On 12 March 1938, units from the Wehrmacht’s 8th Army crossed the border into Austria. Their move into a neighbouring sovereign country was unopposed. Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg had been totally outmanoeuvred by Hitler’s bullying tactics over previous weeks and realised that neither Britain nor France would do anything to stop the takeover of his country. Schuschnigg consequently declared that no blood should be shed to oppose the union of Austria with Germany.
The German troops advancing into Austria were met by cheering crowds waving Nazi flags. That afternoon, Hitler himself crossed the border and drove to a rally in Linz attended by a quarter of a million jubilant Austrians. A few days later, even bigger crowds cheered his arrival in Vienna. On a balcony overlooking the Heldenplatz (Heroes’ Square), Hitler proudly welcomed his homeland of Austria into the Greater German Reich. Nazi propaganda showed newsreel film and photos of crowds waving enthusiastically at the arrival of the Germans in what was named the Anschluss (or ‘joining’) of two German-speaking nations which had traditionally been closely linked.
Despite the prohibition of the union of Germany and Austria in the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, most observers in Britain and France were not alarmed. The Times in London compared it to the union of Scotland and England 250 years before. Only Winston Churchill spoke out against the Anschluss in the House of Commons, saying that appeasing the German Führer would only encourage him to go further, and that Nazi aggression posed a threat to the whole of Europe. He was, of course, right. Later that year, Hitler seized part of Czechoslovakia, and 18 months later had invaded Poland.
