#259
Post
by Sid Guttridge » 03 Apr 2018, 18:17
Hi Lamarck,
To continue:
You post, “The reason that Germans lived in different states prior to that date was because there was no "Germany" as a country.” Exactly. Just because one is German and identifies as such, doesn’t mean one has to be part of one overarching German state, or even want to be. The default position for Germans over the last 2,000 years at least has been to live in multiple German polities. The ideological obsession with a unitary German state with a full range of national institutions ruling all Germans is a very recent one.
You post, “I have said that Bukey is arguably the most researched book about the Anschluss in 1938. I do have other books that are specifically about the Anschluss and will copy and paste some material in the not too distant future. Many sources are going to contradict each other when there was no complete impartiality.”
Firstly, as I have said repeatedly before, Bukey, your “arguably the best researched book about the Anschluss”, nowhere says that support for Anschluss was “overwhelming”. Indeed, he is cautious and says at the top of p.33 “How many tears were shed behind closed doors is impossible to say.”
Secondly, in writing, “Many sources are going to contradict each other when there was no complete impartiality”, you are, once again, repeating my point for me. Given this, how can you be so certain that Austrian support for Anschluss was “overwhelming” if the sources are contradictory? The only way to do this would to be to cherry pick your sources by ignoring those that disagree with your “overwhelming” thesis. (In your defence, much of the material I have used to question your “overwhelming” thesis has been supplied by you.)
You post, “A "percentage" (e.g 75% or higher) of approval and "overwhelming" do not necessarily need to be interchangeable, it depends on how the latter word is used.” Again, you want to cherry-pick a definition that suits your preference by ignoring the true enormity of what “overwhelming” actually means. I would remind you that you supplied two percentage examples of “overwhelming”, one of which was at 83.3% and the other at 92%. “Overwhelming” does not simply mean “large”.
You post, “You agree that Austrian would have "largely" voted "Yes" for the Anschluss in 1938 without the Nazis but you dislike the use of "overwhelming"? Interesting.” Not just “interesting”, but about as far as the evidence so far takes us.
You ask, “…..so because there is no impartial plebiscite result there is no proof that an overwhelming majority of Austrians approved of the Anschluss?” Pretty much. Don’t forget that there were no national opinion polls either. So what, beyond opinion and anecdote, are you relying on in support of the fairly extreme position that support for Anschluss, all other things being equal, was “overwhelming”?
So I repeat, “…..how large the margin was in favour of Anschluss is so far impossible to establish through lack of hard evidence. In the absence of this, it is not safe, or even necessary, to say more than that there was plausibly a clear majority of Austrians in favour of Anschluss. This is quite enough to legitimise the process.”
You post, “There is no evidence for the exact percentage of the Austrians approval of the Anschluss.” Yup. There is just a variety of (as you admit) contradictory, more or less expert, opinions from which you appear to be cherry-picking just one set to support your “overwhelming” hypothesis.
You post, “The reason I am more inclined to believe the idea that 80% of the Austrian population approved of the Anschluss is when one analyses all of the available evidence then it is quite clearly to any observer that the Austrians in overwhelming numbers enhanced the annexing of Austria to the Reich.” No there isn’t. Might I remind you that you offered a contradictory opinion above: “Many sources are going to contradict each other when there was no complete impartiality.”
You go on to say, “There is not a single bit of evidence that there was any sort of rejection of the idea by any marginal numbers of Austrians, neither in the month between the Anschluss and the referendum…..” If Austrians were so entirely in agreement, why did the Nazis use a 100,000 man occupation army, a security police contingent of 40,000 men, arrest tens of thousands of Austrian opponents, exclude others from the voting process, purge the upper echelons of government services, lower the voting age, bribe the electorate, rig the voting process in several ways, etc., etc.? There was no resistance by the Germans at Stalingrad on 3 February 1943. By your rationale, this would be evidence that the 90,000 prisoners taken by the Red Army were happy with their condition! This is a wilfully silly rationale!
You post, “According to you, every historian that has written an 'overwhelming' amount of Austrians approval of the Anschluss is "extreme"?” Really? Where did I write that? I don’t mind honest debate, but blatant misrepresentations like this need to be called out. I have never called any historian “extreme” on this thread (and quite possibly not anywhere else, either). I would suggest that a retraction from you would seem to be in order here.
I think I know what you are trying to say, but I will let you dig yourself out of this hole of your own making. Perhaps you would care to rephrase your point?
When I posted, “A case against the Nazi plebiscite can very easily made without any reference to Schussnigg's plebiscite at all.” You replied, “Not at all”. I have been making that case repeatedly, but to do so yet again, “why did the Nazis use a 100,000 man occupation army, a security police contingent of 40,000 men, arrest tens of thousands of Austrian opponents, exclude others from the voting process, purge the upper echelons of government services, lower the voting age, bribe the electorate, rig the voting process in several ways, etc., etc.?” See? No reference to Schussnigg at all!!!!
You haven’t actually addressed this post of mine: “If you are referring only to the ballot papers as printed, the Nazi paper, while skewed, certainly appears fairer than the Schussnigg plebiscite. However, it should be noted that according to your earlier post, anyone could turn up with a piece of blank paper of the right size and vote "No" under the Schussnigg plebiscite rules outlined by you, which might also give infinite scope for multiple "No" votes. By contrast, the number of "Yes" papers was limited to those printed. Furthermore, as you know, the posting of the ballot papers were only the end result of a much larger electoral process, in which, I would suggest, the Nazi plebiscite comes off rather worse than Schussnigg's as far as bias is concerned.”
You post, “I find it also eerie I was able to find a copy of Schuschnigg's proposed ballot paper with relative ease yet according to you you that was the first time you had seen one.” What is “eerie” about that? I have had several discussions about the Anschluss plebiscites over the last twenty years on AHF and Feldgrau and never once have I found a Schussnigg plebiscite paper before. Please check. Nor is it readily available on Google Images, etc. As I have already said to you publicly, I am very grateful for you finding an illustration and am happy to acknowledge your success in doing so. However, this does not give you the right to question my integrity on the matter. This discussion has so far been pretty instructive. Please don’t spoil your hard work by such dubious tactics. If you have a case, it should be able to stand on its own merits.
You post, “Have you not thought that the actual percentage differences (presumably between a Schussnigg 75% and a Nazi 99%+ result) could have been because of the actual Austrians approval of the Anschluss?” Yes I have. However, apart from the Nazis, and apparently you(?), nobody else seems to give any credibility to the 99% figure. Everyone seems agreed at the very least that there was plausibly a clear majority of Austrians in favour of Anschluss. The question here is whether it was “overwhelming”.
You post, “If a Nazi plebiscite had been held on the same date as Schuschnigg's desired plebiscite then the result approval would probably have been lower and more closer to 75% (which still coincides with the use of 'overwhelming')” Yup. That is plausible. My longstanding question here is which side of the “75%” threshold it would fall in a free and fair plebiscite?
You post, “As already explained, the actual rigging wasn't even necessary….” Yup, I have already suggested this myself several times. Indeed, I would go further - the rigging was probably never necessary at all in order to achieve a majority in favour of Anschluss. It was only necessary to achieve an overwhelming majority bigger than that in the Saarland in order to make it look as though the Nazi project was still gaining in relative popularity.
You add, “…..because a month after the Anschluss Austrians were reaping the rewards for the annexation of Austria economically and socially.” I presume you are here referring to the bribery of the electorate with German goodies mentioned by Bukey on p.35 and the exclusion of the Jews, neither of which are directly related to the principle of Anschluss?
You go on, “Also, if both were held on the same date and just simply looking at the ballot papers alone, the Nazi ballot paper was….. fairer.” Yup, quite possibly - if you are simply looking at the ballot papers alone. However, as every single ballot paper in the Nazi plebiscite was flawed in its own way anyway, this doesn’t say a lot. Furthermore it totally ignores all the other flaws in the Nazi plebiscite (the Nazis use of a 100,000 man occupation army, a security police contingent of 40,000 men, arrests of tens of thousands of Austrian opponents, excluding others from the voting process, purging the upper echelons of government services, lowering the voting age, bribing the electorate, rigging the voting process in several ways, etc., etc.) most of which were not available to Schussnigg. Again you are cherry-picking one point to the exclusion of all else.
You post, “Indeed and just because he (Bukey) doesn't use the words "overwhelming majority" he clearly shows throughout the book the general feeling of the Austrians.” Yup, he does but he is nuanced in a way that you are not admitting. I refer, yet again to his, “How many tears were shed behind closed doors is impossible to say.” If Bukey doesn’t say Austrian support for Anschluss was “overwhelming” (a word he uses in different contexts elsewhere in the book, incidentally) and is qualified in his phraseology regarding numbers, you cannot honestly use him to support your thesis.
You post, “Every single bit of evidence given to you has been either dismissed or ignored.” The trouble is that you are not offering quantifiable evidence, just cherry-picked impressions and opinions and for every impression or opinion you offer, there is a contradictory one.
You say, “Forget any plebiscite result, look at the way the Austrians behaved when actual Wehrmacht soldiers crossed the border. Were there any signs of disapproval? Not a single bit.” Again, you are presuming that Austrian civilians felt free to protest publicly when not only faced by a fully armed military invasion but surrounded by local Nazi thugs who had already proven themselves more than willing to shed Austrian-German blood in 1934 and a Nazi Party that recognized no legitimate opposition in the Alt Reich. You seem to think that the Nazis were liberal democrats tolerant of loyal opposition – they weren’t.
Yet again I would remind you of what Bukey wrote, “How many tears were shed behind closed doors is impossible to say.”. I would also remind you that, according to Bukey (p.29), in Linz, the hometown of Hitler’s youth, the crowd that welcomed him was “between 60,00 and 80,000”, which only sounds impressive until one learns that this was only 30-40% of the city’s population. Furthermore, on p.31 he says that “more than a quarter of a million people packed the inner city” of Vienna, many of whom came from outside the capital. Again, this sounds impressive until one learns that the population of Vienna was about 1,700,000! Perhaps we should regard staying at home an act of passive resistance?
You ask, “Do you have any problems with the use of a "substantial majority" approved of the Anschluss?” Nope, so long as you insert a word of qualification before “approved”. As you agree, we are not dealing with hard facts here, and so have to be somewhat qualified in our opinions.
You post, “The overwhelming majority of Germans supported Hitler and the Nazis.” When? Certainly not in any free and fair elections before 1933, and there were none in Nazi Germany after that. The Nazis never got a majority in any public elections and never risked free elections even in the late 1930s when they very probably had a significant majority.
You post, “There are plenty of other sources that do indeed use the word 'overwhelming'.” I have no reason to doubt you, but you are taking some time in producing them, which does not help your case.
I sometimes wonder if you read what you post. This is from your Kershaw quote, “Only for the pan-Germans, by now entirely sucked into the Austrian Nazi Movement, was an Anschluß with Hitler's Germany an attractive proposition.” As far as I am aware, nobody has yet suggested that Nazis formed a majority of the Austrian population, let alone an “overwhelming” majority.
I would note that you repeatedly refer to the immediate aftermath of WWI, when Austrian national self-confidence was at its lowest, and to 1939-45, when Austria was embroiled in war. I would remind you that we are discussing 1938. As I have posted many times before, it is clear that support for Anschluss, which was very high after WWI, declined in the 1920s and 1930s and several Austrian political parties dropped it from their political programmes in those years. And once into WWII what choice did Austrians have but to support Germany, given that not to do so would have been treasonous and punishable by death?
You post, “Already noted is that many prominent political opponents, predominantly socialists, actually supported the Anschluss.” Yes, once the Nazis had leaned on them after military occupation. (Incidentally, the Nazi plebiscite came after the Nazis had already legislated Anschluss. The plebiscite merely retrospectively confirmed a fait accompli.) In the 1920s they had also been in favour of Anschluss but had dropped it from their platforms in the 1930s. This all goes to evidence that Austrian political opinion was changeable, not fixed, and therefore not likely to be “overwhelming” in any direction.
You quote, “It is, of course, well known that the Anschluss of 1938 unleashed a torrent of enthusiasm for Nazism in Vienna that overwhelmed contemporary observers (including Hitler) and to this day has not been adequately explained.” And yet the crowd in Vienna doing this “overwhelming” is put by Bukey at only about 250,000, which is about 15% of the city’s population. It is easy to see why contemporary observers might be “overwhelmed” by a crowd of 250,000, but those 250,000 don’t necessarily demonstrate “overwhelming” support for Nazism by the population of Vienna. Indeed, the massive absenteeism might well show exactly the opposite – a combination of overwhelming opposition and/or indifference to the Nazis!
I would remind you again of my football analogy. A very large and enthusiastic crowd might turn out to watch, say, a winning Arsenal team tour the FA Cup through the streets of London, but this very large crowd would not represent the overwhelming views of Londoners as a whole, because most of them support other teams. Such crowds are self-selecting, not representative. That is why minority pro-Anschluss crowd reaction in Linz or Vienna cannot be paraded as necessarily representative of the majority who stayed away. As Bukey says, “How many tears were shed behind closed doors is impossible to say.”
Enough for now,
Cheers,
Sid.