Yea, Austria likes to say they were Hitler's first victim, which is dead wrong. Austrian's were overwhelmingly happy with uniting with their Germanic brothers in 1938. It was similar in the Sudetenland as well. Austrians were just as happy as Germans to gas Jews in concentration camps, and shoot Soviet commissars on sight as there German countrymen.
Indeed, the issue of Austro-German culpability & participation within the Third Reich is a complicated one. Aside from a few Communist exiles & other intellectuals, there was no mass instances of native resistance to the Third Reich. Moreover, many Austrians willingly served within the Third Reich & many of the Republic's state & social institutions became Nazified fairly quickly after the Anschluss. Despite this open evidence of collusion with the Third Reich, it became an article of faith within post-war Austria that it wasn't a collaborator, but rather a victim of Hitler's aggression.
This narrative of Austrian estrangement from Germany & victimization partly originated from Allied wartime policies regarding Austria's future. The Allies articulated the idea that Austria was fundamentally innocent in the Moscow Declaration of 1943. Conceived with the assistance of Austrian emigres, the Declaration's immediate goal was to convince Austrian soldiers to surrender & drive a wedge between the Germans & Austrians both at & behind the frontlines. Although the Moscow Declaration of 1943 had avowed that Austria was a separate nation that was the first victim of Hitler's aggression, the Allies behind the scenes held significant doubts about the viability of Austria as an independent state. Austria's seeming inability to resist Hitler in 1938 validated the opinion that the post-Versailles Treaty Austrian state was too small to keep out aggressors, but whose strategic location invited interlopers to interfere in Austrian politics. While Soviet foreign policy with regards to Austria was to keep their options open in the post-war order, the British floated various solutions such as a Danubian confederacy or a political union with Bavaria that would strengthen post-war Austria & prevent a resurgence of Prussian-German militarism. These plans proved stillborn, but the problem of Austria still remained. The British Deputy Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Oliver Harvey, encapsulated how the British saw this dilemma by saying that, "[w]ere it not for the strategic importance of keeping Austria separate from Germany, we could let this flabby country stew. It is clear that Austria is doing next to nothing for herself and we shall have the greatest difficulty in infusing life into her after the war. There are no political leaders inside or outside the country who command any following. Austria will fall into the first arms which are opened to her."
The Americans were reluctant to commit to a full-scale occupation of Austria & were content to push only for an occupation of Vienna. Both the Soviets & the British pushed for a full American commitment to Austria in order to relieve them of burdensome occupation costs. It was this pressure from the Allies, coupled with the fear of a supposed "national redoubt" in the Alps, that made the Americans switch course & commit to an occupation.
The geographic difficulties of occupying Austria & Vienna, where, unlike Berlin, the 4 Allies had to patrol together, made the post-war Austrian occupation quite difficult. As such, there was very little incentive for the Allies to pursue an intensive denazification, for fear of destabilizing the country. Unlike Germany, the Allies delegated denazification efforts to Austrian provincial governments in April 1946. By delegating without any real oversights, denazification in Austria was anemic, even by the lax standards set by the Adenauer administration. Some 90% of Austrian NSDAP members received amnesty, & major Austrian political figures like Karl Renner argued that most Austrians were pressured into joining the party. Only extreme cases of collusion with the Third Reich led to prosecutions.
As the post-war order transitioned to normality, the emerging political consensus hewed to the line that Austrians were, at best, only reluctant Nazis. Post-war cultural production, much of it dominated by Austrian conservatives (although there were a few Communist & leftist cultural movements), stressed Austria's quaint Heimat & history under the Hapsburgs, such as the famous Sissi series of biopics about Empress Elizabeth of Austria. Within this post-war atmosphere, there was a great incentive for Austrians to keep silent about their activities during the war, & the post-war economic reconstruction fostered a sense of Austria moving away from this dark interlude.
This larger amnesia received international sanction with the ratification of the Austrian State Treaty in 1955. One of the provisions for ending the Allied occupation was the formal disavowal of the Austrian state of pan-Germanism & any future unification with Germany. Austrian school curricula stressed Austrian distinctiveness & separation from Germany, as per the State Treaty, & minimized Austrian collaboration with the regime. Ironically, ending the Allied occupation became one of the founding national myths for the post-Treaty Austria, as history textbooks & political discourse stressed the end of an undeserved occupation as a triumph of the new Austria.
This silence about the past came to a head internationally during the Waldheim scandal of the 1980s. Investigative journalists had uncovered the involvement of Kurt Waldheim, a post-war Austrian politician elected President in 1986 after having previously served as UN Secretary-General from 1972-1981, in various activities of the Third Reich during the war. Much of this activity was at odds with what Waldheim claimed in his own official biography. The Waldheim scandal opened up new investigations of Austrian involvement in the Third Reich's various crimes. This included a more critical examination of Austria's political curricula, far-right political movements, & lawsuits over the status of Jewish property. In the latter case, these lawsuits exposed one of the pernicious ideas of the Austrian victimization myth; the position of the Austrian government was that since Austria was occupied by a foreign power, Austria couldn't be held responsible for the crimes of that foreign power. Although the Austrian government bowed to foreign pressure for a Jewish compensation plan in the '50s, the Waldheim scandal highlighted this continued intransigence on this legal point & its self-serving nature.
It should also be added that the narrative of Austrian estrangement from Germany had deep roots beyond the immediate post-war period. Although the pan-German movement of Georg Ritter von Schönerer receives a great deal of attention, such attention often obscures the Austro-German nationalism of the Empire that stressed a particular German identity - Catholic, Hapsburg loyalists devoted to Austria's unique contributions to European culture (often contrasted to the mechanical culture of Prussia or the lack of culture among the Slavs) - that stood at odds with Prussian-led Germany & grew sharper after German unification. This version of Austro-German particularism acquired a nostalgic tinge after the dissolution of the Empire. This nostalgia for a sleepy Austrian Gemütlichkeit was perhaps most elegantly expressed in the fiction & journalism of Joseph Roth, such as The Radetsky March. While this cultural nationalism wasn't strong enough to prevent the Anschluss (&, in many respects, the Third Reich co-opted it after 1938), it was a palpable enough memory to lend the victim narrative a degree of legitimacy. Thus, the revelation of widespread war-time collusion with the Third Reich comes as a shock to many since it seems quite antithetical to a contemporary Austrian identity that rejects connection with Germany.
