Rule of the Nazis

The Anschluss with Germany, which was proclaimed in March 1938 with the aid of false documents and massive propaganda, was not counteracted with any military action from Austria since both morally and strategically the country felt too weak to respond. Internationally there was little reaction: only Mexico, the Soviet Union, Chile and China protested against this measure.

The Austrian cabinet leaders were arrested and then deported to concentration camps. During the following months, Austria's Jews were exposed to unprecedented terror, subjected to mental humiliation and physical torture, robbed of their possessions and expelled from the country. In order to give these actions a quasi-legal basis, on March 13 a mock Council of Ministers was convened which adopted the resolution for the Anschluss. This was followed by a referendum held in Greater Germany on April 10. With outrageous use of propaganda, the votes of the people were misused to "legalize" an act of violence.

The Nazi regime quickly took root in Austria, with the system reaching heights of perfection hitherto unknown in the German Reich. The terror machinery established by the SS and the security service was lent further support by the formerly illegal National Socialists of Austria. Particularly the liquidation of the regime as well as opponents and the persecution inflicted upon the Jewish population throughout the German Reich through deliberate or tolerated acts of cruelty reached new, untold dimensions.

In the following months, some 130,000 Austrians left their homeland in order to find a secure place of exile, mainly in other Western countries. Those who were subject to the Nuremberg Laws were at first divested of almost all their possessions. For Austria, the expulsion of these citizens meant a loss of intellectual substance that was to leave its mark on the country for decades to come. After the end of the Second World War, hardly any of the exiled persons wanted to return to the country that had driven them out.

Shortly after the Anschluss, resistance reared its head within the different political groups; Communists and legitimists, one-time Social Democrats and members of the Heimwehr were unwilling to accept the new regime. However, since a single national resistance group as such was never formed, it was easy for the Nazi rulers to unmask their adversaries and to persecute them relentlessly.
 
Because of the deep rifts that existed between the different political groups, it was also impossible to build an effective and recognized exile government abroad. The individual resistance movements formulated different political objectives, some of which appeared almost utopian. It was only the Moscow Declaration of 1943 that defined a clear direction, when the Allies declared the restoration of a sovereign Austrian state as being one of their war goals.

It was only during the last months of the war that resistance took on a more active form when members of the resistance movement in Tyrol established contact with American intelligence services. While the Austrians failed to succeed in securing military support, they at least managed to provide the Western Allies with information concerning the course of the war.

For Austria the consequences of the Nazi regime and the Second World War were disastrous: During this period 2,700 Austrians had been executed and more than 16,000 citizens murdered in the concentration camps. Some 16,000 Austrians were killed in prison, while over 67,000 Austrian Jews were deported to death camps, only 2,000 of them lived to see the end of the war. In addition, 247,000 Austrians lost their lives serving in the army of the Third Reich or were reported missing, and 24,000 civilians were killed during bombing raids.