Regarding Z and his “subtle” viewpoints I was being sarcastic but didn’t add the (sarc) flag. My bad.

“expat” doesn’t comment often but frequency is not correlated to quality IMO.

A great deal of They Thought They Were Free focuses on Germans who, postwar, still thought Hitler and Nazism weren’t all that bad. It’s quite an interesting book. And The Nazi Seizure of Power is one of the most frightening I’ve ever read, although it’s rather dry in the telling.

On your other points:

It is certainly true that one was more likely to encounter nostalgia for the Nazi period in Germany and Austria than in the States, but I occasionally encountered it among emigres in the States (and Canada) as well. It would be erroneous to assume that it didn’t find expression here.

“My guess is that those in the cheering crowds were either pro-Nazi pro-German or pretending to be, and those who were against stayed home in fear.” Well, the second part of your guess is almost certainly true. I do not doubt that there were plenty of people—and not just in the targeted populations—who were horrified, outraged, and terrified by the rise of Nazism in Germany. Our neighbor’s family was just one example of that. It is equally clear that there were also plenty of people who shared the regime’s hatreds and/or felt that their lives improved in tangible ways under Nazism. Those are the people we mostly didn’t hear from after the war, but there were enough of them to permit what happened to happen (cf. Browning’s “Ordinary Men”, Goldhagen’s “Hitler’s Willing Executioners”, and Bartov’s work on the Wehrmacht’s complicity in carrying out the final solution). Sense of powerlessness: if you are implying parallels with the current situation in this country, I have to agree.

Deco: thanks for the clip of Schuschnigg. A noble sentiment from an Austrian patriot, but: did Austria in fact remain Austria? The “bis in den Tod” part certainly applied to between 250,000-260,000 of the 950,000 Austrians who volunteered for the Wehrmacht and the Waffen SS, but they didn’t die under the red-white-red. Being a numbers guy, you know that Austrians were disproportionately represented in the SS and the death-camp administrations. Those attitudes didn’t magically evaporate after 1945.

Om: there’s a lot of fancy footwork in Zaphod’s comments, but don’t be fooled by that. His views are quite clear and not at all subtle. And yes, it would be useful to have a contemporary perspective from Germany. My impressions are ~35 years old.

Obviously, though, if someone traveled in Germany and talked to Germans of that generation, then that person would be likely to be privy to such reminiscences. However, I was replying to Zaphod and referring to the States, which was Zaphod’s specific reference when he wrote about listening to “old German grandfathers of your friends” reminiscing about building the Autobahn.

That was an ass pull from Mr. Gunther; no reason to take it at face value. Pan German sentiment in 1930 amounted to about 15% of the electorate. Mr. Gunther fancies that the ratio of pan-Germans to the rest increased by more than 20-fold in two years.

Some background on Austria and the Nazi takeover:

The Austrian Nazi Party failed to win any seats in the November 1930 general election, but its popularity grew in Austria after Hitler came to power in Germany. The idea of the country joining Germany also grew in popularity, thanks in part to a Nazi propaganda campaign which used slogans such as Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer (“One People, One Empire, One Leader”) to try to convince Austrians to advocate for an Anschluss to the German Reich. Anschluss might have occurred by democratic process had Austrian Nazis not begun a terrorism campaign. According to John Gunther in 1936, “In 1932 Austria was probably eighty percent pro-Anschluss”.

…Gunther wrote that by the end of 1933 Austrian public opinion about German annexation was at least 60% against. On 25 July 1934, Dollfuss was assassinated by Austrian Nazis in a failed coup. Afterwards, leading Austrian Nazis fled to Germany but they continued to push for unification from there. The remaining Austrian Nazis continued terrorist attacks against Austrian governmental institutions, causing a death toll of more than 800 between 1934 and 1938.

Dollfuss’s successor was Kurt Schuschnigg, who followed a political course similar to his predecessor. In 1935 Schuschnigg used the police to suppress Nazi supporters. Police actions under Schuschnigg included gathering Nazis (and Social Democrats) and holding them in internment camps. The Austrofascism of Austria between 1934–1938 focused on the history of Austria and opposed the absorption of Austria into Nazi Germany (according to the philosophy Austrians were “superior Germans”). Schuschnigg called Austria the “better German state” but struggled to keep Austria independent.

In an attempt to put Schuschnigg’s mind at rest, Hitler delivered a speech at the Reichstag and said, “Germany neither intends nor wishes to interfere in the internal affairs of Austria, to annex Austria or to conclude an Anschluss.”….

Hitler told Goebbels in the late summer of 1937 that eventually Austria would have to be taken “by force”….

Following increasing violence and demands from Hitler that Austria agree to a union, Schuschnigg met Hitler at Berchtesgaden on 12 February 1938, in an attempt to avoid the takeover of Austria. Hitler presented Schuschnigg with a set of demands that included appointing Nazi sympathizers to positions of power in the government. The key appointment was that of Arthur Seyss-Inquart as Minister of Public Security, with full, unlimited control of the police. In return Hitler would publicly reaffirm the treaty of 11 July 1936 and reaffirm his support for Austria’s national sovereignty. Browbeaten and threatened by Hitler, Schuschnigg agreed to these demands and put them into effect….

On 9 March 1938, in the face of rioting by the small, but virulent, Austrian Nazi Party and ever-expanding German demands on Austria, Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg called a referendum (plebiscite) on the issue, to be held on 13 March. Infuriated, on 11 March, Adolf Hitler threatened invasion of Austria,…

To secure a large majority in the referendum, Schuschnigg dismantled the one-party state. He agreed to legalize the Social Democrats and their trade unions in return for their support in the referendum.[4] He also set the minimum voting age at 24 to exclude younger voters because the Nazi movement was most popular among the young….

The plan went awry when it became apparent that Hitler would not stand by while Austria declared its independence by public vote. Hitler declared that the referendum would be subject to major fraud and that Germany would never accept it. In addition, the German ministry of propaganda issued press reports that riots had broken out in Austria and that large parts of the Austrian population were calling for German troops to restore order. Schuschnigg immediately responded that reports of riots were false.

Hitler sent an ultimatum to Schuschnigg on 11 March, demanding that he hand over all power to the Austrian Nazis or face an invasion. The ultimatum was set to expire at noon, but was extended by two hours. Without waiting for an answer, Hitler had already signed the order to send troops into Austria at one o’clock.[43] Nevertheless, the German Führer underestimated his opposition.

As Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Edgar Ansel Mowrer, reporting from Paris for CBS, observed: “There is no one in all France who does not believe that Hitler invaded Austria not to hold a genuine plebiscite, but to prevent the plebiscite planned by Schuschnigg from demonstrating to the entire world just how little hold National Socialism really had on that tiny country.”

Schuschnigg desperately sought support for Austrian independence in the hours following the ultimatum. Realizing that neither France nor Britain was willing to offer assistance, Schuschnigg resigned on the evening of 11 March, but President Wilhelm Miklas refused to appoint Seyss-Inquart as Chancellor. At 8:45 pm, Hitler, tired of waiting, ordered the invasion to commence at dawn on 12 March regardless. Around 10 pm, a forged telegram was sent in Seyss-Inquart’s name asking for German troops, since he was not yet Chancellor and was unable to do so himself. Seyss-Inquart was not installed as Chancellor until after midnight, when Miklas resigned himself to the inevitable. In the radio broadcast in which he announced his resignation, he argued that he accepted the changes and allowed the Nazis to take over the government ‘to avoid the shedding of fraternal blood [Bruderblut]’. Seyss-Inquart was appointed chancellor after midnight on 12 March….

The troops were greeted by cheering Austrians with Nazi salutes, Nazi flags, and flowers… the Austrian government had ordered the Austrian Bundesheer not to resist…

Before the first German soldier crossed the border, Heinrich Himmler and a few Schutzstaffel (SS) officers landed in Vienna to arrest prominent representatives of the First Republic, such as Richard Schmitz, Leopold Figl, Friedrich Hillegeist, and Franz Olah. During the few weeks between the Anschluss and the plebiscite, authorities rounded up Social Democrats, Communists, other potential political dissenters, and Austrian Jews, and imprisoned them or sent them to concentration camps. Within a few days of 12 March, 70,000 people had been arrested. The disused northwest railway station in Vienna was converted into a makeshift concentration camp…

The Austrians’ support for the Anschluss was ambivalent; but, since the Social Democratic Party of Austria leader Karl Renner and the highest representative of the Roman Catholic church in Austria Cardinal Theodor Innitzer both endorsed the Anschluss, approximately two-thirds of Austrians could be counted on to vote for it.[61] What the result of the plebiscite meant for the Austrians will always be a matter of speculation. Nevertheless, historians generally agree that it cannot be explained exclusively by simply either opportunism or the desire of socioeconomics and represented the genuine German nationalist feeling in Austria during the interwar period. Also, the general anti-Semitic consensus in Austria meant that a substantial amount of Austrians were more than ready to “fulfill their duty” in the “Greater German Reich”. How many Austrians behind closed doors were against the Anschluss remains unknown, but only one “unhappy face” of an Austrian in public when the Germans marched into Austria has ever been produced. According to some Gestapo reports, only a quarter to a third of Austrian voters in Vienna were in favour of the Anschluss. According to Evan Burr Bukey, no more than one-third of Austrians ever fully supported Nazism during the existence of the Third Reich.

My guess is that those in the cheering crowds were either pro-Nazi pro-German or pretending to be, and those who were against stayed home in fear.

I recommend two books to you – or anyone interested in the subject of how Germans felt about Nazis and Hitler. Perhaps you’re already familiar with them, but anyway the first is this one, and the second is this.

Raus!

It would be interesting to hear what commenter “expat,” a long time resident in Germany (West) might say. If she wishes to comment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8v8ekzvtKjw

This is also Austria in 1938

I lived and worked in Germany for almost five years. Not just in Germany, but in Munich, the spiritual and administrative home of the Nazi party. Despite the episodes I mentioned, I loved living there and never felt uncomfortable or threatened. I was *interested* in the experiences of people who had lived through 1933-1945 and wanted to hear what they had to say. I didn’t expect or want them to be sorry or express contrition or remorse. I probably wouldn’t have believed it anyway. I wanted them to be *honest*, and wish they had felt able to speak more freely about it. The only time I felt real anger was during the Jenninger Affair in November 1988, on the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht (brief allusion at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philipp_Jenninger; longer write-up in German at https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rede_am_10._November_1988_im_Deutschen_Bundestag). I wasn’t angry at Jenninger’s speech, which was the first honest speech I’d heard from a German politician about the Nazi period. I was angry at the absolutely predictable and dishonest reaction to the speech from the West German political establishment–their “swamp”–and my dumbass co-religionists in Germany and the States. “Willful misunderstanding, pearl-clutching, and public piling-on” doesn’t begin to describe it.

I don’t believe in collective guilt or collective punishment. As far as I was and am concerned, Germans who weren’t around then or who didn’t participate in the crimes of the Nazi regime weren’t guilty and shouldn’t have been made to feel guilty. As for the actual perpetrators and so-called “Schreibtischtaeter” (writing-desk murderers): I wanted to hear from them especially, and was angry that they were silenced as part of the great postwar U.S.-West German blandification project. I believe in facing the ugly stuff straight-up and head-on, not in sweeping it under the rug so that everybody can feel better about themselves. Which is probably why I’m not personally offended by Zaphod’s comments on this forum.