Five Brothers and a War

1938—The Austrian Anschluß

After a program of extorting money from these well-heeled Jews to get out of Austria (30,000 went to the USA) and then the forcible removal, and subsequent murder of the more than 65,000 remaining, there were only 9,000 Jews in Vienna by 1951—six years after the war was over. Even today there are fewer than 7,000. Among the humiliations the Jews were forced into was the cleaning of SS barracks’ latrines using sacred Hebrew prayer cloths. Jews were randomly picked up and arrested. Himmler set up Mauthausen, the first concentration camp, outside of Germany in Linz, Austria. Kurt von Schuschnigg was arrested by the Gestapo and initially kept in solitary confinement, then spent the rest of the war in the Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps. He was freed by the advancing American troops days before Germany surrendered.

nazi germany

Knowing that Austrians were welcoming of the German invasion, Hitler decided to personally lead a parade in his home country. Note Arthur Seyß-Inquart immediately behind Hitler, dressed in a suit.

In the face of Hitler’s invasion of Austria, France and Britain did nothing. Perhaps this was at least partially due to the fact that Hitler was Austrian, but it was definitely because of France’s economic weakness and Britain’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement, whereby Chamberlain wanted to mollify Hitler by giving him certain things that he wanted, in an attempt to then have him stop further aggression. The lesson for Hitler was reinforced that in the face of opposition weakness, he could be bolder. He first re-militarized a section of his own country, effectively giving notice to the entire world that he was cancelling the Treaty of Versailles, then invaded another, an obvious violation of international law, and did so with total impunity.

Five Brothers and a War

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