!!!Widerstandsbewegung, österreichische

Resistance Movement, Austrian: A broad-based illegal resistance 
movement against  National Socialism formed only relatively late, in 
the summer and autumn of 1938, due to several factors: the fact that 
annexation ( Anschluss) to Germany on 13 March, 1938, had not met with 
armed resistance, the thoroughness with which power was seized by the 
National Socialists, the immediate start of persecution throughout 
Austria, the large-scale propaganda campaign in favour of the new 
regime, and a number of declarations in favour of the Anschluss made 
on the part of Austrian institutions or by personalities in the public 
limelight (especially by Austrian bishops and by K. Renner in an 
interview). Unlike resistance fighters in other occupied countries, 
Austrians had to operate in an environment infiltrated by informers 
and fanatical adherents of the regime. The biggest organised groups 
were affiliated either with the workers´ movement (mainly in the 
industrial centres in Upper Austria) or with the Catholic and 
middle-class sector of society. In their fight, these two groups 
united adherents of diverse political views: Social Democrats, 
Communists and other left-wing groups on the one hand, and former 
Christian-Socialists and Heimwehr members, monarchists and Catholics 
on the other hand.

\\
The resistance groups were motivated by different political, 
ideological, social, ethic and patriotic ideas. Their main activity 
was to distribute illegal printed works, such as handbills, leaflets 
and journals, which was aimed at breaking the monopoly on shaping 
public opinion assumed by the Nazi regime. The main motivation for 
resistance of the religious community of the "International Bible 
Students Association" ( Jehova´s Witnesses), banned in 
Austria from 1935/36) was their refusal to do military service. Armed 
resistance groups started to form in 1942, mostly on the initiative of 
the Communists (particularly among the Slovenian partisans in south 
Carinthia, Leoben-Donawitz Group). Towards the end of the war, 
numerous non-partisan resistance groups sprang up, drawing their 
activists from different political and social quarters; one of their 
main objectives of this time was to prevent unnecessary fighting and 
loss of life. The biggest such group was "Group 05" (K.  
Biedermann, A.  Huth, R.  Raschke), which co-operated with the army 
resistance group of Wehrkreiskommando XVII (defence district) in 
Vienna (led by Major C.  Szokoll). The Tyrolean resistance movement 
under K.  Gruber liberated Innsbruck even before the first US troops 
arrived. The spectrum of unorganised resistance or opposition by 
isolated persons stretched from an anti-Nazi attitude and demoralising 
utterances to illegally listening to foreign radio stations and 
sabotage, and to actively helping the persecuted (Jews, foreign 
workers, prisoners of war, etc.). Some 2,700 Austrians were sentenced 
to death and executed as active resistance fighters, around 32,000 
persons (resistance fighters and victims of preventive persecution) 
died in concentration camps and prisons, particularly in those run by 
the Gestapo, and an estimated 15,000 Austrians died in action as 
Allied soldiers, partisans, or fighters in the European resistance 
movement. Around 100,000 Austrian citizens were imprisoned for 
political reasons.

\\
While Austria´s liberation in from the Nazi regime was achieved 
by the allied forces alone ( World War II), the fight put up by the 
resistance played its part in Austria´s political and moral 
rehabilitation and was even of great political significance, being 
acknowledged as the contribution of Austria to its own liberation 
demanded by the Allied Powers in the  Moscow Declaration of 
November 1, 1943. The patriotic and uncompromising commitment to 
Austria as an independent nation and state, strengthened through 
resistance, persecution and emigration, was to become one of the 
intellectual and political cornerstones of the  Second Republic.

!Literature
R. Luža, Der Widerstand in Oesterreich 1938-45, 
Vienna 1985; W. Neugebauer, Widerstand und Opposition, in: E. Talos 
et. al. (eds.), NS-Herrschaft in Oesterreich 1938-45, 1988; S. 
Ganglmair, Widerstand und Verfolgung in Oesterreich 1938-1945, 1988; 
Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance (ed.), Widerstand und 
Verfolgung 1934-45 in oesterreichischen Bundeslaendern (series, issues 
published to date: Vienna, Burgenland, Upper Austria, Tirol, Lower 
Austria, Salzburg).


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