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8 - Nazi Austria: the limits of dissent

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Tim Kirk
Affiliation:
Northumbria University, Newcastle
Anthony McElligott
Affiliation:
University of St Andrews, Scotland
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Summary

In February 1939, the security service (SD) of the SS in Vienna presented Josef Bürckel, head of the Nazi administration in Austria, with a report on popular opinion among the working class. It was based on an interview with five former workers' leaders from Vienna's tenth district. The report is striking in its sensitivity to the customs, hierarchies and internal boundaries of working-class communities, and revealing of Nazi attitudes to workers and working-class politics. The men interviewed had been chosen for their credentials as natural leaders. They had been popular trades union officials in the 1920s, elected repeatedly by their workmates to perform a valid role as leaders of their factory community, but had been unpaid union functionaries, and the SD report distinguished them as such from the salaried and ambitious professional politicians of the Social Democratic Workers' Party (Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei, SDAP) These were men who did not discharge their duties for the sake of personal gain or power, but out of a sense of duty.

In addition, their political position, on the anti-Communist right wing of the labour movement, made them precisely the type of worker – ‘intelligent’ and ‘open to discussion’ – that the Nazis thought they could win for ‘German socialism’.

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Opposing Fascism
Community, Authority and Resistance in Europe
, pp. 133 - 149
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1999

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