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22.6.2010: Austria’s perception of World War II: Weak memory of the outward aggression. Hannes HOFBAUER (Austria).

My father was 17 years old, when he was told to put on a new uniform and to follow the military track towards the East. It took him some time to realize that World War II had begun. From one day to the other, it was no more the labour service that he was obliged to work in when his last school days were over, but the Wehrmacht he found himself put into. The attack on Poland began.

All the decades later my father did not talk much about his expedition in the framework of the biggest aggression seen in the 20th century. Only when it came to discuss his captivity under Soviet control he told to his sons that he was fine with the Russians who guarded the camp. “We did not get much to eat, but the Russians themselves had no food”, he used to describe the situation in a Soviet camp of war prisoners in 1945. Geopolitical backgrounds of the war and the driving forces, which pressed him and his generation to conquer half a continent he did not understand, neither when he was on the battlefield, nor after his return home. From the side of the freed Austrian state no attempts were made to discuss the causes for fascist aggression. The political clearing off only started in the 1980s, more than a generation later, when most of the participants of the German attack were already dead or too old to reflect this new program of education.

There may be psychological reasons, why the analysis of what had happened in the years 1939 to 1945 was postponed for such a long period of time. Not only the surviving cadres of the Nazi-regime benefited from this lack of discussion, but also the new establishment, which defined antifascism and the causes of the aggression according with their interests.

The 1st of September 2009 will not see official memory or manifestations to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the beginning of World War II in Vienna. Parliamentary holidays in Austria end on the 2nd of September.

German Austria in World War II. Some basic figures
It was on the 12th of March 1938 when German troops entered Austria and thereby wiped out the state from the map. During the following months and years Austrians integrated into Nazi Germany almost perfectly. Historians counted 690.000 “Austrian” members of the NSDAP in March 1943, 20.000 out of them organized in the SS.

Resistance movements were composed of various groups and reasons. On top of them we have to mention the Austrian communists, followed by clerical conservatives, left-wing unionists and the majority of the Austrian Slovenes living in Carinthia in the south of the country. It was in this region where some small mountainous areas resisted occupation and stayed free during the whole period of Nazi rule. The main figures of the Social Democratic party did not participate in the resistance movement. Their leader, Karl Renner, who was appointed as the first chancellor after 1945 by the Soviet forces, asked his party followers in March 1938 to vote “Yes” with regard to the integration of Austria into Hitler’s Germany. His “Yes” to the “Anschluss” (annexation) hindered the Social Democrats from clearing off their positions with regard to Nazism and war for more than a whole generation.

During the six years of the war, industry and agriculture only functioned with foreign workers, because the young male Austrians did their “duty” on the European battlefields. These foreign workers were mainly forced workers caught and abducted in East Europe, in Poland, Belarus, Ukraine and Russia. Up to 540.000 of them were misused on the territory of Austria in August 1944.

Financial compensation for forced labourers
In the year 2000 the Austrian government under the chancellorship of the liberal-conservative Wolfgang Schüssel was ready to bring the question of compensating the work of forced labourers to an end. It lasted 55 years until the achievements of the surviving “Eastern labourers” finally were acknowledged, at least financially, although only with a symbolic amount of money. The Austrian government created a fund of 430 Mio. Euro to pay compensation to the 150.000 forced workers who still were alive in the year 2000, which is 2800.- Euro for every former forced worker. The respective claim of Russian, Belorussian and Ukrainian organizations finally was successful, although the majority of the forced workers had died in the meanwhile. To understand the position of official Austria concerning this matter (and why it took so long to compensate this cruelty) we have to take into account the enormous sensibility for this question among the war generation. The compensation of the forced labourers only was possible because most of the Austrian participants in the war had died in the meanwhile. They wouldn’t have understood a financial contribution for “foreign workers” (as Nazi Germany used to name them). To avoid any protest against this compensation, the Austrian government introduced a new sort of small pension for the former soldiers of the Wehrmacht just before the law to compensate the forced workers was issued. This pension should compensate the harm Austrian solders in uniforms of the Wehrmacht had to suffer in captivity. A special Austrian law guarantees between 15.- and 37.- Euro per month for every former soldier, which means that a former young Wehrmacht soldier who reaches an age of 90 will receive an additional pension of 4500 Euro. To be very clear on the geopolitical aspect of this scandal, the only harm that originally would have entitled a former prisoner to receive this newly introduced pension was the harm suffered in Soviet prisoners’ camps. Soldiers who were imprisoned by French, British or American army were not supposed to get this financial compensation until one of them won a legal claim.

This new pension for the time being caught in Soviet camps has two impacts for today’s perception of World War II. First it reveals a slightly anti-Russian impact, telling to the public that the camps of the Red Army were much more cruel than the ones of other allies. If this was true, the reasons should be discussed. My father understood quite well why there was not enough food in the Soviet camps, simply because the German aggression had destroyed the country. Second the new pension for Soviet-captured Austrian prisoner’s of war served to establish a social acceptance to spend money for compensating forced Slavic labourers. Although World War II is over since more than 60 years the topic is highly sensitive in actual Austrian politics.

Violence on the inside and outward aggression
The deep gap in the perception of World War II lies in different approaches concerning internal and external factors of what had happened during the Nazi regime. The discussion on the internal factors dominates widely and ranks its observations along notions like dictatorship, racism and anti-Semitism. Expansion is hardly used as a category for explaining the idea of the German politics, its cruelty is not denied, however. As if the ideology of expansion could be separated from being put into practice. The current explanation of the driving forces of the Second World War concentrates all its efforts on the violence and persecution inside the German Reich. It does so as if the war could be explained by anti-democratic politics and repressive methods against the German population. This is more or less the background of what politicians, media and schoolbooks focus on when the period of World War II is on the agenda. Political dictatorship und Holocaust are in the very centre of the public perception. Conversly, the attack on Poland and the war against Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States more and more escapes perception. Discussions on driving economic forces to overcome a structural crisis by expanding territory, markets and fields of interests got completely out of the field of vision.

This phenomenon has various causes: first the debate on the driving forces of fascism in Austria (and Western Germany) in the mainstream research and media works are heavily engaged in looking for personal guilt and social psychological aspects. As a result, materialist analysis explaining the rise of fascism were marginalized. In this perspective Hitler had to convince the steel and military industry around Krupp and others to support his idea of expansive politics. And not the other way round, that it was the big industry in crisis looking for and supporting a political movement to create state demand for their products, and to make war as the perfect means of realization of profits.

Second the Austrian (and Western German) main stream perception of the crimes of the Nazi regime is more and more monopolizing the definition of the phenomenon of fascism as a whole. The topic of expansion and outward aggression are not within this discourse, which is somehow ironic, because the reason behind the rise of the fascist German Reich was to expand militarily and by this to overcome the economic problems of the late 1920s and the political und military restrictions coming out from the Paris peace treaty in 1919. The attack on Poland and the war against the East aimed at taking over the main economic enterprises and branches in Eastern Europe. Coal and steel in Upper Silesia, oil in Romania and agricultural products in Ukraine etc. pp. were the reasons to expand German territory und to increase the “Lebensraum” (living space) for the German people.

An old peasant in Lower Austria still remembers his agricultural training in 1942. It was a special school near his home, 150 kilometres from Vienna, where a whole class of agrarian apprentices were instructed to grow wheat on Ukrainian earth. This soil was brought by train over more than 1000 kilometres into the German Reich to make young peasants familiar with the soil on which they would work in the near future.

Thirdly and most important, the reason to neglect respectively repress the perception of World War II as a militarily backed economic “Drang nach Osten” today is to avoid any discussion of structural similarity with the situation after 1989/1991. When the three multi-ethnic states Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia fell apart in the early 1990s – as a consequence of the showdown of Comecon and the communist system – the big western capital was ready to take over the core economic enterprises and industrial branches in the East. Again this was a reaction vis-à-vis the economic decline, which caused problems for the capitalist world system in the core countries as well as in the peripheries since the middle of the 1970s. Western capital was not only ready for market expansion, but it needed this expansion to overcome respectively – as we know since autumn 2008 – to postpone the structural crisis of overproduction.

Any analogy between the “Drang nach Osten” of the Nazis in 1939/1941 and the expansion of Western interests in 1989/91 has to be avoided in the eyes of present politics. This is the main reason why the perception of World War II in Austria (and most of the countries in the European Union) more or less rejects any economic analysis. “Today the European space gives rich opportunities to our political sphere of interest to fulfill the framework of our capacity. The tasks to be solved are as huge, that beside us also our highly developed neighbour-countries find a broad field for exporting their capital.” This is what Hermann Josef Abs, member of the board of the “Deutsche Bank” said on a conference on the 25th of October 1940 when he spoke of the possibilities of German expansion. It does not sound so different of what we are used to hear from the side of European Union today. This is not astonishing: Abs became chief of the “Deutsche Bank” after 1945.

However, capital and market expansions after 1989/91 were not connected with military aggression, one could argue. And he is right, if we compare it with the situation in 1939/41. But he is not totally right, because the economic take-over was escorted not only by political and legal transformation in the respective societies, but also by military expansion. We have to remember the NATO-war on Yugoslavia, which marked the end of a period of peace in Europe after 1945. And one could easily see that this war was not fought in order to support self-determination in Croatia, Slovenia or Kosovo. The 78-day NATO-raid was done because the Serb authorities refused to integrate into the concept of IMF’s, US’s and EU’s post-communist New World Order. Not only this hot war was accompanying the economic expansion of western capital after 1989/91. The enlargement of NATO in case of new EU-membership seems to be a condition, otherwise it could not be explained, why each new member of European Union got member of NATO before EU-accession. And not to forget: soldiers of European Union-states (including Austrian soldiers in some cases) today are deployed in Kosovo, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Macedonia and (occasionally) Albania.

This kind of discussion is feared heavily and therefore avoided when it comes to speak about the reasons and driving forces behind the Second World War. A typical discourse can be shown in a speech of Heinz Fischer, the actual president of Austria. On the 5th of March 2009, in commemorating the 60th anniversary of the “European Council”, he expresssed the official Austrian view on the causes for the biggest catastrophe of the 20th century: “It is not easy to understand even today how it could have come to this (Nazi-regime and war, HH). It is not enough to see all responsibility in the personality of Hitler. (…)We have to deal with every single element of the total failure and lack of humanity, the gigantism of the evil. We have to explain racism and xenophobia.” No word on outward aggression and economic reasons behind. The official Austria is not ready to discuss material backgrounds of the “evil”. The perception of fascism and war seems to be a means of “weapons of mass distraction”, to use an idiom of Nobel-prize-winner Paul Krugman.

 

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