Anschluss

Austrian citizens gather in the Heldenplatz to hear Hitler's declaration of annexation.

The territory of the German Reich and Austria after World War I

The dissolution of Austria-Hungary in 1918

German military map during the Second World War, with no border between Germany and Austria (top right; also showing Alsace as part of Germany because it was directly incorporated into the Reich)

Soldiers of the Austrian Federal Army in Vienna, 12 February 1934.

Supporters of Schuschnigg campaigning for the independence of Austria in March 1938, shortly before the Anschluss.

Seyss-Inquart and Hitler with Himmler and Heydrich to the right in Vienna, March 1938

Cheering crowds greet the Nazis in Vienna.

Hitler crosses the border into Austria in March 1938.

Hitler announces the Anschluss on the Heldenplatz, Vienna, 15 March 1938.

Immediately after the Anschluss, Vienna’s Jews were forced to wash pro-independence slogans from the city’s pavements.

Voting ballot from 10 April 1938. The ballot text reads "Do you agree with the reunification of Austria with the German Reich that was enacted on 13 March 1938, and do you vote for the party of our leader Adolf Hitler?" The large circle is labelled "Yes", the smaller "No".

Gate to the garage yard in the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp

"Stairs of Death" at Mauthausen-Gusen with prisoners forced to carry a granite block up 186 steps to the top of the quarry.

A map showing the border changes of Germany in the various years 1933 (red), 1939 (pink) and 1943 (orange).

"Red-White-Red Book" published by the Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1946 describes the events of Austria between 1938-1945 by the Founders of the Second Austrian Republic.

The SS raid a Jewish community center, Vienna, March 1938.

The annexation of the Federal State of Austria into the German Reich on 13 March 1938.

- Anschluss

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Engelbert Dollfuss

Austrian fascist politician who served as Chancellor of Austria between 1932 and 1934.

Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuß wearing the Heimwehr uniform (1933)

His successor Kurt Schuschnigg maintained the regime until Adolf Hitler's annexation of Austria in 1938.

Kurt Alois Josef Johann von Schuschnigg (14 December 1897 – 18 November 1977) was an Austrian Fatherland Front politician who was the Chancellor of the Federal State of Austria from the 1934 assassination of his predecessor Engelbert Dollfuss until the 1938 Anschluss with Nazi Germany.

Nazi Germany

The German state between 1933 and 1945, when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party controlled the country, transforming it into a dictatorship.

Germany's territorial control at its greatest extent during World War II (late 1942):
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Adolf Hitler became Germany's head of state, with the title of Führer und Reichskanzler, in 1934.

While the traditional German states were not formally abolished (excluding Lübeck in 1937), their constitutional rights and sovereignty were eroded and ultimately ended. Prussia was already under federal administration when Hitler came to power, providing a model for the process.

Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda

A Nazi propaganda poster proclaiming that Danzig is German

German soldiers march near the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, 14 June 1940

Death and destruction during the Battle of Stalingrad, October 1942

German refugees in Bedburg, near Kleve, 19 February 1945

Map of the Greater German Reich with administrative divisions set by the Nazi Party, 1944

Public execution of 54 Poles in Rożki, Masovian Voivodeship (near Radom), German-occupied Poland, 1942

Heinrich Himmler, Hitler and Viktor Lutze perform the Nazi salute at the Nuremberg Rally, September 1934

Hitler, Göring, Goebbels and Rudolf Hess during a military parade in 1933

Chart showing the pseudo-scientific racial divisions used in the racial policies of Nazi Germany

A meeting of the four jurists who imposed Nazi ideology on the legal system of Germany (left to right: Roland Freisler, Franz Schlegelberger, Otto Georg Thierack, and Curt Rothenberger)

A column of tanks and other armoured vehicles of the Panzerwaffe near Stalingrad, 1942

IG Farben synthetic oil plant under construction at Buna Werke (1941). This plant was part of the complex at Auschwitz concentration camp.

(from left) Hitler; Robert Ley, head of the German Labour Front; Ferdinand Porsche, armaments manufacturer; and Hermann Göring, head of the Four Year Plan (1942)

Woman with Ostarbeiter badge at the IG Farben plant in Auschwitz

German loot stored at Schlosskirche Ellingen, Bavaria (April 1945)

Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses, April 1933. The posters say "Germans! Defend yourselves! Don't buy from Jews!"

Poster from the Nazi Party's Office of Racial Policy: "60 000 RM is what this person with hereditary illness costs the community in his lifetime. Fellow citizen, that is your money too."

A wagon piled high with corpses outside the crematorium in the Buchenwald concentration camp liberated by the U.S. Army, 1945

The Nazi salute in school (1934): children were indoctrinated at an early age.

Young women of the Bund Deutscher Mädel (League of German Girls) practising gymnastics in 1941

Statues representing the ideal body were erected in the streets of Berlin for the 1936 Summer Olympics.

Prisoner barracks at Dachau Concentration Camp, where the Nazis established a dedicated clergy barracks for clerical opponents of the regime in 1940

General Erich Hoepner at the Volksgerichtshof in 1944

A Nazi book burning on 10 May 1933 in Berlin, as books by Jewish and leftist authors are burned

Plans for Berlin called for the Volkshalle (People's Hall) and a triumphal arch to be built at either end of a wide boulevard.

Leni Riefenstahl (behind cameraman) at the 1936 Summer Olympics

Defendants in the dock at the Nuremberg trials

The Saarland voted by plebiscite to rejoin Germany in 1935, and in 1936 Hitler sent troops into the Rhineland, which had been de-militarized after World War I. Germany seized Austria in the Anschluss of 1938, and demanded and received the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia in that same year.

Republic of German-Austria

Country created following World War I as the initial rump state for areas with a predominantly German-speaking and ethnic German population within what had been the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Map indicating German-speaking areas (red) within the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1911

Austro-Hungarian postal stamp used in German-Austria

One-krone banknote, overprinted with the name Deutschösterreich ("German-Austria")

Their primary objective was Anschluss or union with Germany.

Heim ins Reich

Foreign policy pursued by Adolf Hitler before and during World War II, beginning in 1938.

Prior to the Anschluss in 1938, a powerful radio transmitter in Munich bombarded Austria with propaganda of what Hitler had already done for Germany, and what he could do for his native home country Austria.

First Austrian Republic

Created after the signing of the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye on 10 September 1919—the settlement after the end of World War I which ended the Habsburg rump state of Republic of German-Austria—and ended with the establishment of the Austrofascist Federal State of Austria based upon a dictatorship of Engelbert Dollfuss and the Fatherland's Front in 1934.