History of germany

Anschluss: 1938

On the morning of March 11 Germany closes the border with Austria. There follows a day of frantic last-minute diplomacy, conducted by telephone and telegram. Hitler is determined that the German army shall be invited into Austria. To this end a succession of ultimatums are made to the Austrians, with the threat of immediate invasion if each is not accepted.

The first is that the proposed plebiscite be postponed. The second is that Schuschnigg resign. He does so just before the deadline of 7.30 pm, declaring in a broadcast to the nation that he is yielding to force. The third, which the Austrian president (Wilhelm Miklas) resists until around midnight, is that Austria's leading Nazi sympathiser be appointed chancellor. 

The man in question is Arthur Seyss-Inquart, whom Schuschnigg has taken into his government in 1937 under pressure from Hitler. Anticipating his new powers by an hour or two, Seyss-Inquart sends a message to Berlin during the evening of March 11, requesting the use of German troops to restore order in Austria.

So there is no opposition when German troops cross the border at dawn on March 12. Hitler decides to follow them, encouraged by reports of German Austrians lining the streets to cheer. That evening in Linz, a town where he went to school and where his parents are buried, he is greeted by an ecstatic gathering of Austrian Nazis. 
He speaks to them in terms of a mission fulfilled: 'If Providence once called me forth from this town to be the leader of the Reich, it must, in so doing, have charged me with a mission - to restore my dear homeland to the German Reich. I have believed in this mission, I have lived and fought for it, and I believe I have now fulfilled it.'

In his enthusiasm he makes an abrupt change of plan. His intention has been to place Seyss-Inquart in control of the country. Now he decides, before moving on to spend a day in Vienna, that Austria is to be absorbed within a greater Germany. It is to be known simply as Ostmark, the eastern frontier. The Anschluss ('union' or 'annexation') is complete. 

And there will be a plebiscite after all. On April 10 every citizen within the new borders will be asked to approve Hitler's action in creating Grossdeutschland, the greater Germany. Of those who vote, 99.08% in Germany say yes. In Austria the figure is even higher, at 99.75%.

Those non-citizens who have no vote, including Vienna's large population of Jews (one sixth of the city), have already had drastic evidence of what life in this greater Germany will mean. Himmler is in Vienna two days before Hitler's arrival, organizing the future activities of the SS and Gestapo. On the day of the Anschluss the first arrests are made. 

The victims will include politicians, trade unionists, more than two thirds of the officers in the Austrian army and some 30,000 Jews. Most of them are despatched to concentration camps in Germany.

The Nuremberg Laws, depriving Jews of their rights, now automatically apply in this eastern province of the Reich. Austria's Jewish community experiences, as if overnight, the full force of the persecution which in Germany has taken the five years of the Nazi regime to build up. In the very first days after the Anschluss Jewish shops and businesses are looted throughout Austria, and individual Jews are attacked and humiliated. By the time ofKristallnacht, later in this same year, Austria is merely one small part of the greater anti-Semitic Germany.