Hitler and the Forgotten Nazis Read Free Page B

creation. For the German-Austrians their state represented not liberation but punishment for losing the war. That the German-Austrians were regarded by the victorious Western powers as a vanquished fragment of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy was only too apparent from their treatment at the Paris Peace Conference.
    The Austrian delegation was housed—or perhaps more accurately, “imprisoned”—in the Chateau of Saint-Germain in the suburbs of Paris. Like other enemy delegations, they were literally locked up, and their correspondence with the outside world was censored. 1 By the time the Austrians reached the French capital there was little left to decide. Disputed border areas had already been militarily occupied by Austria’s neighbors; and those countries’ territorial claims, for the most part, had already been recognized by the “Big Four” (the United States, Britain, France, and Italy). Lacking the military power of its neighbors, and cut off by them from vitally needed food supplies, Austria prudently asked only for the German-speaking areas of the old monarchy. But even this request was denied.
    The final terms of the Treaty of Saint Germain, signed on 12 September 1919, awarded to other states not only the more remote German-speaking areas, such as northern Bohemia, Austrian Silesia, and northern Moravia, (ceded to Czechoslovakia), but also contiguous regions with solid German majorities. Thus, southern Bohemia and southern Moravia, with 357,000 Germans and 18,500 Czechs were given to Czechoslovakia for “historical” reasons. 2 The Drau (Drava) River valley of southern Styria, which afforded Austria its best rail link between its eastern and western provinces, was assigned to Yugoslavia without a plebiscite, even though it had a Germanspeaking majority. And most brutally of all, the beloved South Tyrol, with
    225.000    German-Austrians and next to no Italians, was turned over to Italy so that the 38 million Italians could have a strategic frontier against 6.5 million Austrians. Only in German West Hungary (later called the Burgenland), with
    285.000    people, and in southern Carinthia, were boundary decisions made which benefited Austria.
    Crippled from Birth ■ 5
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    Assets and Liabilities of the New Republic
    With little more than 32,000 square miles the Austrian Republic had only 23 percent of the territory and 26 percent of the population of just the Austrian half of the fallen Dual Monarchy. 3 No less than a third of Imperial Austria’s German-speaking subjects had been placed under alien rule. Nevertheless, the country was not entirely without assets. About 96 percent of its population now spoke German, making the country by far the most linguistically homogeneous of the Successor States. Only 10 percent of its land was totally unproductive; 38 percent was covered with forests, and 22 percent was arable. 4 Austria also possessed considerable quantities of iron ore, great water-power potential, and many skilled workers. The country’s majestic mountains and baroque cities had long attracted tourists. Moreover, being astride several Alpine passes and the middle Danube, it was at the junction of several important trade routes.
    But the negative side of the ledger was more important, at least initially. In many instances the new boundaries had separated Austria’s factories from their natural resources and from allied industries. Styrian iron- and steelworks and the textile factories of Vorarlberg had been powered by coal from Austrian Silesia and Bohemia, now part of Czechoslovakia, whereas petroleum had come from Galicia, which was given to Poland. Nor were the Successor States, which eagerly sought to build up their infant industries, anxious to trade with Austria. Austrian industries, previously having sold their goods in a free-trade area of 54 million people, now had a domestic market only one-eighth the size of the monarchy and had few opportunities for export. 5
    The draconian reduction