A mammoth is any species of the extinctelephantidgenusMammuthus, one of the many genera that make up the order of trunked mammals called proboscideans. The various species of mammoth were commonly equipped with long, curved tusks and, in northern species, a covering of long hair. They lived from the Plioceneepoch (from around 5 million years ago) into the Holocene
at about 4,000 years ago, and various species existed in Africa,
Europe, Asia, and North America. They were members of the family Elephantidae, which also contains the two genera of modern elephants and their ancestors. Mammoths are more closely related to living Asian elephants than African Elephants.
The oldest representative of Mammuthus, the South African mammoth (M. subplanifrons), appeared around 5 million years ago during the early Pliocene
in what is now southern and eastern Africa. Descendant species of these
mammoths moved north and continued to propagate into numerous
subsequent species, eventually covering most of Eurasia before extending
into the Americas at least 600,000 years ago. The last species to
emerge, the woolly mammoth (M. primigenius), developed about 400,000 years ago in East Asia, with some surviving on Russia's Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean until as recently as roughly 3,700 to 4,000 years ago, still extant during the construction of the Great Pyramid of ancient Egypt.
Evolution
The earliest known proboscideans, the clade that contains the elephants, existed about 55 million years ago around the Tethys Sea area. The closest relatives of the Proboscidea are the sirenians and the hyraxes. The family Elephantidae
is known to have existed six million years ago in Africa, and includes
the living elephants and the mammoths. Among many now extinct clades,
the mastodon is only a distant relative of the mammoths, and part of the separate Mammutidae family, which diverged 25 million years before the mammoths evolved.
The following cladogram shows the placement of the genus Mammuthus among other proboscideans, based on hyoid characteristics: [[DJS -- See Wiki article above for cladogram]].
Since many remains of each species of mammoth are known from several
localities, it is possible to reconstruct the evolutionary history of
the genus through morphological studies. Mammoth species can be
identified from the number of enamel ridges on their molars; the
primitive species had few ridges, and the amount increased gradually as
new species evolved and replaced the former ones. At the same time, the
crowns of the teeth became longer, and the skulls become higher from top
to bottom and shorter from the back to the front over time to
accommodate this.
Tooth of M. africanavus, one of the earliest known species of mammoth, from North Africa.
The first known members of the genus Mammuthus are the African species Mammuthus subplanifrons from the Pliocene and Mammuthus africanavus from the Pleistocene.
The former is thought to be the ancestor of later forms. Mammoths
entered Europe around 3 million years ago; the earliest known type has
been named M. rumanus, which spread across Europe and China. Only
its molars are known, which show it had 8–10 enamel ridges. A
population evolved 12–14 ridges and split off from and replaced the
earlier type, becoming M. meridionalis. In turn, this species was replaced by the steppe mammoth, M. trogontherii, with 18–20 ridges, which evolved in East Asia ca. 1.8 million years ago. Steppe mammoth populations replaced M. meridionalis in Europe between 1 and 0.7 million years ago. The Columbian mammoth, M. columbi, evolved from a population of M. trogontherii that had entered North America over 1 million years ago. Mammoths derived from M. trogontherii evolved molars with 26 ridges between 800,000 and 400,000 years ago in Siberia, becoming the woolly mammoth, M. primigenius. The woolly mammoth would replace the steppe mammoth in Europe during the late Middle Pleistocene around 200,000 years ago.
A 2011 genetic study showed that two examined specimens of the
Columbian mammoth were grouped within a subclade of woolly mammoths.
This suggests that the two populations interbred and produced fertile
offspring. It also suggested that a North American form known as "M. jeffersonii" may be a hybrid between the two species.
By the late Pleistocene, mammoths in continental Eurasia had
undergone a major transformation, including a shortening and heightening
of the cranium and mandible, increase in molar hypsodonty index,
increase in plate number, and thinning of dental enamel. Due to this
change in physical appearance, it became customary to group European
mammoths separately into distinguishable clusters:
Early Pleistocene – Mammuthus meridionalis
Middle Pleistocene – Mammuthus trogontherii
Late Pleistocene – Mammuthus primigenius
There is speculation as to what caused this variation within the
three chronospecies. Variations in environment, climate change, and
migration surely played roles in the evolutionary process of the
mammoths. Take M. primigenius for example: Woolly mammoths lived
in opened grassland biomes. The cool steppe-tundra of the Northern
Hemisphere was the ideal place for mammoths to thrive because of the
resources it supplied. With occasional warmings during the ice age,
climate would change the landscape, and resources available to the
mammoths altered accordingly.
In February 2021, scientists reported that DNA from million-year old mammoth remains had become the oldest ever sequenced.
The word mammoth was first used in Europe during the early 17th century, when referring to maimanto tusks discovered in Siberia. John Bell, who was on the Ob River
in 1722, said that mammoth tusks were well known in the area. They were
called "mammon's horn" and were often found in washed-out river banks.
Some local people claimed to have seen a living mammoth, but they came
out only at night and always disappeared under water when detected. He
bought one and presented it to Hans Sloan who pronounced it an elephant's tooth.
The folklore of some native peoples of Siberia, who would
routinely find mammoth bones, and sometimes frozen mammoth bodies, in
eroding river banks, had various interesting explanations for these
finds. Among the Khanty people of the Irtysh River
basin, a belief existed that the mammoth was some kind of a water
spirit. According to other Khanty, the mammoth was a creature that lived
underground, burrowing its tunnels as it went, and would die if it
accidentally came to the surface.
The concept of the mammoth as an underground creature was known to the
Chinese, who received some mammoth ivory from the Siberian natives;
accordingly, the creature was known in China as yǐn shǔ 隐鼠, "the hidden rodent".
Thomas Jefferson, who famously had a keen interest in paleontology, is partially responsible for transforming the word mammoth
from a noun describing the prehistoric elephant to an adjective
describing anything of surprisingly large size. The first recorded use
of the word as an adjective was in a description of a large wheel of
cheese (the "Cheshire Mammoth Cheese") given to Jefferson in 1802.
Like their modern relatives, mammoths were quite large. The largest
known species reached heights in the region of 4 m (13.1 ft) at the
shoulder and weights of up to 8 tonnes (8.8 short tons),
while exceptionally large males may have exceeded 12 tonnes (13.2 short
tons). However, most species of mammoth were only about as large as a
modern Asian elephant
(which are about 2.5 m to 3 m high at the shoulder, and rarely
exceeding 5 tonnes). Both sexes bore tusks. A first, small set appeared
at about the age of six months, and these were replaced at about 18
months by the permanent set. Growth of the permanent set was at a rate
of about 2.5 to 15.2 cm (1 to 6 in) per year.
Size of various mammoth species compared with a human
Based on studies of their close relatives, the modern elephants, mammoths probably had a gestation period of 22 months, resulting in a single calf being born. Their social structure was probably the same as that of African
and Asian elephants, with females living in herds headed by a
matriarch, whilst bulls lived solitary lives or formed loose groups
after sexual maturity.
Scientists discovered and studied the remains of a mammoth calf,
and found that fat greatly influenced its form, and enabled it to store
large amounts of nutrients necessary for survival in temperatures as low
as −50 °C (−58 °F).
The fat also allowed the mammoths to increase their muscle mass,
allowing the mammoths to fight against enemies and live longer.
Diet
Depending on the species or race of mammoth, the diet differed
somewhat depending on location, although all mammoths ate similar
things. For the Columbian mammoth, M. columbi, the diet was mainly grazing.
American Columbian mammoths fed primarily on cactus leaves, trees, and
shrubs. These assumptions were based on mammoth feces and mammoth teeth.
Mammoths, like modern day elephants, have hypsodont molars. These features also allowed mammoths to live an expansive life because of the availability of grasses and trees.
For the Mongochen mammoth, its diet consisted of herbs, grasses, larch, and shrubs, and possibly alder.
These inferences were made through the observation of mammoth feces,
which scientists observed contained non-arboreal pollen and moss spores.
European mammoths had a major diet of C3 carbon fixation plants. This was determined by examining the isotopic data from the European mammoth teeth.
The arctic tundra and steppe where the mammoths lived appears to have been dominated by forbs,
not grass. There were richer in protein and easier to digest than
grasses and wooden plants, which came to dominate the areas when the
climate became wetter and warmer. This could have been a major
contributor to why the arctic megafauna went extinct.
The Yamal baby mammoth Lyuba,
found in 2007 in the Yamal Peninsula in Western Siberia, suggests that
baby mammoths, as do modern baby elephants, ate the dung of adult
animals. The evidence to show this is that the dentition (teeth) of the
baby mammoth had not yet fully developed to chew grass. Furthermore,
there was an abundance of ascospores of coprophilous fungi
from the pollen spectrum of the baby's mother. Coprophilous fungi are
fungi that grow on animal dung and disperse spores in nearby vegetation,
which the baby mammoth would then consume. Spores might have gotten
into its stomach while grazing for the first few times. Coprophagy may
be an adaptation, serving to populate the infant's gut with the needed microbiome for digestion.
The woolly mammoth (M. primigenius) was the last species of the genus. Most populations of the woolly mammoth in North America and Eurasia, as well as all the Columbian mammoths (M. columbi) in North America, died out around the time of the last glacial retreat, as part of a mass extinction of megafauna
in northern Eurasia and the Americas. Until recently, the last woolly
mammoths were generally assumed to have vanished from Europe and
southern Siberia about 12,000 years ago, but new findings show some were
still present there about 10,000 years ago. Slightly later, the woolly
mammoths also disappeared from continental northern Siberia. A small population survived on St. Paul Island, Alaska, up until 3750 BC, and the small mammoths of Wrangel Island survived until about 2000 BC
Recent eDNA research of sediments indicates mammoths survived in north
central Siberia at least as late as 2000 BC, in continental northeast
Siberia until at least 5300 BC, and until at least 6600 BC in North
America.
A definitive explanation for their extinction has yet to be
agreed upon. The warming trend (Holocene) that occurred 12,000 years
ago, accompanied by a glacial retreat and rising sea levels, has been
suggested as a contributing factor. Forests replaced open woodlands and
grasslands across the continent. The available habitat would have been
reduced for some megafaunal species, such as the mammoth. However, such
climate changes were nothing new; numerous very similarwarming episodes had occurred previously within the ice age
of the last several million years without producing comparable
megafaunal extinctions, so climate alone is unlikely to have played a
decisive role. The spread of advanced human hunters through northern Eurasia and the Americas around the time of the extinctions, however, was a new development, and thus might have contributed significantly.
Mammuthus primigenius "Hebior Mammoth specimen" bearing tool/butcher marks
Whether the general mammoth population died out for climatic reasons or due to overhunting by humans is controversial.
During the transition from the Late Pleistocene epoch to the Holocene
epoch, there was shrinkage of the distribution of the mammoth because
progressive warming at the end of the Pleistocene epoch changed the
mammoth's environment. The mammoth steppe
was a periglacial landscape with rich herb and grass vegetation that
disappeared along with the mammoth because of environmental changes in
the climate. Mammoths had moved to isolated spots in Eurasia, where they
disappeared completely. Also, it is thought that Late Paleolithic and
Mesolithic human hunters might have affected the size of the last
mammoth populations in Europe.
There is evidence to suggest that humans did cause the mammoth
extinction, although there is no definitive proof. It was found that
humans living south of a mammoth steppe learned to adapt themselves to
the harsher climates north of the steppe, where mammoths resided. It was
concluded that if humans could survive the harsh north climate of that
particular mammoth steppe then it was possible humans could hunt (and
eventually extinguish) mammoths everywhere. Another hypothesis suggests
mammoths fell victim to an infectious disease.
A combination of climate change and hunting by humans may be a possible explanation for their extinction. Homo erectus is known to have consumed mammoth meat as early as 1.8 million years ago,
though this may mean only successful scavenging, rather than actual
hunting. Later humans show greater evidence for hunting mammoths;
mammoth bones at a 50,000-year-old site in South Britain suggest that Neanderthals butchered the animals, while various sites in Eastern Europe dating from 15,000 to 44,000 years old suggest humans (probably Homo sapiens) built dwellings using mammoth bones (the age of some of the earlier structures suggests that Neanderthals began the practice). However, the American Institute of Biological Sciences
notes that bones of dead elephants, left on the ground and subsequently
trampled by other elephants, tend to bear marks resembling butchery
marks, which have allegedly been misinterpreted as such by archaeologists.
Many hypotheses also seek to explain the regional extinction of
mammoths in specific areas. Scientists have speculated that the mammoths
of Saint Paul Island (Alaska), an isolated enclave where mammoths
survived until about 8,000 years ago, died out as the island shrank by
80–90% when sea levels rose, eventually making it too small to support a
viable population.
Similarly, genome sequences of the Wrangel Island mammoths indicate a
sharp decline in genetic diversity, though the extent to which this
played a role in their extinction is still unclear.
Another hypothesis, said to be the cause of mammoth extinction in
Siberia, comes from the idea that many may have drowned. While traveling
to the Northern River, many of these mammoths broke through the ice and
drowned. This also explains bones remains in the Arctic Coast and some
of the New Siberian Islands.
Dwarfing occurred with the pygmy mammoth on the outer Channel Islands of California,
but at an earlier period. Those animals were very likely killed by
early Paleo-Native Americans, and habitat loss caused by a rising sea
level that split Santa Rosae into the outer Channel Islands.
One proposed scientific use of this preserved genetic material is to
recreate living mammoths. This has long been discussed theoretically but
has only recently become the subject of formal effort due to advances
in molecular biology techniques and cloning of mammals.
According to one research team, a mammoth cannot be recreated,
but they will try to eventually grow in an "artificial womb" a hybrid
elephant with some woolly mammoth traits. Comparative genomics
shows that the mammoth genome matches 99% of the elephant genome, so
some researchers aim to engineer an elephant with some mammoth genes
that code for the external appearance and traits of a mammoth. The outcome would be an elephant-mammoth hybrid with no more than 1% mammoth genes. Other projects are working on gradually adding mammoth genes to elephant cells in vitro.
"Red-White-Red Book" published by the Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1946, an official description of the point of view on events of 1938–1945 by the founders of the Second Austrian Republic
The victim theory (German: Opferthese), encapsulated in the slogan "Austria – the Nazis' first victim", was the ideological basis for Austria under allied occupation (1945–1955) and in the Second Austrian Republic until the 1980s. According to the founders of the Second Austrian Republic, the 1938 Anschluss was an act of military aggression by the Third Reich.
Austrian statehood had been interrupted and therefore the newly revived
Austria of 1945 could not and should not be considered responsible for
the Nazis' crimes
in any way. The "victim theory" which was formed by 1949 insisted that
all of the Austrians, including those who strongly supported Hitler, had been unwilling victims of the Nazi regime and were therefore not responsible for its crimes.
The "victim theory" became a fundamental myth in Austrian
society. It made it possible for previously bitter political opponents –
e.g. the social democrats and the conservative Catholics – to unite and bring former Nazis back into social and political life for the first time in Austrian history.
For almost half a century, the Austrian state denied the existence of
any continuity between it and the political regime which existed in
Austria from 1938 to 1945, actively kept up the self-sacrificing myth of
Austrian nationhood, and cultivated a conservative spirit of national
unity. Postwar denazification was quickly wound up; veterans of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS took an honorable place in society. The struggle for justice by the actual victims of Nazism – primarily the Jews – was 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. Powerful outside
pressure and an internal political discussion forced Austrians to
reconsider their attitude to the past. 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".
The idea of grouping all Germans into one nation-state had been the subject of debate in the 19th century from the ending of the Holy Roman Empire until the ending of the German Confederation. The Habsburgs and the Austrian Empire favored the Großdeutsche Lösung ("Greater German solution") idea of uniting all German-speaking peoples into one state. On the other hand, the Kleindeutsche Lösung
("Lesser German solution") sought only to unify the northern German
states and not include Austria; this proposal was largely advocated by
the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Prussia. The Prussians defeated the Austrians in the Austro-Prussian War in 1866 which ultimately excluded Austria from Germany. Otto von Bismarck established the North German Confederation
which sought to prevent the Austrian and Bavarian Catholics from
forming any sort of force against the predominantly Protestant Prussian
Germany. He used the Franco-Prussian War to convince other German states, including the Kingdom of Bavaria to fight against the Second French Empire. After Prussia's victory in the war, he swiftly unified Germany into a nation-state in 1871 and proclaimed the German Empire, without Austria.
After Austria's exclusion from Germany in 1866, the following year Austria sided with Hungary and formed the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1867. During its existence, the German-speaking Austrians hoped for the empire to dissolve and advocated an Anschluss with Germany. Following the dissolution of the empire in 1918, the rump state of German-Austria, was created. Immediately following the publication of the humiliating terms of the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye (1919) a drive for unification with Germany appeared, but its practical actions were strictly suppressed by the victorious states.
The short-lived state of "German-Austria" ceased to exist and the
concept of union with Germany was rejected by the victors, thus leading
to the establishment of the First Austrian Republic. The independent Austrian Republic turned out, however, to be non-viable.
After a short period of unity (1918–1920) people not recognizing
themselves as a nation divided up into three armed enemy camps: the
working class lead by the social democrats;the conservative Catholics led by the governing Christian Social Party and the Catholic Church; and thirdly supporters of unification with Germany. In 1933 the head of the conservatives Engelbert Dollfuss dissolved parliament, drove social democrats out of power-holding structures, banned communists and Nazis and installed a one-party authoritarian rule of a right-wing trend. In February 1934 the conflict developed into a civil war that resulted in the defeat of the left-wing forces. In July National Socialist sympathisers rebelled, killed Dollfuss, but failed to seize power. During March 11–13, 1938
the Austrian state fell under the pressure of Nazi Germany and Austrian
National Socialists. The absolute majority of Austrians supported the
annexation by Germany. Only some solitary pieces of evidence show public
rejection or at least indifference to the Anschluss, mainly in rural
areas. Although there were about half a million people in the capital including thousands of Jews, thousands of "Mischlings" and political opponents who had reasons to fear Nazi repressions, there was no active resistance to the Anschluss.
March 15, 1938. Vienneses greet Hitler on Heldenplatz. Such evidence like this was rejected in the postwar Austria as Nazi propaganda. Ideologists of the Second Republic alleged that there had not been any mass support of Anschluss and all the Austrians, without any exception, were "victims of occupation".
Austrian Germans favoured 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 neighbour. Nearly all Austrians expected that the new regime would quickly restore a pre-Depression standard of living. A majority of the population also awaited a "solution" of the odious Jewish question. Antisemitism, as one of the national strains, flourished in Austria more than in any other German-speaking land: since 1920 parties with openly antisemitic programs had been ruling the country. Pogroms that started in Vienna and Innsbruck simultaneously with the Anschluss were not organised by Hitler's agents, but by Austrians themselves.
According to eyewitnesses' accounts, they exceeded similar acts in
Germany in the level of cruelty and the scale of involvement of local
townspeople. In May 1938 spontaneous violence changed into an organised "Aryanisation" – planned confiscation of Jewish assets in favour of the Reich and German manufacturers. For instance, no Jews owned any property in Linz after riots and "Aryanisation".
At this stage the primary aim of Hitlerites was not to create a
Holocaust in Austria, but to force Jews to emigrate outside the Reich. During 1938–1941 about 126 or 135 thousand Jews escaped from Austria; nearly 15 thousand of them shortly perished in German-occupied countries.
Starting with the Dollfuss-Schuschnigg regime and after this wave of
emigration Austria forever lost its scientific schools of Physics, Law,
Economy, Viennese school of psychoanalysis and Werkbund architects. However, apart from emigration, during 1933-1937 there was an influx of refugees from Germany. The Holocaust started in Austria in July 1941 and, on the whole, finished by the end of 1942. The arrested were taken off to ghettos and concentration camps in Belarus, Latvia and Poland via Theresienstadt and eventually killed. At the end of the war slaughter resumed in Austria, where thousands of Hungarian Jews worked on the construction of defence lines. Extermination of Jews, treated as slaves "privatized" by the local Nazis, continued for several weeks in the rural areas of Styria after Germany surrendered. The case of slave-holders from Graz
reached the court of the British occupation power. British field
investigations resulted in 30 verdicts of death for Styrian Nazis, 24 of
them were executed. In total one third of Austrian Jews perished just in 7 years (nearly 65 thousand people); as little as 5816 Jews, including 2142 camp prisoners, survived till the end of the war in Austria.
The total number of deaths caused by Hitler's repressions in Austria is estimated to be 120,000. During the two years (1940–1941) of Aktion T4, 18,269 mentally ill people were killed in Hartheim castle alone. Practically all of the Gypsy community living in Austria was eliminated; moreover, no less than 100 thousand Slovenes, Czechs, Hungarians and Croatians were forced to relocate out of the Reich.
Apart from this, 100 thousand more people were arrested for political
reasons; nearly 2700 were executed for active resistance and nearly 500
perished resisting arrest or were targeted by local forces. Austrian resistance
against the Nazi Regime was meagre and produced no significant results;
the overwhelming majority of Austrians actively supported the regime
until its end. Among 6.5 million Austrians of all ages, 700 thousand (17% of adults) were members of the NSDAP.
In 1942, before the number of casualties from the Reich grew to a large
number, the ratio was greater: 688 thousand Austrians (8.2% of the
overall population) were NSDAP members. Together with their family members, 1/4 of all Austrians were involved in the NSDAP.
A disproportionate share of the personnel within the Nazi repression
machine came from Austria: the region where 8% of the population of the
Reich lived produced 14% of SS soldiers and 40% of extermination camp staff. More than 1.2 million Austrians fought on the side of the Axis powers. During the war, 247 thousand military personnel were killed and 25-30 thousand civilians perished in allied bombings and the Vienna offensive. 170 thousand Austrians returned disabled and more than 470 thousand were taken prisoner by the Allies.
Despite all of these losses, the actual population of Austria did not
decrease during the war. The country accepted hundreds of thousands of
Germans escaping allied bombings; no less than a million foreigners –
war prisoners and workers from the countries occupied by Germany – had been working in Austria. In April 1945, there were 1.65 million displaced persons in the territory of Austria.
The term "the first victim of Germany", as applied to Austria, first
appeared in English-speaking journalism in 1938, before the beginning of
the Anschluss. Shortly before the outbreak of the war in 1939, the writer Paul Gallico - himself of partly Austrian origin - published the novel The Adventures of Hiram Holliday,
part of which is set in post-Anschluss Austria and depicts an Austrian
society strongly detesting the newly imposed Nazi rule, with Austrians
feeling oppressed by the vicious alien rule; in Gallico's depiction,
there were hardly any Austrians collaborating with the Nazis.
References to Austria as "the first victim of Germany" appeared
in Soviet literature in 1941, after the German invasion of the USSR (Soviet authors called Spain "fascism's first victim", implying combined aggression by Italy and Germany, while Austria was assigned the role of "Hitler's first victim"). On February 18, 1942 Winston Churchill
said in his speech to Austrian emigrants: "We can never forget here on
this island that Austria was the first victim of Nazi aggression. The
people of Britain will never desert the cause of the freedom of Austria
from the Prussian yoke".
The British initiative
The Allies started to discuss the postwar destiny of Austria in 1941. On December 16 Stalin reported his plan for German break up to Anthony Eden: Austria would become an independent state again.
The British, having no plans for such a distant future, had nothing
against this proposal. During 1942–1943 the attitude of the Allies to
the Austrian question changed: the leaders of the USSR had not suggested
any new scheme, while the British took the future of Austria into
serious consideration.
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. 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.
Harrison's viewpoint was that recreation of an independent but weak
Austria within the borders of the First Republic was only possible with
the readiness of the Western allies to support the new state for many
years.
Harrison did not believe in the ability of the Austrians to
self-organize nor in the probability of them rising in armed resistance
against the regime.
The best solution according to the British point of view would have
been a strong confederation of Danube states with Austria included de
jure as an equal member, but de facto as a cultural and political
leader.
It was not possible to create such a union in immediate post-war
Europe; an independent Austria would have to be created first, and it
would have to be provided with political guarantees and financial
support. Only afterward a political union could have been developed
step-by-step.
Soviet historiography of the 1970s called the British project an attempt to "push through the idea of a new Anschluss".
As M. A. Poltavsky wrote, the Allies pursued a plan to "create a
conglomeration of regions in Europe that would have become a constant
seat of conflicts". There are two points of view on the motives of British politicians in contemporary western historiography.
The traditional one considers their actions solely an attempt to
protect British concerns and to oppose the USSR in the postwar break up
of Nazi Germany.
According to an alternative point 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.
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.
Text endorsements
At the end of May 1943 Harrison's plan was approved by the British cabinet, 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. Molotov's deputy, Solomon Lozovsky, decried such a union calling it "the instrument of anti-Soviet politics".
The British did not abandon the plan, so on August 14, 1943, Eden sent
Harrison's project, the "Declaration on Austria", to Moscow and
Washington. The text started by stating that "Austria was the first free
country to fall victim to Nazi aggression".
Again, facing resistance from Soviet diplomats, the British started to
back down. According to Soviet insistence, the project lost any mention
of association with neighbouring states and Atlantic Charter, the "Austrian nation" was replaced with an unambiguous "Austria", "Nazi aggression" – with "Hitlerite aggression". The British negotiations with the Americans were not any less difficult.
The Moscow Declaration on Austria was the result of this haggling between the Allied ministers.
It was adopted on September 30 and published on November 1, 1943.
Despite all the edits made, the phrase "the first victim" remained
practically untouched: "Austria, the first free country to fall a victim
to Hitlerite aggression, shall be liberated from German domination…".
The text was finished with a strict reminder, which was insisted by
Stalin, that Austria "has a responsibility, which she cannot evade, for
participation in the war on the side of Hitlerite Germany" (full text).
According to Stalin's addendum, the responsibility was not lying on the
shoulders of certain people, groups, or parties, but the society as a
whole; there was no way for an Austrian to escape from collective
responsibility. Stalin, like Churchill, had also considered Austria to be a buffer between Soviet and Anglo-American spheres of influence, and had not been in a hurry to carry out the "export of revolution".
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.
The authors are unlikely to have suspected "the first victim" would
become an Austrian national theme, which would be carefully cultivated
and protected, and determine Austrian foreign policy for many years. Moreover, they didn't know that another part of the Declaration – the Austrian responsibility – would die on the vine.
Response of belligerent Austrians
Different
historical schools admit that defeats in 1943 gave rise to doubt
amongst the Austrians about the future of the Reich and helped the
spread of separatist sentiments.
But they disagree on the role of this sentiment in history. According
to the official post-war Austrian point of view, the defeat in the Battle of Stalingrad started a fully-fledged "national awakening". Soviet historians insisted that in 1943 a new stage of resistance began in Austria, and the Moscow Declaration proved to be an "important factor that influenced the Austrian nation". Contemporary Western historians believe that there is no reason for drawing firm conclusions about "awakening" or "resistance".
Antihitlerite and separatist sentiments had been spreading both in
Vienna and remote places of Austria, but nearly in the same degree as in
other lands of the Reich.
War defeats, the Italian withdrawal from the war, Anglo-American
bombings, streams of refugees and prisoners facilitated this; but
Western historians deny the influence of the Moscow Declaration. Evan
Bukey admits that the Declaration inspired the Austrian underground, but
neither increased their forces nor helped to spread separatist
sentiments. R. Keyserling wrote that the Declaration brought the Allies more harm than good. The operation of British propagandists among Austrian soldiers at the Italian front failed :
the Moscow Declaration has not influenced the fighting spirit of German
troops and, probably, merely was a great help for Goebbels' counterpropaganda.
Austria was far behind the lines of belligerent Germany and the
reaction of Austrian civilians to the Moscow Declaration was twofold. On one hand, people made a false conclusion that the status of "the first victim" would help Austria avoid allied bombings. On the other hand, "Moscow" in the title was unmistakably associated not with the western allies, but with uncompromising Bolshevism. The people, as a whole, were indifferent to the news and did not support any anti-Hitler opposition groups.
During 1943–1944 the number of arrests increased, but 80% of arrested
were foreign workers, whose number was 140 thousand in Vienna alone.
During 1944, as the military and economic landscape got worse,
dissatisfaction increased among Austrians too, but not with the Hitler
regime, but with the stream of refugees, especially Protestants, from
the North.
Internal conflicts did not undermine the fighting spirit of the nation.
Quite the contrary, the success of the Allies and reactivation of air
bombings of Austria only consolidated its population around the figure
of the Fuehrer. During the unsuccessful 20 July plot people of Vienna fully supported Hitler.
Declaration of 'Victimhood'
Heroes' Monument of the Red Army in Vienna.
The phrase "…in battle against the German fascist invaders" carved on
the stone tablet in front of the monument, from the Austrian
politicians' point of view, confirmed innocence of Austrians.
On April 13, 1945, the Soviet troops captured Vienna. 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. Renner, who had previously been an active supporter of the Anschluss,
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. The majority of Austrians
agreed with him.
But the proclamation of April 27, which was addressed not so much to
the nationals as to the victorious states, declared the opposite: events
of 1938 were not the result of an agreement between equal parties or
expression of the popular will, but the result of "an uncovered external
pressure, a terrorist plot by own National Socialist [Nazi] minority,
deception and blackmail during talks, and then – an open military
occupation … The Adolf Hitler's Third Reich deprived people of Austria
of their power and freedom to express their will, led them to a
senseless and pointless massacre, which no one Austrian has not wanted
to take part in."
The proclamation of April 27 gingerly repudiated the claim of the
Moscow declaration about Austria's contribution to its liberation:
since, as the fathers of the Second Republic asserted, during the
1938–1945 period Austrian statehood had been temporarily interrupted,
the revived Austria should not have been responsible for crimes of
"invaders". In May–June 1945 the Provisional Government recorded this proposition in an official "doctrine of the occupation" (German: Okkupationsdoktrin).
All the guilt and responsibility for the crimes of the occupation
regime was laid at the door of Germany – the only successor of the
Hitlerite Reich.
The position of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Austria on the
Jewish question became a practical consequence of this doctrine: as
there had not been Austrians to persecute Jews, but German occupiers,
then "according to international law Austrian Jews should submit their
claims for reparations not to Austria, but the German Reich". The Foreign Minister of Austria Karl Gruber organized the compilation and publishing of the "Red-White-Red Book [de]" in order persuade the victorious Allied Powers.
The intent of Austrian politicians, in publishing this collection of
real documents and selectively compiled "historical comments", was to
persuade the victorious Allied Powers of the forced nature of the
Anschluss and also of a mass rejection of Hitler's regime by Austrians.
The book was planned to have more than one volume. But the second
volume, the "story of Austrian resistance", was not published: according
to the official version not enough archive evidence was found.
The authors affirmed, for instance, that in 1938 70% of Austrians had
not simply been against Anschluss, but they were said to feel a "fanatic
animosity" against it. This is how the myth was established to later become an ideological foundation of the postwar Austria.
The founders of the Second Republic probably had a moral right to consider themselves to be victims of political repressions. Twelve of the seventeen members of the Cabinet of Leopold Figl,
that headed the government in December 1945, were persecuted under
Dollfuss, Schuschnigg and Hitler. Figl himself was imprisoned in Dachau and Mauthausen and for this reason he was insolent towards emigrants who had "escaped from difficulties". So it is not surprising that the myth of "the road to Dachau" (German: Der Geist der Lagerstrasse) followed "the first victim" myth:
according to this legend, during their imprisonment, Austrian
politicians came up with the agreement to stop interparty squabbles and
to unite forever for the sake of building a new and democratic Austria. Representatives of the major parties of the First Republic – conservatives, social democrats and communists – did unite, but only in the beginning of April 1945.
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 occupational powers.
The statement about "all-nation unity" of all Austrians in the cause of
post-war reconstruction, being essential for the country to survive and
revive, became the third fundamental myth. In fact not less important
for Austria to survive was the political and financial support from the USA.
Evolution of 'Victimhood' ideology
Anti-fascist period
An
anti-fascist spirit dominated Austrian public politics for two post-war
years. Propaganda about the supposed feats of the Austrian resistance
proved to the Allies the contribution made to the defeat of Nazism,
which was required from Austrians by the Moscow Declaration. The other
task of anti-fascist propaganda was to find a new ideology that could be
relied on by a morally and financially exhausted nation. Anti-fascist rhetoric, forced from above, ran through the whole social life of Austria. Broken chains appeared on the coat of arms of Austria as a symbol of liberation of Austria from "foreign occupation" by Germany, memorial tablets and modest temporary monuments in honour of perished anti-fascists were installed in towns (the only big monument of this period, Heroes' Monument of the Red Army in Vienna, was erected due to insistence of the USSR).
Propaganda at all levels praised feats of a few anti-fascist heroes,
but carefully avoided the topics of Austrian Jews and extermination
camps. The "victim theory" of this period, that ended not later than 1949, was based on four statements:
the Anschluss of 1938 had not been a union of the German nation, but a violent seizure of Austria by a foreign aggressor;
1938–1945 should be considered a period of foreign occupation;
despite having been suppressed by the occupiers, the Austrian
resistance made a prominent contribution to the victory of the
anti-Hitler coalition;
Austrian soldiers of the Wehrmacht were forced to serve under a threat of cruel terror.
An informal ideology constructed from an anti-fascist openly left
position was adopted by the Union of Concentration Camps Prisoners (German: KZ-Verband).
This organisation pursued an aim to take control of the government and
insisted that only active anti-fascists should be considered true
victims of the regime thus closing their doors to "passive victims" –
above all Jews who returned from the camps. 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. The position of KZ-Verband determined the contents of the first Austrian laws about aid to Nazi victims.
The Austrian government agreed not to offer them compensation, but
solely an allowance and not for everyone - just to active participants
of the resistance movement.
On the initiative of both social democrats and conservatives, this law
was extended to victims of the Dollfuss-Schuschnigg regime (except
National Socialists). The "passive victims", especially emigrants, were
not eligible for the allowance. The legislators followed political interests and helped only those from whom they could expect political assistance.
Several thousands of surviving Jews were of no interest, as opposed to
hundreds of thousands of former front-line soldiers and Nazis.
Change of direction
Already
in 1946 it became clear that leftist anti-fascist propaganda was not
being accepted in Austrian society, so by 1947 its time was over.
Prisoners, who returned from allied detention, were surprised to find
that Austrians "forgot" about the years of Hitler's regime. A patriotic
upsurge appeared in the country and replaced bitter memories.
In 1947 the Allies began the mass liberation of captivated Austrians
and Austrian government restored half a million of "less tainted" (German: Minderbelastete) members of the former NSDAP (Nazi party) to their civil rights.
From that moment a political struggle for the votes of former Nazis and
veterans became a governing trait of Austrian political life. Conservatives and social democrats
rejected anti-fascist rhetoric, while communists, who supported it,
quickly lost their political weight. At the beginning of 1947 they lost
their places in government, the police closed the 'KZ-Verband' at the
end of that year. "February 1948" events in Czechoslovakia and the threat of "export of revolution" deprived communists of all their former influence. A three-party coalition changed to a classical two-party system; the "Federation of Independents"
now took the role of a small third political force. The grouping -
created under social democrats sponsorship, – was a union of former
Nazis, a virtual successor of the Austrian branch of NSDAP (Nazi party),
who were banned to join the "large" parties at that time.
The marginalization of the communists, who really had been the backbone
of the insignificant Austrian resistance, meant a political defeat of
anti-fascists as a whole.
The communists failed to enter the governing elite, their past
endeavours appeared to be not needed in the contemporary internal
Austrian politics; they were however occasionally remembered in
communication with western diplomats.
Party ideologists realized that the anti-fascist policy did not
resonate in Austrian society so they found the way out through the
propagation of a conservative view of an Austrian "national identity".
The "Book of Austria" published by the government in 1948 stated that
Austria has been a country of simple, peaceful people of high culture,
kind Catholics famous not for their wars or politics but for their
ancient traditions. In place of an internal enemy (Nazism), the new ideology took on the familiar foreign enemy – Bolshevism.
The image of "innocent victimhood", mostly addressed to the victory
states and anticipating the expected near-term withdrawal of the
occupying troops, was a good fit for internal policy, too. The "victim
theory" assumed two forms: one for internal and one for foreign use.
Austrians were still exploiting the slogan of the Moscow Declaration
about being "Hitler's first victim" in their foreign politics. But
inside Austria it was transformed into the newest unifying myth that all
the Austrians, without any exception, were all victims.
As a political expedient all sections of society were sequentially
included to the list of the victims. Former Nazis were included to the
myth as "victims" who have been deluded and deceived by the foreign
tempter. Soon after the Federal Elections of 1949 (German: Nationalratswahl in Österreich 1949), they were officially recognized as "victims" of denazification together with those who they themselves victimized. In 1949 Rosa Jochmann, ideologist of social democrats, anti-fascist of the immediate past and former prisoner of Ravensbrück presented the new doctrine in this way:
We all were the victims of fascism. A soldier who has
come through the war in its worst form at the front was the victim. The
population of the home front, who has been afraid of waiting for
air-raid alarm and who has been dreaming of getting rid of bombing
horror, was the victim. Those who had to leave their motherland were the
victims … and finally we, unprotected victims of the SS, inmates of
prisons and camps, were the victims.
Opfer des
Faschismus waren wir alle. Opfer war der Soldat, der draussen an der
Front den Krieg in seiner furchtbarsten Form erlebt hat, war die
Bewolkerung, die im Hinterland voll Entsetzen auf den Kuckkuckruf
wartete, um in ihre Unterstaende zu fluchten und voll Sehnsucht der Tag
herbeizuwunschen, der diesen Schrecken von ihr nahm. Opfer waren jene,
die die Heimat verlassen mussten, um das zumeist traurige Los des
Emigranten auf sich zu nehmen, und Opfer waren schliesslich wir, die wir
in Gefangnissen, Zuchthausern und Konzentrationslagern der SS
ausgeliefert gewesen sind.
In the time of this new order, none of the truly abused groups such
as Jews, Gypsies and political opponents to Nazism could ever hope to
get targeted support from the state. Austrian society rejected claims
from these groups and portrayed them as attempts to enrich themselves at
the expense of all the "Nazis' victims".
The existence of these groups itself was an 'inconvenience': they
reminded the great mass of Austrians about their criminal past, hence
their erasure from the collective memory.
By 1949 installation of memorials to heroes of the resistance was no
longer desirable, at least at the provinces. And by the beginning of the
1950s, it was identified as being antagonistic Communist propaganda. Some of the previously installed monuments were removed (e.g. common graves in KZ Ebensee and Sankt-Florian), other were redesigned to replace "provocative" texts with "neutral" ones (e.g. memorial tablet in Innsbruck
at the place of death of Franz Mair (Widerstandskämpfer) that was
edited twice – the first time at the alleged request of German tourists,
the second time – at the request of local Catholics).
The ideas of anti-fascists, who were "undermining the foundations"
while hundreds of Austrians were performing their "sacred duty" (even if
under the banners of "German occupiers"), were finally discredited and
condemned.
Revanche
Burghard Breitner memorial in Mattsee. On the presidential elections of 1951 the former Nazi, military doctor Breitner got 622501 votes (15,4 % of the electorate)
On the contrary, war veterans got the seat of honor. In 1949-1950 veteran societies (German: Kameradschaft) appeared spontaneously all over the country.
For instance, by 1956 there were 56 veteran groupings in an
under-populated region of Salzburg. In 1952 there were 300 groups
uniting 60 thousand veterans in Styria.
These societies had unequivocal support of all political parties
without exception and they actively participated in local political
life.
War memorials that had been erected throughout the country – from the
capital to small villages – became clear evidence of full rehabilitation
of Wehrmacht soldiers and SS forces. The peak of their construction was
in the years 1949–1950s.
Mass meetings of veterans became commonplace. The ban of wearing of
German military uniform, that had been introduced in 1945, was
demonstratively violated everywhere.
The Provisional Government nervously watched the rise of nationalism.
On the one hand, veterans in Nazi uniform provoked the occupational
powers; on the other hand, Austrian veterans made common cause with their German counterparts. The border of Austria and the FRG was practically open, threatening a new, spontaneous Anschluss that was disturbing for the Allies too. The government tried to prevent the statements of pro-German activists in the federal media, but did not dare to prosecute their political wing – the Federation of Independents. In the presidential elections of 1951 the former Nazi and the candidate of the Federation of Independents Burghard Breitner got more than 15% of votes.
In 1955 Austrians convinced the Allies to exclude any provisions of Austrian responsibility for Hitlerite crimes from the Austrian State Treaty established that year. Earlier Israel has renounced its claims to Austria.
After sovereignty had been recovered and the occupying troops had
pulled out, the Austrian conservative rhetoric reached its climax.
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. From this point of view Austria had been a "victim" not only of Hitler, but also of the victorious occupiers.
The first of federal politicians to express this opinion in public was
Figl during the celebrations of the signing the Austrian State Treaty.
Austrian politicians thought that ultra-right forces would have
quickly lost their influence in an independent state, but despite their
estimations, the veteran movement increased rapidly and took up the role
of defender of a society free from the "red threat" and promoter of the state ideology. The distinction between the Austrian Armed Forces
and the veteran societies, as it seemed to foreign observers, was
smoothed away: employed officers openly wore Hitlerite uniform, the veterans claimed to have a right to carry arms and to create an armed volunteer corps. The Social Democrats, who promoted the establishment of the Federation of Independents in 1949, were the first to realize the threat, but conservatives from the ÖVP prevented the attempts to restrain the veterans.
Only in 1960 conservatives became concerned with the unpredictable
behaviour of people dressed in Wehrmacht uniform, so Austria banned the
wearing of the Swastika.
Conciliation
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. In 1961 the power passed to the socialist government under Bruno Kreisky. Over the next several years (not later than 1962-1965),
as the first post-war generation entered society, the state ideology
softened. A process to return the Resistance heroes to the public
conscience began. It was followed by a rival campaign of ultra-rightists
with the opposite intent.
A political dialogue within the firmly consolidated and inflexible
ruling elite was still not possible: protesting sentiments started to
manifest themselves in both cultural and scientific spheres.
In 1963 historians and anti-fascists founded the national archive of
the Resistance, in 1964 the federal government approved the construction
of the first memorial for the victims of concentration camps in Mauthausen. Austrian society interpreted these cautious steps as a challenge for the dominating ultra-right views and resisted such "attempts to blacken the past". During the shooting of the musical film The Sound of Music, the plot of which unfolds just the times of the Anschluss and immediately after, the Authorities of Salzburg
forbade the producers to decorate the streets of the city with Nazi
symbols insisting that "there had never been Nazis in Salzburg". They retreated only after the producers threatened to use the true newsreels of the Nazi processions in Salzburg. The film had a worldwide success, but failed in Austria.
The death of a 67-year old anti-fascist Ernst Kirchweger, beaten to death on March 31, 1965, during a demonstration against Nazi professor Taras Borodajkewycz catalysed change. The subsequent demonstrations of protest were unexpectedly supported by all the federal-level politicians.
The elite no longer had any need for the politics of the ultra-right.
Moreover, being afraid of a spontaneous movement to an authoritarian
dictatorship, the elite preferred to distance themselves from the
ultra-right. In the same year the first memorial for anti-fascists constructed by the federal powers was opened in Hofburg.
By the beginning of the 1970s the "victim theory" had mutated again.
Anti-fascists were now returned to the official pantheon, but honouring
of the Wehrmacht soldiers was still predominant.
Open anti-Semitism surrendered its positions slowly: according to the
1969 poll the genocide of Jews has been firmly approved by 55% of FPÖ electorate, 30% of ÖVP electorate and 18% of SPÖ
electorate (the question was "Do you agree that during 1938-1945 the
Jews got their come-uppance?"; the results of the "firmly agree" answer
are given here); by 1985 these proportions decreased by 45%, 25% and 16% respectively.
All the political parties viewed the "everyday life" during the Nazi
era with considerable tolerance, and they subsequently shaped it,
intentionally or not, into legitimacy and even prestige.
The consensus reached in the 1960s was maintained into the following decade. The Protests of 1968 in Vienna, jokingly called "a tame revolution" (German: Eine Zahme Revolution), had few consequences.
The post-war generation of Austrians, as compared to Germans of the
same age, appeared to be passive and did not try to review the past in
the same active manner; this generation did not influence politicians,
but rather followed them. The ruling social democrats, with the knowledge of Kreisky, continued both secret and obvious cooperation with former Nazis.
Episodic protests against Nazi officials gave no results. In 1970 a
minister of Kreisky's government, a former Untersturmführer of the SS
Johann Öllinger, was exposed by the West German press and had to resign. Instead Kreisky (a Jew himself, who escaped to Sweden in 1938) appointed another former Nazi in his stead Oskar Weihs. In 1975 the case of a political ally of Kreisky, FPÖ president Friedrich Peter, who had been an officer in the 1 SS Infantry Brigade during WWII, was a turning point. Austrian politicians solidly supported Peter and condemned Simon Wiesenthal who had exposed him. According to the Opinion Polls this viewpoint was supported by 59% of Austrians. Kreisky accused Wiesenthal of aiding and abetting the Gestapo and called Austrians to reconciliation; all of them, the Chancellor said, were the Nazis' victims.
Practical implementation
End of denazification
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. Researchers pick out three or four stages of denazification:
April – May 1945: the occupying powers took sole charge of the lustration (removal from office) and criminal prosecution of former Nazis;
May 1945 – February 1946: Austrian "people's courts" (German: Volksgericht) worked simultaneously with the above;
February 1946 – May 1948: Austrian powers carried out denazification alone.
During the whole period "people's courts" tried 137 thousand cases and passed 43 capital sentences.
The American occupiers conducted denazification firmly and consistently: the bigger part of 18 thousand prosecuted Nazis was convicted in their sector.
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). Many more Nazis were detained by the
Soviet powers and then handed to Austrian authorities.
In the beginning, the Soviet powers were prepared to "whitewash" the
"less tainted" Nazis with the hope that they would help to reinforce the
Austrian communist party resources.
But after the latter was defeated at the November elections in 1945,
the Soviet powers abandoned the idea to "export the revolution" to
Austria and ceased to rely on the Austrian communist party.[127] The British sector of occupation, Carinthia,
was the one with the largest part of Nazis within the population.
During the elections of 1949 rehabilitated Nazis made 18,8 % of
Carinthia electorate; this compared with 9.9% in Vienna and 8.7% in Lower Austria and Burgenland.
Tensions between the bodies that prosecuted Hitlerites, and economic
powers, that actively recruited former Nazi industrial and commercial
managers, were never ending in the British sector.
Mass lustration and post-war economic restoration appeared to be
incompatible: there was not enough spotless people to fill all the
urgent vacancies. One third of judges in the "people's courts" were former Nazis; 80%, according to Soviet claims, of the Austrian gendarmerie in the British sector were former Nazis.
Austrian powers regularly reported about "full denazification" of one
or another department, but in reality the "cleaned out" Nazis were
simply transferred from one position to another. Political parties, including the Communists,
actively accepted Nazis under their patronage and protected them from
the occupational powers and rival parties using the principle "do not
touch ours or we will attack yours".
After the Cold War
started, the Austrian government used the dissension between the former
Allies to promote a reconsideration of the value of denazification. In May 1948 it was discontinued and a 9-year "period of amnesties" of former Nazis started. The victory states preferred civil peace and stability to righting a wrong and secretly agreed with the Austrian viewpoint. In 1955 "people's courts" were dismissed, Nazis' cases were passed to courts of general jurisdiction, that in 1960 become notorious for verdicts of not guilty in resonant cases. In mid-70s the prosecution of Nazis was officially stopped.
Denial of financial restitution
In the second half of 1945, about 4500 surviving Jews returned to Vienna.
Renner and his government, using the "victim theory" as a cover,
refused to return them their property seized during the Nazi regime. All
the responsibility to help former camp inmates was laid on to the Vienna Israelite Community and the"American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee".
According to the Financial Aid Law of July 17, 1945 Austria only
supported "active" (political) prisoners, but not "passive" victims of
ethnic cleansing.
This support was limited to a modest allowance, there was no question
of compensations for losses. Politicians justified this rejection of
restitution both with ideological clichés and the real weakness of the
new state that was established from the ruins of the defeated Reich.
According to Figl all that had happened in Austria was similar to a
natural disaster. Austria was not capable of either recouping the losses
or even easing the miseries of people who had suffered during those
years.
Until the end of the 1990s, the public policy of the Second
Republic in terms of restitution was defined by the "victim theory".
Procrastination of legislative decisions on the matter and bureaucracy
during their administration became an unwritten practical rule. The
first to formulate it was the Minister of Internal Affairs Oscar Helmer
(one of few politicians who have admitted the responsibility of
Austrians) in 1945: "Ich bin dafür, die Sache in die Länge zu ziehen"
("I think that this question should be dragged out").
All the legislative decisions concerning restitution were passed only
under pressure from the allied occupational powers and later – after
1955 – by the US and Jewish social organizations. Austrian legislation has developed in fits and starts from one foreign policy crisis to another. In the beginning Austrians resisted and tried to develop another consensual decision, haggled for mutual concessions, and then silently sabotaged the decision.
Successful completion of legislative initiatives to recognise rights of
one or another group was determined by the political weight of its
activists:
for half a century the priority was to get pensions and allowances for
Wehrmacht veterans. Jews and Gypsies got formal recognition in 1949, medical crimes victims – only in 1995, homosexuals and asexuals – in 2005.
As a result, Austrian law that regulated restitution to victims
turned out to be a complicated and controversial "patchwork quilt" made
of a multitude of acts on separate cases. The law of 1947 about social assistance to the victims of repressions had been corrected 30 times during 50 years.
For some incidental points like the restitution of confiscated property
Austrians formed a fair and fully-fledged legal basis as early as 1947.
The other ones, like the lost rights of rented apartments, were left without any decision. All these laws referred not to public law, but to private civil law.
Plaintiffs were obliged to prove their rights in Austrian civil courts
that had an adverse policy (except a short period in the end of the
1940s). Even when the federal government had a fair mind to settle another dispute, the state apparatus had no time to try all the claims. Probably neither politicians nor ordinary officials realised the real scale of Hitler's repressions.
Rewriting of history
For
the Second Republic to survive it was necessary for the Austrians to
establish their own national identity, and this needed to be created.
As far back as the 1940s, a new, particular history of Austria had been
urgently composed to satisfy this purpose: it introduced into existence
a unique Austrian nation that differed from the German one. The heroes' pantheon of this history was made up of people that had no connection with Germany within the 20th century, i.e. Leopold the Glorious or Andreas Hofer. In 1946 a celebration of the 950-year anniversary of the ancient name of Austria (German: Ostarrichi)
was right on the button. As Austrians were made up from a set of
ancient nations then, according to Austrian historians, they were not
Germans genetically
The religion was also different: Austrians are mainly Catholics,
Germans – Protestants. The consensual opinion of Austrian academics was
that a common language could not be the determining factor.
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, who however together wrote the consensual ("coalitionist", German: Koalitionsgeschichtsschreibung) history under administration of the party supervisors.
Probably there was no alternative during those years: simply no
humanitarian or ideological schools existed outside of the party camps. Both the schools fabricated the contemporary history in their own way, supporting the all-nation "victim" myth. Conservative historians hid Leopold Kunschak's anti-Semitism, social democrats were silent about Renner's sycophancy before Stalin and Hitler.
The competing groups never tried to expose each other, they continued
to mutually respect the party legends and taboos for three decades. Anton Pelinka
thought that denying and silencing the historical reality allowed for
the first time in history, a consolidation of society and healing of the
wounds of the past.
In the 1970s historians, following the political order, focused
on investigation of the interwar period; the Nazi regime being
interpreted as absolution from sins of the First Republic and still
within the boundaries of the "victim theory".
Authors of the standard "History of Austria" (1977) Gorlich and Romanik
stated that WWII belonged to world history, it was not an Austrian war
because Austria as a state did not participate in it. Along with this, Austrian patriots knew that the path to Austrian national revival laid through Hitler's defeat. Austria's own history was considered separate to a common one with Germany; by 1980 the belief that a special, "non-German" national identity of Austrians had long existed, became firmly established. The Austrian lineage of Odilo Globocnik, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Adolf Eichmann and other Nazi criminals was suppressed: the historians called them German occupiers. The only existing (as of 2007) monograph
about denazification in Austria (Dieter Stiefel, 1981) described it as
an unfounded and incompetent intervention of the victors into home
affairs.
Left-wing historians, in their turn, criticised the Allies for supposed
suppression of a spontaneous anti-fascist movement, which had no
appreciable influence in reality.
School syllabus
One of the methods to consolidate the ideology became the Austrian school syllabus, where the "victim" myth was closely interwoven with the myth about a special, non-German identity of Austrians.
The highest goal of the Austrian school system became a patriotic
education in a spirit of national union that required forgetting the
immediate past and forgiving the past sins of all compatriots.
Textbooks presented the Anschluss as an act of German aggression
against innocent "victims" and methodically shifted blame to other
countries, who gave Austria up during the hard times. The first textbooks blamed the western countries for appeasement of Hitler. In the 1960s the USSR temporarily became the main villain whom Austrians fought against in a just war.
Until the 1970s the existence of Austrian support for the Anschluss as
well as Austrian Nazism was denied: according to the textbooks Austrian
society was a solid mass, of which every member equally was a "victim"
of foreign forces.
Authors of a 1955 school reading book ignored the concept of Anschluss
('union'): Austria was literally presented as a victim of German military aggression, just like Poland or France. Books of the 1950s and 1960s mentioned the Holocaust rarely and in a reduced form of a minor episode.
The topic of a traditional Austrian anti-Semitism 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. In the 1960s a typical cliché of Austrian school programmes was an indispensable comparison of the Holocaust and Hiroshima or sometimes Katyn massacre.
But the description of the catastrophes in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were
more prominent than the description of the events inside Austria itself. School impressed the idea that the Allies were not been any better than Axis powers, and Nazi crimes were not anything extreme.
The first textbooks to give a real, historical picture of events,
not the myth, were published in Austria only in 1982 and 1983. Authors
for the first time discussed the problem of anti-Semitism in their
contemporary society and were first to admit that Hitlerite
anti-Semitism had national, Austrian roots.
Other textbooks of 1980s continued to diligently reproduce the "victim"
myth. They mentioned the existence of concentration camps, but their
description was reduced to just a political prosecution of a political enemies of Hitler;
the books considered the camps as a place where consolidation of the
national elite has happened, a personnel department of the Second
Republic in its own way. The Holocaust was mentioned but was never classified as genocide; there were no absolute figures of exterminated people: Austrian school invented the "Holocaust without Jews".
Only in 1990s authors of textbook admitted the real scale of the
crimes, but kept the comparison of the Holocaust with Hiroshima. The two
catastrophes still co-existed and were continuously compared, and
Austrians who committed evil acts were still presented as passive
executors of foreign will.
Historical role
All the countries that suffered under Nazi power tried more or less to forget their own past after the war. Ones that had a resistance movement glorified it, forgetting about collaborationism. Others, like Austria, preferred to consider themselves victims of the foreign aggression, although Austria, itself, did have a resistance movement
(The Resistance in Austria, 1938–1945 Radomír Luza, University of
Minnesota Press, 1984). According to the opinion of American
politologist David Art, the Austrian "white lies" about being a "victim"
served four important purposes:
For the first time in modern history the two rival political
forces – conservatives and social democrats – united around this issue.
The common rhetoric of being a "victim" allowed the country to forget
the Civil War
of the 1930s; mutual silence about the sins of the past helped to
establish trust relationships between the two parties. The "big
coalition" of conservatives, social democrats, church and trade unions,
formed in the 1940s ruled the country for almost half a century;
The recognition of all Austrians as "victims" allowed the integration of the former Nazis (1/6 of all adults in the country) into social and political life;
Distancing from the German "occupiers" was essential to build Austrian national identity. Austrians of 1920s–1930s considered themselves Germans and being a part of the Reich for 8 years just confirmed their beliefs.
Politicians of 1940s understood that the so-called "Austrian nation"
never existed, but they needed an ideology to form a core of national
identity – the "victim theory" was the one to solve the problem;
The "victim theory" allowed the postponement and delay of restitution for half a century.
Industrial assets that had been taken from Jews during Hitler times and
nationalized by the Second Republic, became the part of an economical
foundation of postwar Austria.
Decline of the theory
Waldheim affair
In 1985 the ÖVP political party nominated the former UNSGKurt Waldheim for the federal president election. During WWII Waldheim served as an intelligence officer
in the Wehrmacht within the occupied territories of the USSR, Greece
and Yugoslavia. West German and later Austrian and American journalists
and the WJC accused Waldheim of being a member of Nazi organizations and of passive co-operation in punitive actions in the Balkans.
Waldheim denied all the accusations and insisted that the campaign of
defamation has been directed not towards him in person, but towards all
his generation. The president of WJC Edgar Bronfman
acknowledged this: "The issue is not Kurt Waldheim. He is a mirror of
Austria. His lies are of secondary importance. The real issue is that
Austria has lied for decades about its own involvement in the atrocities
Mr. Waldheim was involved in: deportations, reprisal murders, and other
[acts] too painful to think about". The Waldheim affair captivated the country, an unprecedented discussion about the military past developed in the press. At the beginning of it the conservatives, who absolutely dominated in Austrian media, formulated a new "victim theory" that was the first in history to apply to the patriotism of Austrians.
From the right-wing's point of view, both Austria and Waldheim
personally became victims of the campaign of defamation by the world
Jewry, therefore support for Waldheim should be a duty for all patriots.
The questions about a Hitlerite past were interpreted as an attack
against the patriotic feelings of Austrians; the right-wingers insisted
that during WWII Austrians behaved respectably, so digging the past up
was unneeded and harmful.
The electoral campaign of Waldheim was built on a call to
Austrian national feelings. Waldheim won the elections in the second
round of voting, but he was not able to perform his main responsibility
as the president of Austria – diplomatic representation. The USA and later European countries boycotted Waldheim.
Austria gained a reputation as a promoter of Nazism and a foe to
Israel. European organisations continuously criticised the country for
its support of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
In order to rehabilitate the president, the Austrian government founded
an independent commission of historians. In February 1988 they
confirmed accusations against Waldheim: while not being the direct
executor or the organizer of war crimes, it was impossible for him not
to know about them.
The direct result of the Waldheim affair in home policy was the defeat
of the social democrats and the factual break-up of the postwar
two-party system. The Green Party appeared on the political scene and the radical right-wing FPÖ under Jörg Haider
grew in strength. The system of mutual taboos collapsed and politicians
were no more obliged to keep silent about rivals' affairs.
Left-wing opposition
"A Jew forced to clean the street" – a part of the memorial against wars and fascism at Albertinaplatz, 1988.
Domestic opposition to the ideology represented by Waldheim arose
from the circles of liberal-left intellectuals, far from the political
power of the influential mass media.
During the latter decades of the 20th century the left movement
mobilised. In 1992 they called out more than 300 thousand people to
demonstrate against Jörg Haider.
Scandals around Waldheim and Haider ended with the victory of the
liberal-left school and a full revision of the former ideological
guidelines.
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 analysed the
immoral, in their opinion, evasion by Austrian politicians by not
admitting the responsibility of the nation.
Attention of the researchers switched from the acts of individual
Austrian politicians to previous campaigns against Gypsies and
homosexuals.
Critics of this school (Gabriele Matzner-Holzer, Rudolf Burger and
others) noticed 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.
In the 1980s, the topic of Nazi crimes started getting covered regularly on television.
Victims of Nazism who survived to the 1980s and who were previously
afraid of speaking out, started to regularly appear on the screen both
as witnesses of the past and as heroes of documentaries. In 1988 the memorial against wars and fascism (German: Mahnmal gegen Krieg und Faschismus) was opened under the walls of "Albertina"; in 1995 a public exhibition about the Wehrmacht (German: Wehrmachtsausstellung)
became the event of the year and started a discussion of the previously
untouchable topic of the almost half a million Austrians who fought on
Hitler's side.
A change of social sentiment resulted from the Austrian media
turnaround: admission of the criminal past replaced the previous denial.
At the beginning of the 1990s collective responsibility was admitted by
only a small circle of intellectuals, politicians and left-wing youth;
by the mid-2000s the majority of Austrians had gradually joined them.
Acknowledgement of liability
The abandonment of the "victim theory" by the Austrian state and gradual admittance of the responsibility began in 1988.
Austria contributed to an existing fund of for Nazi victims,
established a new fund and for the first time in history made payments
for benefit of emigrants, and widened the scope of legally recognised
victims (in particular Gypsy and Carinthian Slovenes).
These actions of the state were prompted both by changes in Austrian
society and by the unparalleled crisis in foreign politics.
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.
As early as 1987 Hugo Portisch, advisor of the federal chancellorFranz Vranitzky,
recommended the government to immediately and unconditionally admit the
responsibility of Austria and to apologize to the world Jewry;
Vranitzky concurred this opinion, but had no courage to act.
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,
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. But neither Americans nor Israelis were impressed by this cautious confession made inside the Austrian Parliament. Things started to move only after Vranitzky officially visited Israel in 1993; during his visit he admitted the responsibility not solely of the nation, but also the state but with a condition that the concept of a collective guilt was not applicable to Austrians. A year later public apologies were made by the new conservative president Thomas Klestil.
The "victim theory" had now been completely abandoned,
at least at the level of the highest organs of government. Nobody has
doubted the will of Vranitzky and Klestil, but sceptics doubted if the
Austrian nation was ready to share their position. Conservative politicians had no desire to support this new ideology
and the influence of the FPÖ party swiftly increased. The unification
of the left and right happened only in 2000 during another crisis in
foreign politics caused by the FPÖ's electoral victory. This time Austria was not only under pressure from the US and Jewish organisations but also the European Union. Unexpectedly, Austria's integration in the EU appeared to be more vulnerable than in the 1980s.
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. The work of the Austrian Historical Commission (German: Österreichische Historikerkommission) resulted in admission of the economical "aryanisation" of 1938–1941 as a part of the Holocaust (that was equal to unconditional consent for restitution); Under the Washington Agreement signed with the Austrian government and industries, Austria admitted its debts towards Jews ($480 mln) and Ostarbeiters ($420 mln). For the first time in Austrian history, this programme of restitution was fulfilled within the shortest possible time.
