Austria was the first country to fall to Nazi Germany, but it functioned less like an occupied nation and more like a loyal vassal state. When the German Army crossed the border into Austria in the early hours of March 12, 1938, its progress turned into a victory parade. Austrians filled the streets of their towns and threw their arms up in salute. Some even handed flowers to the passing soldiers or tossed swastika confetti. A British tourist wrote in her journal that the chants of “Sieg Heil” and “One people—one empire—one Leader” were “so repeated that it sounded like a giant pulse beating in your ear.” At Linz, not far from Adolf Hitler’s hometown of Braunau am Inn, “even the trees and streetlamps were full of screaming, shouting people,” one resident remembered.
In CBS Radio’s inaugural “World News Roundup” broadcast on March 13, Edward R. Murrow reported from Vienna. “They lift the right arm a little higher here than in Berlin and the ‘Heil Hitler’ is said a little bit louder,” he noted. With a language and culture shared with Germany, Austrians became fully amalgamated within the Third Reich; in fact, Austrians were the only non-Germans who could become officers in the German armed forces, the Wehrmacht.
Because of the high degree of support for Germany, the fragile pockets of Austrian resistance against the Nazis during the war had to operate differently from those in occupied countries like France or Norway, which had well-armed and wide-ranging networks. Austria’s resistance was not only smaller and more precarious than that of other countries, but it also originated from a more motley collection of motivations. Resistors included politically organized Communists, devout Catholics, apolitical pacifists, and Austrian Legitimists who sought to restore the monarchy under Otto von Habsburg, a prominent voice of Nazi resistance and heir apparent of the Habsburg family dynasty.
As time went on, though, several of these
