Why didn't Hitler advocate Austrian nationalist ideas?

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi ljadw,

Interesting stuff, but you haven't actually answered my question:

What do you mean by "artificially high" and "normal".

Is there a recommended level for female employment?

"Artificial" implies that somebody was contriving that the situation be so. Who was this?

It also strikes me that 1934, in the midst of the Great Depression everywhere, does not provide a very "normal" baseline for anything.

Cheers,

A still inquisitive Sid.

[ljadw]

It was ''artificial high '' ( I used brackets ) because when the economic situation became better,the % of women in the working force decreased,as unemployed men would occupy the new jobs and the situation would again become ''normal ''(brackets again ).
A fictive example ; in 1927 (before the crisis ):the workforce was 75% men and 25% women;due to the depression ,it was in 1933 55% men and 45% women,when in 1937 the situation became better, it was in 1937 66% men and 34 % women and when the crisis was over, it would be 75% against 25 % again .
During WWI the women rate also increased,temporarily, and when the war was over,''normalcy '' returned .
The example is fictive as the progress of women would not be nullified, not totally .

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi ljadw,

I see what you are trying to say, I think.

However, who is to say what is "artificial" or "normal"? Women's presence in the waged labour force was on an upward trajectory almost everywhere throughout the last century with, as you say, tremporary artificial peaks during the world wars. It is at an all time high at the moment, but is this to be regarded as abnormal or artificial? I would suggest that normalcy evolves and is a moving target.

Cheers,

Sid.

[Lamarck]

However, that said, it was not actually true that "German citizens were doing much better than they were during the Weimar Republic". In fact, consumption was often much lower in the late 1930s than it had been in the late 1920s. (A little more on that later, as I don't have the reference on me now). What Hitler was holding out to Germans seems to have been "Jam tomorrow" - the hope of a better future, not the reality of a better present.

Cheers,

Sid

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8onbm_8bcgQ

24:00

The vast majority of those considered to be Germans (since Jews were not considered Germans) were doing much better than they were during the Weimar Republic.

[ljadw]

Hi ljadw,

I see what you are trying to say, I think.

However, who is to say what is "artificial" or "normal"? Women's presence in the waged labour force was on an upward trajectory almost everywhere throughout the last century with, as you say, tremporary artificial peaks during the world wars. It is at an all time high at the moment, but is this to be regarded as abnormal or artificial? I would suggest that normalcy evolves and is a moving target.

Cheers,

Sid.

The 1934 situation was temporarily, thus artificial ,as during the world wars .The situation in 1937/1938 was considered as normal by the contemporaries,the 1933/1934 situation was considered by the same contemporaries as abnormal , not only by bias but because it was inevitable 85 years ago (1933 is as far from today as it was from 1848 )that the % of women in the work force would be lower than the % of men,because most women had a double job : their first job was to care about the men, children and housekeeping, jobs that were done without the modern remedies as hoover, electricity, bath, washing machine ,etc,

[Lamarck]

Anyway, getting back to the main topic.

I think one of the fundamental reasons why Hitler believed in German nationalism and identified as a German is because that is how the vast majority of people in Austria thought around the time when he was born and grew up. After Austria was excluded from Germany in 1866, many German Austrians were shocked and still identified strongly as Germans, rejecting any notion of a separate Austrian identity.

The Social Democratic leader Otto Bauer described it as "the conflict between our Austrian and German character".

The teachers at the schools Hitler went to all expressed German nationalist ideas. Nevertheless, Hitler seems to have taken German nationalist a lot more serious than his schoolmates.

His friend Josef Keplinger once recalled that Hitler told him, "You are not a Germane [old German]" and elaborated by saying, "You have dark hair and dark eyes." Hitler noted his brown hair and blue eyes.

Hitler identified the part of Austria where he was born as "Bavarian by blood" in Mein Kampf.

Two pan-Germans in Austria that were to hugely influence Hitler were Georg von Schönerer and Karl Lueger. Both hoped for the collapse of the Austrian-Empire and for "German Austria" to be annexed to Germany. Many Reich Germans also hoped for the German lands that were not annexed to Germany during the unification to eventually be unified.

WWI also enforced Hitler's strong German nationalist ideas. After WWI there is a story of a Professor Baumann, who proposed that Bavaria should break away from Prussia and found a new South German nation with Austria. Hitler did not agree and began vehemently attacking the man's arguments. According to Hitler, the "professor" left the hall acknowledging unequivocal defeat.

The judge during the Beer Hall Putsch trial stated that he was not going to deport Hitler back to Austria because:

"The court explained why it rejected the deportation of Hitler under the terms of the Protection of the Republic Act: "Hitler is a German-Austrian. He considered himself to be a German. In the opinion of the court, the meaning and the terms of section 9, para II of the Law for the Protection of the Republic cannot apply to a man who thinks and feels as German as Hitler, who voluntarily served for four and a half years in the German army at war, who attained high military honours through outstanding bravery in the face of the enemy, was wounded, suffered other damage to his health, and was released from the military into the control of the district Command Munich I."

Similarly, Hitler did not care about the loss of his Austrian citizenship.

He publicly declared:

"The loss of my Austrian citizenship is not painful to me, as I never felt as an Austrian citizen but always as a German only . . . . It was this mentality that made me draw the ultimate conclusion and do military service in the German Army."

Although it may appear strange to people that are unaware of the histories of Austria and Germany, in the early 20th century it was not strange, but in fact perfectly normal for an Austrian to be the leader of Germany.

I think Alan Bullock in his book Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (2003), on p.2 wrote a satisfactory reason why Hitler was a pan-German:

"Hitler, of course, was a German, but he was born a subject of the Habsburg Empire, where Germans had played the leading for centuries. However, with Bismarck's creation in the 1860s of a German Empire based on Prussia, from which the Austrian Germans were excluded, the latter found themselves forced to defend their historic claim to rule against the growing demands for equality of the Czechs and the other "subject peoples"."

With regards to the Anschluss, it is perfectly reasonable to assume that many Austrians were appealed to it because Hitler was an Austrian by birth who had restored Germany economically (how the Nazis portrayed the economy in Germany is what I mean) and the idea of unifying Austria which was not doing too well in the late 1930s and would obviously benefit from the annexation by a native Austrian clearly had some effect on the support for the Anschluss.

[ljadw]

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi Lamarck,

Possibly the best on-topic post of the entire thread!

An appreciative Sid.

[ManfredV]

Yes, it is a very good explanation!

[George L Gregory]

I remember when A. J. P. Taylor published his book The Origins of the Second World War in the early 1960s and the controversy it caused.

Anyway, I was looking at the books on one of my bookshelves and had a look at it to see what he wrote about this subject.

He wrote on page 26:

One territorial provision of a negative nature went against the national principle for reasons of security. German-speaking Austria, the rump of the Habsburg monarchy, was forbidden to unite with Germany without the permission of the League of Nations. This was a grievance for most Austrians, including the German corporal Hitler, who was at this time still an Austrian citizen. It was not a grievance for most Germans of the Reich. They had grown up in Bismarckian Germany, and regarded Austria as a foreign country. They had no wish now to add her troubles to their own. This was still more the case with the German-speaking peoples elsewhere—in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Rumania. They might be aggrieved at becoming citizens of alien national states. The Germans of the Reich knew little about them, and cared less.

He also wrote a chapter “Anschluss: the End of Austria” which is interesting to read.

For example, he wrote:

Hitler, too, entered Austria on the morning of 12 March. At Linz, where he had gone to school, he addressed the excited crowds. He succumbed to this excitement himself. As he went on to the balcony of Linz Town Hall, he made a sudden, unexpected decision: instead of setting up a tame government in Vienna, he would incorporate Austria in the Reich. Seyss-Inquart, Chancellor for a day, was told to issue a law, ordering himself and Austria out of existence. He did so on 13 March. The Anschluss was submitted for approval to the people of Greater Germany. On 10 April 99.08% voted in its favour, a genuine reflection of German feeling.

Hitler had won. He had achieved the first object of his ambition. Yet not in the way that he had intended. He had planned to absorb Austria imperceptibly, so that no one could tell when it ceased to be independent; he would use democratic methods to destroy Austrian independence as he had done to destroy German democracy. Instead he had been driven to call in the German army. For the first time, he lost the asset of aggrieved morality and appeared as a conqueror, relying on force. The belief soon became established that Hitler’s seizure of Austria was a deliberate plot, devised long in advance, and the first step towards the domination of Europe. This belief was a myth. The crisis of March 1938 was provoked by Schuschnigg, not by Hitler. There had been no German preparations, military or diplomatic. Everything was improvised in a couple of days—policy, promises, armed force. Though Hitler certainly meant to establish control over Austria, the way in which this came about was for him a tiresome accident, an interruption of his long-term policy, not the maturing of carefully thought-out plans. But the effects could not be undone. There was the effect on Hitler himself. He had got away with murder—the murder of an independent state, even though its independence was largely sham. Hitler’s self- confidence was increased, and with it his contempt for the statesmen of other countries. He became more impatient and careless, readier to speed up negotiations by threats of force. In return, statesmen elsewhere began to doubt Hitler’s good faith. Even those who still hoped to appease him began to think also of resistance. The uneasy balance tilted, though only slightly, away from peace and towards war. Hitler’s aims might still appear justifiable; his methods were condemned. By the Anschluss—or rather by the way in which it was accomplished—Hitler took the first step in the policy which was to brand him as the greatest of war criminals. Yet he took this step unintentionally. Indeed he did not know that he had taken it.

Hitler was at first going to turn Austria into a satellite and then later annex it. It was actually the enthusiasm Hitler received from the Austrians which made him ultimately annex Austria to the Reich the following day.

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi GLG,

When this thread began, I rather assumed such support existed, but it has become apparent as it progressed that the evidence for this is slimmer than one might have expected.

The AJP Taylor quote refers to Linz. This was the home town of Hitler's youth and perhaps where he was most popular. Yet the crowd amounted to "only" about 4O percent of its population. In other words, 60 percent did not attend.

When Hitler got to Vienna, where he was not popular, only 17 percent are estimated to have turned out. In the photos this still looks a lot, because it was a large city, but in fact 83 percent of its population stayed at home.

There is only one visual narrative from the period - the one provided by Goebbels. There is also only one test of public opinion - the Nazi administered, and heavily rigged, plebiscite. We have therefore become habituated to believe that Austrian support for Hitler's Anschluss was "overwhelming". But dig a little deeper and one begins to question how "overwhelming" it actually was.

Cheers,

Sid

[George L Gregory]

Hi GLG,

When this thread began, I rather assumed such support existed, but it has become apparent as it progressed that the evidence for this is slimmer than one might have expected.

The AJP Taylor quote refers to Linz. This was the home town of Hitler's youth and perhaps where he was most popular. Yet the crowd amounted to "only" about 4O percent of its population. In other words, 60 percent did not attend.

When Hitler got to Vienna, where he was not popular, only 17 percent are estimated to have turned out. In the photos this still looks a lot, because it was a large city, but in fact 83 percent of its population stayed at home.

There is only one visual narrative from the period - the one provided by Goebbels. There is also only one test of public opinion - the Nazi administered, and heavily rigged, plebiscite. We have therefore become habituated to believe that Austrian support for Hitler's Anschluss was "overwhelming". But dig a little deeper and one begins to question how "overwhelming" it actually was.

Cheers,

Sid

Hi Sid,

I think the fact that Hitler was wanting to use force to achieve the Anschluss just goes to show that even he was unsure about the general feeling amongst the Austrians.

We’ll never know with complete certainty how many Austrians would have voted for the Anschluss in a free plebiscite. The Nazis certainly used propaganda and the newsreels and pictures show jubilant Austrians, but we really don’t know how many Austrians were generally in favour of the Anschluss. Most historians do agree that a majority of Austrians would have voted for the Anschluss at that time in March 1938, but there were many reasons for wanting it. Most Austrians in 1938 weren’t in favour of the Anschluss because of some sort of pan-German racial feeling amongst them. It was a mixture of things like the Nazi propaganda played a big part in it because of the economic myth of the Third Reich compared to the effects of the Great Depression still being felt in Austria, the fact that the Austrian Republic was tiny compared to the Third Reich, the fact that the Austrians hadn’t fully developed a national identity since Austria had been left as a rump state in 1919, and it’s worth noting that Antisemitism was very popular in Austria in the early 20th century.

Overall a lot of Austrians were floating voters and their views were quite often ambivalent. The Austrian Catholics played a big part in the plebiscite result because once they gave Hitler their backing then a lot of their cohorts followed suit. However, although it is true that before the Anschluss happened there are plenty of questions to be asked about how popular it was, once the ball got moving and the Nazis moved into Austria, the Austrians did go a long with it, just like in many other territories the Nazis annexed. It was easier to go along with the events than resist to them.

I wonder... did the fact that Hitler was an Austrian by birth play any role in the Austrians’ so-called approval of the Anschluss? I think so. I mean, he spoke in Vienna about returning his homeland to the Reich.

Also, I question how many Austrians basically thought to themselves, “Is it worth refusing to go along with this and ostracising myself and potentially put my family and me in danger?” Remember, a lot of Germans who joined the Hitler Youth and other Nazi organisations felt that way.

Another thing worth noting is that whilst many Austrians considered themselves to be Germans, that didn’t necessarily mean that they wanted Austria to be annexed to Germany because they wanted Austria to remain independent. The Austrian fascists in the 1930s admitted that the Austrians were Germans, but they wanted Austria to remain ‘free’.

A few days after the Anschluss roughly 70,000 Austrians had been arrested. The plebiscites in Austria and the Reich were rigged and about 400,000 Austrians were excluded from it. The results of the plebiscites mean nothing because just like all of the other plebiscites during the Third Reich, they were neither carried out democratically nor were they fair.

[George L Gregory]

Sid, in order to claim accurately that a ‘majority’ of people supported an event, what percentage people do you think that had to turn out on the streets to support it?

How many British people had to show their support on the streets of Britain to claim accurately that the ‘majority’ of British people supported VE Day in 1945? What percentage of British people had to show their support in Whitehall when Winston Churchill greeted the British people?

How many Russians, Poles, Germans, British, etc, had to show their support on the streets to say that the majority of them supported the end of the Cold War?

Your claim that because only a certain percentage of Austrians from certain areas e.g. Linz and Vienna showed up on the streets means that we don’t know how many Austrians supported the Anschluss or that it’s wrong to claim that a ‘majority’ of Austrians supported the Anschluss is quite simply nonsense. Also, we don’t have to just to rely on Nazi propaganda.

Also, it was precisely because of the spontaneous support from the Austrians which made Hitler act promptly and annex Austria!

The plebiscites in Austria and the German Reich regarding the Anschluss were no doubt rigged, but there was undeniably genuine support for the Anschluss - NOT necessarily support for the Nazis - in both Austria and Germany. Someone only has to read a book about the history of Germany to see why! It was another action taken by Hitler which boosted his popularity and also one in which he was able to use himself since he was an Austrian to justify his action to annex Austria to Germany. Although after WW2 Austrians used the ‘victim theory’ to distance themselves from what the Nazis did, there is no evidence that there was any genuine substantial resistance to the Anschluss.

[George L Gregory]

“Despite open displays of remorse about the Nazi era, the 70th anniversary of Austria's annexation has inevitably revived a long-running debate about whether its citizens were victims or willing accomplices of the Third Reich.

Public reluctance to confront the issue was underscored this week by Otto von Habsburg, the 95-year-old son of the country's last emperor. He told a meeting of the ruling conservative People's Party: "No state in Europe has a greater right than Austria to call itself a victim." He went on to dismiss an Allied wartime declaration that Austria shared responsibility for the Nazis as "hypocrisy and lies". The thousands who greeted Hitler were just like "high-spirited football fans", he insisted.

His remarks followed publication of an opinion poll on Tuesday which showed that almost two thirds of Austrians wanted an end to what was described as the "endless discussion" about the country's role during the Second World War. (The result of a similar poll conducted eight years ago was the same).

However, new evidence and a growing mass of research about Austria's role during the Third Reich suggests that the argument that the vast majority of its citizens were willing accomplices to Nazi rule has become incontrovertible.

Less than a month after German troops marched into Austria, Hitler ordered that the invasion be ratified by plebiscite. The poll conducted on 10 April 1938 showed that 99.75 per cent of Austrians were in favour of the annexation. Subsequent claims that the results were doctored by the Nazis were later substantiated. But recent research suggests that the actual number in favour of Nazi rule was still about two thirds of the electorate.

Professor Gerhard Botz, a historian at Vienna University who has researched the period closely, said yesterday: "Hitler was welcomed into the country as a successful Austrian who was returning home from abroad and suddenly letting his own people take part in his successes. He was a sort of ersatz monarch."

Gershon Evan, an Austrian Jew whose parents were arrested and killed by the Nazis, recalled during a television broadcast yesterday how quickly racial persecution took hold in Vienna, a city in which every 10th citizen was then Jewish. "What happened in Germany over five years, happened in Vienna in five days," he said. "We had no idea that we would face such violence."

Austria's Jewish community numbered some 200,000 before the Second World War and was considered one of Europe's most vibrant. Most, like Mr Evan, managed to flee the country after the Anschluss, but 65,000 were murdered in the Nazi death camps. New research has shown that the number of Austrians who held key positions in Nazi concentration camps was disproportionately high. Today, Austria is home to 10,000 Jews.

Film footage of the jubilant reception given to Hitler in Vienna has frequently been dismissed in Austria as stage-managed Nazi propaganda. "This kind of argument is used by the Austrians who claim that they are innocent and the Nazis were the invaders," said the Viennese author and historian Brigitte Hamann.

However, new independent film material about the period was shown for the first time in Germany this week. The colour footage, shown on Germany's ZDF channel, was taken from 90 minutes of film shot by an Austrian forester called Marilius Mayer in March 1938. The film shows images of a provincial town in which the locals have turned out en masse to demonstrate their support for the invading Nazis. The streets are hung with hundreds of red, black and white swastika banners and the town square has been hastily renamed "Adolf Hitler Platz".

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/worl ... 95016.html

So, yeah, Sid, don’t be so quick to dismiss the newsreel as simply “Nazi propaganda”. And, even if we were simply to accept it as Nazi propaganda, well propaganda in itself doesn’t necessarily mean something is a lie or wrong.

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi George,

I agree with almost everything you write in all three posts.

I, personally, believe that it is entirely likely that Hitler's plebiscite would have passed in a free and fair plebiscite, but he wasn't offering one.

I also think it entirely possible that Schussnigg's plebiscite could have passed in a free and fair contest, but he also wasn't offering one.

Hitler couldn't let Schussnigg's flawed plebiscite go ahead in case it passed, so he invaded and imposed his own flawed plebiscite.

Hitler couldn't let his Austrian plebiscite be free and fair because, although entirely likely to pass, it was almost certain to return a result worse than the earlier League of Nations plebiscite in the Saarland, which had gained 90.73% approval. If the Austrian plebiscite got less than 90%, it would look as though the Nazi project was losing steam, not gaining momentum.

The improbable Austrian result of 99.73% set the bar extremely high and the next plebiscite in Sudetenland fell slightly below it with with an equally unlikely 98.68%. Topping these was verging on the impossible so no plebiscite was even offered to Memel or Danzig.

You post, "So, yeah, Sid, don’t be so quick to dismiss the newsreel as simply “Nazi propaganda”. And, even if we were simply to accept it as Nazi propaganda, well propaganda in itself doesn’t necessarily mean something is a lie or wrong." I did not "dismiss" it at all. It was doubtless an accurate representation of what the camera was pointed at. The problem with it lies in that it was pointed at a self-selecting minority audience and not at the population at large. It was shot as Nazi propaganda and, unless we put it into historical context, we will just be perpetuating that propaganda.

Cheers,

Sid.