12 April, 2006
Austria’s president Heinz Fischer has criticized his country’s self-depiction after World War II. In an interview with the daily newspaper "Der Standard", Fischer said that Austria’s 1955 Declaration of Independence had white-washed the country’s collaboration with Hitler Germany, which annexed Austria in 1938. Fischer said that the document incorrectly represented the “war waged by the Nazis as one that no Austrian could have predicted or wanted.” Many people had known that "Hitler meant war" and after his initial successes in 1939/40, many Austrians had enthusiastically backed the triumphs of the Wehrmacht, Fischer pointed out. He criticized that the Independence declaration contained “not one word about the Jewish victims, about those who died in the concentration camps, who had to flee the country, who became victims of Nazi justice.”
