Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- Introduction: Community, authority and resistance to fascism
- 1 The German revolution defeated and fascism deferred: the servicemen's revolt and social democracy at the end of the First World War, 1918–1920
- 2 Dangerous communities and conservative authority: the judiciary, Nazis and rough people, 1932–1933
- 3 The anti-fascist movement in south-east Lancashire, 1933–1940: the divergent experiences of Manchester and Nelson
- 4 Spain 1936. Resistance and revolution: the flaws in the Front
- 5 The Blueshirts in the Irish Free State, 1932–1935: the nature of socialist republican and governmental opposition
- 6 Town councils of the Nord and Pas-de-Calais region: local power, French power, German power
- 7 Structures of authority in the Greek resistance, 1941–1944
- 8 Nazi Austria: the limits of dissent
- 9 ‘Homosexual’ men in Vienna, 1938
- 10 ‘The years of consent’? Popular attitudes and forms of resistance to Fascism in Italy, 1925–1940
- 11 Saints and heroines: rewriting the history of Italian women in the Resistance
- Notes
- Index
8 - Nazi Austria: the limits of dissent
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- Introduction: Community, authority and resistance to fascism
- 1 The German revolution defeated and fascism deferred: the servicemen's revolt and social democracy at the end of the First World War, 1918–1920
- 2 Dangerous communities and conservative authority: the judiciary, Nazis and rough people, 1932–1933
- 3 The anti-fascist movement in south-east Lancashire, 1933–1940: the divergent experiences of Manchester and Nelson
- 4 Spain 1936. Resistance and revolution: the flaws in the Front
- 5 The Blueshirts in the Irish Free State, 1932–1935: the nature of socialist republican and governmental opposition
- 6 Town councils of the Nord and Pas-de-Calais region: local power, French power, German power
- 7 Structures of authority in the Greek resistance, 1941–1944
- 8 Nazi Austria: the limits of dissent
- 9 ‘Homosexual’ men in Vienna, 1938
- 10 ‘The years of consent’? Popular attitudes and forms of resistance to Fascism in Italy, 1925–1940
- 11 Saints and heroines: rewriting the history of Italian women in the Resistance
- Notes
- Index
Summary
In February 1939, the security service (SD) of the SS in Vienna presented Josef Bürckel, head of the Nazi administration in Austria, with a report on popular opinion among the working class. It was based on an interview with five former workers' leaders from Vienna's tenth district. The report is striking in its sensitivity to the customs, hierarchies and internal boundaries of working-class communities, and revealing of Nazi attitudes to workers and working-class politics. The men interviewed had been chosen for their credentials as natural leaders. They had been popular trades union officials in the 1920s, elected repeatedly by their workmates to perform a valid role as leaders of their factory community, but had been unpaid union functionaries, and the SD report distinguished them as such from the salaried and ambitious professional politicians of the Social Democratic Workers' Party (Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei, SDAP) These were men who did not discharge their duties for the sake of personal gain or power, but out of a sense of duty.
In addition, their political position, on the anti-Communist right wing of the labour movement, made them precisely the type of worker – ‘intelligent’ and ‘open to discussion’ – that the Nazis thought they could win for ‘German socialism’.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Opposing FascismCommunity, Authority and Resistance in Europe, pp. 133 - 149Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999