Anschluss Austria: 75 Years

From Yahoo Canada:

"Incidents make Jews wary, 75 years after Hitler annexed Austria"

Marina Plistiev, a Kyrgyzstan-born Jew, has lived in Vienna for 34 years but still doesn't like to take public transport.She recalls the day in 1986 as a teenager when she and her four-year-old brother, whom she'd collected from school with a fever, were told to get off a tram for having the wrong tickets, and nobody stuck up for them, apparently because they were Jews. "With me (now), you don't see I'm Jewish but with my children you see that they're Jews. They get funny looks," she told Reuters at Kosherland, the grocery store that she and her husband started 13 years ago. While Austria is one of the world's wealthiest, most law-abiding and stable democracies, the anti-Semitism that Plistiev senses quietly lingers in a nation that was once a enthusiastic executor of Nazi Germany's Holocaust against Jews. After decades of airbrushing it out of history, Austria has come a long way in acknowledging its Nazi past, and the 75th anniversary on Tuesday of its annexation by Hitler's Third Reich will be the occasion for various soul-searching ceremonies. But Jewish leaders who fought hard to win restitution after World War Two are on guard against a rising trend in anti-Semitic incidents, occasionally condemned by Austrian political leaders but seen more generally as a regrettable fact of life. A new poll timed to coincide with the anniversary found that three of five Austrians want a "strong man" to lead the country and two out of five think things were not all bad under Adolf Hitler. That was more than in previous surveys. The history of Vienna - once home to Jewish luminaries of 20th-century culture such as Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Arnold Schoenberg, but later Adolf Eichmann's testing ground for what would become the "Final Solution" that led to genocide of 6 million Jews - means its Jews are always on the alert. Seeking to avoid being forever branded as the country that welcomed absorption by the Third Reich and refused to atone for it, Austria has made gestures to underline its disowning of both the Nazi past and previous manifestations of anti-Semitism. Rabbi Andrew Baker of the American Jewish Congress advocacy group has seen a marked change since a 1991 poll that he helped design found that most Austrians thought it was time to put the memories of the Holocaust behind them. "There was still a social anti-Semitism that kind of defied embarrassment," he said. "The Austrians have come a long way since then, but they had a long way to go." Today's Austrian Jewish community of 15,000 is diverse, formed mainly of post-war immigrants from eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Before the 1938 annexation, the "Anschluss", Austria's Jewish population was 195,000, the same size as present-day Linz, a provincial capital not far from Hitler's birthplace. Two-thirds of them were driven out in the "Aryanisation" program immediately following the Anschluss and all but about 2,000 left behind were killed in concentration camps. Today's Austrian Jewish community is almost entirely in Vienna.

"The most terrible thing was not the way hundreds of thousands of Austrians celebrated Hitler's arrival, but the enthusiasm with which they dispossessed the Jews," recalled Ari Rath, a Holocaust survivor who fled Vienna at the age of 13. "We went from being people to non-persons overnight," he said in fluent German, a language he suppressed for decades. "It's a different Austria now, but you cannot forget it took until 41 years after the war ... before Austrians began seriously to confront the Nazi past of this country." He was referring to the so-called Waldheim Affair of the mid-1980s, in which President Kurt Waldheim was outed as having hidden his knowledge of German atrocities during his wartime past as a Nazi military officer. The case triggered a long-suppressed international debate about Austria's history. Austrians, many of whom had wanted a union with Germany, maintained for decades that their country was Hitler's first victim, ignoring the fact that huge, cheering crowds had greeted Hitler in March 1938 with flowers, Nazi flags and salute. Within days of March 12, tens of thousands of Jews and dissenters were under arrest, imprisoned or packed off to concentration camps. Jews were shut out of jobs and schools, forced to wear yellow badges, and had their property confiscated.

          

^ As the article states it took Austria 41 years to even consider their role in the Holocaust and so it will take them a lot longer to fully move away from it. People wonder why the Austrians were harsher Nazis than the Germans were. It shouldn't be a big surprise. Hitler was Austrian. Plus in most circumstances people on the outs want to show their loyalty and so tend to be more aggressive in their approach. The German Nazis had since 1933 to show their loyalty to the Party while the Austrians started in 1938 and so many felt they had to make up for lost time. Of course that doesn't excuse all the horrible things they did from then to 1945. ^

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/incidents-jews-wary-75-years-hitler-annexed-austria-022043862.html