A demand rooted in Mein Kampf
Adolf Hitler’s ambition to unite Austria with Germany predated the specific pressures of the late 1930s by well over a decade, articulated explicitly in his 1925 book Mein Kampf and rooted further back in Austria’s exclusion from German unification under Prussian leadership in the nineteenth century. Post-First World War treaties at Versailles and Saint-Germain had explicitly forbidden any Austro-German union, a prohibition Hitler set about circumventing once in power, informing his military leadership of annexation plans as early as November 1937. Economic pressure sharpened the timeline: Germany’s Four Year Plan faced steel and raw material shortfalls by 1937, and Austria’s magnesium, iron and hydroelectric resources, along with its gold reserves, made annexation increasingly attractive to figures like Hermann Göring, who pushed the issue within the German leadership.
A chancellor browbeaten at Berchtesgaden
On 12 February 1938, Hitler summoned Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg to Berchtesgaden and, according to multiple accounts, threatened military invasion unless Schuschnigg accepted Nazi sympathisers into his government, including installing Arthur Seyss-Inquart as Minister of Public Security with control over the police. Seeking to reassert Austrian sovereignty, Schuschnigg announced a referendum on independence for 13 March, deliberately setting the voting age at twenty-four to exclude younger, more pro-Nazi voters, a manoeuvre that provoked Hitler to issue an ultimatum on 11 March demanding Schuschnigg’s resignation. Schuschnigg resigned that evening; Seyss-Inquart became chancellor after midnight and then, using a forged telegram falsely presented as his own request, provided the pretext for German troops to enter Austria on 12 March.
A referendum that never happened
German forces met no organised resistance, and Hitler addressed crowds in Vienna on 15 March as annexation was declared complete, with Austria subsequently redesignated as the German province of Ostmark and its independent political structures dissolved. A plebiscite held on 10 April reported 99.7 percent approval for the union, but the vote followed roughly 70,000 arrests within days of the occupation and the disenfranchisement of around 360,000 people, some eight percent of eligible voters, drawn primarily from left-wing political opponents along with Austrian Jews and Romani citizens, many of whom were held in concentration camps during the voting period itself, circumstances that make the reported margin difficult to treat as a straightforward measure of public opinion.
Troops that entered on a forged telegram
Historians remain genuinely divided over how much authentic support existed for the annexation independent of this coercion. Historian Evan Bukey has suggested perhaps two-thirds of Austrians may have supported union with Germany, citing endorsements from Socialist leader Karl Renner and Catholic Cardinal Theodor Innitzer alongside genuine nationalist sentiment and appreciation for Nazi unemployment programmes. Historian Alfred D. Low, by contrast, has argued the Nazi regime specifically avoided holding a genuinely free plebiscite because it feared losing one, contending that a majority of Austrians actually favoured continued independence, a view political scientist Eric Voegelin, who fled Austria in 1938, also held; historian Julie Thorpe has separately cautioned that prominent elite endorsements do not by themselves demonstrate broad popular sentiment either way.
A vote held after seventy thousand arrests
Postwar Austria adopted an official narrative, formalised in the Allies’ 1943 Moscow Declaration describing Austria as Nazi Germany’s first victim, that emphasised coercion over complicity and shaped Austrian national identity for decades, contributing to the restoration of Austrian independence under the 1955 State Treaty. This victim framing has been substantially complicated by later historical research documenting significant Austrian participation in Nazi administration and in the genocide that followed, evidence that sits uneasily against the narrative of pure coercion the postwar Austrian state maintained for so long, without straightforwardly disproving that genuine coercion was also present in March 1938 alongside whatever domestic support existed.
A victim narrative that outlived the war
The Anschluss is worth close attention precisely because its most quoted statistic, the 99.7 percent approval, cannot be taken at face value once the surrounding arrests, disenfranchisement and propaganda are accounted for, yet historians still cannot agree on what the genuine underlying sentiment actually was. Reading the episode means holding two things together without collapsing them into one: real popular enthusiasm existed in parts of Austrian society, and real coercion and violence shaped the vote that supposedly confirmed it, a combination that makes any single confident percentage, whether the official one or a scholarly alternative, an oversimplification of what the surviving evidence can actually support.