Anschluss
The Anschluss was the annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany, completed on the 12th of March 1938 without a single shot fired. German troops crossed the border that morning and were met with cheering crowds, Nazi salutes, and flowers. The event was dubbed the Blumenkrieg: the Flower War. Yet behind that striking image lay decades of fractured politics, coercion, and a question that divided Austria to its core: was this a homecoming, or a conquest? The documentary that follows traces how a 19th-century debate about German nationhood became the justification for a 20th-century takeover, and asks what the Austrians themselves actually wanted.
Otto von Bismarck's 1871 unification of Germany deliberately excluded Austria, creating what Austrian Social Democrat leader Otto Bauer called "the conflict between our Austrian and German character." The exclusion had a strategic logic: it kept Germany firmly Protestant and firmly Prussian. Austria, with its Catholic Habsburg dynasty and its sprawling multi-ethnic empire, was a rival, not a partner.
When the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed in 1918, Austria was stripped of its imperial territories by the Treaty of Saint-Germain and the Treaty of Versailles. The same treaties banned the new republic from calling itself "German-Austria" and forbade any union with Germany. Plebiscites in the border provinces of Tyrol and Salzburg returned majorities of 98% and 99% in favor of joining the Weimar Republic, though historian Erich Bielka later documented serious electoral fraud, including pre-printed "Ja" ballots distributed at polling stations and a train chartered from Bavaria to bring Tyrolean emigrants home to vote.
By the early 1930s, scholars like Jody Manning estimated that no more than half of Austrians actually favored union in 1919, and even Otto Bauer conceded that the conservative bourgeoisie and the peasantry preferred an independent Austria. The legal prohibition of Anschluss therefore fell on ground that was far less unified than its proponents claimed.
Adolf Hitler joined the German Workers' Party on the 12th of September 1919 as its 55th member. From his earliest political writings, reuniting Austria with Germany was not peripheral to his worldview; it was the opening demand. The 1920 National Socialist Program stated as its first point: "We demand the unification of all Germans in the Greater Germany on the basis of the people's right to self-determination." In Mein Kampf, published in 1925, Hitler wrote that he would achieve this union by any means possible.
Once Hitler became chancellor of Germany on the 30th of January 1933, the Anschluss concept fused with Nazi racial ideology. The "Heim ins Reich" policy sought to incorporate as many ethnic Germans living outside Germany as possible into a Greater Germany. Nazi agents worked inside Austria to destabilize the government, which was controlled by the Fatherland Front, a movement that fiercely opposed union. The campaign turned violent: Austrian Nazis murdered Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss in July 1934 in a failed coup. Dollfuss's successor, Kurt Schuschnigg, called Austria "the better German state" and looked to Mussolini's Italy for protection.
The Austrian Nazis who fled to Germany after the failed coup continued organizing from exile. Between 1933 and 1938, terrorist attacks against Austrian governmental institutions caused 164 deaths and 636 injuries.
Hermann Goering's role in forcing the Anschluss was driven less by ideology than by industrial desperation. Hitler's Four Year Plan, launched in September 1936, demanded that Germany be ready for a world war by 1940. The plan required massive investment in the Reichswerke steel works and synthetic oil programs that soon ran wildly over budget. British historian Ian Kershaw wrote that Goering, "far more than Hitler, throughout 1937 made the running and pushed the hardest for an early and radical solution to the 'Austrian Question'."
In a secret speech before German industrialists in April 1937, Goering stated plainly that the only solution to the steel production shortfall was to annex Austria, which he noted was rich in iron. His calculations were not wrong: Austria supplied Germany with magnesium and the products of the iron, textile, and machine industries, and held gold and foreign currency reserves of 748 million Reichsmarks in its central bank, more than twice Germany's own cash at the time.
Goering's vision differed from Hitler's in emphasis. Goering wanted Eastern Europe inside a German economic sphere he called the Grossraumwirtschaft. Annexing Austria was the key first step toward that broader economic bloc, not simply a racial project. He was prepared to push for Anschluss even at the risk of losing Italy as an ally.
On the 12th of February 1938, Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg traveled to Hitler's mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden. He left with an ultimatum: appoint Arthur Seyss-Inquart as Minister of Public Security, with full and unlimited control of the police, or face the consequences. Seyss-Inquart, a long-time Nazi sympathizer, favored an evolutionary approach to union while opposing the violent tactics of the Austrian Nazi underground. He also cooperated with Catholic groups and hoped to preserve some measure of Austrian identity within a united state. To Schuschnigg, appointing him was handing the keys to a man who would unlock the door from the inside.
On the 9th of March 1938, Schuschnigg announced a referendum on Austrian independence to be held just four days later. He set the minimum voting age at 24, reasoning that Nazi support was strongest among younger Austrians. He also made a deal with Austrian Socialists: legalize their press, return confiscated funds, and reinstate their symbols in exchange for backing at the polls. According to analyst Peter R. Knaur, Nazi leadership privately admitted they commanded only twenty percent of potential votes in the country, which is why they could not allow the plebiscite to proceed.
Hitler sent an ultimatum on the 11th of March demanding Schuschnigg resign and hand power to Seyss-Inquart. The deadline was noon, then extended by two hours. Hitler had already signed the invasion order at one o'clock without waiting for an answer. That evening, President Wilhelm Miklas refused to appoint Seyss-Inquart, but eventually resigned himself to the outcome after midnight. A forged telegram was sent in Seyss-Inquart's name requesting German troops before he even held the chancellorship.
Within days of the 12th of March, 70,000 people had been arrested. Heinrich Himmler and a group of SS officers had flown into Vienna before the first German soldier crossed the border, targeting prominent figures of the First Republic including Leopold Figl and Richard Schmitz. Social Democrats, Communists, and Austrian Jews were swept into prisons and concentration camps. The disused northwest railway station in Vienna was converted into a makeshift detention facility.
The plebiscite held on the 10th of April recorded 99.7% support for the Anschluss. Historian Evan Burr Bukey warned that this result demands "great caution": around 360,000 people, roughly 8% of eligible voters, had their voting rights stripped away, mostly Jews, Romani people, and former members of left-wing parties. Officials stood directly beside the open voting booths and received ballots by hand. The village of Innervillgraten recorded 73.3% support, the lowest of any Austrian municipality, which itself underscores how far the official figure departed from the secret-ballot norm.
Historian Gerhard Botz argued the Nazis did not falsify the count but that Cardinal Innitzer's and Karl Renner's endorsements opened Catholic-conservative and socialist voters to a yes vote. Other scholars disagreed sharply: Julie Thorpe cautioned that such endorsements do not stand as evidence for pan-German sympathies among Austria's working population, and British historian Donny Gluckstein noted that Austrian socialists reacted with "disgust" to Renner's statement. Political scientist Eric Voegelin, who fled Austria shortly after the Anschluss, wrote that "there was not much doubt that in 1938 a majority of Austrians did not favor a union with Germany."
Jewish women and men were forced onto the streets of Vienna within days of the 12th of March, compelled to scrub away pro-independence slogans painted for the cancelled plebiscite. Jewish actresses from the Theater in der Josefstadt were put to work cleaning toilets by the SA. The Nuremberg Laws were applied in Austria from May 1938, and Jews were gradually blocked from virtually all professions, expelled from schools and universities, and required to wear the yellow badge from September 1941.
Kristallnacht, the pogrom of the 9th and the 10th of November 1938, destroyed every synagogue and prayer house in Vienna and in other Austrian cities including Salzburg. The Stadttempel was the sole survivor, protected only because its location inside a residential block prevented it from being burned without destroying neighboring buildings. More than 6,000 Jews were arrested overnight; the majority were deported to Dachau in the days that followed.
By the end of 1941, 130,000 Jews had left Vienna. Thirty thousand went to the United States. Those who departed had to surrender all property and pay the Reich Flight Tax, though some received help from international aid organisations to cover the cost. Of the more than 65,000 Viennese Jews later deported to concentration camps, fewer than 2,000 survived.
The persecution extended to the Romani community. Between 1938 and 1939, around 2,000 Romani men were sent to Dachau and 1,000 Romani women to Ravensbrück. Starting in 1939, Austrian Romani were required to register with local authorities, and Nazi racial theory eventually declared 90% of them to be of mixed ancestry, placing them on the same legal footing as Jews.
The Moscow Declaration of 1943, signed by the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom, called Austria "the first free country to fall a victim to Hitlerite aggression" and declared the Anschluss null and void. That language gave Austrian politicians a framework: the victim theory, known in German as the Opferthese, which held that Austria had been annexed by force and bore no collective responsibility. The theory was politically useful in the postwar negotiations that led to the Austrian State Treaty of 1955, which restored Austrian sovereignty and kept the country from being divided as Germany was.
The reckoning Austria avoided for decades arrived in the 1980s. The catalyst was the 1986 presidential election of Kurt Waldheim, a former UN Secretary-General who was accused of Nazi party membership and membership in the Sturmabteilung. Waldheim was later absolved of direct war crimes involvement, but the affair forced public discussion of a past that had been carefully set aside. That same year, Jorg Haider took the chairmanship of the Freedom Party of Austria and began using rhetoric that critics described as apologetic toward Austria's Nazi-era past, including calling members of the Waffen-SS "men of honour."
Thomas Bernhard's 1988 play Heldenplatz, staged at Vienna's Burgtheater fifty years after Hitler addressed the crowds on that same square, provoked outrage before a single performance had taken place. Politicians called Bernhard a Nestbeschmutzer, someone who soils his own nest. Waldheim, still president, called the play "a crude insult to the Austrian people." By 2008, a survey found that 82% of Austrians considered themselves a separate nation; in 1987, only 6% identified as German. Austria formed a Historical Commission in 1998 with a mandate to examine the Nazi expropriation of Jewish property; its report came in 2003, though noted Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg refused to participate, citing objections to what he saw as Austria's relative inattention to its own culpability.
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Common questions
What was the Anschluss and when did it happen?
The Anschluss was the annexation of the Federal State of Austria into Nazi Germany, completed on the 12th of March 1938. German troops crossed the border unopposed after Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg resigned under threat of invasion, and Austria ceased to exist as an independent state.
Why did Hitler want to annex Austria?
Hitler, an Austrian German by birth, wrote in Mein Kampf in 1925 that he would unite Austria and Germany by any means possible. The first point of the 1920 National Socialist Program demanded unification of all Germans in a Greater Germany, and the "Heim ins Reich" policy sought to incorporate ethnic Germans living outside Germany into the Reich.
Did Austrians support the Anschluss?
The official plebiscite of the 10th of April 1938 recorded 99.7% support, but historians treat this figure with caution. Around 360,000 people, roughly 8% of eligible voters, were stripped of their voting rights before the vote. Political scientist Eric Voegelin, who fled Austria after the annexation, wrote that "there was not much doubt that in 1938 a majority of Austrians did not favor a union with Germany."
What happened to Austrian Jews after the Anschluss?
Persecution began immediately on the 12th of March 1938. Jews were forced onto the streets, expelled from professions and schools, and subjected to the Nuremberg Laws from May 1938. By the end of 1941, 130,000 Jews had left Vienna. Of the more than 65,000 Viennese Jews deported to concentration camps, fewer than 2,000 survived.
What role did Hermann Goering play in pushing for the Anschluss?
Goering was the loudest voice within Nazi leadership calling for annexation, driven primarily by economic pressure. Hitler's Four Year Plan was falling behind its steel production targets, and in a secret speech before German industrialists in April 1937, Goering stated that annexing Austria, rich in iron, was the only solution. British historian Ian Kershaw wrote that Goering, far more than Hitler, made the running throughout 1937 in pushing for an early resolution of the Austrian question.
How did the Anschluss affect Austria's postwar identity?
From 1949 to 1988, many Austrians relied on the "victim theory," the idea that Austria was the first country forcibly occupied by Nazi Germany, to avoid a full reckoning with domestic complicity. The theory supported the 1955 Austrian State Treaty restoring sovereignty. By 2008, a survey found 82% of Austrians considered themselves a distinct nation; in 1987, only 6% identified as German.
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