Austria — the Nazis' first victim

"Austria – the Nazis' first victim" was a political slogan first used at the Moscow Conference in 1943 which went on to become the ideological basis for Austria and the national self-consciousness of Austrians during the periods of the allied occupation of 1945-1955 and the sovereign state of the Second Austrian Republic (1955–1980s). According to the interpretation of the slogan by the founders of the Second Austrian Republic, the anschluss of 1938 was an act of military aggression by the Third Reich. Austrian statehood had been interrupted, and therefore revived Austria in 1945 could not and should not be responsible in any way for the Nazis' crimes. The "victim theory" formed by 1949 (German: Opferthese, Opferdoktrin) insisted that all the Austrians, including strong supporters of Hitler, had been unwilling victims of a Nazi regime and therefore were not responsible for its crimes.

The "victim theory" became a fundamental myth of Austrian society. For the first time in Austrian history, this made it possible for previously bitter political opponents – i.e. the social democrats and the conservative Catholics – to unite and to bring former Nazis back to the social and political life. For almost half a century, the Austrian state denied any continuity of the political regime of 1938–1945, actively kept up the self-sacrificing myth of Austrian nationhood and cultivated a conservative spirit of nation unity. Postwar denazification was quickly wound up; veterans of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS took an honourable place in society. The struggle for justice by the actual victims of Nazism – first of all Jews – were deprecated as an attempt to obtain illicit enrichment at the expense of all the nation.

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