Korea should learn from Austria

Austria and Nazism: Owning Up to the Past
By Dr Robert Knight
Last updated 2011-02-17

When the Wehrmacht marched into Austria in 1938 (and Austrian Nazis took over the country 'from below') they fulfilled one of Hitler's life-long ambitions, the 'return' of German-Austria to the Greater German Reich. The pictures of an ecstatic Führer announcing the event in Vienna, and the equally ecstatic crowds who were listening to him, went all round the world at the time. The contemporary impression that the vast majority of Austrians supported the Anschluss (the union of Austria and Germany in 1938) was reinforced by the overwhelming endorsement it got in the plebiscite held in April 1938.


Austria as victim?
In Moscow, in October 1943, the Allies decided that Austria should be reestablished as an independent state, once the war was won. At the same time they described Austria as the 'first victim of Hitlerite aggression'. Many of Austria's post-war leaders, after some initial hesitation, took this as a lifeline to help them in the foundation of a post-war project, in which Austria claimed it was not guilty for what had happened in the country during the Nazi years.


An investigation by the Austrian government in 1946 described Austrian suffering under German rule, and Austrian resistance to that rule. It also claimed that only a handful of traitors had collaborated with the Nazis. At the end it demanded 'justice for Austria', by which it meant the speedy end of the Four-Power occupation (in fact this occupation was to last until the State Treaty of 1955).

Using this logic, they suggested that justice - including compensation or reparation - for the victims of Nazi rule was a matter for Germany. The Austrian state could not be held liable. Under pressure from the west (the US in particular) post-war Austrian governments did, however, set up a legal administrative framework for returning some of the property taken from victims of Nazi rule in the course of their persecution.


The commission's findings run to 14,000 pages, including 53 individual reports and one volume of conclusions. This amount of research cannot be easily summarised. But broadly speaking it shows the involvement of Austrian individuals, groups and institutions in all facets of expropriation of assets from the Jewish community in the Nazi years; from daylight robbery to more subtle forms of expropriation in the name of economic rationality. It also shows how numerous individual Austrians and institutions - from Vienna's Dorotheum auction house to the state (federal, regional and local) - gained as a result of these activities.

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However, an enormous number of Austrians had been involved with the Nazi regime: as many as 500,000. In a country of just six million people, this turned out to be a significant bloc. The dominant post-war parties, the Socialists and the Christian Socialists, began to actively court former Nazi supporters.


'Instead of the myth of Austria being Nazism's first victim, they moved instead to what is known as the co-responsibility, Mitverantwortung: that Austria had been in fact part of the Third Reich and therefore bore along with Germany some of the responsibility for what happened.'



So after 70 years, with most of the victims now dead, should Austria still be paying for its Nazi past?

'Can you say that these issues end? Well, I think in a legal sense there may be certain kinds of limitations, but these questions have remarkable longevity and they can continue to re-emerge again and again,' says Thomas Berger.

Anschluss
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Anschluss (German: [ˈʔanʃlʊs] (About this soundlisten) "joining") refers to the annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany on 12 March 1938.[1] The word's German spelling, until the German orthography reform of 1996, was Anschluß[2] and it was also known as the Anschluss Österreichs

違いも多くあるだろうけど、韓国とオーストリアは、大雑把に、併合→協力→戦時残虐行為→終戦→犠牲国として独立

は同じなわけで、オーストリアは被害者に補償しようとしているけど、韓国は被害者のまんま。おかしいよなああ。