Austria followed an even shorter route to transforming its citizens from perpetrators into victims. Taking its cue from the Allies’ Moscow Declaration of 1943, on 27 April 1945 Austrian independence from the Reich was declared, with the assertion that the Anschluss of March 1938 had made Austria the ‘first victim’ of National Socialist aggression. Ten years later, a State Treaty was signed, giving formal Allied recognition to the non-aligned Second Republic, and its first article enshrined this myth. When Austria opened a permanent exhibition in the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1978, it
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