Is it true that Austrians are ethnic Germans?

Discussions on the propaganda, architecture and culture in the Third Reich.
ManfredV
Member
Posts: 460
Joined: 10 May 2005, 11:55
Location: Pirmasens

Re: Is it true that Austrians are ethnic Germans?

#61

Post by ManfredV » 30 Nov 2020, 18:33

George_S: "Beside we are Scandinavians we are also Germans". Even Hitler didn't claim that :lol:
Don't mix up german and germanic .

George L Gregory
Member
Posts: 1083
Joined: 13 Nov 2020, 16:08
Location: Britain

Re: Is it true that Austrians are ethnic Germans?

#62

Post by George L Gregory » 18 Dec 2020, 18:15

I came across an interesting book last night - Paul Ham’s “Young Hitler: The Making of the Führer”.

Ham wrote:
A brief summary of those upheavals will help understand why young Hitler, an Austrian, grew up in thrall to the German nation and felt contempt for the Austro-Hungarian regime. In 1815 the Congress of Vienna, convened to negotiate the peaceful reconstruction of Europe after the defeat of Napoleon, created a loose association of thirty-nine German states, or principalities, known as the German Confederation, the majority of which would be unified by Bismarck. It was conceived as the prelude to a modern state that would replace the ailing Holy Roman Empire.

Riven by internal disputes and competing power claims, the Confederation failed to consolidate, ruptured under the democratic revolutions that swept Europe in 1848, and was eventually torn apart when its two most powerful members, Prussia and Austria, and their allies, went to war in 1866. This climax of old hostilities, traceable to the invasion of Austrian-controlled Silesia in 1740 by Prussia’s Frederick the Great, ended with Austria’s defeat.

Excluded from the new German sphere, Vienna’s ruling Habsburg dynasty scrabbled together a ‘dual monarchy’ with Hungary, under the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867. Meanwhile Prussia, under the firm guidance of Bismarck, confirmed its ascendancy over the German principalities and, with the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, forged ahead with the creation of the unified German state.

A pervasive feature of Bismarck’s Germany, as we have seen, was the citizens’ rich conception of themselves as ‘Germans’, in the sense of sharing a national - and racial - affinity. Hitler’s family, along with millions of fellow German-speaking Austrians, shared this palpable German identity, regardless of the fact that they lived in a different country. It was a near-mystical connection that transcended politics and geography. And yet, they were excluded from the newly formed German Reich and felt like outcasts, exiled from the land of their origins.


George L Gregory
Member
Posts: 1083
Joined: 13 Nov 2020, 16:08
Location: Britain

Re: Is it true that Austrians are ethnic Germans?

#63

Post by George L Gregory » 29 Dec 2020, 09:31

Sid Guttridge wrote:
25 Nov 2020, 02:45
As I understand it, there is no claim that Austrians are a distinct ethnic group. They are a mix of largely Germanic, Slavic and Celtic origins, with the former contributing about half their DNA. Their language apparently reflects this greater Germanic ethnic influence.
Germans are also not a distant ethnic group. They are a mixture of Roman, Iranian, Celtic, Germanic, Baltic and Slavic origins.

The Romans settled all over Germania. The Celts inhabited southern Germany. There were Slavic tribes who settled in modern-day Eastern Germany. The Huns also invaded Germany. Germany only became “German” after the different tribes were eventually Germanised. The Old Prussians who essentially unified Germany were originally a Baltic tribe who were Germanised.

This is why the fundamental question is: Was it really enough for German-speaking Austrians who were born and lived in the Austria-Hungary Empire, like Hitler, to describe themselves as Germans? Take Hitler’s school friend August Kubizek who had Czech ancestry. Or, two more Austrians - Odilo Globočnik who was of Germanised Slovene ancestry and Otto Skorzeny who had Germanised Polish ancestry. We can also find an abundance of examples of Nazis who were born in Germany who had ostensibly Russian, Czech, Polish or other non-Germanic surnames.

Even if we accept Hitler’s argument that as an Austrian he was therefore an “ethnic German”, his ancestry is uncertain and while there is no evidence of any Czech or Jewish ancestry, he was certainly troubled by such rumours. What is more is that there was incest in his family - his parents Alois and solars were officially too closely related that they had to get special permission to get married because they were officially considered to be first cousins once removed because Johann Georg Hiedler was considered to be Alois Hitler’s father, but if his brother Johann Nepomuk Hiedler were Alois Hitler’s father then Adolf Hitler’s parents would have been half-uncle and half-niece.

Helmut Heiber in his short biography of Hitler wrote:
The aberrational quality of the Hitler family beginning with the ambitious and enterprising father of Adolf shows that other blood must have entered the Lower Austrian Waldviertel stock which had been weakened by years of inbreeding.
In contrast, Joachim Fest wrote in his book The Face of the Third Reich that Nazi propaganda claimed the complete opposite:
The indulgence normally accorded to a man's origins is out of place in the case of Adolf Hitler, who made documentary proof of Aryan ancestry a matter of life and death for millions of people but himself possessed no such document. He did not know who his grandfather was. Intensive research into his origins, accounts of which have been distorted by propagandist legends and which are in any case confused and murky, has failed so far to produce a clear picture. National Socialist versions skimmed over the facts and emphasized, for example, that the population of the so-called Waldviertel, from which Hitler came, had been 'tribally German since the Migration of the Peoples', or more generally, that Hitler had 'absorbed the powerful forces of this German granite landscape into his blood through his father'.

Post Reply

Return to “Propaganda, Culture & Architecture”