Vienna 1938–1955: Anschluss, War, The Third Man and Occupation

The short version

In March 1938 German troops crossed into Austria and the country was annexed to Nazi Germany — the Anschluss. Huge crowds in Vienna welcomed it. Within days the city's Jewish population, then one of the largest in Europe, was being humiliated, robbed and driven out; by 1945 more than 65,000 Austrian Jews had been murdered. Vienna was bombed from 1944, taken by the Red Army in April 1945 and then divided among the Soviet Union, the United States, Britain and France. For ten years the city lived under occupation, a grey, hungry and morally murky world immortalised by the film The Third Man. On 15 May 1955 the Austrian State Treaty was signed at the Belvedere; the last foreign troops left that autumn. This article tells that story with the restraint it demands, and shows where it can be seen and remembered in Vienna today.

Before the Anschluss

The First Republic was bitterly divided. After the short civil war of February 1934, which ended Red Vienna, Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss ruled as a dictator in a Catholic, authoritarian "corporate state". He was murdered by Austrian Nazis in a failed coup in July 1934. His successor, Kurt Schuschnigg, tried to keep Austria independent while under growing pressure from Berlin. In February 1938 Hitler summoned him to Berchtesgaden and forced concessions. Schuschnigg's last move was to call a referendum on independence for 13 March. It never took place.

March 1938

On the evening of 11 March Schuschnigg resigned in a radio address that ended with the words *"God protect Austria"*. Austrian Nazis took over the streets and public buildings that night. On 12 March German troops crossed the border, unopposed and greeted with flowers in many towns. Hitler, born in Braunau am Inn and a failed art student in Vienna before 1914, entered the city on 14 March and stayed at the Hotel Imperial. On 15 March he spoke to a crowd of well over a hundred thousand people on Heldenplatz from the terrace of the Neue Burg. A plebiscite held under Nazi control on 10 April, from which Jews and political opponents were excluded, produced an official "yes" of over 99 per cent.

It is important not to soften what came next. The violence in Vienna began immediately and was often carried out by neighbours rather than German soldiers. Jewish men and women were forced to scrub pro-independence slogans off pavements with brushes, watched by jeering crowds. Shops and apartments were looted and "aryanised". Thousands of political opponents, among them Social Democrats, Communists and supporters of the old regime, were sent to Dachau. Sigmund Freud, then eighty-two, left for London in June; his apartment at Berggasse 19 is now the Sigmund Freud Museum.

Persecution and deportation

In 1938 around 200,000 people in Vienna were classified as Jews under Nazi law. Adolf Eichmann, himself raised in Linz, set up the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in a confiscated Rothschild palace, a machine designed to strip people of their property in exchange for permission to leave. About two-thirds of Vienna's Jews managed to emigrate, often penniless and separated from their families.

During the November Pogrom of 9–10 November 1938, synagogues and prayer houses across the city were set on fire and destroyed, and thousands of Jewish men were arrested. The main synagogue, the Stadttempel, survived only because it was hidden inside a residential block and a fire would have spread to non-Jewish homes. Between 1939 and 1942 most deportation trains left from the Aspang station in Landstrasse for ghettos and killing sites in the East. The Jewish history of the city — before and after — is told in Jewish Vienna.

Other groups were persecuted too: Roma and Sinti, homosexual men, Jehovah's Witnesses, Slovenes in southern Austria, political prisoners, and people with disabilities. At the Steinhof psychiatric hospital, whose Otto Wagner church visitors come to admire, several thousand patients were deported to be killed, and hundreds of children died at the "Am Spiegelgrund" clinic on the grounds. A memorial exhibition there tells their story.

Many Viennese took part in the crimes, and many profited. Some resisted: members of Catholic, Socialist, Communist and monarchist groups were imprisoned or executed, among them the nursing nun Restituta Kafka, beheaded in Vienna in 1943.

War comes home: 1944–1945

For most of the war Vienna was out of range of Allied bombers. That changed in 1944, when raids from Italy began to hit refineries, factories and railway yards and, increasingly, residential districts. To defend the city the regime built six colossal concrete flak towers, in three pairs. They are still there, too massive to demolish: two in the Augarten, two in Arenbergpark, one in the courtyard of the Stiftskaserne barracks, and one in Esterházypark that now houses the aquarium of the Haus des Meeres, with a climbing wall on its outside.

On 12 March 1945 bombs set the State Opera on fire; only the front section with the grand staircase and foyer survived. In April the Battle of Vienna was fought street by street as the Red Army advanced. In the chaos of those days fires spread to the roof of St. Stephen's Cathedral, and the great Pummerin bell crashed down and shattered. The Soviets took the city on 13 April. What followed for many civilians, above all women, was a period of looting and sexual violence that was spoken about openly only decades later.

On 27 April 1945 a provisional government under the veteran Social Democrat Karl Renner declared Austria's independence restored. The Soviet war memorial on Schwarzenbergplatz, the Monument to the Soldiers of the Soviet Army, was unveiled that summer and, under the terms of the later treaty, is still maintained by Austria.

Four in a jeep: the occupied city

Like Germany, Austria and its capital were divided among the four Allies. Vienna had an American, a British, a French and a Soviet sector, while the Innere Stadt was an international zone patrolled jointly by military police of all four powers — the famous "four men in a jeep" — with command rotating every month. The Soviets set up their headquarters in the Hotel Imperial, the British in the Hotel Sacher. Food was rationed, fuel scarce, bomb sites everywhere, and a black market in cigarettes, nylon and medicines flourished.

The Third Man

That is the world of The Third Man (1949), written by Graham Greene and directed by Carol Reed, shot on location in the ruins in 1948. Orson Welles plays Harry Lime, a racketeer selling diluted penicillin that kills children, and the chase through Vienna's sewers and the conversation in a cabin of the Giant Ferris Wheel are among the most famous scenes in cinema. The Riesenrad itself had burned in 1945 and was rebuilt with half its original number of cabins. Anton Karas's zither theme became a worldwide hit.

The film is still woven into the city. The private Third Man Museum in Wieden has an obsessive collection of props, posters and documents about postwar Vienna; check its limited opening days before going. The Burg Kino on the Ring has screened the film regularly for decades, and guided walks take visitors to its locations.

1955: "Austria is free"

Negotiations dragged on for a decade, stalled by the Cold War. They moved only after Stalin's death, when Austria promised to remain permanently neutral. The Austrian State Treaty was signed on 15 May 1955 in the Marble Hall of the Upper Belvedere by the foreign ministers of the four powers and Austria's Leopold Figl, who then showed the signed document to the cheering crowd from the balcony. The last occupation troops left in October, and on 26 October 1955 parliament passed the law on permanent neutrality — today Austria's National Day. In November the rebuilt State Opera reopened with Beethoven's *Fidelio*, an opera about liberation from tyranny. The story of the neutral city that followed is in Vienna, international city.

The long road to memory

For decades postwar Austria described itself as "Hitler's first victim", a phrase taken from the Allies' Moscow Declaration of 1943. It allowed many to avoid the question of Austrian participation. That began to change with the international debate over President Kurt Waldheim's wartime past in 1986, and in 1991 Chancellor Franz Vranitzky acknowledged in parliament Austria's share of responsibility. Restitution funds and memorials followed.

Places of remembrance in Vienna:

• Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial by Rachel Whiteread (2000), a concrete library with its books turned inwards — the memorial page has details.
• The Shoah Wall of Names Memorial in the Ostarrichipark in Alsergrund (2021), carrying the names of more than 64,000 Austrian Jewish victims.
• The Monument against War and Fascism by Alfred Hrdlicka on Albertinaplatz (1988), beside the Albertina, with its much-debated figure of a kneeling Jewish man scrubbing the street.
• Stones of Remembrance, small brass plaques set in pavements outside the last homes of victims, especially in Leopoldstadt.
• Museums: the Museum of Military History covers the war; the House of Austrian History in the Neue Burg covers the Republic from 1918 (check its current opening details).

Visit these places quietly, and give them time. They are not side attractions but part of understanding the city — as much as the palaces described in Habsburg Vienna.