Did Anschluss was good or bad for Austria?

Between 1938 and mid-1940, the Nazi administration in Austria focused on motivating the economy and relieving social suffering in order to win popular support, encourage working class away from socialism, and facilitate Austria to contribute to the German war machine. By early 1939, the Austrian economy was recovering, and unemployment was falling quickly.

Policies were designed to speed economic efficiency and integration with Germany led to rise of large firms and to the relocation of industry from the east to the Austria-Germany border in the west. Although these changes brought much of the Austrian economy under the control of the Third Reich, the economy was modernized and diversified. Thus, in spite of wartime damage done to the Austrian economy and economic infrastructure, the Anschluss years helped overcome that Austria was economically unviable and laid the foundation for the mixed economy of the postwar years.

These economic advances, however, come together with the Nazi’s political repression and barbaric racial policies, of which the Jews were the principal victims. The Unification with the Nazi Germany legitimized the full venting of Austria’s anti-Semitic political tradition in which the pronounced Jewish presence in key areas of economic, political, and cultural life has associated Jews with many developments in Austrian society that were opposed by the country’s conservative, rural, and Catholic population.

The Jewish population of Austria was numbered approximately 220,000 in 1938. In general Nazi anti-Semitic legislation and policies were imposed more quickly and more expansively in Austria than in Germany, and Austria became the testing ground for the political acceptability of policies later adopted in Germany.

After allowing a sign of violent popular anti-Semitism in the weeks immediately after the Anschluss, the Nazis systematized anti-Semitic persecution. Laws and regulations were implemented to drive Jews from the economic area and out of Austria in general, in an orderly manner to guarantee that the transition did not disrupt the economy or cause the loss of economically valuable possessions.

At first, Jews were encouraged to emigrate and the Central Office for Jewish migration was set up in Vienna to streamline the emigration process. In 1938 about 80,000 Jews left Austria! They left legally and illegally and in the end some 150,000 escape!

However, in October 1941, Germany’s policy of encouraging emigration, already made difficult by the war, was replaced with policies to exterminate the Jews. About one third of Austria’s Jewish population is probably to have died in the Holocaust. As well to the Jews, there were other victims of fatal German nationalism. Austrian Slavic minorities, such as the Czechs. Slovene, Slovaks, and Croats, were under attack for adaptation, deportation, or extermination.

Made by Valeria Pretell