No, Austria Wasn’t a Victim in World War II

Before the Third Reich seized Czechoslovakia or invaded Poland, it joined itself to Austria. The Anschluss, as it was called in German, had significant popular support; to demonstrate that it was something other than a conquest, Hitler also had Austrian troops station themselves in Germany as German troops entered Austria, creating a “mutual occupation.” The Austrian foreign minister appears to have had a somewhat different narrative in mind during a television appearance last week, as Liam Hoare writes:

Reflecting on the Ukraine crisis, Schallenberg mused most unwisely: “After all, we experienced first-hand in 1938 what it means to be abandoned.”

It has been several decades since Austria . . . officially gave up its victimhood myth: the idea that, following the Anschluss in March 1938, . . . Austria became the “first victim of National Socialism.” “We acknowledge all the facts of our history and the deeds of all sections of our people, the good as well as the evil,” Chancellor Franz Vranitzky told the Austrian parliament in 1991.

Schallenberg never meant to invoke the myth of Austrian victimhood, or so he said the next day. But he said what he said, and to hear those words escape from the mouth of Austria’s number-one diplomat, even if late on a Sunday at a testing time given events in Ukraine, was incredibly jarring. It is true, to be unnecessarily generous for a moment, that Mexico was the only country to protest the Anschluss at the League of Nations. It is also true that Adolf Hitler heaped tremendous political and military pressure upon Austria in the lead-up to the Anschluss, and viewed one way, it did constitute an illegal occupation and annexation of one state by another, as an Austrian foreign ministry communiqué framed the event in 2008.

But the victimhood myth was just that and its death came not a moment too soon. Austria was an independent state before 1938, but it was also a fascist one on the Italian model, with a close relationship [between the regime and] the Catholic Church. Austria had a small but active and incredibly violent Nazi party, and Nazis such as Arthur Seyss-Inquart were incorporated into the Austrian government before the Anschluss. [And] 200,000 Austrians turned out to cheer . . . Adolf Hitler’s proclamation of the Anschluss on March 15, 1938, a development welcomed by, among others, the prominent social democrat Karl Renner and the archbishop of Vienna.

Read more at Vienna Briefing

More about: Adolf Hitler, Austria, World War II

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society