Austrian Origins of National Socialism

Abstract

It has become common to interpret the National Socialism of contemporaray Germany as a mere recrudescence of "Prussion militarism," and to consider the Weimar Republic an unnatural interruption of a basic tendency towards Prussionism in German political life. This is to discount the democratic capacties of the north Germans and to to minimize the extent to which National Socialism is the outgrowth of seeds sown among the Germans of the south, especially the Austrian and Sudeten Germans. It is forgotten that at least some of the ideas of National Socialism may be traced back to the nationalism among the Germans of the Hapsburg realm before the Great War, and that Adolf Hitler himself, as a native of that realm and a resident in it up to the age of twenty-three or twenty-four, absorbed much of the spirit and many of the ideas of this nationalism. I propose to examine some of the roots of German nationalism in Austria with the primary object of throwing light on the Austria antecendents of contemporary Nationalism Socialism, and with the subsidiary purpose of describing the political atmosphere in which Hitler himself grew to to manhood.