Creating a Victimised Nation: The Politics of the Austrian People’s Courts and High Treason

In 1945, Austria was liberated from Nazi rule and re-established as an independent nation state. It was over seven years after the ‘Anschluss’, or annexation of Austria by Hitler’s Germany in March of 1938. Karl Renner, the first Chancellor of the First Republic that was established in 1918–1919 as a result of World War I, was given a second chance to form a provisional state government. He was now responsible for re-founding an Austrian (but no longer ‘German’) nation state for the Austrian people and proclaiming it an independent state.1