By Martin Malek, independent political scientist. Presented at the event Totalitarianism in the 21st Century: How is Resistance Possible?
Not to spill German Blood: Austria 1938. – Nation, military resistance and freedom: Ukraine 2022.
25 March 2025, Diplomatic Academy (Vienna)
Of course, I would not have been invited to this event if I had written a book[1] exclusively about an Austrian general who is not remembered by the general public in Austria. My investigation is also and especially concerned with the conclusions that can and should be drawn for the present from the European events in the second half of the 1930s that led to the Second World War.
What can be said about General Alfred Jansa and the world-historical events in which he was involved? He was born in 1884 in the town of Stanislau, which is now known as Ivano-Frankivsk in Ukraine, and became an officer in the army of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. During the First World War, he served on several fronts (including the one against Russia), mainly as a staff officer. In 1920, Jansa joined the new army of republican Austria. In 1932 he was transferred to the central apparatus of the Ministry of Defence, and from 1933 to 1935 he was a military attaché in Nazi Germany, where he was able to witness the character of Hitler’s regime. Jansa, who was a Catholic conservative and certainly not a democrat in today’s sense, never left even the slightest doubt about his rejection of Hitler’s regime. In 1935 he returned to the Ministry of Defence in Vienna and became Chief of Staff of the Austrian Armed Forces. As such, he had several variants of the so-called ‘Jansa Plan’ drawn up, i.e. military measures aimed at defending Austria against an invasion by the German Wehrmacht for at least a few days.
In the meantime, the pressure on the leadership of the authoritarian ‘corporate’ (often referred to as ‘Austrofascist’) state, created in 1934, under Federal Chancellor Kurz Schuschnigg was growing: internally, the (actually banned) Austrian Nazis were becoming ever stronger, while externally, Berlin was interfering ever more brazenly in Austrian affairs – with the provisional climax of Hitler’s dictate to Schuschnigg in Berchtesgaden on 12 February 1938. However, Jansa had already learned a few weeks earlier that he was to be dismissed as Chief of the General Staff. His plan for military defence against Germany was invalid; Schuschnigg surrendered without a fight. The Wehrmacht invaded on 12 March 1938, Austria experienced the ‘Anschluss’ to the Third Reich and thus disappeared from the political map of the world for over seven years. Great Britain and France did nothing – this was a consequence of their fatal ‘appeasement’ policy, which contributed massively to Hitler becoming ‘self-confident’ until he felt strong enough to attack Poland in 1939 after his infamous pact with Stalin’s Soviet Union.
Why is this still relevant today?
Putin probably imagined the consequences of Russia’s large-scale attack on Ukraine from 24 February 2022 to be like the Wehrmacht’s invasion of Austria in 1938. Back then, there was talk everywhere of ‘Kyiv in three days’, i.e. the assumption that the Russian army would march into the capital with little or no Ukrainian resistance and overthrow Ukraine’s leadership. This would very likely have been followed by a kind of ‘annexation’ of Ukraine to Russia after a faked ‘referendum’. However, as we know, things turned out differently: not only the armed forces, but practically the entire Ukrainian society took up resistance against the Russian invaders – and continues to do so to this day. This is the most important reason why Ukraine still exists as a state in the first place. Western powers have not sent regular soldiers to fight on the side of Ukraine – as they did in 1938, when they abandoned Austria. However, they now supply Ukraine with military hardware and provide considerable economic aid.
The Russian military intervention did not begin in 2022, but back in February 2014; it was followed by the occupation and annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea and the unleashing of a war in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbass. Ukraine has not surrendered with the arguments that a fight against Russia is futile anyway and that ‘unnecessary victims must be avoided’. In Ukraine, the overwhelming majority categorically rejects Putin’s narrative that Russians and Ukrainians are ‘one people’ (so why, subjectively, would Ukrainians have no reason to oppose the Kremlin’s planned simple ‘takeover’ of their country by the Russian army). In Austria, on the other hand, significant parts of the population had already assumed before March 1938 that they were ‘Germans’ in Hitler’s sense – or they were very quickly ‘convinced’ of this.
Events from the occupation of the Rhineland, which had been demilitarised under the Treaty of Versailles (1919), in March 1936 at the latest should have made it perfectly clear that a revisionist, imperialist military power like Hitler’s Germany, which was prepared to use massive force, could not be stopped, tamed, ‘defused’ or even ‘integrated’ by appeasement, persuasion, offers of cooperation or appeals to any ‘common interests’, but only through determination and firmness. General Alfred Jansa clearly understood this back then. However, the fear of resolutely defending oneself against an aggressor often leads people to sugarcoat reality. This was the case with Hitler in Western Europe before the Second World War, and it was the case with Putin at least until the major Russian attack on Ukraine on 24 February 2022 (and still is to some extent in Western Europe and North America).
There is not a single example in all of history of this collective Stockholm syndrome maintaining, strengthening or restoring peace anywhere.
The conclusion is clear: war, ‘ethnic cleansing’, deportations, violent border movements etc. must not be profitable. If they do, this only encourages dictators to embark on ever new and more daring military adventures. Expansionist dictators must be stopped from the outside, as they have usually eliminated internal opposition and will not stop on their own.
[1]Martin Malek: „Das Bundesheer steht bereit“. General Alfred Jansa und seine Pläne für militärischen Widerstand gegen einen deutschen Einmarsch 1935 – 1938. Voraussetzungen, Begleiterscheinungen und Rückschlüsse für die Gegenwart. Wien 2025.
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