Austria victim theory
Starting with the political administration in 1988 and then followed by most of the Austrian people, the nation admitted its collective responsibility for the crimes committed during the Nazi occupation and officially abandoned the "victim theory".
[8] In 1933, the conservative leader Engelbert Dollfuss dissolved parliament, drove social democrats from power structures, banned communists and Nazis, and installed a one-party authoritarian rule with a right-wing trend.
[10] Austrian Germans favored the advent of strong power capable of preventing another civil war and negating the humiliating Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, rather than the specific unification with the northern neighbor.
[25] Practically all of the Gypsy community living in Austria was eliminated; moreover, no fewer than 100,000 Slovenes, Czechs, Hungarians and Croatians were forced to leave Austrian Germany.
[36] On September 26, 1942, Eden declared Churchill's plan for the creation of a "Danube confederation" composed of Austria, Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia – a vast buffer state that would have separated Western Europe from the USSR.
[37][38] In the spring of 1943, Geoffrey Harrison, a 34-year-old civil servant in the Foreign Office, developed a plan for the post-war organisation of Austria, which subsequently became the official British policy regarding the Austrian question.
[44] According to an alternative explanation advanced by R. Keyserling, the British were mainly guided by erroneous utopian plans to foment mass resistance against the Nazi regime in Austrian lands, to disrupt the German Reich from the inside, and to create a convenient springboard for an attack from the south.
[44][45] Both points of view agree that in 1943 British and American politicians mistakenly thought that Germany was ready to collapse under pressure from Soviet troops or people's indignation from the inside of the Reich.
[46][47] At the end of May 1943 Harrison's plan was approved by the British cabinet,[43] but by June Vyacheslav Molotov had let the Foreign Office know that any association or confederation of Danube states was not acceptable to the USSR.
[38] His short-term goal was to exploit the surviving Austrian industrial, human, and natural resources; probably that's why Stalin insisted on the stricter wording concerning responsibility.
[55] The operation of British propagandists among Austrian soldiers at the Italian front failed :[56] the Moscow Declaration has not influenced the fighting spirit of German troops and, probably, merely was a great help for Goebbels' counterpropaganda.
Two weeks later, on April 27, the Provisional Government, formed by Soviet forces under Karl Renner, promulgated the "Proclamation of the Second Republic of Austria", which reprinted the text of the Moscow Declaration.
[63] Renner, who had previously been an active supporter of the Anschluss,[64] still considered it a historical necessity and expressed his regret over the forced separation of Austria and Germany under pressure from the Allies in his address to the nation.
[78] According to the contemporary point of view, the politicians were united not because of conscious choice, but because of the need to survive in harsh postwar conditions and intentional pressure from the Allied occupation powers.
[82] The "victim theory" of this period, that ended not later than 1949, was based on four statements:[67] An informal ideology constructed from an anti-fascist openly left position was adopted by the Union of Concentration Camps Prisoners (German: KZ-Verband).
[83] Simon Wiesenthal accused KZ-Verband of continuing the "only for Aryans" practice that was accepted in Austrian parties before Anschluss – of copying Nazi division of inmates into "upper" and "lower" categories.
[89][16] The communists failed to enter the governing elite, their past endeavors appeared to be not needed in the contemporary internal Austrian politics; they were however occasionally remembered in communication with western diplomats.
[105] At last Austrians could openly express their attitude to the results of WWII: according to the "victim theory" of that period (1955–1962) the invasion of the victory states in 1945 was not a liberation, but a hostile occupation that superseded the Hitlerite one.
[110] The fifteen years of Leopold Figl and Julius Raab's conservative governments maintained a full and uncompromising denial of guilt of Austria and the Austrians in Hitlerite crimes.
[121] Denazification in Austria in comparison with other counties was mild and smoothly transacted: there was nothing like the internal ideological conflict, leading to the civil war in Greece, or the political repressions experienced in Eastern Europe and Yugoslavia.
[128] During the whole period of the occupation the Soviet powers arrested and prosecuted approximately 2000 Austrians, 1000 of them were removed to the USSR for trial and penal consequences, about 200 were executed (for "espionage", as a rule).
[143] Successful completion of legislative initiatives to recognise rights of one or another group was determined by the political weight of its activists:[144] for half a century the priority was to get pensions and allowances for Wehrmacht veterans.
[138] During the first post-war decades historical perspectives within Austria, like the society as a whole, was separated into two-party columns – conservative and social-democratic,[154] who however together wrote the consensual ("coalitionist", German: Koalitionsgeschichtsschreibung) history under administration of the party supervisors.
[159] Austria's own history was considered separate to a common one with Germany;[155] by 1980 the belief that a special, "non-German" national identity of Austrians had long existed, became firmly established.
[167] The topic of a traditional Austrian antisemitism and its role in the events of 1938–1945 were never discussed; from the authors' point of view the persecution of Jews had been an exclusive consequence of Hitler's personal animosity.
[185] Authors of the generation of 1990s investigated the evolution of old prejudices and stereotypes (first of all anti-Semitism), disputed the role of the Resistance in the history of the country and analyzed the immoral, in their opinion, evasion by Austrian politicians by not admitting the responsibility of the nation.
[139] Critics of this school (Gabriele Matzner-Holzer, Rudolf Burger and others) stated that the left-wing authors tended to judge people of the past, using the moral norms existing at the end of the 20th century, and have not tried to clearly ascertain if it ever was really possible to repent in such a criminal society (German: Tätergesellschaft) steeped in Nazism as the Austria of the 1940s.
[189] During the whole of Waldheim's term of office (1986–1992) Austria's international situation deteriorated; governments of the US and Israel joined the pressure made by the Jewish diasporas as they did not wanted to admit such a 'Nazi country', which had also supported Yasser Arafat and Muammar Gaddafi, to the world political stage.
[181] Only in July 1991, one year before the end of Waldheim's term, when the political influence of Vranitzky and Social Democrats had noticeably increased,[190] did the chancellor make a public apology on behalf of the nation and admit its responsibility (but not guilt) for the crimes of the past.
[194] Politicians had to make concessions once again: under the insistence of Klestil the leaders of the parliamentary parties signed another declaration on the Austrian responsibility and approved a new roadmap towards satisfying the claims of victims of National Socialism.
