Anschluss

Rico's friend Kelley, also a history junkie, sends this:

I was watching a World War Two documentary last night on the rise and fall of Nazi Germany. When it came to the annexation of Austria, these two women appeared in a snippet of newsreel footage. The woman on the right (usually shown cropped) was one of the most famous news photos of my youth. She was always portrayed as an Austrian woman sobbing at seeing her country crushed by the vile Nazis and saluting, lest she be singled out as a dissenter. I grew up with that as an article of faith, as she periodically re-appeared in articles, and sometimes, textbooks, as an icon of the times. Somewhere in my thirties, I was reading The New York Times Review of Books and there she was again, in a letter to the editors. I guess she had been included in an article in the preceding week. Somebody wrote in and revealed that, for years, we'd had it all wrong. The writer said that one only had to look at the sweater she was wearing: the typical folk-craft style of ethnic Germans living in Austria. He went on to say that when the Nazi columns rolled into Vienna, native Austrians would never have turned out, much less tender the Party salute. The Austrians stayed home. That woman was an ethnic German, overcome with tears of joy.

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