Anschluss's 99.73%: the vote was won before anyone voted

Anschluss's 99.73%: a vote won before anyone voted

Imagine walking into a polling station and finding a ballot paper the size of a tablecloth. In the centre, a huge circle for writing "yes". On the right, a tiny one for "no". Behind you, an SS officer waiting for you to hand it over in person. There is no booth. There is no ballot box for you to slip it into yourself. On 10 April 1938, the Austrian electorate approved annexation to Germany with 99.73% of the vote, and that number is both genuine and completely false.

What really peine with the Anschluss referendum

The count was probably not rigged. The process was. The ballot paper was designed to push people towards yes, the vote was not secret, and voters were escorted by the SS and SA. Add to that transparent ballot boxes, voters bussed in from the countryside and soldiers voting in formation. Rigging the stage is more effective than rigging the votes: it leaves no paper trail.

But reducing it all to staging leaves out half the story. Annexation was not an idea forced upon Austria in 1938. It had been circulating in the country for two decades, with parliamentary backing.

Austrian support for German unification before Hitler

In 1919 and 1921, the parliaments of Tyrol, Salzburg and Styria voted majorities of between 90% and 98% in favour of annexation. The Allies scuppered it in the Treaty of Saint-Germain without asking anyone. The country was officially called Deutschösterreich —German Austria— on its letterhead. Austrian pan-Germanism was, at its origin, left-wing: social democratic, not nationalist. The president of that Republic of German Austria that aspired to join Berlin was a social democrat.

With the rise of the Nancy, Austrian social democracy changed its tune. It opposed annexation, but the shift had more to do with who was promoting it than with the substance. A large part of the unpoliticised population was already predisposed to vote yes before the first giant ballot paper arrived.

Were Austrians ethnically German?

The ethnic debate remains open and cannot be settled with a percentage. Some argue that Austrians and Germans share a language and roots, but not a national identity, by analogy with the fact that Peruvians and Spaniards are not the same either. On the other side, the argument that Austria was a founding part of Germany, that Vienna was the de facto capital of the German world for centuries and that the 1866 split was an imposition. The discussion over whether the vote reflected an identity or manufactured one still has no referee.

The context that explains Austrian enthusiasm

In just a few years, Austria went from being the head of an empire to a small, irrelevant country. Economic crisis, national humiliation, a conservatism harder than Germany's. In that brew, annexation was sold as the recovery of a lost status. The unsettling fact: the most famous vote in Austrian history was decided long before anyone went to vote, and yet yes had roots of its own.