Hitler, Chamberlain and Munich by Nick Shepley

Author:Nick Shepley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Hitler, Chaimberalin, Munich, War, Reararmament, Treaty of Versailles, Czech Crisis, Poland, World War Two, Czechoslovakia
ISBN: 9781783331079
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited
Published: 2013-06-20T00:00:00+00:00

Austria

The Anschluss, the union between Austria and Germany, has been banned in the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Hitler, himself an Austrian German, born in Braunau am Inn in the Innviertel region in upper Austria, had loathed the racially and ethnically diverse nature of the Austro Hungarian Empire into which he was born, seeing it as a mongrel state. He had long since harboured ambitions about returning post Versailles Austria, a small impoverished rump state, predominantly of German speakers, to the greater Germanic racial community of the Reich.

Similarly to Germany in the immediate aftermath of World War One, a republic was declared in Austria. Initially the parliament of Imperial Austria, in October 1918, the Reichsrat, met as a provisional government, and at the end of the month established the state of German Austria. The Emperor was quickly persuaded not to have any role in government business, and the revolutions in both Russia and Germany had convinced him that the days of the ruling autocrat were long gone, wisely, he removed himself from any form of decision making.

The Treaty of St Germain in 1919 apportioned many German Austrians and their territories to other newly created countries across central Europe. Over three million Austrians became citizens of Italy, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia, and it was the scattering of these Germanic citizens that gave Hitler an immense amount of ammunition against the supposed hypocrisy of the Treaty of Versailles. He claimed that the principals of self determination, laid out in Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points applied to everyone else except Germans, and that for those German Austrians separated from the rest of their peoples, only tyranny would result. Across central and eastern Europe, there was in fact remarkably little persecution of ethnic German minorities before the war, the only reports of prejudice were fictitious and exaggerated works of Goebbels imagination.

Austria’s new post imperial status meant that she was shorn of much of her industry, situated as it was in Czechoslovakia, she now had to rely on a largely agrarian economy, and by the early 1920s was facing dire economic troubles, with galloping inflation, partly caused by the mass printing of currency during the war, in a bid to quickly repay mounting debt.

As inflation ate away at the value of the Austrian Krone, a League of Nations loan was organised in order to prevent bankruptcy and the collapse of the republic. The loan was a watershed moment in Austrian political history, for it signalled an end to Austrian economic autonomy, as the conditions that were attached to the granting of the loan meant that the Austrian economy was essentially supervised from abroad by League Of Nations creditors. Throughout the 1920s Austria was dominated by the Christian Social Party, a stable centre right party that represented the Catholic majority in Austria, along with the business interests of the middle classes, but this did not mean that it was free from instability.

As with a Germany in the 1920s, the far left and the extreme right both existed not only as political forces, but also as a paramilitary presence in the streets.

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