Anschluss — Annexation of Austria
German troops crossed into Austria on 12 March 1938 and were met with flowers. Union with Germany had been a mainstream Austrian position since 1918, when a rump state of six million German speakers was left over from an empire of fifty million and voted for it; the treaties of Versailles and Saint-Germain forbade it. Hitler was Austrian and had made it the first sentence of Mein Kampf. Austrian Nazis had murdered the chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss in a failed putsch in 1934, and Mussolini had moved troops to the Brenner to stop Germany intervening. By 1938 Italy was Germany's ally and would not. Kurt Schuschnigg was summoned to Berchtesgaden in February and told to legalise the Nazi party and appoint Arthur Seyss-Inquart interior minister with control of the police. He then tried to escape by calling a referendum on independence for 13 March, with the voting age set at twenty-four to exclude the youngest cohort. Germany demanded its cancellation, then Schuschnigg's resignation, then that Seyss-Inquart request German troops — a telegram Berlin drafted and sent for him. Schuschnigg resigned rather than have Austrians shoot at Germans. The Wehrmacht's advance was mechanically shambolic, with tanks breaking down on the roads, and politically effortless. Hitler drove to Linz and to Vienna through cheering crowds and was startled enough by them to annex outright rather than form a union. A plebiscite in April returned 99.7 per cent. Some 70,000 people were arrested in the first weeks, and Jewish Austrians were made to scrub pavements.
- Year: 1938 CE
- Category: Political
