Why didn't Hitler advocate Austrian nationalist ideas?

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi Lamarck,

Everyone seems agreed that, at the very least, a "clear majority" of Austrians probably favoured Anschluss.

It is worth pointing out that just a "clear majority" of Austrians supporting Anschluss would have been sufficient to legitimize the project, if the will of the Austrian voters had been fairly consulted. Just 51% would have been enough, and support was very probably rather higher than that.

The irony is that, by so blatantly rigging a plebiscite to make support for the project appear absolutely "overwhelming", the Nazis did more to discredit the Anschluss project than anyone else.

Cheers,

Sid.

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi Guys,

The thread asks, "Why didn't Hitler advocate Austrian nationalist ideas?"

Hitler had been non-compliant since 1909, when he was meant to report for the draft in Austria. However, at the third time of asking he reportedly attended the Austrian conscription board: "Hitler was bitterly upset when after being medically examined on 5th February, 1914, he was rejected as being: "Unfit for combatant and auxiliary duty - too weak. Unable to bear arms." Apparently, they found evidence of a lung ailment.

So it looks as though Austria gave him some grounds to feel rejected before he actually rejected it in favour of Pan-Germanism.

His acceptance by the German Army later in the year must have been a welcome contrast.

Cheers,

Sid.

[Lamarck]

Hi Sid,

All historians opinions will be "believes" because he or she can only go on the evidence that is available to support any notion about the Anschluss. It is impossible to determine with complete certainty how many Austrians would have voted for the Anschluss in 1938 in a free election. Reasons to vote for the Anschluss varied, I highly doubt a majority would have voted for it because of the racial theories the Nazis preached, Bukey stated in his book that after WW1 very few Austrians actually thought of themselves as Germans in the way the far-right nationalists in Austria and Germany defined 'German'. According to some pan-German theories, many perfectly ordinary ethnic Germans would have been considered racially inferior due to not being Nordic, etc.

Vienna seems to be the one place in Austria that was less likely to have voted for the Anschluss in 1938. Whether that was because of the amount of Jews that lived there or because the area was more liberal than nationalist, it is hard to say for definite.

Which way the opponents and proponents of Schuschnigg would have voted would ultimately have been the decisive factor in an independent Austria or the Anschluss in 1938.

A customs union is not the same as an outright annexation of a territory but it does show that there was certainly a large amount of people in both Austria and Germany between 1918-1938 that thought a customs union between the two countries would give an economic advantage to both countries.

We can keep arguing about what percentage but the truth is that we will never know for sure because there is nothing to do go on but simply anecdotal evidence and reports that were reported by the Nazis.

The word "overwhelming" is an adjective used to describe a noun. I don't think it's incorrect to say that an overwhelming amount of Austrians between March and April 1938 certainly expressed clear genuine enthusiasm and support for the Nazi cause of the Anschluss, without necessarily supporting the Nazis.

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi Lamarck,

You post, "We can keep arguing about what percentage but the truth is that we will never know for sure because there is nothing to do go on but simply anecdotal evidence and reports that were reported by the Nazis" Yup, with the proviso that it is reasonable to infer that there was probably some sort of majority in favour of Anschluss, all other things being equal.

Cheers,

Sid.

[Lamarck]

Hi Sid,

The endless amount of pages arguing over the use of 'overwhelming' really makes no sense when put in context. The word 'overwhelming' when used as an adjective means 'very great in amount' or '(especially of an emotion) very strong'. How does the use of that word to describe the Austrians in 1938?

Similarly, the use of 'overwhelm' as a verb can mean several things but the definition of 'have a strong emotional effect on' (e.g I was overwhelmed with guilt) also reflects the Austrians in 1938, quite clearly.

Of course not every Austrian displayed open enthusiasm when the Germans crossed the border and annexed Austria but quite evidently thousands did and I don't see how Lee's quote of "overwhelming majority" contradicts this to be the case simply because the plebiscite was rigged. As I have already mentioned, it was exactly the response of the Austrians that made Hitler change his mind about the future of Austria.

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi Lamarck,

If the word "overwhelming" is to be applied, it must be with some hard evidence.

It seems plausible enough that a clear majority of Austrians were in favour of Anschluss, even with Hitler's Germany.

However, what is lacking thus far is evidence that this clear majority was "overwhelming".

Hitler clearly wanted it to be "overwhelming" because he rigged a plebiscite on the subject to return an "overwhelming" result, even though he would probably have won with a perfectly adequate clear majority in a free vote.

However, we don't have to uncritically share his desire that support for Anschluss should be "overwhelming", especially when hard evidence of this seems to be lacking.

What is wrong with a clear majority of, say, 66%? It legitimizes the Anschluss project more than adequately.

Why do we need an "overwhelming" result like Hitler did?

Cheers,

Sid.

[Lamarck]

Hi Sid,

Are you rejecting the use of 'overwhelming' as an adjective or a verb to describe the Austrians in 1938?

Please do define which definition of 'overwhelming' you are questioning to be applied to the Austrians approval of the Anschluss.

How Hitler wanted the plebiscite result to turn out to be is totally irrelevant. Look at the definitions of the word 'overwhelming', I can't see a single definition that cannot be used to describe the Austrians approval of the Anschluss.

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi Lamarck,

I don't understand what you mean in asking "Are you rejecting the use of "overwhelming"as an adjective or a verb to describe the Austrians in 1938?"

Clearly the Austrians were "overwhelmed" (to use a passive verb) on a number of levels by the German invasion.

Otherwise, I am simply asking for some substantive evidence that their support for Anschluss was "overwhelming" (adjective), as claimed by Hitler, the Nazis and a couple of you here.

You are amongst those claiming it was "overwhelming", but apart from a couple of opinions, that are contradicted by other opinions, you have offered nothing substantive, as yet.

You ask, "Please do define which definition of "overwhelming" you are questioning....."

I have already set a benchmark some weeks ago (6 Feb) - 75%.

If you can substantiate with hard evidence that more than 75% of Austrians supported Anschluss, I would consider this "overwhelming".

Otherwise we are left with a plausible clear majority of uncertain magnitude.

What I don't understand is why you are on a mission to get accepted that Austrian support for Anschluss was "overwhelming", despite the absence of substantive evidence, especially when the Anschluss would be perfectly well legitimized by a clear majority, upon which we all seem agreed!

Cheers,

Sid.

[Lamarck]

Hi Sid,

You're really just flogging a dead horse as you have already made your mind up, stop pretending otherwise. You are simply begging the question, you are asking for evidence where there is none - something you know fine well. The reasons for the lack of survey or plebiscite evidence has already been thoroughly discussed. Historians have used other evidence to generally agree that the vast majority of Austrians would have voted for the Anschluss in 1938 irrespective of a rigged plebiscite result or not.

You don't get to decide what percentage is considered to be "overwhelming".

Anyway, there does not need to be plebiscite or survey results to prove anything, other evidence is available and has been taken into account which is why historians quite clearly agree that the majority of Austrians would have voted for the Anschluss even without the Nazis and that during the time between the proclamation of the Anschluss and the actual vote the support for it drastically increased.

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi Lamarck,

You post, "you are asking for evidence where there is none - something you know fine well."

Firstly, it is you who is claiming superior knowledge, not me. I am simply asking you to justify your proposition that Austrian support for Anschluss was "overwhelming". You haven't yet done so.

Secondly, I did not know that there is no such evidence, but I assumed from your posts that you did have such evidence that Austrian support for Anschluss was "overwhelming". That is why I have been asking you what this evidence is.

However, you now admit that there is none.

This being so, how can you possibly sustain the proposition that Austrian support for Anschluss was "overwhelming"?

You are asking us to buy into a proposition for which, by your own words, there is no evidence.

You post, "historians quite clearly agree that the majority of Austrians would have voted for the Anschluss even without the Nazis and that during the time between the proclamation of the Anschluss and the actual vote the support for it drastically increased."

Firstly, it is quite clearly untrue that, "historians quite clearly agree that the majority of Austrians would have voted for the Anschluss even without the Nazis" because you have yourself provided information that 66% of Austrians might well have supported Schussnigg's continued independence plebiscite. This is symptomatic of the way you are consistently overstating your case.

Secondly, no one, as far as I am aware, is arguing that it is not the case "that during the time between the proclamation of the Anschluss and the actual vote the support for it drastically increased.". It would be miraculous if it hadn't, given the weight of propaganda, intimidation, bribery, etc., the Nazis employed to achieve this (read your source Bukey) - and yet were still so lacking in confidence that they blatantly rigged the plebiscite to secure their desired result in favour of an "overwhelming" Anschluss.

The point at issue is whether this increase amounts to an "overwhelming" majority. We are still waiting for you to demonstrate this. Indeed, you did not even claim it in your last text.

Finally, there is the as yet unaddressed point that the time of the plebiscite probably represented the absolute peak of Austrian support for Anschluss (except possibly the immediate aftermath of WWI). A month before, as your own source opined, an independence plebiscite might have passed with a clear majority. Later in the year disillusion was beginning to set in (again see your source Bukey). The plebiscite high seems to have been atypical of the general trend of Austrian public sentiment as it represented an artificially contrived peak. Take way the German armed occupation, the one sided Nazi propaganda, the arrest of tens of thousands of opponents by 40,000 imported German police, etc, etc, and I think we can safely say that the plebiscite "high" was artificial, however clear a majority it may or may not have been.

Cheers,

Sid.

[Lamarck]

Hi Sid,

Sid, I'm not going to repeat what I already have several times, it has become ad nauseam now. You are begging the question. By the way, thanks a lot for hijacking my thread to make it all about the Anschluss since p. 5, for over 10 pages we have been going around in circles.

Perhaps users could engage in this thread and discuss why Hitler favoured German nationalism over Austrian nationalism.

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi Lamarck,

On a point of fact, it was not me who introduced the "overwhelming" proposition on p.5, it was ljadw.

I questioned this.

You then supported the "overwhelming" proposition and proceeded to advocate it for ten pages before conceding that there was no evidence to support it.

What would you have the rest of us do? Just accept whatever you post without question?

You must at the very least accept equal share in any blame for this diversion, which could have been avoided if you had only posted to me in the first place, ".....you are asking for evidence where there is none" instead of waiting ten pages to do so.

I am perfectly happy that the thread should return to its original question, "Why didn't Hitler advocate Austrian nationalist ideas?", and hope it now does so.

However, I reserve the right to question and disagree where necessary.

Cheers,

Sid.

[Lamarck]

Sid,

Do not be so disingenuous. I have said that ".....you are asking for evidence where there is none" of a free plebiscite to support that 75% or more Austrians agreed with the Anschluss (who on earth decided that you get to decide what is considered 'overwhelming' is beyond me!). However, you do not get to define what percentage is considered to be overwhelming just to suit your belief. The reason you have done this is because you know fine well there are no free surveys, plebiscites, etc available. Nevertheless, historians have concluded by other available evidence that a clear overwhelming majority of Austrians and Reich Germans supported the Anschluss, especially between 1918-1938, and would have voted for the Anschluss with or without the Nazis in 1938.

The only thing you keep going back to support your thesis that there is a lack of evidence is that there is no free plebiscite result between 1938-1945 but yet you ignore all of the other evidence. There is clear evidence that a majority of Austrians supported the Anschluss until the collapse of the Third Reich. Even a decade after the end of the Third Reich nearly half of the Austrians that were questioned in a survey still considered themselves to be Germans.

Bukey wrote on p. 161:

Although an overwhelming majority of the Austrian people endorsed the triumph of German arms, particularist feeling, class division, and diversity of opinion persisted, especially in Vienna.

The lack of support in Vienna does not change a thing. I have never disputed that there was a lack of genuine support in Vienna and have even made a reference about it in my previous posts.

Bukey's book Hitler's Austria: Popular Sentiment in the Nazi Era, 1938-1945 is arguably the definitive book about the Anschluss, was he lying when he wrote what I have quoted because there is no free plebiscite result available?

Of course you have a right to participate in a discussion and disagree but to simply dismiss evidence without any contrary evidence which you have done on several occasions is dishonest.

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi Lamarck,

So much for your claimed desire to get back on topic!

I proposed 75% as a means of providing a little clarity to the nebulous world of "overwhelmingism". For a whole month you have tacitly gone along with it and only now see reason to object.

I proposed 75% for a reason. It is a general rule of thumb in the military that, all other things being equal, 3:1 odds are required to have a reasonable prospect of overwhelming the enemy (that is 75% on one side to 25% on the other).

However, if you do not like 75%, please feel free to propose another percentage, with justification, and we can discuss it.

Of course, you will not do so, because you know full well that there is no hard statistical basis for any percentage regarding what proportion of the population of Austria supported Anschluss.

As we have seen, estimates range for 66% in favour of continued independence under Schussnigg's proposed plebiscite to 99%+ for Anschluss under the Nazi plebiscite barely a month later. Austrian public opinion was clearly fluid on the issue.

Thus, beyond a reasonable probability that, all other things being equal, a clear majority of Austrians probably inclined towards union with Germany in March-April 1938, it is not possible to go further.

This "clear majority" is quite enough to legitimize the Anschluss project.

What mystifies me is why you feel it necessary for Austrian sentiment in favour of Anschluss to be "overwhelming" in the absence of any hard evidence? Why isn't a more sustainable "clear majority" enough?

Cheers,

Sid.

P.S. Perhaps you would care to clarify what period Bukey was referring to when he wrote, "Although an overwhelming majority of the Austrian people endorsed the triumph of German arms.....". Remember, (1) Bukey is not here referring to the Anschluss and (2) I have a copy of Bukey.

P.P.S. You post, ".....to simply dismiss evidence without any contrary evidence which you have done on several occasions is dishonest." Why? It is you proposing that Austrian support for Anschluss was "overwhelming", not me. I don't have to prove a negative to question this. It is therefore up to you to substantiate your case with hard evidence, or it falls.

[Lamarck]

Well because Hitler developed German nationalist ideas which made him think that Austria should be part of Germany, discussion about the Anschluss is pretty much inevitable.

We don't need to discuss a percentage because as I have already admitted, there were no free plebiscite or survey results carried out between 1938-1945. However, historians do generally agree that with or without the Nazis, a clear majority of Austrians would have voted for the Anschluss in 1938.

You are correct in saying that the reference of "German arms" was in reference to WW2 not the Anschluss. However, it is an indication that a clear majority of Austrians supported being part of Germany and fighting as Germans. I don't know a single historian that has made the claim that the Austrians would not have clearly voted for the Anschluss in 1938, do you know of one?

And yet, while it is unlikely that Austrians would have given Nazi candidates sufficient support to bring them to power under democratic or even semidemocratic conditions, there can be no doubt that most of the populace looked favorably on a merger with Germany, even under Hitler's leadership.

Bukey, p. 21

There is some reports by the Gestapo of Austrian patriotism but overall the vast majority of Austrians believed in the Anschluss. (Ibid, p. 82) The 'overwhelming majority' of Austrians also supported the Nazi social and racial policies. (Ibid, p. 83)

There is not a single incident in all of the time that the Ostmark existed because of the Anschluss that a movement even existed that supported the independence of Austria. The Nazis never managed to fully convert the majority of Austrians into Nazis but there is no evidence that the Austrians as a whole disagreed with the idea of a Greater Germany.

I have never actually managed to get an answer from you, the Schussnigg's independence vote that could possibly have gained the support of two-thirds of the Austrian population would also have been rigged and never happened so it is totally irrelevant, so why are you so willing to rely on the idea that Schussnigg's proposal of an independent Austria would have legitimately gained two-thirds of the populace as a mere fact yet you ignore the Nazi plebiscite result because it was just simply rigged and according to you Nazi propaganda?

Despite all of the outbursts of genuine support and enthusiasm that actually happened when the Anschluss took place, you have dismissed firsthand accounts of the genuine approval of the Anschluss by referring to the Schussnigg plebiscite. Your arguments against the notion that an overwhelming majority of Austrians supported the Anschluss is non-existent.

By the way, there is no word called "overwhelmingism". I think it's quite eerie that you mentioned passive verbs in a previous post and then decided to invent a new word.

The problem is with you is that every single bit of evidence that clearly indicates an overwhelming majority of Austrians supported the Anschluss is not good enough for you because it's neither a plebiscite result nor in compliance with your belief that the Schussnigg plebiscite was legitimate and represented what most Austrians really thought.

I have come to the conclusion that no amount of evidence will ever be considered as hard enough evidence for you because it is not a free plebiscite result that shows over seventy-five percent of Austrians voted for the Anschluss, am I right?

The reason I'm quite determined to include the word 'overwhelming' before majority is because the word 'majority' can mean even just as little as a 'tiny majority' since it essentially means 'the greater number'.

I have already explained the various definitions of 'overwhelming' and that it can be used as either an adjective or a verb. The available evidence that shows a clear majority and a strongly emotional amount of Austrians were in favour of the Anschluss ostensibly means that the word can be used to describe the Austrians in 1938 as either an adjective or a verb. A 'clear', 'overwhelming', 'great' or any other words that mean essentially 'very great' can accurately be used to describe the Austrians approval of the Anschluss in 1938. The same can also be applied for the Austrians approval of the antisemitism that the Nazis practiced.