The Sound of Goosestep - Austrians in the Wehrmacht 

tis the bestest

Maybe the war was all about the good outfits after all.

So long, farewell, aufweidersein, goodbye, I have a gun, So kiss your ass goodbye! Seriously I almost fell out of my chair when I saw the thumbpick, That alone deserves an upvote.

No it's a cursed Thumbnail.

If I recall the father was the commander in Das Boot

Great Skiing, love the place.

Well, nevertheless, the orders from Berlin did came from Austrian too.😂😂😂😂

Germany was a young mosaic country. There was no German army uniform until 1912. So many men in the military had reason to feel like Bavarians first and Germans second. Also within the British troops many wanted to point out that they were Scots, Irish and such. But I guess willingness to fight also depended on the unit type. A Prussian Grenadier Guard unit might have more willingness to fight than a unit of Saxon reservists. Provincealism existed also in the German army in WW2, but it was probably to a lower extent than in WW1 since Germany had existed for some time now and more merged together into a country.

@Fabian Kirchgessner I guess the high losses in the beginning of the war demoralized the Austrian army for the rest of the war. Germany won victories, while the Austrians won none. Germany modern equipment while the Austrians lacked artillery. The Austrians faced one bloodbath after another. Battles were lost or ended even. A few were won, but usually with German help. So it is easy to understand why the war no longer was fun for the Austrians by the end of 1914. The empire had already become dependent on life support from Germany. This was a humiliating prestige loss, and took a toll on the country's self-esteem. Most of its best units had been wiped out. And the slavs within the army had limited willingness to fight. And the Austrian militia units were also of low quality. So there was not much left of the Austrian army. It had become too weak to launch large offensives on its own. Its only major military victory it won on its own for the rest of the war, was when some Austrian militia units which were badly equipped and trained managed to hold off the entire Italian army which were attacking through the Alps and thinking that Austria was an easy win after all catastrophic defeats it had suffered against Serbia and Russia. But despite greatly outnumbering the Austrian low quality units were the unable to break through. And they suffered large losses.

@@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714 can't really blame them, given the displacements/ethnic cleansing that happened in eastern europe post-war. Edit: just to clarify, this was initially a response to someone else speaking about Baltic Germans doing something similar when the red army approached until the collapse of communism.

Victory has a thousand fathers, defeat is an orphan and all that.

There is certainly a lot of cultural overlap with Switzerland as well in Austria. Language and culture don't always correlate with ethnicity. Naturally, smaller countries feel themselves more neutral, although as part of the so-called West.

Austrians continue doing that to this day

@@cv4809 What if a Mexican deny being Spanish?

Perhaps Barnhard can quantify that in a follow-on video. Maybe the farther South, the more Italian sausage....

They got better pastry as well, regardless if Vienna bread is Austrian or not

Maybe not pizza, but coffee.

Interesting place,Austria.I hear they also have some brothels in Vienna that don't know what a condom is.

@@nattygsbord I dunno. Sachertorte vs Swartzwaldtorte. It's close...

I am Italian-Austrian and my uncle was in the royal army and after September 43 he went with former soldiers in a white partisan unit. The strange thing is that the only one who wasn't killed as a prisoner was a young Austrian man of 19 years old who spoke Italian. My father in 1951, 20 years old, escaped to Italy when Lower Austria was under Soviet occupation.

There are differences between Northern and Southern Germans, just like there are differences between New York and Texas.

@@scratchy996 More than that, even. Depending on which linguist you ask, Austro-bavarian is an entirely separate _language_ from standard german instead of just a dialect group.

@@GaldirEonai I know, I was trying to give an example that Americans would understand.

@@GaldirEonai the difference between a language and a dialect is political, not scientific. I have seen northern Germans and Austrians speak English with each other 40 years ago - in the meantime the TV did a lot of leveling of the Language

Why do they dislike veinna?

@@edward9674 Because the general stereotype is that vienniese people think they are better than other austrians. Note the use of the word stereotype.

@@ThomasTee Ah! So you mean Vienniese people are like Canadians or Californians?! That makes sense.

Seems there's a similar notion in most countries. Capitals breed a certain type, and it's far from all of the inhabitants of course, but by God do they stand out and rub people the wrong way.

Vienna is our one and only genuinely cosmopolitan city. Everything else in the country has a very provincial feel to it when you leave out the tourists. So yeah, it's basically a different country.

The young lovers singing about love and stuff, only for him to become as about “Brown Shirt” as he could get.... is amusing.........likely he died in Russia years later.

@@davidbrennan660 Cant say as I'd use the word amusing. More like sickening.

You should see the movie, it’s genuinely a great movie

@@navaladmiral2962 I’ll get around to seeing it one day.

Thank you for the info.

Interestingly enough, my mother (who also loved the movie) found the thumbnail to be hilarious.

Seriously! I'd use it and send it to my mom who loves that movie

What movie?

@@gammelgemse Sound of music (1965)

@Mialisus > There you go king, use that for proper greentext

I believe that scene was in the director's cut.

@Mister Apol: Not enough, nowhere near enough.

@@jgranger3532 But you claim that all Austrians without exceptions were Nazis and that isn't true.

@Fabian Kirchgessner You can absolutely blame them for such blind loyalty.

@Fabian Kirchgessner that is at least doubtfull

@@TomTom-rh5gk On a per capita basis there were more card carrying Austrian nazis than German.

They may have been considered politically unreliable.

@@Shauma_llama Almost certainly the reason. Just another way that such dictatorships shoot themselves in the foot.

@@Shauma_llama Yeah, as much as I don't want to parrot something that people (probably with little to no military history knowledge) have been saying as they comment about how much the thumbnail for this video upsets them, Captain von Trapp is a great example of a politically unreliable officer from the former Habsburg Empire. I don't think monarchism was very popular in Austria in the interwar period (even compared to Hungary, oddly), but the officer corps had a lot of committed monarchists.

Stalin purged the Red Army officers for the same reason. When the shit hits the fan you don't want guys around who can rally the people against you.

I made the mistake of reading the comments without my glasses and at first read that as "Eyes Wide Shut", which is . . . not about the Second World War. It is based on an interwar Austrian novella though.

Thank you for the info. I will try to find a copy.

That's some shade throwing at Switzerland, lol

I think it's important to remember that prior to the post WW1 Austria was a fairly multi-cultural empire. Aside from the obvious Hungarian side, many families had connections to, e.g., Southern Poland / Galicia. It gave the average soldiers an alternate group identity to fall back on, when their German supremacism went sour; something that the "mainland" German soldiers had more completely been stripped of.

@@lucidnonsense942 I think the opposite is the case. Etno-nationalism is a typical thing of the Balkans. The nazis and the Serbians under Milosevic liked to put ethnic minorities into concentration camps so they could purify an area for their own race. Nazism was born in Hitler's mind when he was in Vienna. His contact with jews and slavs there did not make him feel more tolerant. Instead did those two groups became the largest victims of his murder programs. And to some degree I can understand the frustration of the German minority of the Habsburg empire. They stood for the bulk of its military strength and they were the ones keeping this thing together, while all other minorities were just thinking about themselves and trying to carve out privileges for their own ethnic group, without thinking much about what was in the best interest of the empire as a whole. Germany was rich, while Eastern Europe was less so economically and culturally. So of course did some South Germans like Hitler think that it would be better with a dictatorship and a hard rule with an iron fist, instead of listening to dozens of minority people and not get anything done in this dysfunctional state. Much is also talked about the old German roots to racism and anti-semitism. But no one ever talks about Austria's racist and anti-semitic roots. It was the Habsburg rulers religious intolerance which created the thirty years war 1618-1648. Prussia under Frederick the Great practiced religious toleration. While Maria Theresa on the other hand was a warm believer in the Catholic faith, and she could not tolerate the jews so she kicked them out from all her inheritary dominions. And as I said earlier, etno-nationalism had a long history within the Habsburg empire. And on top of all that was serfdom very strong in this empire. The fragmented state was too weak to force the oppressive German nobles who run this empire to pay their taxes or giving up their privileges like in other more modern and free countries. So when the nobles didn't pay any taxes - then did the poor peasants have to pay more taxes instead. So the tax burden was very unfairly distributed. The German landlords paid no taxes, while their slavic peasants paid much taxes to the state and was also forced to serve their feudal lords. And this structure of the Habsburg empire would remain up until the late 1800's when the empires taxation started to became much more fair. But the state was still very backwards compared to the rest of Europe and had not catched up. So no wonder that many people had many good reason to hate this old empire and wanted to break apart from it.

@@lucidnonsense942 Shouldn't some shade be thrown at the home of the Gnomes of Zurich? I mean, if +++%CARRIER LOST

There is a difference between how the population vs how the politicians see the issue. Politicians always try to impose their view to the population, for their own personal gains. I live in Romania and we have a somewhat similar situation with Moldova.

yeah, pretty much. Well, those who do sometimes know it from abroad and then decided to move to Austria.

I must either be Austrian or a zoomer, 'cause no clue

Lucky them!

I‘m German and only got to know it via american friends

​@Albert Felsen You're just so wrong on so many levels. Bringing up American and Dutch Slavery doesn't make you're point for you at all, it's actually bizarre. Saying that they shouldn't have gotten rid of their Nazis because some people would lose there jobs is actually a pretty extremely despicable thing to say. We're talking about people that took part in Mass Murder, Genocide, War Crimes. I really shouldn't have to explain why Nazism is bad to anyone. Your opinion is truly flabbergasting. None of what you said makes any sense on any level. You're coming across like a Nazi apologist. I'll parrot the famous American phrase about Communists, "The only good Nazi is a DEAD Nazi". Screw those people and anyone who supports them or idolizes them.

I read somewhere that 20% of the SS members were Austrians, while Austrians made up 8% of the population of the reich. So that seems like an over-representation. However, I do not think that indicates combat willingness. It can just be a sign of political affiliation.

@@nattygsbord However, only about 200K were barred from voting in 1945. Rest of them did vote for ÖVP or SPÖ.

@@nattygsbord Waffen SS would be the exact question,i think,not allgemeine.

​@@Panos-xo9rc In later stages of the war even the WaffenSS was not a volutary force anymore. So neither a good indication. (If i can trust the words of my grand-grandmother. 2 of her brothers were conscripted into it. According to her they certainly didn't join voluntarily, they had hoped to be allowed to stay on the mountain farm as needed workers. It was a small farm and they weren't even 18 yet. Both never made it back. The only thing they got from them was a card saying "Wir fahren übers schwarze Meer, und sehen und nimmer mehr" -> We cross the black sea and won't see each other again. But in german it rhymes.)

The young Austrian soldiers didn't grow up with Goebbels' propaganda machine. They weren't radicalized. There are a lot of misconceptions about the SS. It wasn't a monolithic organization like it's portrayed in Hollywood movies and the media (which just repeats what they see in movies). They were volunteers at the beginning of the war, but later new conscripts and entire regular army units were just assigned to the SS. Political views and racial features didn't matter anymore. Of course there were still foreign volunteer SS units, like Nordic and French, and they joined for various reasons.

Wow! Historically I have not Visualized ever getting a comment like from a RU-vid Channel creator.

;)

It seems that minority of Austrians were during the WW2 the fanatical Nazis, but majority were more human. In general, there were many German/Austrian Catholics that believed themselves opressed by Nazis and considered Poles on the same side.

In addition many Austrians used to settle down in Poland. As Catholics they were mostly on the Polish-German conflict against German protestants. The example is en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Weigl.

8:06 Encirclement at Stalingrad was definitely not the "safest" sector of the front, far from it..

I am mostly Croatian from my heritage. The croatians sent the 369th reinforced Regiment (it had 3 battalions instead of 2) into the eastern front to please Pavelic and Hitler - they were mostly volunteers. They were part of the 100th Jäger division, which was designated a "light" division. The other part of this division was mostly austrians. There was even consideration to name that division "german/croatian" at some point. In any case, this division "happened" to be around the area of Stalingrad, and I guess, germany, needing to feed soldiers into the meatgrinder of that battle, decided that this light division of croatians and austrians are good enough. Few croatians lived to tell the tale, same for the austrians, I assume. The croatian 369th regiment were the only axis minor ally forces who took part in the fights to control stalingrad, before the soviets made their counter offensive and created the "Kessel" - where other german allies got trapped as well...

@@variszuzans299 i do believe that was said with sarcasm :)

@@variszuzans299 yes but those were normal infantery divisions. And I guess you know but normal infantery divisions suffered Stalingrad events on the eastern front post 1942 on a regular basis. What I mean isnt that there werent Austrian units with major loses but that their number was lower because austrians were on average in more specialized divisions (mountain divisions) then the germans. I mean for example of all german divisions mountaineers would be something like 5% of total troops at most while for the austrians it was more like 30% of their deployed soldiers (the mathe is just guessing on memeory, cant look it up right now) Im not saying some austrian units didnt see the shitty frontlines, but in comparrison to their german based allied units the percentage was smaller.

@@noobster4779 The 3rd mountain division (the ones taking Narvik) left norway in 1942... They got transferred to the eastern front and basically served as normal infantery wherever they were needed. The rest of the war they spent at the eastern front reatreating back all the way to hungary/slovakia with everyone else.

Might happen, if I remember correctly some Volkssturm units from Austria were actually moved to Berlin or nearby, but that was an exception not the rule, since most Volkssturm units were old men not young boys. More info on the Volkssturm here: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-XHkBXuJUujI.html

Nope, didn't know about the book.

"The Finnish Government also accepts the obligation to intern German and Hungarian nationals in Finnish territory." This meant deportation to the USSR, causing some 200,000 of them to eventually cross the Norwegian border

@@MilitaryHistoryNotVisualized Dann hoffe ich, dass ich dir nicht zu viel zusätzliche Arbeit aufdränge. Du hast sicher schon eine ellenlange Leseliste für alle deine Videos und Themenbereiche.

danke, habs auf meine (lange) Liste gesetzt, werd vielleicht mal darauf zurückkommen wenn ich mich wieder mit dem Thema beschäftige. Dieses Video hatte ich vor zirka einem Jahr angefangen aber dann auf Eis gelegt und erst vor kurzem wieder "ausgegraben".

"Quick" question about this book: does he come to the same coclusion as the guy who wrote the only available german language book about the Narvik campaign, that it basically took until the retreat of the allies in Narvik for the austrian soldiers to be considered equal to "german germans" in fighting?

Six EU member states and are not NATO-members: Austria, Cyprus, Finland, Ireland, Malta, Sweden and Switzerland (Schengen only). Technically speaking, these countries could invade Germany.

The one group we learned aobut in school, you can still find the mark on St. Stephens cathedral in vienna today. If you go around it you will find O5 marked on it. In german Austria is written Österreich and the Ö can be substituted with Oe if there isn't an ö available in the font ect. E is the fifth letter so O5 means Ö. And that's all i know about them. If you want a "cool" story you should look up the battle for castle itter at the end of the war. Resistance plays a small part in it.

There were some, but few. Slovenes, Communists, Socialdemocrats, Convervatives/Catholics, Monarchists. (In this order, by far the biggest groups were the Slovenes & Commies). When the British paradropped agents to foster the resistance, they were quickly caught and handed over to police by the populace.

generally yes, but not sure if a that point it was done at 100 %: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_district_(Germany)

thank you, I assume in English or also German?

@@MilitaryHistoryNotVisualized Hello and thank you for the reply. Well I am native Finn and speak&read English fluently but I have "decent" skills in German so to say, so both English and German work, as I have read in German for example the following books: "Des Kaisers Falke" (Biography of Conrad von Hötzendorf in German) and "Erinnert euch an mich: Über Nestor Machno - Porträt des ukrainischen Anarchisten" (German) and Barbara Stollberg's "Das Heilige Römische Reich Deutscher Nation vom Ende des Mittelalters bis 1806" in German)

this one is one of the few books on the subject I know, BUT there are several caveats: 1) it is a from a conservative professor (linked to the övp), 2) the "First Austrian Republic" (1. Republik) is a generally problematic, 3) it is dated by now and not sure if it is up to current research etc., I read parts of it during university. The professor was one of the best public speakers I have witnessed, maybe there are videos of him on RU-vid. www.amazon.de/Erz%C3%A4hlungen-Schriftenreihe-Forschungsinstitutes-politisch-historische-Dr-Wilfried-Haslauer-Bibliothek/dp/3205994000

@@MilitaryHistoryNotVisualized Alright, well thank you very much!

Not much planning needed though. Military structure was after all similar and both countries had the experience of WW1 of how they would fight and plan their units. Also the german practice of keeping divisions from a certain region came in handy again because...well....the austrian divisions were basically just austrian divisions to begin with so no need to change personal on a large scale. Command and combat language was the same anyway and most austrian units, if necessary, propably just got a short retraining to use german weapons and tactics. But all of that would be to hard to achieve. I mean the wehrmacht to begin with expanded from a few hundred thousand soldiers to millions of men in a few years. Incorporating a few already fully trained units with the same language would really be that hard.

It is true.Rumor has it Adolph tied to sell one of his paintings to a mustached Georgian (with a Greek passport) but he declined.

@@Panos-xo9rc Also I heard they visited the same cafe or something like that

PS Trotsky,not Lenin.Lenin did pass through Austria-Hungary on his way to Switzerland though.

Mussolini and Sigmund Fraud was also there

Interesting fact: During his lief in austria Tito had a son with an austrian woman. He fought in the Wehrmacht on the Balkanfront - against bis own father.

Probably that is true, but considering they were facing the soviets they would have done better to fight to the last man. Not much mercy or a lack of atrocities were recoded during the siege of Vienna.

My grand uncle was a Austrian pow in the Soviet Union and he said it was a lot worse than the war itself and he wouldn’t have surrendered if he knew what was coming.

Don't think the Russians cared who you are when wearing a German uniform

That isn't entirely correct. The 2nd and 3rd mountain division were baiscally the ground forces for the occupation of norway, but were replaced in 42 or 43 i think by the 6th mountain division (mostly bavarian troops) as occupation force and were moved to the easern front. Both mountain divisions were used as normal infantery on the eastern front as they needed anyone they could find. And no, they weren't deployed closer to austria than the others, the Wehrmacht could not afford such luxury to place someone closer to their liking. And from a book i read about the experiences of an austrian in the 3rd mounatin division who came in in 43 i think, he made almost the whole way from todays ukraine to hungary in fighting retreat on foot.

Thank you for providing some detail and colour! I don’t think that there is in fact much disagreement between what you elaborated on and my initial points. Even being stationed in Norway for only sometime would likely have reduced relative fatality and opportunity for knight’s crosses, and of course being stationed close to Austria is a relative statement depending on where the action is. But when the choice was between Hungary and Danzig, then I’d assume you’d have a larger share of Austrians in close and familiar territory- not least because some might actually have some knowledge of the territory once you were fighting close to Vienna for example.

@@nilshansen8562 "then I’d assume you’d have a larger share of Austrians in close and familiar territory- not least because some might actually have some knowledge of the territory once you were fighting close to Vienna for example." I dont think the germans were logistically able to move troops like that at that stage of the war. I've recently read up on this and I can tell you that it was mostly Volkssturm Truppen maning the defensives on the route between the modern Austria/Hungary border and Vienna, which is less than 100km. The soviets first crossed the border of the Ostmark end of march 45 Vienna was captured on April 14th The city was only held by some 20.000 Wehrmacht troops, a bit of Volkssturm and the rest of the hungarian army (which actually was the strongest axis force in the battle of vienna). The germans had 52 tanks in/around vienna while the soviets had ~700 The war had become very desparate for the german side at that point, austrian Wehrmacht soldiers would be fighting whereever they ended up at this point afaik. My Great Uncle was in the Handelsmarine (merchant navy) when the war ended (TIL he was one of few). He initially ended up in Hamburg, said he was hella scared what Vienna would look like but it wasnt that bad compared to many german cities. He joined the danube river police force in vienna after the war

Texans make up a disproportionate amount of SEALs

those were different troops. The Austrian SS was actually considered 2nd class, so a lot of those guys went for career openings in the east....

It’s just memeing a well known shot from the only movie most English speakers have ever seen set in Austria.

I think anyone who's ever seen the musical or the movie knows that the von Trapps are anti-Nazi. Anyone who hasn't (probably everyone in Austria itself) wouldn't know or care what the movie is about anyway.

@lati long its importent to remember that a lot of "Von"'s hated the nazis and the third reich, not only from hapsburg background but also prussians and others. its because hitler himself and most nazis didn't come from the nobility.

@lati long yes, the main difference on the appearance of waffen ss and the wehrmacht was their camouflage patterns

Do you mean the Sudetenland? Because the inhabitants of the Protectorate were sure not as friendly to the regime as Austrians...

@@vaclav_fejt h u h?

Bavaria was the stronghold of the nazi party during the 1920's. And it did not have much success elsewhere until the last years before the regime change. Much of it did of course have to do with economic reasons, that the almost bankrupt nazi party could not afford to pay for radio propaganda in other states. But even so was the distribution of nazi support not even across the country after the party got large funds from the German tax payers.

don"t know, but one of the large Austro-Daimler armoured cars was given to the SS in Danzig and figured in the attack on the polish post pffice