Lacking outside pressure for political reform, factions of Austrian society tried for a long time to advance the view that the Anschluss was only an imposition of rule by Nazi Germany.

Hitler ordered troops to the Austrian border, prepared for a full-scale military assault into Austria to support the National Socialists.

His strategy, outlined in the Hossbach Memorandum, included the annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland part of Czechoslovakia to gain Lebensraum ("living space").

[12] In February 1938 Franz von Papen, the German ambassador in Vienna arranged a meeting between Hitler and Schuschnigg at Obersalzberg in Gaden in Bavaria.

Hitler threatened repeatedly to invade Austria and forced Schuschnigg to implement a range of measures favourable to Austrian Nazism.

The Agreement of Gaden guaranteed the Austrian Nazi Party political freedom and assisted Arthur Seyß-Inquart in becoming Home Secretary (Innenminister).

Edmund Glaise-Horstenau who was at the time in Berlin brought Hitler's ultimatum from there and Göring reinforced it with a telephone message to Schuschnigg.

After Schuschnigg left office, the federal president Wilhelm Miklas asked Arthur Seyß-Inquart to form a new government as the Germans demanded.

Supporters of the Austrian Nazi Party together with members of the SS and SA occupied public buildings and offices throughout Austria without a previously planned transition period.

Hitler himself, Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, and many other leading figures of the Nazi regime held speeches.

Prominent Austrians like Cardinal Theodor Innitzer, who signed a declaration of the bishops with Heil Hitler, and the Social Democrat Karl Renner promoted the approval.

[2] In response to a request from the Nazi government, the day before the referendum, all the churches in Austria tolled their bells in support of Hitler.

[19] Excluded from the referendum were about 8% of the Austrian voters: about 200,000 Jews and roughly 177,000 Mischlinge (people with both Jewish and "Aryan" parents) and all those who had already been arrested for "racial" or political reasons.

"[2] In the wealthy district of Währing Jewish women were ordered to put on their fur coats and scrub the streets while officials urinated on them, as crowds of Austrians and Germans cheered.

The Kristallnacht ("Night of Broken Glass") pogroms of November 1938 were especially brutal in Austria; most of Vienna's synagogues were burned in view of the public and fire departments.

After the war, Renner again became the Austrian head of state; he remained antisemitic, even with Jewish returnees and concentration camp survivors.

[2] According to Thomas Berger, professor of international relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, the people who were involved in the Final Solution were disproportionately Austrian.

On the one hand, this very successful Catholic resistance group wanted to revive a Habsburg monarchy after the war (as planned by Winston Churchill and later fought by Joseph Stalin) and very successfully passed on plans and production facilities for V-2 rockets, Tiger tanks and aircraft (Messerschmitt Bf 109, Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet, etc.)

With the location sketches of the production facilities, the Allied bombers were able to carry out precise air strikes and thus protect residential areas.

Among the most famous emigrating artists, there were the composers Arnold Schönberg and Robert Stolz, the film-makers Leon Askin, Fritz Lang, Josef von Sternberg, Billy Wilder, Max Reinhardt, the actors Karl Farkas and Gerhard Bronner and the writers Hermann Broch, Robert Musil, Anton Kuh and Franz Werfel.

Stefan Zweig escaped via London, New York, Argentina and Paraguay to Brazil where he committed suicide in February 1942, together with his wife Charlotte Altmann.

Additional scientists going into exile were Sigmund Freud, Erwin Schrödinger, Kurt Gödel, Martin Buber, Karl Popper and Lise Meitner.

The struggle for justice by the actual victims of Nazism – first of all Jews – were deprecated as an attempt to obtain illicit enrichment at the expense of the entire nation.

In 1986, the election of a former Wehrmacht intelligence officer, Kurt Waldheim, as a federal president put Austria on the verge of international isolation.

Starting with the political administration of the 1990s and followed by most of the Austrian people by the mid-2000s, the nation admitted its collective responsibility for the crimes committed during the Nazi occupation and officially abandoned the "victim theory".

[38] In mid-2004, the question of how to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the death of Robert Bernardis, who was shot on 8 August 1944 after being involved in the 20 July plot against Hitler, led to a political conflict.

Politicians of the opposition (SPÖ, Grüne) as well as some celebrities suggested renaming a barracks as "Robert Bernardis-Kaserne", which was turned down by the governing ÖVP and FPÖ.

Schmid was sentenced to death by a Wehrmacht court-martial and was shot on 13 April 1942, after he saved the lives of a hundred Jews in the Vilnius Ghetto.

A study in 2019 by the Claims Conference showed that 56% of Austrians do not know that 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust and that 42% are unfamiliar with the Mauthausen concentration camp, located 146 kilometers (90 miles) from Vienna.

[39] Austria's most popular political party as of 2023, the FPÖ, has been accused by the Austrian Mauthausen Committee of being involved in right-wing extremism and possessing a neo-Nazi ideology.