Austria's long reckoning with its Nazi past
Of victims and perpetrators
Before I moved to the UK, I knew very few Austrians personally. I’d been to Austria on holiday a few times as a child, but it had seemed very far away from my Heimat east of Berlin.
Journeys to Austria in the summer holidays involved getting up at 3 o’clock in the morning so my dad could take full advantage of the empty autobahn. Even when the plan worked, and we sped through without any traffic jams or roadworks, it was still a seemingly endless journey of around 10 hours. There are only so many comic books you can read…
Soon, the landscape would gradually change with the flat, open fields of northern Germany giving way to increasingly mountainous terrain. Eventually, I’d look out of the window and see sheer rock walls right next to the road, then crystal clear streams and finally the spectacular backdrop of the alps towing over surreally picturesque towns and villages.
People still spoke German, but I barely understood what they were saying. They paid for things in schillings and groschen. And they drank a delicious herbal soft drink called Almdudler, which came in funny glass bottles. It all seemed wonderfully strange to me.
Now I find it strange that I only got to know Austria and Austrians better after moving to the UK. And so I had a rather peculiar experience this week as I walked into the Austrian Cultural Forum in London and saw many people I knew there. Having just returned from Warsaw mere hours earlier, I felt comfortable and familiar among British Austrians and Austrians in Britain in a way I hadn’t quite expected.
Even Bernhard Wrabetz, the Austrian Ambassador to the UK, immediately came over, said hello, and told me about a book on German history he had just read and was keen to discuss over drinks after the event if I had time to stay. I was reminded of why I had so enjoyed my “Austrian phase” in 2023, when I found myself attending a few events at the Embassy in London and travelling to Vienna to discuss Beyond the Wall.
In other ways, however, Austria remains an enigma to me. Growing up in Germany means growing up with a dark and heavy past as the backdrop to your present. Nazi history is always there: in school lessons, on plaques, in museums, in memorials, in street names, in public debates and politics.
This is especially true in Berlin, where intense discussions over the new and vast Holocaust Memorial raged when I was still at school. The world around me felt intense and very 20th-century. Austria, however, was associated with imperial pomp, Empress Sissi, Lipizzaner horses, Mozart and cake. I never questioned that. You just don’t as a child. The idea that, for a long time, Austria itself didn’t question the composition of its collective memory either hadn’t occurred to me.
When I told a Polish academic in Warsaw this week that I was off to an Austrian event in London the next day, he told me a fascinating story. He said that shortly after the end of the Cold War, he was approached to take part in a joint Austrian-Polish event to commemorate the victims of Nazism. His Austrian counterpart was looking for suitable Polish panellists, ideally including a Holocaust survivor, so that they could talk about what the Nazis had done to their two countries respectively. After all, Austria had been the “first victim” of Nazi Germany. The Polish academic said that he and many of his compatriots were shocked by this attitude. After all, a disproportionate number of concentration and death camp staff on their soil had been Austrian.
Negotiating this discrepancy between Austria as a victim and a perpetrator nation is what will always set it apart, especially from Germany. It’s a conflict over the national narrative that hasn’t yet been resolved. The event I had come to see at the Austrian Cultural Forum was precisely about this issue. Entitled “From Repression to Remembrance”, it celebrated 30 years (!) since Austria first began to officially acknowledge the role its people had played in Nazi crimes, including the Holocaust.
After the Second World War, Austria promoted the idea that it had been the “first victim” of Nazi aggression, pointing to the 1938 Anschluss, when Nazi Germany annexed Austria, as a forced event. This story framed Austrians primarily as people who were invaded, rather than as participants in Nazi crimes.
There were strong geopolitical reasons for this framing: unlike Germany, Austria, which was also initially divided into occupation zones, was allowed to re-establish itself as an independent and unified state shortly after the war. Without the weight of historical guilt, it could immediately set about building a new republic. The Allies accepted the victim narrative because it fit Cold War priorities. Austria became a neutral buffer state between East and West, and stability mattered more than deep moral reckoning.
This position helped Austria regain sovereignty relatively quickly in 1955, but it came at a social cost. Within families, the idea of national victimhood made it easier to avoid difficult conversations about collaboration, enthusiasm for Nazism or personal responsibility, leading to decades of silence.
This silence began to crack in 1991, when Austrian Chancellor Franz Vranitzky gave a landmark speech before the National Council. In it, he openly acknowledged that many Austrians were not just victims but also perpetrators and supporters of Nazi crimes. This was a major break from decades of official language and was shocking for some, overdue for others.
Vranitzky did not claim collective guilt in a legal sense, but he emphasised moral responsibility and the need to remember victims honestly. The speech marked a turning point in Austria’s public memory culture, signalling that the state was finally willing to confront uncomfortable truths. It also created space for broader public discussion, education and historical research that had long been sidelined.
Out of this shift came concrete action, most notably the creation of the Austrian National Fund for Victims of National Socialism in 1995. The Fund was established to provide symbolic payments and support to Holocaust survivors and other victims, including those who had long been ignored. Beyond financial compensation, it played a crucial role in recognition, officially naming victims and acknowledging their suffering on behalf of the state.
The National Fund also supports education, remembrance projects and historical documentation, helping ensure that this history is not pushed back into silence. In this way, Austria moved from a story focused on its own victimhood toward a more complex and honest engagement with its past. This is what we had gathered in London to discuss. A panel debate entitled “Bridging Generations - 30 Years of the National Fund of the Republic of Austria” featured speakers from different generations: a Holocaust survivor and second- and third-generation descendants.
We heard from Hedi Argent MBE, who was born in Vienna in 1929 and witnessed the humiliation she and her family were subjected to by fellow Austrians as well as the terrifying pogrom of November 1938. They managed to leave Austria just in time, six weeks before the war began, and one week after Hedi’s tenth birthday. Despite Austria having introduced a citizenship scheme for survivors and their descendants, Hedi can’t bring herself to reconnect to her former home country in that way.
The other two speakers, whose parents and grandparents were Austrian Jews who’d fled from persecution during the Nazi era, talked movingly about how this family trauma still affected their lives in the UK. Hedi too explained that she had once had a seemingly harmless row with her British-born daughter decades after her ordeal in Austria, and that in the course of this argument, her daughter had said: “You always have six million dead people standing behind you.” Hedi said this with a calm voice but admitted that she hoped her grandchildren and great-grandchildren wouldn’t feel the same way.
Austria today is trying to make up for lost time, gathering testimonies from remaining survivors, acknowledging historical truths it had previously found hard to hear, and funding educational and cultural projects such as the one I attended this week.
In recent years, this reckoning has also taken a legal form through a new citizenship scheme linked to Austria’s responsibility toward Nazi victims. Introduced in 2019 and later expanded, the law allows descendants of people persecuted by the Nazi regime, including Jews and other targeted groups, to reclaim Austrian citizenship without having to give up their existing nationality. Symbolically, this policy reverses the exclusions and expulsions of the Nazi era and frames citizenship not as a privilege granted anew, but as a right that was unjustly taken away. Many people in the room told me afterwards that they had used this scheme. Others said they wouldn’t or couldn’t, as it didn’t feel right or their relationship with Austria would never recover.
I wasn’t watching this debate as a German who feels that her own country has done a better job remembering the horrors of Nazism and its attendant crimes. Germany has plenty of open wounds and its own demons to battle. I listened as someone who very much feels like an outsider to Austrian history and culture, that country’s attempts to grapple with its own past and the responsibilities and conclusions that spring from this renegotiation of narratives. As such, I found the evening deeply fascinating.
If you happen to be in London with a little time to spare, I can recommend the accompanying exhibition that runs at the Austrian Cultural Forum from 5 January 2026 to 13 February 2026. It’s free, open Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm and located at 28 Rutland Gate, London SW7 1PQ.
I hope to return to Austria later this year to discuss my upcoming Weimar book with people there. It also considers questions of responsibility – of individuals, communities and nations. I have no doubt that engaging with people who grappled with this at a different time and in a different way will be a thought-provoking encounter, as all my interactions with Austria have been. To me, it remains a country both strange and familiar.
Great article of a rarely discussed subject. I think the Waldheim affair might have been an impetus for the 1991 speech as well. I remember one of my history professors in college musing that the Austrians had convinced the world that Hitler was a German and that Beethoven was an Austrian.
A friend wrote his PhD on Britain and the Anschluss using National Archive records that had just been released at the time so I have sent him this essay. When I took my uni option in politics of the German speaking countries I was taught by experts on the BRD and Switzerland, but I had to read Austria up for myself. The country had some very distinctive features in terms of the Proporz system, the long-lasting Grand Coalition and corporatist arrangements. I haven't followed contemporary Austrian politics very closely, but the populist right seems to be strong. Another stimulating essay.