An Austrian survey has found that 42 per cent of respondents said that "not everything was bad under Adolf Hitler," whose Nazi government annexed Austria 75 years ago. The survey also found that 54% of the 502 respondents said a Nazi party would have some success in democratic elections today, and that 61% supported the concept of a "strong man" as leader "who doesnt need to worry about parliament or elections." The poll was commissioned by the Austrian daily newspaper Der Standard, and was reported on by the Austria Press Agency on Friday, a day before publication by the paper. The results of the survey are worrying because in 2008 only a fifth of Austrian citizens espoused the idea of a strong leader. The survey also found that just 15% of respondents felt that the Nazi annexation should have been opposed by force, while 42% thought that war with Germany would have made their country's situation worse. Another 43% said that doing so wouldn't have made a difference. After decades of airbrushing it out of history, Austria has come a long way in acknowledging its Nazi past, and the 75th anniversary on Tuesday of its annexation by Hitler's Third Reich will be the occasion for various soul-searching ceremonies. But Jewish leaders who fought hard to win restitution after World War II are on guard against a rising trend in anti-Semitic incidents, occasionally condemned by Austrian political leaders but seen more generally as a regrettable fact of life. Austrian Jews have grown more vigilant as hooligans verbally abused a rabbi, Austria's popular far-right party chief posted a cartoon widely seen as suggestively anti-Semitic, and a debate opened on the legality of infant male circumcision. The new poll, timed to coincide with the anniversary of the annexation, found that three of five Austrians wanted a "strong man" to lead the country and two out of five thought things were not all bad under Adolf Hitler. This was higher than in previous surveys. The history of Vienna once home to Jewish luminaries of 20th-century culture such as Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Arnold Schoenberg, but later Adolf Eichmann's testing ground for what would become the "Final Solution" that led to the genocide of 6 million Jews means its Jews are always on the alert.
