Fascism och nazism i Österrikes historia

For us Swedes, Austria is associated above all with the Alpine landscape, the open expanses and Vienna as Europe's city of culture. Behind this idyll lies a brown history. Setting out from the Habsburg empire and its dissolution at the end of the First World War, the author recounts the turbulent 1920s, which in the mid-1930s ended first with the victory of fascism and, a few years later, with the arrival of Nazism in 1938.

Austrians greeted Hitler's Anschluss by turning out almost to a man to welcome him in Linz, Vienna and in his birthplace of Braunau am Inn. Austrians thereafter played a central role in the Holocaust of Europe's Jews. For a long time after the Second World War the country managed to conceal its real history by means of the so-called victim theory — a theory the Allies handed it on a silver platter by declaring in 1943 that Austria had been Hitler's first victim. In today's Austria the victim theory has been thrown on the rubbish heap of history. Instead one encounters memorials and museums at concentration camps that were once hidden from public view.