Anschluss

In March 1938 Nazi Germany absorbed Austria. Under threat of invasion, the Austrian chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg cancelled a planned vote on independence and resigned, and on 12 March German troops crossed the border unopposed. The union, known by the German word Anschluss, or "joining", ended Austria's existence as an independent state until 1945, began the brutal persecution of Austria's Jews and was the first of Adolf Hitler's territorial seizures before the Second World War.

When Germany was unified in 1871, Austria was left outside the new empire. After Austria-Hungary collapsed in 1918, the small German-speaking republic that remained declared itself part of Germany, and many on the left and centre doubted that it could survive alone. The peace treaties of 1919, Versailles and Saint-Germain, forbade any union. During the 1920s the idea retained wide support, but once Hitler, himself Austrian-born, took power in Germany in 1933, it became bound up with Nazi plans to gather all ethnic Germans into a Greater German Reich.

From 1933 Austria was ruled by an authoritarian, Catholic-nationalist regime under Engelbert Dollfuss that banned the Austrian Nazi Party and opposed union with Germany. Austrian Nazis waged a terror campaign, and on 25 July 1934 they murdered Dollfuss in a failed coup. His successor, Schuschnigg, relied on Benito Mussolini's Italy, which then backed Austrian independence. In July 1936, however, he signed an agreement with Germany releasing imprisoned Nazis and promising to follow Berlin's lead in foreign policy. As Mussolini drew closer to Hitler, Austria lost its protector, and Hermann Göring pressed for annexation to obtain Austria's iron ore, gold reserves and labour. In November 1937 Hitler told his military chiefs that he intended to seize Austria and Czechoslovakia.

At a meeting at Berchtesgaden on 12 February 1938, Hitler bullied Schuschnigg into appointing the Austrian Nazi Arthur Seyss-Inquart as minister in charge of the police. On 9 March, seeking to rally the country, Schuschnigg announced a referendum on independence for 13 March, setting the voting age at 24 to exclude younger voters among whom the Nazis were strongest. Hitler demanded that the vote be called off and Schuschnigg replaced by Seyss-Inquart. With no help forthcoming from Britain or France, Schuschnigg resigned on the evening of 11 March, telling Austrians by radio that he would not shed German blood. A telegram requesting German troops was sent in Seyss-Inquart's name before he had even been appointed chancellor.

On the morning of 12 March the German 8th Army entered Austria. The Austrian army had been ordered not to resist, and crowds greeted the troops with flowers and Nazi salutes. Hitler crossed at his birthplace, Braunau am Inn, and on 15 March addressed a huge crowd on Vienna's Heldenplatz, proclaiming his homeland's entry into the Reich. Arrests began at once: some 70,000 people were detained within days. Jews were humiliated in the streets, forced to scrub pavements, and robbed of homes and businesses. A plebiscite on 10 April, held under intimidation and with around 360,000 people excluded from voting, officially recorded 99.7 per cent approval. Historians still debate how many Austrians genuinely welcomed annexation.

Britain and France protested but did nothing; Neville Chamberlain told the House of Commons that only force could have prevented it. Mexico made the strongest formal protest at the League of Nations. Emboldened, Hitler turned next to Czechoslovakia, leading to the Munich Agreement in September 1938.

Austria became the German province of Ostmark. Some 130,000 Jews had left Vienna by the end of 1941; of more than 65,000 Viennese Jews deported, fewer than 2,000 survived the Holocaust. In 1943 the Allies declared the annexation null and void, and a provisional government did the same on 27 April 1945. After ten years of Allied occupation, the Austrian State Treaty of 1955 restored full sovereignty. From 1949 until the late 1980s many Austrians found comfort in portraying their country as Nazism's first victim, an idea drawn from the 1943 Allied declaration.

Our 1930 map shows an independent Austria beside Weimar Germany, while our 1938 map shows Nazi Germany in the year of the annexation.