In Europe

outside force: in the early morning of Saturday, 12 March, Germany's 8th Army rolled through the Austrian border posts, ostensibly to help the new Austrian government ‘restore order’.
    Despite their meticulous planning, however, there was one thing the Nazis had overlooked: the overwhelming enthusiasm of the Austrian people. To their own surprise, the advancing German troops were welcomed with flowers and cheering. German Army reports spoke of ‘song and laughter’ and ‘an unbelievable euphoria’. American and British correspondents in Vienna described how entire crowds sangand danced in the streets, punctuated by cries of ‘Down with the Jews!’ and ‘
Sieg Heil!
’.
    That afternoon, to the accompaniment of chiming church bells, Hitler himself made a triumphal entry into Linz. From both Catholic and Protestant pulpits, God was thanked for this bloodless revolution. On Monday, Hitler arrived in Vienna. Hundreds of thousands of people came out. It was, according to one eyewitness, ‘the biggest crowd I have ever seen in Vienna’. ‘Stately trees on the pavement were literally bowed down with the weight of numbers trying to get a better view,’ wrote the correspondent for the
Manchester Guardian
.
    The arrests began that very weekend. Some 20,000 Austrian citizens – communists, journalists, Jewish bankers, workers, aristocrats and anti-Nazis from all walks of life – were rounded up. At the same time there began ‘a medieval pogrom with a modern look’. As soon as the Nazis had seized power, on the evening of Friday, 11 March, tens of thousands of Viennese citizens marched on Leopoldstadt, the city's Jewish quarter along the Danube. Families were attacked in their homes, businessmen were pulled from taxis, hundreds of Jews committed suicide.
    The American newspaper correspondent William Shirer visited the SS headquarters at the Rothschild palace. ‘As we entered we almost collided with some SS officers who were carting up silver and other loot from the basement. One had a gold-framed picture under his arm. One was the commandant. His arms were loaded with silver knives and forks, but he was not embarrassed.’
    Gitta Sereny, fourteen at the time, heard countless voices all over the city shouting ‘
Deutschland erwache! Juda verrecke!
’ On the Graben, she and a girlfriend stumbled upon a few men in brown uniforms, surrounded by a crowd of laughing Viennese citizens. In the middle of the throng she saw a dozen middle-aged men and women down on their knees. They were scrubbing the paving stones with toothbrushes. She recognised one of the men as Dr Berggrün, the paediatrician who had saved her life when she had had diphtheria at the age of four. ‘I had never forgotten that night; he had wrapped me again and again in cool, wet sheets, and it was his voice I had heard early that dawn saying, “
Sie wird leben
.” She will live.’
    The doctor saw her walk up to the men in brown, he shook his head,but she screamed ‘How dare you!’ She shouted that a great doctor was being humiliated here, a man who saved lives. ‘Is this what you call our liberation?’ her girlfriend added, tears running down her face. Sereny: ‘It was extraordinary: within two minutes the jeering crowd had dispersed, the brown guards had gone, the “street cleaners” had melted away. “Never do that again,” Dr Berggrün said to us sternly, his small, round wife next to him nodding fervently, her face sagging with despair and exhaustion. “It is very dangerous!”’
    The Berggrüns died in the gas chambers at Sobibor in 1943.
    On Sunday, 10 April, a referendum was held to ratify the
Anschluss
. Anyone who did not openly vote ‘yes’ immediately became suspect. The turnout was unnaturally huge, and 99.73 per cent of the population voted ‘yes’. In fact, a large majority of Austrians probably were in favour of annexation. As well as being the dream of most German-speaking Austrians, it had the support of the major ecclesiastical and political groups, and Germany was also seen as a model of miraculous economic recovery. In Hitler's birthplace, Branau, 5 of the 3,600 inhabitants voted against it.
    In the little village of Sankt Radegund, thirty-five kilometres down the road, exactly one man voted ‘no’. It was Franz Jägerstätter, one of village's most influential citizens. I saw a picture of him: a handsome, proud man in gleaming leathers, sitting astride a sparkling motorbike, with his parents and a little