According to Simon Wiesenthal, nearly half of the crimes associated with the Holocaust were committed by Austrians, who comprised just 8.5 percent of the population of Hitler's Greater German Reich. Bruce Pauley's book explains this phenomenon by providing a history of Austrian anti-Semitism and Jewish responses to it from the Middle Ages to the present, with a particular focus on the period from 1914 to 1938. In contrast to works that view anti-Semitism as an inherent national characteristic, his account identifies many sources and varieties of the anti-Semitic sentiment that pervaded...

Pauley shows that the Austrian Nazis were not compliant servants to the German Nazi party and that they controlled a fascinating movement troubled by contradictions between perverted idealism and violence. Pauley analyzes the Austrian Nazi party's social composition, leadership problems, slow growth in the 1920s, response to the Great depression, propaganda, structure, SS and SA activities, resistance to the German party, and contribution to the Anschluss of 1938.

Originally published in 1987.

A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in...

The fourth edition of Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini: Totalitarianism in the Twentieth Century presents an innovative comparison of the origins, development, and demise of the three forms of totalitarianism that emerged in twentieth-century Europe.

• Represents the only book that systematically compares all three infamous dictators of the twentieth century
• Provides the latest scholarship on the wartime goals of Hitler and Stalin as well as new information on the disintegration of the Soviet empire
• Compares the early lives of Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini,...