Austria and Vienna in particular has a sordid history with the genocidal version of anti-Semitism. They actively sought and celebrated the Anschluss and liquidated their Jewish population with frightening speed.
After the war they tried to re-write history into that they were overtaken by Germany and were victims.
Seems not much has changed.
Hitler wouldn’t have been so anti-semitic had he grown up in Germany, rather than Austria.
After the war they tried to re-write history into that they were overtaken by Germany and were victims.
You raise an issue that makes for an interesting historical debate. I know that there were both pro-Nazi and anti-Nazi groups in Austria at the time of the Anschluss. I once had an interesting conversation with an anti-Nazi German man who had left Germany and came to the US a few years before, then went to Austria to engage in anti-Nazi activism and came back to the US just in the nick of time to possibly save his life.
FWIW, the well-know musical, "The Sound of Music," is set in the time frame of the Annschluss and features an anti-Nazi and patriotic Austrian aristocrat named Von Trapp who, IIRC, is forced to leave his native country for Switzerland.
Another question: if the anti-semitism in Austria was so ingrained for so long at the time of the Anschluss, then why and how did Vienna have a fairly large and thriving Jewish community up to then?