Außenpolitische Dokumente der Republik Österreich 1918–1939: Band 12, Österreich zwischen Isolation und Anschluss ed. by Walter Rauscher and Arnold Suppan (review)

There is no shortage of accounts of the 1938 annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany. This dramatic moment in European history was recorded by eyewitnesses, and news of the event was spread through newspaper reports and newsreels around the world. What can, at times, get lost in these reports is that what transpired in mid-March 1938 did not come as a complete surprise to the world; in particular, the government of Austria was acutely aware of the German desire to incorporate their southern neighbor into a larger German-speaking empire. In their book, Außenpolitische Dokumente der Republik Österreich 1918–1939: Band 12, historians Walter Rauscher and Arnold Suppan describe the reactions of the Austrian Foreign Ministry to the increasing pressure they faced from German forces starting in 1937.

This text is part of a twelve-volume project to publish and examine the most important foreign policy documents produced by the Austrian government in the interwar period. Specifically, this volume focuses on the correspondence issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs between September 1937 and March 1938. That seven-month period was, of course, a highly charged time as the independent Federal State of Austria teetered on the edge of its ultimate annexation into Nazi Germany, something that had been in the cards for many years but had been held at bay by both diplomatic efforts and the threat of military conflict. Austrian independence had been a topic of intense speculation since the creation of the First Republic in 1919 and was nearly ended with the assassination of Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss in the July Putsch of 1934. It was only because of Italian support for Austrian independence, most obviously in the form of the Rome Protocols, that Germany did not annex the country at this point; as we now know, the reprieve was only temporary.

The book is divided into two rough sections. The first is an introductory essay written by Arnold Suppan, a diplomatic historian at the University of Vienna and the vice president of the Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, publisher of this text. In this essay Suppan presents a concise history of the last days of the corporate state, showing how the Austrian government attempted to make sense of a continent undergoing tremendous change. In the second and probably more important section of the book, Suppan and Rauscher have re-published nearly two hundred examples of diplomatic correspondence from this period, all of which illustrate the concerns of the Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs over the collapse of the Austro-Italian cooperation and the potential consequences of this failure. As is common with diplomatic correspondence, none of these documents are particularly long, but they reveal how the Foreign Ministry worked to make sense of the changing alliances in Europe on the eve of World War II. They were produced by envoys throughout the continent and contain, as is to be expected with this type of communication, details of behind-the-scenes conversations with people of all sorts who had potentially valuable information on the position of Austria.

One of the most interesting of these documents is, unsurprisingly, the last in this section. This protocol, from March 15, 1938, details the liquidation of the Foreign Ministry and, most importantly, lists the twenty ministry officials who were deemed at the meeting to be eligible and appropriate to be recommended for transfer to the new government. What is thought-provoking about this text is not the detail of what transpired at the meeting, which seems to have been borderline mundane, but the establishment that this diplomatic protocol of the truth that the Anschluss was not a conquering of a foreign entity by a military power but the acquiescence of an admittedly weak country to be legally integrated into its stronger neighbor. While Austria would, in...