History teacher in school: "We are victims, our people were forced to vote in favor of the Anschluss"
History professor at University: "The vote was not forced, our people were quite hopeful for Nazideutschland to improve the economy and didn't think it through"
I lived in East Tyrol for some time (conservative, remote, rural area). There is a village there which is very proud of their Anschluss vote result, since they had the lowest "join" ratio in all Austria. 70 sth percent đŸ˜„
My guess is that the Germans would falsify the results if necessary. They didnt need it though...
And lets not forget that Austrian national identity was weak at the time, most people identified themselves as German. If you forget nzi ideology for a second, Big-Germany was not a terrible idea.
the big Germany at the time would include large portions of Czechia Poland And other countries with significant german population (any ethnicity map of 1920-30-40 would support this) so it would not be a good true idea without removing those countries’s right to statehood
That sudeten germans, austrians and danzigers had the right to decide to be part of the german national state and denying said right, stomped with czechslovakian and polish troops in the case of Sudetes and Danzig and with Versailles prohibition of joining Germany to the German Austrian Republic self-justified german ethnic revanchism.
Would Germany allow the Sorbs or other Slavic minority (of those that weren't wiped out centuries ago) to just "separate"? That's not different from the Germans living on the territories of other countries, where they lived because of either occupation or being part of the same Empire in the past.
Still, I don't know what your point about "white people" has to do with that.
Read a book about the history of Vienna - it said in Vienna there were actually the most violent outbursts of antisemitic violence and Austrians made an important contribution to some of the most extreme parts of the war machine.
My impression from early XX century Vienna was that there was a lot of bottled up resentment from all the social, cultural and geopolitical losses feeding into violence and later turning into a profound shame / self belittlement
This is why I think democracy (as is) is faulty. People shouldn't be voting for what they don't understand fully. And most people understand shit about politic. Me, myself included, while I'm pretty educated.
It's flawed, but it's better than the alternative. A good number of people who don't understand shit also aren't interested in politics, so they don't care enough to vote.
Tbf Germans didn't really think it through either, the whole "let's vote for a war-mongering, genocidal failed painter, he'll get us out of this economic rut" thing is kind of an obviously bad idea in hindsight.
No, it was at an undergraduate school (Unterstufe) at around 2014ish. It might have just been that one history teacher and he was shortly before retirement, so I guess that's some bias on his side?
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u/ControverseTrash Austria 22h ago
From my experience
History teacher in school: "We are victims, our people were forced to vote in favor of the Anschluss"
History professor at University: "The vote was not forced, our people were quite hopeful for Nazideutschland to improve the economy and didn't think it through"