PAUL SCHWARTZ
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magazine even noted that Kreisky himself had "garnished" his ad–
ministration with a half-dozen former Nazis. Such was the tone of
scorn that one would have thought that denazification in Germany
had been a complete success.
Perhaps the cheapest shot at the Austrians was found in the
magazine
Der Stem,
which devoted an article to Waldheim's cam–
paign stop in Braunau, Adolf Hitler's birthplace. Observing that
many of the people in the crowd who greeted Waldheim had "per–
sonally experienced" the "celebrated-notorious son of their city"
Adolf Hitler, the magazine adds that these people did not under–
stand why "their Kurti" should be besmirched only because he, like
everyone else back then, had cooperated "a little bit." Making
Waldheim's visit to the village where Hitler was born the focus of an
article reveals much about the way Germans used the Waldheim af–
fair. As a Swiss friend of mine summarized, "The Austrians only
say, 'Anschluss, Anschluss, we are victims too,' and the Germans,
'Hitler wasn't German, you know'."
Austria was certainly more than an innocent victim of the
Anschluss, or annexation, by Germany in 1938. Austro-fascism ex–
isted prior to and then apart from Nazism; Austria welcomed the
Anschluss with jubilation in the streets of Vienna; and many
Austrians made a career by serving the Third Reich . Quite a
number of Austrians helped carry out the Final Solution. But the
coverage of the Waldheim affair in West Germany reflects a pa–
thetic, half-buried desire to make the whole Nazi saga into an
Austrian invention foisted on the German nation.
At the end of an interview with a German magazine given dur–
ing the Austrian election campaign last April, Waldheim advised
that no one sitting in a glass house should throw stones. But apart
from an eagerness to blame Austria for this gruesome chapter of
their shared past, Germans do not want to throw stones. They want
to put an end to the discussion. In intellectual circles in Germany, a
parallel development has been the comparison of the crimes of Hitler
with those of Stalin.
The intellectual furor started with an essay by the historian
Ernst Nolte in the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
in June of 1986. Nolte
was careful to make an admission of the singularity of the Nazi
crimes in his article . He remarks that "despite all comparability," the
Nazis' misdeeds were "qualitatively different" from the social
destruction that the Bolsheviks undertook. Nolte goes on to argue,
however, that one should not concentrate solely on the crimes of the
