Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

In 1947 the Austrian authorities passed a law distinguishing between ‘more’ and ‘less’ incriminated Nazis. 500,000 of the latter were amnestied the following year and their voting rights restored. The former—about 42,000 in all—would all be amnestied by 1956. After that Austrians simply forgot about their involvement with Hitler altogether. One reason for the ease with which Austria emerged from its dalliance with Nazism is that it suited all local interests to adjust the recent past to their advantage: the conservative People’s Party, heir to the pre-war Christian Social Party, had every reason to burnish its own and Austria’s ‘un-German’ credentials so as to divert attention from the corporatist regime they had imposed by force in 1934. The Austrian Social Democrats, indisputably anti-Nazi, had nonetheless to overcome the record of their pre-1933 calls for Anschluss with Germany. Another reason is that all parties were interested in massaging and flattering the votes of ex-Nazis, a significant electoral constituency that would shape the country’s political future. And then, as we shall see, there were the new configurations shaped by the onset of the Cold War.