The roots of the Anschluss reach back not to the 1930s but to 1871, when Otto von Bismarck unified the German states into an empire and deliberately left Austria out. The exclusion stung. For decades, the question of whether Austria belonged with Germany - the so-called German Question - had dominated Central European politics. Austria had championed a Grossdeutsche Losung, a "Greater Germany" under Habsburg leadership that would unite all German-speaking peoples. Prussia wanted no such thing, and the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 settled the matter by force. When the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed after World War I, the rump Republic of German-Austria found itself stripped of its imperial territories, economically fragile, and forbidden by the Treaties of Versailles and Saint-Germain from uniting with Germany. The very name "German-Austria" was banned. Plebiscites in Tyrol and Salzburg yielded 98 and 99 percent support for union with Germany, but the Allied powers would not permit it. The desire for Anschluss did not begin with the Nazis. It began with a nation that had been told, twice, that it could not join the family it considered its own.

When Hitler became Germany's chancellor in January 1933, the Anschluss idea acquired a new and dangerous patron. Nazi agents worked to destabilize Austria's government from within, cultivating sympathizers and funding Austrian Nazi cells. On July 25, 1934, Austrian Nazis attempted a coup in Vienna, storming the Federal Chancellery and shooting Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss. He bled to death on a couch while his attackers refused to allow a doctor or a priest to attend him. The putsch failed - Italian dictator Benito Mussolini mobilized troops on the Austrian border in a show of support for Austrian independence - but the message had been delivered. Many leading Austrian Nazis fled to Germany, where they continued plotting. By 1938, Mussolini had shifted his allegiance to Hitler, and Austria had lost its only powerful protector. When Hitler summoned Schuschnigg to Berchtesgaden on February 12, 1938, and presented him with an ultimatum demanding that Austrian Nazi Arthur Seyss-Inquart be appointed interior minister, the chancellor had no allies left to call.

Schuschnigg's last gamble was the referendum: a simple yes-or-no vote on Austrian independence, scheduled for March 13. Hitler could not risk it. The Nazis demanded cancellation, then demanded Schuschnigg's resignation, then demanded a new government under Seyss-Inquart. On the evening of March 11, Schuschnigg made his final radio address: "God protect Austria." By dawn on March 12, Wehrmacht columns were crossing the border. There was no resistance. Austrian soldiers had been ordered to stand down. In many towns, German troops were greeted with flowers and cheering crowds. Hitler himself entered Austria that afternoon, crossing at Braunau am Inn and arriving in Linz, where an enormous crowd gathered to welcome him. On March 15, he addressed an estimated 200,000 people at Heldenplatz in Vienna. A plebiscite held on April 10, under Nazi supervision and without secret ballots, returned a 99.7 percent approval - a number that tells more about the regime conducting the vote than about Austrian opinion.

The jubilation in the streets masked an immediate horror. Within hours of the German entry, the persecution of Austrian Jews began. Jewish homes and businesses were looted. Men and women were forced to scrub pro-Schuschnigg slogans from sidewalks on their hands and knees while crowds jeered. Tens of thousands were arrested in the weeks that followed. The violence in Vienna was so swift and widespread that it shocked even some Nazi officials accustomed to the more gradual persecution in Germany. Austria's Jewish population, which numbered roughly 200,000 - most of them in Vienna - faced confiscation of property, forced emigration, and eventually deportation to concentration and extermination camps. The Anschluss also triggered the first major refugee crisis of the Nazi era, as tens of thousands fled the country. For the rest of Europe, the annexation was a warning that went largely unheeded. Six months later came the Munich Agreement and the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. A year after that, the invasion of Poland. The Anschluss was not just the end of Austrian sovereignty; it was the proof that Hitler meant every word he had written.

After the war, Austria spent decades cultivating the narrative that it had been Hitler's "first victim" - a framing enshrined in the 1943 Moscow Declaration by the Allied powers. The reality was more complicated. Austrians served at every level of the Nazi apparatus, from the Wehrmacht to the SS to the administration of death camps. Adolf Eichmann, architect of the Holocaust's logistics, was raised in Linz. The country did not formally acknowledge its shared responsibility until President Thomas Klestil addressed the Israeli Knesset in 1994. Even today, the Heldenplatz where Hitler spoke his triumphant words remains one of Vienna's central public spaces - its name unchanged, its history inescapable. Austria's relationship with the Anschluss is the relationship every nation has with its darkest chapter: a struggle between the comfort of forgetting and the necessity of remembering.