1938: Personal Petitions Sent to Reich Commissioner Josef Bürckel

In the months following the “Anschluss” on 12 March 1938, the Nazis deployed every means available to secure their rule in Austria. This meant taking control of the state administration and entrenching the Nazi Party as the instrument of power. Moreover, efforts were made to reshape Austrian society into a Nazi Volksgemeinschaft or “people’s community”. This was a process characterised firstly by the exclusion of anyone who, for racist or ideological reasons, could not be part of this Volksgemeinschaft or Leistungsgemeinschaft (“performance community”), and secondly by an assertion of “racial unity” between the members of this “national community”. For the former group (Jews, Romnja and Roma, people with disabilities, resistance fighters, …) this meant discrimination, public humiliation, segregation, the loss of civic rights, expropriation, persecution, forced exile and murder. For the second group, there was the prospect of national greatness, social security, individual advancement and consumption. These two aspects find visual expression on the one hand in the photographs of Jews forced to scrub the streets during the Anschluss pogroms, and on the other in the mass parades and torchlit processions held in March and April 1938. 

Violent processes of exclusion and promises of a Nazi Volksgemeinschaft played an important role in shoring up Nazi rule. These two strategies were intimately linked through people’s concrete actions. It was only through people’s active participation in the mass gatherings staged for Nazi propaganda, and likewise through violent and brutal campaigns of persecution and expropriation, that the Volksgemeinschaft was formed and Nazi control ensured. One expression of this securing of power through action are the personal petitions sent to Josef Bürckel, the Reich Commissioner for the Reunification of Austria with the German Reich and the Gauleiter (Nazi district governor) of Vienna. In 1938 thousands of Austrians wrote to the top-ranking Nazi in Austria to denounce people, present their ideas for the future Nazi state, or to try to gain personal advantage through his support. The correspondents included a small number of Jews who had not yet lost their faith in the rule of law and expected assistance from Bürckel, as well as the relatives of people who had been imprisoned for their political attitudes. However, only a very few letter writers expressed criticism of the Nazis’ violent measures.