Grim Anniversary: Austria Remembers Nazi Takeover

Austrian leaders urged their people on Wednesday not to dismiss the Nazi past as no longer relevant 70 years after Hitler took over the country with popular support.

They spoke at a special session of parliament marking the 70th anniversary of the "Anschluss" annexation, to be followed after nightfall by a silent candle-lit vigil in a Vienna square where huge crowds once cheered Hitler's return to his homeland.

It has been an occasion for discussion about the extent to which Austrians were victims of Nazism or willing accomplices. Most Austrians now agree they were deeply complicit in the Nazi machinery of war and genocide after decades of denial.

However, a poll released on Tuesday showed 60 percent of Austrians were weary of talk about the past after six decades of democracy now anchored in the European Union.

Political leaders warned them against temptations to close the book on the Anschluss, when local Nazis, told Hitler's columns were about to cross the border, seized power overnight and immediately began purging foes and persecuting Jews.

"We cannot draw a line under the past because the events of 1938-45 retain resonance today," parliament president Barbara Prammer said, referring to polls in which a quarter of those aged 14-24 still yearned for a "strong leader".

The post-war position that Austrians were victims of Hitler had proven to be "a fiction of history", she said. But Austria only "belatedly acknowledged injustices" done in its name by agreeing a reparations fund for Jews within the past decade.

The legionnaires had indeed had their day, as they could finally admit publicly to their allegiance to the previously banned Nazi party without fear of reprisals. The National Socialists were fully in control and Gleichschaltung, the forced coordination of Austrian society, was well underway, just three weeks after Nazi Germany's annexation of its neighbor, on March 12, 1938.

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But the idea isn't that people should pass judgment, said Fritz Hausjell, the project's head of research and a professor of communications history at the University of Vienna. It's meant to give people a sense of how the contemporaneous press interpreted Nazi Austria from both inside and outside the country.

 

"We want to show how the media was used to facilitate this system, how the construction of reality was facilitated by the media," Hausjell said.

A Jewish sports club that once produced Olympic champions for Austria reopened its doors on Tuesday, 70 years after being forcibly dissolved in the Nazi takeover of the country.

The festive rebirth of the Hakoah sports centre coincided with a week of otherwise solemn events commemorating the Nazi "Anschluss", or annexation, in March 1938 which many Austrians welcomed at the time to the shame of many today.

"Today, we can see that the Third Reich has turned to dust, Nazi ideology is outlawed and Hakoah lives on," club chief Paul Haber told reporters before a ceremony attended by Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer, Jewish and other civic leaders.

Hakoah, founded in 1909 and meaning "strength" in Hebrew, was an eminent name in pre-World War Two European sport. Some of its athletes won Olympic medals in swimming and wrestling.

But its very creation reflected anti-Semitism -- a refusal of other sport associations in Austria to admit Jews.