Hitler's
1912 paintings of St. Charles's church and the Vienna State Opera
House; his disinterest in people is pretty clear. This is confirmed as
Frederic Spotts relates in Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics
(172), when in 2002 an art critic was asked to review some of Hitler's
paintings without being told who painted them describing them as quite
good, but that the different style in which he drew human figures
represented a profound disinterest in people. Even back in 1936, after
seeing the paintings Hitler submitted to the Vienna art academy, John
Gunther wrote how they were all "prosaic, utterly devoid of rhythm,
colour, feeling, or spiritual imagination. They are architect's sketches
painful and precise draftsmanship; nothing more. No wonder the Vienna
professors told him to go to an architectural school and give up pure
art as hopeless." Nevertheless, far from 'proving' his paintings as
"grim" as the Wikipedia entry misquotes them, Collotti and Mariani
actually state that "his water colours show that as a painter Hitler was
anything but 'grim'", stating that it was in fact his "political
programme" that was in fact 'grim'. In discussing his paintings, they
write how Hitler's
water
colours have for their subject various urban environments of Vienna and
Munich:
cities with a strong cosmopolitan spirit,with nothing of the
rural about them.They give the impression of having been copied from
photographs rather than painted at the easel in front of the subject;
the style and treatment are those of works edited at a writing desk.
Some of the views are, in fact, repeated, maybe even falsified,
maintaining the same optical axis but from a closer viewpoint. In these
cases the close-up is an improvement. executed with a surer hand, The
urban environment represented is almost always very complex: with a
movement of volume, a multiplicity of planes, fragmentation of spaces,
attempts at dynamic chiaroscuro etc. The attention to detail is
considerable. The various building materials can be easily distinguished
as can the condition of the buildings of their decorative details,
objects and street furnishings, posters on the walls, even to the
dressing of the shop windows.
(28) The Water Colours of Hitler: Recovered Art Works Homage to Rodolfo Siviero
From
1908 to 1913, Hitler tinted postcards and painted houses for a living
painting his first self-portrait in 1910 at the age of 21. This
painting, along with twelve other paintings by Hitler, was discovered by
American Army Sergeant Major Willie J. Mc Kenna in 1945 in Essen.
Samuel Morgenstern, an Austrian businessman and a business partner of
the young Hitler in his Vienna period, bought many of the young Hitler's
paintings. According to Morgenstern, Hitler came to him for the first
time at the beginning of the 1910s, either in 1911 or in 1912. When
Hitler came to Morgenstern's glazier store for the first time, he
offered Morgenstern three of his paintings. Morgenstern kept a database
of his clientele, through which it was possible to locate the buyers of
young Hitler's paintings. It was found that the majority of the buyers
were Jewish. An important client of Morgenstern, a lawyer by the name of
Josef Feingold, bought a series of paintings by Hitler depicting old
Vienna.
Ecstatic citizens of Vienna were waiting for Hitler until finally at
around half past five in the afternoon on March 14, 1938, he entered the
city that had once been the capital of the Holy Roman Empire of the
German Nation, passing the Schönbrunn Palace. The church bells here
also chimed for him, and “the demonstrations of enthusiasm that
accompanied Hitler’s entry into the city defied description,” as the Neue Basler Zeitung wrote.

The
Nazi flag flying at the Austrian chancellery building on March 11,
1938. That afternoon at 17.00, the “adviser of the Reich Chancellor,
Engineer Wilhelm Keppler,” who Kershaw describes as "a one-time small
businessman," flew into Vienna on a special flight, landed at the Aspern
Airport, and from there immediately drove to the Federal Chancellery.
Around the same time, a train pulled into the West Train Station in
Vienna, bearing Rudolf Hess who too proceeded to the Federal Chancellery
for consultations immediately upon arrival. This had been the site for
important events in European politics for over 250 years- it was here
that Chancellor Klemens Wenzel von Metternich held the Congress of
Vienna, which was held after Napoleon Bonaparte's defeat in 1814 and
resulted in the balance of power that would ultimately collapse in 1914.
Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuß was murdered on July 25, 1934 by ten
Austrian Nazis of Regiment 89 (Paul Hudl, Franz Holzweber, Otto Planetta
and others) here in his office in 1934. Along with 154 ϟϟ men disguised
as Bundesheer soldiers and policemen who pushed into the Austrian
chancellery, they had entered this building and shot him in an attempted
coup d'état. Dollfuß was killed by two bullets fired by Nazi Otto
Planetta; the event is commemorated on the plaque just outside the rathaus shown here. In his dying moments he asked for Viaticum, the Eucharist
administered to a person who is dying, but his assassins refused to give
it to him. His death had enraged Mussolini, whose wife Rachele was
entertaining the rest of Dolfuss's family, and led to his decision to
move troops to the Brenner pass on the Austrian border leading Hitler to
proclaim that he did not support the coup, which ultimately led to its
failure. His successor Kurt von Schuschnigg gave his farewell speech
shortly before Austria was annexed by Nazi-Germany in 1938 with his
famous closing words "Gott schütze Österreich;" he
would be arrested by the Vienna Gestapo in the former Hotel Métropole
which was serving as the Vienna Gestapo headquarters before being taken
to Munich in the fall of 1938 by which time the 1.83 metre tall
Schuschnigg weighed more than forty kilograms. Schuschnigg was
interrogated in the Reich Security Main Office on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse
in Berlin and then imprisoned in several concentration camps starting
with Dachau, followed by Flossenbürg and finally in Sachsenhausen from
1941. In the spring of 1945, Schuschnigg was transferred from
Sachsenhausen to Dachau where over 130 other prominent special prisoners
from various concentration camps were being held hostage. Under the
command of ϟϟ Obersturmführer Edgar Stiller and ϟϟ Untersturmführer
Bader who were tasked with liquidating the prisoners in case of doubt,
they broke into three groups. On May 4, 1945, Schuschnigg, his wife Vera
and daughter Elisabeth, like the other hostages, were finally liberated
by the Americans. After 1945 and the restoration of independence the
offices of the Federal Chancellor were once again located here.
Standing in front of the Hotel Imperial, located on the Ringstraße at Kärntner Ring 16. Hitler stayed here when he finally arrived in Vienna at
around half past five in the afternoon on March 14, 1938. Hitler had actually worked at the hotel as a day labourer during his youthful period as a virtual tramp in Vienna, and now returned as an honoured guest. Now amidst the jubilations and the chorus of the crowd outside of the hotel, Hitler stepped onto the balcony around 19.00 together with the aged Austrian General Krauss and delivered a short address:
My German Volksgenossen!
What you are feeling now is something I myself have felt to the bottom of my heart in these five days. It is a great, historic change which our German Volk has undergone. What you are witnessing at this moment is something the whole German Volk is experiencing with you; not only two million people in this city, but seventy-five million members of our Volk, in one Reich. They are all deeply stirred and moved by this historic turning point, and they all consecrate themselves with the vow: no matter what may happen, the German Reich as it stands today is something no man will ever again break asunder and no man will ever again tear apart!
There is no crisis, no threat, and no force that might break this vow. Today these are the devout words of all German beings from Königsberg to Cologne, from Hamburg to Vienna!
Benito Mussolini would also stay at the hotel during the war with
considerably less fanfare, being shepherded through the back door on
September 13, 1943, following his spectacular rescue out of detention by
German paratroopers in Unternehmen Eiche. Before the war, the Imperial had partly been owned by Samuel Schallinger, who was forced to sell it in 1938 due to the Nazi persecution of Jews. Schallinger died in 1942 at the Theresienstadt concentration camp near Prague. Simon Wiesenthal celebrated his 90th birthday here in 1998 with a kosher dinner party. “Look, even the chandeliers are shaking,” said Wiesenthal at the dinner. “Hitler is gone. The Nazis are no more. But we are still here, singing and dancing."
Hitler's motorcade approaching the rathaus whilst, on March 15 at around 11.00, 200,000 cheering Austrians assembled on the Heldenplatz in front of the Hofburg to hear a “proclamation of liberation.” This would be the climax to Hitler's triumphal tour through Austria. The Heldenplatz
served on 15 March 1938 as the setting for Hitler's theatrical appearance in Vienna, the last of the cities in Austria to embrace his leadership. On that day, more than a quarter of a million people converged on the square, where Hitler was saluted by large formations from the SA, ϟϟ, Hitlerjugend, and the Bund deutscher Madchen. Hitler captivated the cheering masses with a speech in which he compared the new mission of Austria to the commandment that had drawn the German settlers of the old Holy Roman Empire. One commentator makes the stunning claim that "Among the millions of photographs taken during the Anschluss, only a single snapshot of an unhappy face has come to light"—a reflection of the Austrians' hopes that the new union with the more prosperous Germany would benefit their country economically.
Gail Finney (52-53) Performing Vienna
Two little boys greeted Hitler upon his arrival carrying a banner between them bearing the slogan “The Sudeten Germans greet the
Führer.” They had all gathered to hear Hitler say that "[t]he oldest eastern province of the German people shall be, from this point on, the newest bastion of the German Reich" followed by his "greatest accomplishment" (completing the annexing of Austria to form a Greater German Reich) by saying "As leader and chancellor of the German nation and Reich I announce to German history now the entry of my homeland into the German Reich." Hitler later commented: "Certain foreign newspapers have said that we fell on Austria with brutal methods. I can only say: even in death they cannot stop lying. I have in the course of my political struggle won much love from my people, but when I crossed the former frontier (into Austria) there met me such a stream of love as I have never experienced. Not as tyrants have we come, but as liberators."
On the balcony of the Hofburg with its commanding view of the Austrian Parliament Building, the Rathaus, and the Burgtheater, Hitler gave the following address:
Germans! Men and Women!
Within
a few short days, a radical change has taken place in the German
Volksgemeinschaft, whose dimensions we might see today, yet whose
significance can only be fully appreciated by coming generations. In the
past few years, the rulers of the regime which has now been banished
often spoke of the special “mission” which, in their eyes, this country
was destined to fulfil. A leader of the legitimists outlined it quite
accurately in a memorandum. Accordingly, the so-called self-sufficiency
of this Land of Austria, founded in the peace treaties and contingent
upon the mercy of foreign countries, was to perform the function of
preventing the formation of a genuinely great German Reich and hence
block the path of the German Volk to the future.
I hereby declare for
this Land its new mission. It corresponds to the precept which once
summoned the German settlers of the Altreich to come here. The oldest
Ostmark of the German Volk shall from now on constitute the youngest
bulwark of the German nation and hence of the German Reich. For
centuries, the storms of the East broke on the borders of the Old Mark
in the turbulent times of the past. For centuries into the future, it
shall now become an iron guarantor of the security and freedom of the
German Reich, and hence a safeguard for the happiness and peace of our
Great Volk. I know the old Ostmark of the German Reich will do justice
to its new task just as it once performed and mastered the old.I am
speaking on behalf of millions of people in this magnificent German
Land, on behalf of those in Styria, in Upper and Lower Austria, in
Carinthia, in Salzburg, in Tirol, and above all on behalf of the city of
Vienna, when I assure the sixty-eight million other German
Volksgenossen in our vast Reich listening this very minute: this Land
is German; it has understood its mission, it will fulfil this mission,
and it shall never be outdone by anyone as far as loyalty to the great
German Volksgemeinschaft is concerned. It will now be our task to devote
our labour, diligence, shared dedication, and joint strength to solving
the great social, cultural and economic problems; yet first and foremost
to make Austria ever grow and expand to become a fortress of National
Socialist willpower.
 |
Cycling where Hitler drove |
I cannot conclude this address to you without
calling to mind those men who, together with me, have made it possible
to bring about this great change— with God’s help—in such a short time. I
may thank the National Socialist members of the government, with the
new Reichsstatthalter Seyss-Inquart at their fore. I may thank the
innumerable party functionaries; I may thank above all the countless
anonymous idealists, the fighters of our formations who have proven in
the long years of persecution that the German, when put under pressure,
only becomes tougher.
These years of suffering have served but to
strengthen me in my conviction of the value of the German-Austrian being
within the framework of our great Volksgemeinschaft. At the same time,
however, the splendid order and discipline of this tremendous event is
proof of the power of the idea inspiring these people. Hence in this
hour, I can report to the German Volk that the greatest orders of my
life have been carried out.
As the Führer and Chancellor of the
German nation and the Reich, I now report to history that my homeland
has joined the German Reich.
The entrance to the Neuen Burg wing of the Hofburg Palace on the left, from which terrace Hitler had made his address. Originally he spoke from a specially constructed wooden balcony erected in the centre of the building’s neo-Gothic facade, but it was later replaced with a permanent stone one to commemorate the event. Such is its impact that to this day, it remains closed to the public with only one speech ever being given since Hitler's- that of Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel who gave a speech from it in 1992, calling on Austrians to fight racism and confront the country's past. "The balcony is nothing. It is a symbol, nothing more. The purification, the change cannot come from the balcony. It must come from below." Now the usual group of nutcases plaguing society is calling for the balcony to just be completely destroyed, but not until some "speech for peace"is performed from it. Nevertheless, Willi Mernyi, chair of Austria’s Mauthausen Committee which seeks to preserve Holocaust memory in Austria, suggests that the idea that the balcony only be opened to tours such that guides could provide “context” and “clarification” for visitors although the so-called 'Hitler-Balkon' “must not become a pilgrimage site for neo-Nazis."


Prinz Eugen's statue at Heldenplatz. Eugen had been considered by Napoleon for dubious reasons as one of the seven greatest commanders of history. The wartime German cruiser Prinz Eugen was named in his honour, as was the 7th ϟϟ Volunteer Mountain Division Prinz Eugen, a German mountain infantry division of the Waffen-ϟϟ. It was formed in 1941 from Volksdeutsche volunteers and conscripts from the Banat, Independent State of Croatia, Hungary and Romaniainitially named ϟϟ-Freiwilligen-Division Prinz Eugen.
Although looking uncannily like Nazi eagles, these eagles perched on the Ring in Vienna at the entrance to the Hofburg at Heldenplatz predate the anschluss by about four years when the outer gate of the Hofburg was redesigned between 1933 and 1934 into an "Austrian Heroes Monument." This resulted in a new gate built on each side of the Hofburg as an extension of the axes of these equestrian statues. These two eagle gates designed by Wilhelm Frass were intended to draw attention to the new monument from the Ringstrasse. In the 1930s, Heldenplatz began to be used for mass events, with the speakers mostly speaking to the crowd from the balcony of the Neue Burg, starting in 1932 with a rally during Hermann Göring's visit, a 1934 rally for the Fatherland Front and of course the 1938 Nazi rally for Hitler. All these events made made Heldenplatz a synonym for the "Anschluss". During the war, open-air exhibitions were held on Heldenplatz such as the 1940 Wehrmacht exhibition "Der Sieg im Westen," shown here on the right then and today with the rathaus behind.
On March 13, 1938 Reich youth leader Baldur von Schirach gave a speech on Heldenplatz in front of 40,000 children and young people, in which he announced that instead of the “Austrian young people” there was only the “Hitler Youth”. Preparations for the corriordination of Austria with the rest of Germany were started in the background by Josef Bürckel based on the model of the Saarland. On March 15, 1938 so-called “liberation rallies” took place here in front of around 200,000 people. People had full pay off work, and children had been off school since March 12th which ensured that enough people could greet Adolf Hitler on his arrival in Vienna. The Austrian Nazi Karl Anton Prinz Rohan described this event as a “festive, happy revolution”. When Hitler arrived at Heldenplatz at noon on March 15, the square was also filled with military, youth and other formations of the Nazi Party. Seyss-Inquart reported to the Fiihrer that Austria had given up its independence and consequently the "Ostmark" had "returned home". Hitler delivered his speech, mentioning the word "Austria" only twice, and spoke of the bulwark against past and coming storms in the East in order to "announce before history the entry of my homeland into the German Reich". Stormy shouts of victory and salvation and applause that lasted for several minutes followed; the Germany and Horst Wessel songs were sung and shouts of “We thank our Führer!” were repeated over and over again. Then Hitler and Seyß-Inquart left Heldenplatz in a car, returning at 14.00 to lay a wreath at the Hero's Gate. The next day Reichsführer ϟϟ Himmler and Austria representative
Josef Bürckel swore in 7,500 men of the Austrian police in the presence
of ϟϟ leader Ernst Kaltenbrunner on Heldenplatz, shown here.
A fortnight later Göring gave his propaganda speech on Heldenplatz for the referendum on the “Anschluss”. In April 1938 the “Day of the Austrian Legion” and the “Day of the Greater German Reich” were held. A maypole from Garmisch-Partenkirchen was transported to Heldenplatz for May Day that year. The Nazi rulers were well aware of the power of the unfinished square. Despite their aversion to the Habsburg Monarchy, the Nazis were able to stage and thus justify their own rule as a continuation of the old imperial tradition with the help of the symbols of imperial power that offered them the backdrop of the Heldenplatz. With this in mind, there were considerations to resume the building project of the Kaiserforum and to complete it with a Nazi ceremonial space. To that end a 'Haus des Führers' intended for exhibition purposes as well as various memorials. The fact that Heldenplatz was to be converted into a National Socialist “cultural district” is also indicated by its use as a venue for open-air exhibitions, such as for the show “The Victory in the West” of 1940 mentioned above. During the war and postwar hardship however, Heldenplatz was transformed from the centre of imposing power into an agricultural land and by May 1946, the Allied troops celebrated their liberation celebrations here. From 1951, the British, American, Soviet, and French units used the square as the changing of the guard.
Hitler and his entourage walking through the Äußeres Burgtor, also known as the Heldentor or Hero Gate, on March 15, 1938 after having laid a wreath here. In 1934 the outer castle gate was converted into a war monument dedicated to the fallen of the First World War, although the external shape of the building was not allowed to be changed. Göring visited the place of honour on March 27. At the time of Nazi rule in Austria, there were considerations to upgrade the Heldenplatz architecturally. For this purpose, the main axis of the square was to be rotated by 90 degrees so that the balcony of the Hofburg, from which Adolf Hitler had announced the annexation of Austria, would have become the main focal point for large marches. For this purpose they wanted to relocate the equestrian monuments of Archduke Karl and Prinz Eugen of Savoy. The SA later obtained its own memorial here, which was removed again after the end of the war.
Standing in the middle of the Ringstraße from where Hitler took his place in the reviewing stand


Standing in front of the Loos Haus on Michaelerplatz and as it appeared during the Anschluß. The sign reads "Gleiches Blut gehoert in ein gemeinsames Reich"- "Shared blood belongs in a shared Reich." The right shows the entrance with a shrine to Hitler, featuring his bust and an honour guard.
According to Hermann Czech (14) "we see the decoration applied just prior to the referendum of 1938 on Austria’s Anschluss with Nazi Germany. The “beautification” of Loos’s portal, transforming it into a “contemporary altar”, generates a mood in which intimidation prevails. The carpet in the image on the right just does not fit, and it is not hard to see why."
The supposed Hitler painting on the left of Michaelerplatz was recovered in Bolzano in 1945, by an Italian governmental stolen art retrieval team under the supervision of Rodolfo Siviero, now part of a collection of twenty alleged Hitler watercolours held at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence since 1954.
Apparently when painting Michaelerplatz, Hitler chose to ignore the building completely-
In 1910, opposite the pompous dome of the new courtcastle at the Michaelerplatz, he built the house of a men’s fashion parlor as a deliberate provocation that flustered the Viennese as “a monstrosity of a house” and as “a house without eyebrows.” For it made do without the usual ornaments above the windows and had a smooth surface. Loos was thoroughly delighted with all the excitement and on December 11, 1911, to an overcrowded audience, gave a lecture entitled “A Monstrosity of a House.” Hitler’s reaction to the house under dispute was idiosyncratic: when he drew the Michaelerplatz, he pretended the Loos House did not exist and copied a historic representation from the eighteenth century.
Hamann (71) Hitler's Vienna

Hitler driving through Vienna with the Burgtheater in the background and my bike today in front. The Nazis would leave their mark on the history of the Burgtheater. In 1939, the strongly anti-Semitic book by the theatre scholar Heinz Kindermann, Das Burgtheater, in which he analysed negatively, among other things, the “Jewish influence” on the Burgtheater. On October 14, 1938, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Burgtheater, a Don Carlos production by Karl-Heinz Stroux was shown, which served Hitler's ideology as the role of Marquis Posa was played by the same Ewald Balser , who a year earlier in another Don Carlos production at the Deutsches Theater in the same role called out to Joseph Goebbels in the audience: "Give freedom of thought!". The actor and director Lothar Müthel, who was director of the Burgtheater between 1939 and 1945, staged the Merchant of Venice in 1943 , in which Werner Krauss portrayed the Jew Shylock as clearly anti-Semitic. The same director staged Lessing's parable Nathan the Wise after the war. Hitler himself only visited the Burgtheater once during the Nazi regime in 1938, later refusing for fear of an assassination attempt.
Actors and theater employees who were classified as “ Jewish ” under the Reich Citizenship Act of 1935 were soon banned from performing; they have been given either leave, dismissed or arrested. Between 1938 and 1945 the Burgtheater ensemble did not offer any noteworthy resistance to Nazi ideology- its programmes were heavily censored, and only a few actively joined the resistance, such as Judith Holzmeister or the actor Fritz Lehmann. Many Jewish ensemble members were helped to emigrate; one actor, Fritz Strassny , was murdered in a concentration camp.By the summer of 1944 the Burgtheater had to be closed because of the general closure of all theatres. From April 1, 1945, when the Red Army approached Vienna, a military unit was encamped in the building, part of which was used as an arsenal. It ended up being damaged in a bomb attack on April 12, 1945 in which the auditorium and stage became unusable with only the steel structure remaining. The ceiling paintings and parts of the foyer were almost undamaged. In 1951 the Burgtheater opened its doors for the first time, but only in the left wing, where the celebrations for the 175th anniversary of the theatre took place.
Immediately
after the German invasion of March 1938, the Viennese began to
threaten, torment, and deprive Jewish fellow citizens as the
ϟϟ began to throw them out of their homes. Of the
nearly 200,000 Jewish Viennese, around 120,000 were robbed and emigrated
(the most famous refugee was Sigmund Freud), about 60,000 were
murdered. The Viennese town administration was reorganised according to
the national socialist pattern. On the occasion of the 150th
anniversary of the death of the German composer, the Nazi administration
celebrated a Mozart year in the framework of the "Mozart Week of the
German Reich". From March 17, 1944, more than fifty air raids were
carried out on Vienna, which destroyed about one-fifth of the city. Not
by fighting, but by plunder, the St. Stephen's Cathedral, which had
previously surrendered the air war without a bomb hit, also set fire. In
April 1945 came the eight-day battle for Vienna, which ended with the
defeat of the Wehrmacht and the occupation by the Red Army, which had
advanced from Hungary. Consequences of the time of National Socialism
The effect of the capital function of Vienna in the monarchy, effective
until 1938, ended with the beginning of the Nazi era. The spiritual and
artistic life of Vienna suffered, above all, through the persecution of
the Jews, an enormous, not to be compensated, bloodletting. The
emergence of the Eastern bloc made Vienna a meeting point for the spies
from the East and the West, but slowed down the economic and scientific
reconstruction of Vienna. More than 20 per cent of the house stock was
completely or partly destroyed, almost 87,000 apartments were
uninhabitable. More than 3,000 bombs were counted in the city area,
numerous bridges lying in ruins, canals, gas and water pipes had
suffered serious damage. At first, the problem was solved, and the city
had to be made operational again. At the problematic 'Memorial for the 65,000 murdered Austrian Jews of the Shoah,' designed by the British artist Rachel Whiteread. Located at Judenplatz, this memorial was unveiled on October 25, 2000, one day before the Austrian national holiday, in the presence of Federal President Thomas Klestil, the President of the Viennese religious community Ariel Muzicant, Simon Wiesenthal, the architect, and other dignitaries and guests. The memorial was not allowed to distract from the aesthetics of the square, and so it seems more a work of classical beauty than somehting reflecting the obscenity of the Holocaust despite Simon Wiesenthal's request that "[t]his monument shouldn't be beautiful; it must hurt." It chooses to represent the victims not as humans, but as nameless books, their spines turned away to make themall look the same, uniform and nameless. Further controversy was created by the archeological excavation of the Judenplatz to make room for the memorial which impacted the historic site where substantial ruins of the city's oldest synagogue were discovered. These ruins conjured another tragic chapter in Vienna's Jewish history. In 1421, a year after two Jews in Upper Austria were found guilty of blood libel, over one thousand Jewish residents were either killed or expelled in what became known as the first Wiener Gesera or Viennese decree. In an act of martyrdom, eighty Jews barricaded themselves inside the synagogue and burned it to the ground. Remains of the synagogue, including walls, pedestals of columns, a ceramic floor, and the bima itself - the platform upon which the Torah was read - were excavated between July 1995 and July 1996. Whiteread's monument was to be built directly above the synagogue site before a compromise solution was agreed upon that involved moving the structure by just one metre. Residents of the square complained about losing their parking spaces, and the right-wing Freedom Party objected to the project's high costs. On top of that, the Jewish community itself was split with some of its most prominent members such as Leon Zelman, President of the Jewish Welcome Service in Vienna and Ariel Muzicant, then Assistant President of the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde, complaining that Wiesenthal was presuming to speak for the entire community, with others arguing that Wiesenthal was not one of them, leading him to write in defence of his Austrian heritage.

The Wehrmacht marching past the parliament building, renamed the Gauhaus during Nazi rule, with me at the same spot today. It was during the renovations that were taking place as seen behind me that workers came across four paintings by Hitler, two busts and a relief in a cupboard in the cellars. “It's not really a surprise when you clear out a building after 130 years,” a spokeswoman for the parliament told AFP. “We know that the building was used as a 'Gauhaus' during World War II and we expected to make discoveries like this.” During the war, the building was badly damaged by bombing. On February 7, 1945, one such strike destroyed two of the total of 24 monolithic columns in the central hall , made of red-grey limestone from Adnet bear Salzburg. The two destroyed pillars were replaced by two new ones, broken from the same quarry, in 1950. The plenary hall itself was almost completely destroyed.
According to Hamann (4),
He was not yet twenty years old, Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, when he set foot for the first time in the magnificent building on the Franzensring, 1 in other words, the Parliament building in Vienna, and to be more precise: the House of Representatives of the Austrian Reichsrat. This time, however, he was not interested in the building by Theophil Hansen, the architect he so admired, but in Parliament as a political institution.
Hitler's drawing from the same vantage point. Hitler attended parliamentary debates here, and in Mein Kampf he claims it was here that he began to loathe democracy. As Hitler himself related (71),
I went to the Parliament whenever I had any time to spare and watched the spectacle silently but attentively. I listened to the debates, as far as they could be understood, and I studied the more or less intelligent features of those ‘elect’ representatives of the various nationalities which composed that motley State. Gradually I formed my own ideas about what I saw. A year of such quiet observation was sufficient to transform or completely destroy my former convictions as to the character of this parliamentary institution. I no longer opposed merely the perverted form which the principle of parliamentary representation had assumed in Austria. No. It had become impossible for me to accept the system in itself. Up to that time I had believed that the disastrous deficiencies of the Austrian Parliament were due to the lack of a German majority, but now I recognised that the institution itself was wrong in its very essence and form. A number of problems presented themselves before my mind. I studied more closely the democratic principle of ‘decision by the majority vote’, and I scrutinised no less carefully the intellectual and moral worth of the gentlemen who, as the chosen representatives of the nation, were entrusted with the task of making this institution function.

The extravagant town hall from Adolf-Hitler-Platz in a Nazi-er postcard and from the same spot today. From September 1, 1945 to July 27, 1955 Vienna was divided in its borders
before 1938 into four sectors. The brightened areas were integrated
into Greater Vienna in 1938 and belonged to the Soviet occupation zone
of Lower Austria. A few days after the end of the fighting of the war in the area of Vienna in the middle of April, the
Soviet Army created a new city administration. Political parties also
formed - even before the war on May 8 had finally come to an end in
Europe. It was only in the autumn of 1945 that the Soviets provided
other areas of Vienna to be administered by the military contingents of
the United States and Britain with a sop to France. It remained
then until 1955 "Viersektorenstadt." In the first district, which was
not assigned to any of the four occupying powers, the crew changed every
month. On the Schwarzenbergplatz, the southern part of which was
called Stalinplatz in 1946-1956, the Red Army built the monument, the
monument of liberty, the monument of the Red Army, or monument to the
Red Army in 1945. It was unveiled on August 19, 1945 and has since been
maintained by the city administration.

The 1,441-room Rococo Schönbrunn palace which had been the main summer residence of the Habsburg rulers, located in Hietzing, Vienna. Here it is after the anschluss with its sign forbidding entrance to Jews. Although once in power Hitler chose not to stay here because he detested its "imperial pomp," as a young man would not get out of bed until midday when, according to his best friend at the time, August Kubizek, he would go for a stroll in Schönbrunn Park before sitting up late at night over grandiose and senseless projects in which practical incompetence fought with impatient self-inflation. “We often watched the old emperor [Franz Joseph] traveling from Shoenbrunn to the Hofburg Palace in his coach” Kubizek would later relate. Waite (41) records how "[d]uring his Vienna days he always saved a bit of dried bread to feed the birds and squirrels in the Schönbrunn where he went to read on summer evenings."
After the war during the Allied Occupation of Austria, Schönbrunn Palace was requisitioned to provide offices for both the British Delegation to the Allied Commission for Austria and for the Headquarters for the British Military Garrison present in Vienna. The British had begun by organising racing in the park here at Schönbrunn where commander General Sir Richard McCreery occupied the room that had served Napoleon before him, a fact that caused the French general de Lattre de Tassigny considerable annoyance. McCreery, who had served with the British army in Italy, endured strained relations with Koniev from the outset. Soon after he moved into a villa near the palace in Hietzing the Soviets kidnapped his gardener. He was never seen again.
Döbling
Just north of Vienna with the Leopoldsberg in the background. During the Weimar republic the Social Democrats had planned and established many blocks of public housing, siedlungen of which the Karl-Marx-Hof is one of the largest. The suburb of Döbling had a high percentage of Jewish residents and maintained a synagogue in the district. During the Reichskristallnacht this synagogue (like almost all others in Vienna) was destroyed. The harbour itself only ever became economically important for the logging industry and after the war it was converted into a marina for rowing clubs and motorboats. This was not before the Russian raping and looting that took place in which
[a] boon to the Russians and the looters were the big wine houses in Döbling and Heiligenstadt. The Russians emptied the great tun in Klosterneuburg and then sprayed it with machine- gun fire when it would provide them with no more solace. People were seen carrying off wine from Heiligenstadt in large vessels... (MacDonogh, 30)
‘The great provision of wine and schnapps in Vienna, above all in the vineyard areas, possibly provided a foundation for the raping of the women when it took place.’ It is true that some of the most aggravated instances were in the great cellars of Döbling, where Austrian sparkling wine or Sekt is made, and the wine ‘village’ of Grinzing. (33)
Salzburg Looking down towards Salzburg from Maria Plain and from the exact same spot from a Nazi-era postcard with the swastika rising from behind.
On February 5, 1914 Hitler travelled from Munich to Salzburg and was found "unfit for service, too weak and incapacitated for weapons" (which did not prevent him from serving as a war volunteer in the Bavarian Army during the First World War). Bullock (47) records that "after the Germans marched into Austria in 1938 a very thorough search was made in Linz for the records connected with Hitler's military service and Hitler was furious when the Gestapo failed to discover them." In the years after the Great War, as a politician for the Nazi Party he appeared at party events of the sister party DNSAP; at the Representatives' Day of all national socialists in the German-speaking area held in Salzburg on August 7, 1920, Hitler, who was still unknown outside Munich and who was also not the chairman of the Nazi Party, spoke up and delivered a celebrated speech in which he invoked the "Volksgemeinschaft" (as opposed to class thinking), calling for workers to win national ideas and make National Socialism a popular movement, and attacked Jews. The following evening in the Kurhaus gave him the opportunity for another speech. The Austrian Nazis used the opportunity to invite Hitler for a campaign campaign in the fall of 1920. On October 1, Hitler spoke at the Kurhaus in Salzburg in a speech lasting several hours where he distinguished himself as "a speaker far beyond the usual level of outstanding speakers who has the power to disseminate his views with compelling force," according to the Salzburg party newspaper "Deutscher Volksruf".
The following day Hitler appeared in Hallein at an event disrupted by Social Democrat participants led by Mayor Anton Neumayr. Hitler also gave a speech at the national Nazi party conference which took place from August 13 to 15, 1923 in Salzburg, The Nazi press reports focused more on the staging and inspiring effect of the performance than on the content of the one-and-a-half-hour speech in which Hitler openly announced that in a short time in Germany the decision would fall - bringing this a few months in his later attempted coup. The attitude of the Salzburg Nazi Party to Hitler was ambiguous. On the one hand glorifying him through visits of the Salzburg Nazi functionaries Otto Troyer, Anton Funk and Hans Prodinger with the imprisoned Nazi leader. On the other hand, some articles in the "People's Call" argued against the Hitler cult and against the Munich way of the violent seizure of power.
On the morning of March 12, 1938, German troops marched into the city of Salzburg. In many places, solstice fires in the form of swastikas were lit by supporters of the Hitler Youth in the mountains whilst, on official orders, the church bells rang throughout the country. The first German officers arrived in Salzburg at midnight between 11 and 12 March 1938.
Austrians celebrating the German army's entry into Salzburg via the Staatsbrücke over the river Salzach on March 12, 1938 and the site on my birthday, 2018. The first tank tips arrived in the early morning and from 10.30 to 11.00 aircraft of the German Air Force dropped leaflets with Hitler's greeting over the city. The German troops entered Salzburg with the roaring cheers of the population. Large quantities of Nazi flags and armbands had been delivered by truck and were distributed to the population. Franz Krieger's press photos seen here, taken on the afternoon of March 12, show German troops on the Staatsbrücke and Platzl, critical points at which a particularly large number of people had flocked to one another. The propaganda campaign for the "Anschluss" consisted of promises and
concrete economic improvements. In the course of the initial propaganda
effort workers received higher wages; child benefits, marriage loans and
unemployment benefits were paid out.

Not all Salzburgers cheered, although the only noteworthy resistance actions in the district of Salzburg were
in the working class strongholds Hallein and Bischofshofen. In the
afternoon and evening of March 11 there were clashes between Nazis and
Communists in Hallein and riots in Bischofshofen. Nazi newsreels showed
images from Salzburg on April 29, 1938 under the title "The borders have
fallen," where members of the Hitler Youth dismantled and destroyed
border symbols between Germany and Austria as boundary markers and signs
were symbolically burned. Books were next twenty-four hours later when,
on April 30, 1938 at around 20.30 books were burned at Residenzplatz which
the Nazis described as "degenerate art." 1,200 works by Jewish,
social-democrat, Marxist, ecclesiastical or liberal authors were
destroyed including works by Stefan Zweig, Arthur Schnitzler, and Franz
Werfel that had previously been collected
from libraries and private households near Residenzplatzwith as many as
5,000 watching or taking part. This organised book burning was the only one on Austrian soil. Zweig wrote, shocked,
to a friend the next day of how Salzburg was the "most Nazi city" and
"humiliated" him. Zweig had lived in the city for many years, but went
into exile in 1934 after the fascist coup attempt. Now, four years
later, one of his books was thrown into the fire so that "it burns the
flames like all Jewish writing" as it roared over the Residenzplatz.
Nevertheless, at this stage of the dictatorship the Nazi leadership was
not at all happy about the burnings given the view of it abroad and how
it was a provocation for conservative Catholics. Thus the press ignored
the Salzburg book burning; in the Austrian section of the Münchner
Neuesten Nachrichten for example one reads a report about the
celebrations before May 1st, but nothing about the book burning.
In Austria, a total of 72,000 people were imprisoned in the first few
days after the Anschluss. Political opponents, Jewish citizens and other
minorities were subsequently arrested and deported to concentration
camps. The synagogue was destroyed.
After Germany invaded the Soviet Union, several PoW camps for Soviet prisoners and other enemy nations were organised in the city. During the Nazi occupation, a Romani camp was built in Salzburg-Maxglan intended as an Arbeitserziehungslager (work 'education' camp), which provided slave labour to local industry. It also operated as a Zwischenlager (transit camp), holding Roma before their deportation to German camps or ghettos in German-occupied territories in eastern Europe.
Soon Allied bombing would end up destroying roughly 7,600 houses and kill 550 inhabitants. Fifteen air strikes destroyed 46 percent of the city's buildings, especially those around Salzburg railway station. Although the town's bridges and the dome of the cathedral were destroyed, somehow much of its Baroque architecture remained intact. As a result, Salzburg is one of the few remaining examples of a town of its style. American troops entered the city on May 5, 1945 and it became the centre of the American-occupied area in Austria. Several displaced persons camps were established in Salzburg—among them Riedenburg, Camp Herzl (Franz-Josefs-Kaserne), Camp Mülln, Bet Bialik, Bet Trumpeldor, and New Palestine.
The Mirabellgarten and Mozartdenkmal with the wife today. The primary allure of Mozart for the Nazis lay in the representation of a purely German cultural icon. As one of the most revered composers, Mozart's Austrian roots were conveniently overlooked, his legacy instead co-opted into a narrative of German racial and cultural supremacy. Erik Levi argues that the appropriation of Mozart was a strategic move by the Nazis to "claim cultural capital". They reinterpreted Mozart's operas to fit into a vision of German culture that was steeped in the ideals of racial purity, national unity, and Aryan supremacy. This appropriation was not merely an ideological imposition, but was facilitated through active reinterpretation of Mozart's works, with Nazi officials even going as far as altering Mozart's operas to suit their ideology. For instance, Kater's "The Twisted Muse" elucidates how The Marriage of Figaro, a critique of aristocratic privilege, was moulded into a piece that celebrated Aryan nobility. Such distortions of Mozart's operas were pivotal in creating a cultural narrative that served Nazi propaganda.
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Another vital facet to consider is the manner in which Mozart was used to project an image of Germany to the world. The Salzburg Festival, renowned for its performances of Mozart’s works, became a platform for showcasing Nazi Germany's 'refinement' to a global audience. The high international regard for Mozart allowed the Nazis to exploit his music as a symbol of Germany's cultural superiority, thereby attempting to legitimise their regime. David B Dennis, in his book "Inhumanities: Nazi Interpretations of Western Culture", highlights how the festival was utilised to project an image of a "culturally rich and peaceful Germany" contrary to the militaristic reality of the regime. By luring diplomats and foreign intellectuals with the charm of Mozart’s music, the Nazis hoped to manipulate the world’s perception of the Third Reich. Furthermore, a discussion about Mozart’s importance to the Nazis would be incomplete without considering the psychological aspects. Historian Michael H. Kater in his "Composers of the Nazi Era" provides an in-depth analysis of the Nazis' complex relationship with Mozart. According to Kater, Hitler, who was an avid fan of opera, often sought solace in Mozart’s music during periods of stress, suggesting that Mozart had an indirect, psychological influence on the Nazi leadership. Body - Part 3 Finally, Mozart's music was also used as a propaganda tool within Nazi concentration camps. In an abhorrent juxtaposition, the beauty of Mozart's melodies was exploited to mask the horrors of the Holocaust. The Theresienstadt camp, for example, often used performances of Mozart’s pieces to deceive Red Cross inspectors about the conditions of the camps. Shirli Gilbert, in her book "Music in the Holocaust", explains how the Nazis used Mozart’s music to create an illusion of normalcy amidst the brutal conditions in these camps. Even the victims of the Nazi regime, the Jewish prisoners, were coerced to perform Mozart’s music. This is a haunting testimony to the Nazis' duality, appreciating the beauty of Mozart’s music while inflicting unimaginable cruelty. It shows the deeply disturbing use of Mozart's music as a tool of deception and control in the hands of the Nazis. Gilbert further expounds how, paradoxically, many Jewish musicians held onto Mozart's music as a symbol of resistance and a source of solace amidst their grim circumstances. This showcases the complex, dualistic role Mozart’s music played during this period – as both a tool of Nazi propaganda and a beacon of hope and resistance for their victims. Another intriguing aspect to consider is the post-war perception of Mozart in light of his association with the Nazis. Levi argues that the post-war era saw a strong push to "denazify" Mozart, with extensive attempts made to disassociate his legacy from the taint of Nazi propaganda. This process not only reinstated Mozart’s universal appeal but also presented a case study on the lasting implications of art appropriation in a political context. In this endeavour, scholars like Brigid Brophy, in her biographical study "Mozart the Dramatist", sought to reinstate Mozart's cultural and historical context, arguing that his operas were not celebrations of racial superiority but humanistic dramas that transcended national and racial barriers. Thus, the post-war perception of Mozart was heavily shaped by the need to extricate his legacy from its wartime manipulation.
Drake Winston in front of Mozart's statue in 2019. Although the performance of Mozart’s Coronation Mass K317 in Salzburg's Cathedral conducted by organist Joseph Messner four days after Hitler’s triumphant entry into Salzburg on April 6 captured the euphoria of the moment, the Nazis had considerable issues with co-opting Mozart into their propaganda as seen later that year when the initial plans for the 1938 Salzburg Festival had been summarily altered. Of the four operas originally promised for 1938 for example, only Don Giovanni and Figaro were retained. Even then, the honour of opening the Festival was bestowed on Wagner’s Die Meistersinger, conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler and staged in the presence of Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess. This would lead Goebbels to conclude that the inclusion of Wagner’s Tannhäuser and
Die Meistersinger had been a tactical mistake which diluted the
primacy of Mozart given that, despite all the propaganda, ticket sales for performances of Don Giovanni and Figaro amounted to roughly a third of the amount taken the year before. By November 6 Goebbels could record in his diary that Hitler had agreed that in future no further Wagner performances would be allowed at Salzburg, but from now on, the Festival’s main focus would be orientated towards Mozart and Richard Strauss.
Despite the uniquely Germanic character of the 1938 Salzburg Festival Nazi propaganda stressed both Mozart operas were still presented in the original Italian, ostensibly to emphasise the burgeoning alliance with Italy, and which overrode the embarrassment of highlighting the Jewish authorship of the libretti. Of note too was the significant role allotted to sacred music, possibly as an attempt to reach out to the Catholic Church although the performance of Mozart’s Requiem under Joseph Messner in Salzburg Cathedral was dedicated to the memory of the 140 Nazis who had died during an abortive coup in July 1934.
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With Drake Winston |
The following year on August 9, 1939 Hitler attended a performance of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni at the Salzburg music festival which was the first time he participated in this particular event. To judge by his reported demeanour there could not have appeared to have been a large-scale military conflict looming on the horizon. When it came, it would see the most overwhelmingly lavish musical celebration to have been organised by the Nazi regime involving the extensive and morale-boosting activities organised throughout the German Reich and its occupied territories in 1941 to mark the 150th anniversary of the death of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Yet as Erik Levi notes in Mozart and the Nazis: The Abuse of a Cultural Icon, Mozart seems the most unlikely candidate to have become a useful adjunct to Nazi propaganda.
Although depicted at the time as the shining example of youthful German genius, whose memory German soldiers were supposedly fighting on the Eastern front to preserve, his music, unlike that of Beethoven or Wagner, does not easily fit into the mould of Teutonic heroism that was required at this particular time. In fact, Mozart was probably the least easily malleable of all the great composers to have been appropriated by the Nazis. On almost every level, his philosophical and moral outlook seems at odds with their weltanschauung. For example, despite a few isolated expressions of German patriotism that appear in his letters, he does not strike one as a virulent nationalist, at least not in the sense in which such a position was understood by the Nazis. As a libertarian who generally felt at ease in most of the countries of Europe, his vision appears to have transcended national barriers rather than emphasised Germanic hegemony. Furthermore, had he been alive and working during the 1930s, his well-known activities as a Freemason and his apparent willingness to collaborate with a Jewish librettist on three of his greatest operas would surely have placed him on a collision course with the regime.
Hitler at Residenzplatz on April 6, 1938. Hitler had arrived at Salzburg at 14.00 at the main train station where he was met by Gauleiter Anton Wintersteiger, General Eugen Beyer, ϟϟ Obergruppenführer Josef Dietrich, ϟϟ Obergruppenführer Franz Lorenz and various police and party officials. Accompanying Hitler were Reichsführer ϟϟ Heinrich Himmler, SA Obergruppenführer Wilhelm Brückner, Reichspressecheffer Dr. Otto Dietrich and ϟϟ group leader Julius Schaub. The entourage drove here to the residence, where a reception with party leaders including state governor Dr. Albert Reitter as well as Minister Edmund Glaise-Horstenau awaited him. Hitler signed the city's golden book and a choir of Salzburg middle school students under the direction of Prof. Friedrich Gehmacher performed a “folk song homage” and Otto Plantl recited a poem. As a welcome gift, the city presented him with one of the most valuable
objects from the Salzburg Museum Carolino Augusteum: Carl Spitzweg's
painting Der Sonntagsspaziergang. He then drives to the Austrian Court from where Hitler was cheered on the balcony by spectators and then asked a boy from the crowd to enter the hall. At 15.30 the procession continued to travel through Südtirolerplatz, Rainerstraße, Dreifaltigkeitsgasse, Adolf-Hitler-Platz,
Bismarckstraße, Staatsbrücke, Rathausplatz, Kranzlmarkt, Alter Markt,
Residenzplatz, Domplatz, Franziskanergasse to end at the rally in the Festspielhaus which lasted until 17.00. Among the roughly 3,000 people attending were predominantly “old fighters”, and was broadcast with loudspeakers on the streets and squares of the city, where 50,000 people were expected to have listened. 6,000 SA and ϟϟ men served on security detail. The rally itself began with a flag march and speeches by district leaders and Gauleiter Fritz Wächtler; apparently first aid had to be provided in 214 cases during the rally. Hitler spoke in his speech of his supposed longing for home: "For years I dreamed of entering this country in spite of everyone who hated this hour - and now I'm here!" He eventually ended his speech with reference to the issue of an economic integration of Austria into the Reich:
We have a most magnificent goal before us, the goal of rendering this Volksgemeinschaft more profound and to integrate this country economically in the enormous cycle of our great economic life—a truly magnificent goal. I am so happy that I was allowed to create this goal and to work on it. In only a few months’ time, the tide of new creativity and new economic activity will surge through this country. In a few years, thoughts of Social Democracy and Communism will have faded like the memory of an evil spirit from a distant past, and these ideas will be laughed at... Never before have I stepped before the nation with a clearer conscience or with greater pride and confidence. I am certain: on April 10 the entire German Volk will make its greatest avowal in history. It will solemnly pledge its allegiance to the new Reich and the new community. For only if all Germans form part of a sworn-in and unified community can Germany’s future be assured for all time. Our children and grandchildren shall not have to be ashamed of their ancestors. One day they shall, with all due respect, look back to those who lived before them, to those who protected the Reich, the Reich which gives life and sustenance to them. By then, April 10 will have become one of the great days in German history. All of us greatly rejoice in the knowledge that Providence has chosen us to fashion this day.
The next day Hitler attended the breaking of new ground at the Walserberg near Salzburg for the Reich Autobahn, which was to connect Salzburg and Vienna one day. In front of an assembly of construction workers, Hitler delivered a short address, declaring
Here, too, we will begin with action immediately. I will hold you responsible, Herr Generalinspekteur [Todt], not only for commencing work here on this very day, but also for completing this first section within three years. You, my fellow workers, will help him. This bond shall tie together all of Germany and it shall serve as proof to the world that a Volk and a Reich capable of seeing through such an enormous undertaking—that these can never be separated. Now I myself will commence this work.
Subsequently, Hitler himself inaugurated the construction by digging the ceremonial first spadeful. Nonetheless, his wish did not come true that the Autobahn might be completed “within three years.” As with many of his other enterprises, the war was to end the construction work prematurely.

Roughly three miles west of Salzburg is schloss Klessheim, a Baroque palace located in Wals-Siezenheim. Due to its proximity
to the Obersalzberg, Schloss Kleßheim was chosen as the "Guest House of the Führer" and served as the setting for state receptions. The palace was designed and constructed by Austrian architect Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach for Prince-Archbishop Johann Ernst von Thun in 1700. It became the summer residence of the Archbishops of Salzburg. After the anschluss Hitler, when staying at his nearby Berghof residence, used Schloss Klessheim for conferences and to host official guests like Benito Mussolini, Miklós Horthy, Ion Antonescu, Jozef Tiso and Ante Pavelić. On April 16 and 17 1943, Horthy was Hitler’s guest at Klessheim castle. In addition to political and military matters, the talks mostly concerned the round-up of Hungarian Jews and their transport to concentration camps, that is, extermination camps. Horthy did not want to deal with this problem, and so Hitler felt forced to explain to him the necessity of the extermination of the Jews in the following manner:
If the Jews do not want to work there, then they will be shot. If they cannot work, they will go to seed. They must be treated like the tuberculosis bacillus that can infect a healthy body. This is not cruel if you consider that even innocent creatures of nature, like the rabbit and the deer, are shot so that they cannot do harm. Why should you be more kind to these beasts, who want to bring us Bolshevism? Nations that do not fight off the Jews go to seed. The decline of the once-so-proud Persian people is one of the most famous examples of this. Today, they lead as pitiful an existence as the Armenians.

Whilst Horthy stayed at Klessheim on another occasion the following year, Hitler on March 19, 1944 secretly gave orders for Operation Margarethe to occupy Hungary and enforce the deportation of the Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. On July 7, 1944, on the occasion of a weapons exhibition, an attempt by several Wehrmacht officers around von Stauffenberg to kill Hitler failed, when conspirator Helmuth Stieff did not trigger the bomb. Until October 1944, the palace remained outside the reach of Allied bombers. In May 1945 it was seized by the American military administration. The American commander Mark Clark had his headquarters in Schloss Klessheim like Hitler before him. Clark was pleased with Klessheim, and was under no illusions about its previous role as a guesthouse for visitors to Berchtesgaden. It had been ‘wonderfully modernised and furnished with art treasures, mostly stolen from France’. Reichsadler statues made of lime stone, that were attached to the entrance portals, remain a reminder of the Nazi era today
Eva Braun water-skiing on Wolfgangsee, a lake lying mostly within the state of Salzburg named after Saint Wolfgang of Regensburg, who, according to legend, built the first church here in the late 10th century.
Zell am See

Years before the Nazis even took power in Germany, Zell am See organised a "Gautag der Hitlerpartei" for the 11th and 12th of October in 1930 in the district capital. At the welcome party about 250 people, mostly Germans, were involved. On Sunday at 9.00 a festive service took place in the parish church, although its pastor of Zell am See refused to allow the flags and standards inside the church. After the service, a celebration took place in the town square. Here, various speakers from neighbouring Bavaria on the 'Austromarxismus' started. The region, directly adjacent to Bavaria, was well located geographically for supporting propaganda from Germany. After the seizure of power by Hitler in 1933, Austrian Nazi officials found shelter in neighbouring Germany and can continued their work from there. In the spring of 1931 bloody clashes between Nazis and Social Democratic supporters occurred again and again in the Zell am See area. In April 1931, 34 Nazis held a meeting in Ferleiten. On the return trip, they were attacked by about 200 workers, and in the ensuing mêlée one person was severely injured and four persons slightly injured. In September 1932, a meeting in Zell am See ended in a bloody hall battle between the Social Democrats and the National Socialists. The local organisation of the Social Democratic Party was invited under the theme "National Socialist demagogy" to a meeting in the Park Hotel on Zell am See. After the event, three people were seriously injured and ten slightly injured. The Parkhotel was badly damaged. During the parliamentary elections between the National Council election in 1930 and the state election in 1932, the Nazis made considerable gains in this area.

The church and Schmittenhöhe during the Nazi-era and today
From Where Eagles Dare and the same site today
Göring visiting the town in 1942 whilst promoting the local hydroelectric plant, seen with Drake along Dreifaltigkeitsgasse. During construction work for a gliding school for the National Socialist Air Corps (NSFK ), forced labourers from the occupied war zones in the east built barracks on communal land from 1939 onwards, and the Gauleitung also ordered the construction of makeshift homes for bomb victims in Zell am See. But the air war increasingly reached the mountains, and by the end of the war there had been 459 air raid alarms, although the town itself was spared from bombing. From the beginning of Nazi rule, there were also deportations to concentration camps in Zell am See (including the former government commissioner and later district captain Franz Gasteiger), so-called 'Aryanisations' (with favours such as the Nazis' general music director Herbert von Karajan or the Führer sculptor Joseph Thorak ) and reprisals against the population. In this regard, prison sentences were imposed several times on account of statements hostile to the regime for incitement, listening to “enemy radio stations ” or “black market slaughter.” Andreas Kronewitter, a Reichsbahn employee in Zellwas sentenced to death in 1944 and executed on the basis of letters written to his son at the front about undermining military force. In April 1945, during the Battle of Berlin, evacuation measures were carried out for the Reich government located in Berlin, the Reich ministries and the security apparatus. Only Hermann Goering went to southern Germany with his staff after Hitler had decided to stay in Berlin on April 22nd. Most of the staff to be evacuated were to move north.
The hauptplatz during Nazi rallies in 1938 and Drake Winston today. The tourist office has moved to the main street. At the beginning of May 1945, the last Reich government was formed in Flensburg in the special area of Mürwik . The Alpine fortress propagated by leading Nazis was a mirage, but towards the end of the war there were a few evacuated Wehrmacht command posts in Mittersill, Niedernsill, Maria Alm and Zell am See, and the High Command of the Luftwaffe moved into quarters in Thumersbach. In general, Zell am See also experienced the largest invasion in its history during this time. Already from1942 there were more Reich Germans and South Tyroleans were mainly settled in the “Neue Heimat” in Schüttdorf and Einöd, so in the last months of the war thousands of refugees came to Zell from the combat zones of Germany and eastern Austria. In addition to accommodation in the barracks and makeshift homes, hospitals often had to be set up in hotels and inns, and the number of inhabitants rose to over 11,000. .gif)
The first American soldiers in Pinzgau were the paratroopers of the 101st American Airborne Division ( 101st Airborne Division ). They moved into Zell am See on May 8, 1945, the day of the unconditional surrender of the Wehrmacht. A little later, the " Rainbow Division " (42nd Infantry) took over the administration, denazification and democratisation of the liberated areas in Pinzgau. Soon American commanders, working with city officials, were able to alleviate widespread shortages of food and other necessities. It is also worth mentioning that at that time there was an American university (the Rainbow University) in the Grand Hotel with a branch in the Metzgerwirt. As everywhere else, the first years after the end of the war were difficult in Zell as the shortage of food made things difficult for the people, and there was also extensive clean-up and restoration work to be done. But slowly everything was restored, the infrastructure on the Schmittenhöhe was continuously improved with new lifts and more spacious ski runs, and shipping was also promoted through the purchase of the Libelle boat. This was followed by municipal works, the construction of the elementary school, the adaptation and establishment of the hospital and much more. Due to the rising economy and the steadily growing tourism, Zell am See soon moved up into the front ranks of Salzburg's tourist destinations as winter tourism became more and more important and skiing found more followers.

Overlooking Zell on Schmittenhöhe.
Spending a cold winter morning at castle Fischhorn. As shown in the then-and-now GIFs, a fire on On September 21, 1920 destroyed large parts of the castle. The owner had it restored by the Bremen architect Karl Wolters based on the much simpler architecture that existed before the neo-Gothic reconstruction. In May 1943 the Nazis seized the castle and the surrounding buildings. From then on, the property of the ϟϟ served as a remontage, as a riding school and from September 1944 as a sub-camp of the Dachau concentration camp. On the evening of May 7, 1945 German Corps G, First Germany Army, and the American Seventh Army had negotiated a cease-fire, and both units agreed to stop troop movements as well as to cease shooting at each other. During this time Göring sent a note to Seventh Army Headquarters in Kitzbühel informing them that he would meet the Americans at the Fischhorn Castle at Zell am See, to surrender.
As they drove up to the gaunt stone building, Göring glimpsed a G.I. and an ϟϟ officer standing guard on opposite sides of the gateway. Rather alarmingly, the castle still housed the staff of an ϟϟ cavalry division. “Guard me well,” he said, turning to his captors, but a Luftwaffe major noticed that his face was wreathed in smiles. Emmy and Heli Bouhler fell into each other’s arms as they stepped out of the cars. “When do I get to meet Eisenhower?” asked Göring. Stack answered evasively. Later, Göring returned to the matter. He turned to the interpreter. “Ask General Stack,” he said, “whether I should wear a pistol or my ceremonial dagger when I appear before Eisenhower.” “I don’t care two hoots,” retorted the general.
Irving, Göring (686)
In May 1945, Hermann Göring was captured in Altenmarkt im Pongau by
American soldiers. From May 7-9, 1945 Göring lived with Emmy and
daughter Edda in castle Fischhorn before being transferred to the Grand Hotel in Kitzbühel.