn, a small town on the German border. He grew up speaking the same language, absorbing the same culture, developing the same resentments as other German Austrians who felt their people had been unfairly divided.
His German nationalism crystallized early. As a young man attending meetings of the German Workers' Party in Munich, Hitler got into a heated argument with a professor who advocated that Bavaria should break away from Prussia and unite with Austria as a new South German nation. Hitler attacked this idea vehemently—not because he opposed Austrian-German unity, but because he saw it as undermining German unity rather than completing it.
His oratorical skills in demolishing the professor's arguments impressed the party leadership so much that they invited him to join. The rest, as they say, is history.
The Nazi program, published in 1920, listed as its very first point: "We demand the unification of all Germans in the Greater Germany on the basis of the people's right to self-determination." Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, published in 1925, that he would achieve union between Austria and Germany "by any means possible."
This wasn't mere rhetoric. Austria occupied a central place in Hitler's ideology. The "Heim ins Reich" concept—literally "home into the Reich"—aimed to incorporate all ethnic Germans living outside Germany's borders into a single Greater German state. Austria, with its entirely German-speaking population, was the most obvious target.
By 1937, Hitler was ready to act. On November 5th, he called a secret meeting with his military leadership and informed them of his intention to annex both Austria and Czechoslovakia. The only question was timing and method.
The Trap
Kurt Schuschnigg, who had succeeded the murdered Dollfuss as chancellor, tried to maintain Austrian independence through the same formula: authoritarian nationalism, Catholic identity, Italian support. But by 1938, the ground had shifted beneath him.
Mussolini, Italy's dictator, had drawn closer to Hitler. The Rome-Berlin Axis, formalized in 1936, meant Italy would no longer oppose German expansion into Austria. Schuschnigg had lost his protector.
In February 1938, Hitler summoned Schuschnigg to a meeting at Berchtesgaden, the Führer's mountain retreat in the Bavarian Alps. What followed was less negotiation than intimidation.
Hitler screamed. He threatened invasion. German generals paraded through the room in an obvious display of military power. He presented Schuschnigg with an ultimatum: appoint Arthur Seyss-Inquart, an Austrian Nazi sympathizer, as Minister of the Interior with control over the police, or face military consequences.
Schuschnigg capitulated. He had no choice. Austria's army of 30,000 troops couldn't possibly resist the Wehrmacht.
But Schuschnigg tried one last gambit. On March 9th, he announced a snap plebiscite for March 13th. The Austrian people would vote on whether to remain independent. The question would be phrased to favor a "yes" for Austria: "Are you in favor of a free, German, independent and social, Christian and united Austria?"
Schuschnigg expected to win. Despite everything, he believed most Austrians still preferred independence to Nazi rule.
Hitler couldn't allow the vote to happen. A democratic rejection of Anschluss would undermine his entire claim that the German people yearned for unification. On March 11th, Germany issued an ultimatum: cancel the plebiscite and resign, or face invasion.
Schuschnigg resigned that evening. In a farewell radio address, he explained that he was yielding to force and ordered the Austrian military not to resist. "God protect Austria," he concluded.
The next morning, German troops crossed the border.
The Annexation
March 12, 1938, was a Saturday. The weather was clear. German soldiers marched into Austria unopposed, some of them literally stopping to buy postcards and refreshments from Austrian vendors along the way.
In Vienna and other cities, crowds gathered to welcome the German troops. Swastikas appeared on buildings. Nazi supporters who had kept their sympathies hidden now emerged to celebrate openly. The atmosphere was, in many places, genuinely festive.
But not everywhere, and not for everyone.
Almost immediately, Austrian Nazis began attacking Jews. Mobs forced Jewish men and women to scrub pro-Schuschnigg slogans from the streets on their hands and knees while crowds jeered. Jewish shops were looted. Jews were beaten, robbed, humiliated. The violence was worse, more spontaneous, more public than anything that had occurred in Germany itself.
Over the following weeks, approximately 70,000 people were arrested—political opponents, Jews, Catholics who had supported the old regime. Many were sent to concentration camps. Thousands of Jewish Austrians committed suicide in the first weeks after the Anschluss.
Hitler himself arrived on March 14th, entering Vienna in triumph. He gave a speech from the balcony of the Hofburg, the former imperial palace, declaring the "entry of my homeland into the German Reich."
A plebiscite was held on April 10th, now under Nazi control. The ballot was designed for only one possible answer. Opponents had been arrested or intimidated into silence. Jewish Austrians couldn't vote at all. The official result: 99.7% approval.
Austria was renamed "Ostmark"—the Eastern March—and divided into administrative regions that erased its identity as a unified state. It would not exist again as an independent country until 1945.
What the Anschluss Reveals
The annexation of Austria holds uncomfortable lessons about how democracies die and how populations can be manipulated into accepting—even celebrating—their own subjugation.
First, economic crisis creates vulnerability. Austria in the 1930s was devastated by depression. Unemployment was rampant. The old order had failed. In such conditions, promises of restoration, of national greatness, of being part of something larger and more powerful than a struggling small state, held genuine appeal.
Second, the suppression of democracy by domestic authoritarians prepared the ground for external conquest. Dollfuss and Schuschnigg believed that by crushing the left and establishing their own fascist state, they could resist Nazi fascism. Instead, they eliminated the political forces that might have most strongly opposed Hitler while normalizing authoritarian rule. When the Nazis came, many Austrians saw it as simply a change in management rather than a fundamental transformation.
Third, international abandonment matters. The Western democracies did nothing. Britain and France, still reeling from the carnage of World War I, had no appetite for military confrontation. The League of Nations was toothless. Mussolini, who had once protected Austria, now stood aside. Schuschnigg faced Hitler utterly alone.
Finally, the Anschluss shows how historical grievances can be weaponized. The Allies' refusal to let Austria join Germany in 1919 created a genuine sense of injustice. The Nazis exploited this mercilessly. They presented the annexation not as conquest but as liberation, the reunification of a people unjustly divided by vindictive foreign powers. Many Austrians accepted this narrative.
The truth, as always, was more complicated. Austria wasn't simply Germany. It had its own history, its own identity, its own traditions. But identity is malleable, and under the right conditions—economic collapse, political polarization, international isolation, and relentless propaganda—a nation can be convinced to erase itself.
The Long Shadow
After World War II, the Austrian question was resolved differently. The Allied powers, having learned from the interwar period, restored Austrian independence but imposed permanent neutrality. Austria would not join either NATO or the Warsaw Pact. It would be a buffer state, constitutionally forbidden from union with Germany.
For decades, many Austrians promoted what historians call the "victim myth"—the idea that Austria was Hitler's first victim rather than a willing participant in the Nazi project. This narrative had obvious appeal. It allowed Austrians to distance themselves from the Holocaust and from war guilt more generally.
The reality was more complicated. Austrians served in the Wehrmacht in proportion to their population. Austrians staffed concentration camps. Adolf Eichmann, who organized the logistics of the Holocaust, was Austrian. So was Hitler himself.
It took until 1991 for an Austrian chancellor to acknowledge publicly that Austrians had also been perpetrators, not merely victims. Reckoning with this history continues today.
The Anschluss serves as a warning. Democratic institutions are fragile. National identity can be manipulated. Economic desperation creates political opportunity for extremists. And when the moment of crisis comes, international solidarity may be nowhere to be found.
Austria vanished on a spring Saturday in 1938 because a confluence of forces—historical grievance, economic collapse, political polarization, authoritarian normalization, international appeasement, and ruthless opportunism—made it possible. Understanding how it happened is essential to preventing it from happening again.