Hitler's Austria: Popular Sentiment in the Nazi Era, 1938-1945. (Reviews: modern Europe).

Kennedy, Sean

Hitler's Austria: Popular Sentiment in the Nazi Era, 1938-1945, by Evan Burr Bukey. Chapel Hill, North Carolina, University of North Carolina Press, 2000. xvi, 320 pp. $39.95 U.S. (cloth).

Following the Anschluss, Austria became, as Evan Burr Bukey puts it, "a site for the realization of visionary projects that ranged from the separation of church and state, to the extermination of social and racial undesirables and the mass production of rocket engines" (p. 227). While the local Nazis -- an exceptionally fractious lot -- grumbled at their perceived marginalization, their homeland experienced substantial investment and concerted attempts to secure the loyalty of the working class. Yet the Third Reich's policies also involved rural depopulation and anticlerical violence. Most ominously of all, Austrian Jews experienced a particularly virulent antisemitism.

How the Austrian people responded to these policies, and to the privations and upheavals of the Second World War, is the subject of Bukey's judicious, informative, and well-written book. The main thrust of his argument is that support for Hitler's regime was both substantial and durable. The Anschluss was greeted with considerable enthusiasm, as Austrians were relieved that war had been avoided and hopeful at the prospect of economic recovery. And while the population was anxious over the outbreak of war in 1939, there was widespread satisfaction over the victories of 1940.

Even when Hitler's armies began to encounter difficulties, many Austrians were supportive, notwithstanding considerable grumbling about shortages and resentment towards Reich German "carpetbaggers." The Moscow Declaration of 1943, which promised the restoration of Austrian independence and was aimed at stimulating opposition, received a lukewarm reception, and many people were dismayed at the news of the attempt on Hitler's life in July 1944. Only in the final stages of the war did morale really begin to crack -- by the spring of 1945 the violence had come full circle, and in some working-class neighbourhoods was being directed against Nazi supporters. But, although Bukey points out that some 100,000 Austrians eventually became active resisters, he also concludes that the broader public did not identify with their aims.

"Popular sentiment" is, of course, an amorphous thing, and the great strength of Bukey's work is the close attention he pays to variations in outlook among the different segments of Austrian society. The working class, he notes, suffered from grievously high levels of unemployment during the Depression, and had already experienced repression at the hands of the Dolfuss-Schuschnigg regime. Thus, the Nazis' success in lowering unemployment did not go unappreciated, though complaints about inflation and residual attachments to Social Democracy persisted. As for the rural population, it tended to be unenthusiastic. While the Third Reich devoted some resources to the modernization of Austrian agriculture, its officials also implemented an unpopular Entailed Farm Law, fixed prices, and encouraged the emigration of farmhands from the countryside. For devout Catholic peasants -- an appreciable segment of opinion -- anticlericalism was also an issue, though it should be pointed out that their fear of Bolshevism translated into a determination to resist the Soviets, even in 1944-45.

Such cross-cutting sentiments help to illustrate how Austrian Catholicism could be neutralized as a force for dissent. Disturbed by some aspects of Nazi rule, the clergy were nevertheless inclined to support the war against the Soviet Union, and this served to neutralize potential opposition on the part of their parishioners. However, the church also found that Nazi hostility, accompanied by the discontinuation of state financial support and a forced reliance upon voluntary tithing, revealed the limits of its popular base -- over 300,000 people left between 1938 and 1941. In the long run, the sundering of ties to the state would reinvigorate Austrian Catholicism, and a number of disaffected clergy and parishioners moved towards resistance. But in the short run, many Catholics were demoralized.

Bukey also explores the roots and significance of the antisemitism which was widespread in Austria during this period. While mass murder may not have been the inevitable result of this sentiment, "thousands of Austrians, especially in Vienna, yearned to strip the Jews of their rights and property, to segregate them from society, to eliminate them from their midst" (p. 131). Kristallnacht was more savage in Vienna than anywhere in Germany except Middle Franconia, and there was considerable approval at the expulsion of the city's Jewish population. In the final stages of the war, some civilians were forced to confront the full consequences of Nazi policy when they witnessed the SS force-march camp inmates to Mauthausen. Yet, although they were reportedly horrified at what they saw, a 1946 survey in the American zone of occupation suggested that many Austrians believed that although "the Nazis had gone too far in the way they dealt with the Jews, something had to be done to place limits on them" (p. 225).

In a brief epilogue Bukey provides a empathetic assessment of the efforts of Austria's postwar politicians to deal with the past. While strongly lamenting the survival of antisemitic attitudes, he contends that the legacy of interwar political strife, the need to rebuild, and a popular backlash against American de-Nazification all encouraged the construction of a fallacious memory of the war. The xenophobic Freedom Party has sought, with a distressing amount of success, to use this to its political advantage, but Bukey believes that an impressive segment of Austrian opinion is determined to confront the reality of the past. One can only hope, with him, that his book will contribute to this ongoing process. It certainly deserves the attention of all those interested in the dynamics of public opinion under Hitler's "New Order." Sean Kennedy University of New Brunswick