The Austrian Railwayman and the Party Card
In March 1939, a year after the Anschluss that brought Austria into the Reich, the Reichsbahn had absorbed the Austrian railways, and the "people's community" (Volksgemeinschaft) now governed every workshop. In Linz, the town of Hitler's childhood and now elevated into a showcase of the regime, the pressure of the party is felt right down to the depots and workshops, and everyone watches to see how to behave in order to keep their place.
A forty-five-year-old railwayman, once close to the Social Democratic milieu that had been dissolved in 1934 and then banned, watches his colleagues take their stand one after another. Applying to join the NSDAP would secure his position and that of his family; staying away would preserve his convictions but expose him to being sidelined, or even denounced.
Should he apply for his party card to secure his job, refuse any membership and keep his distance, or hold his post while quietly seeking a clandestine contact? The dilemma poses itself daily, with no obvious way out.
To keep his job a year after the Anschluss, should the railwayman apply for an NSDAP membership card, abstain from doing so, or quietly seek a fallback?
The work of shows that after the Anschluss a large portion of the Austrian working class, including former Social Democrats and Christian Socials, accommodated itself to the regime out of opportunism and fear for their jobs: promotion and even merely keeping one's job increasingly depended on joining the NSDAP, whose membership rolls had reopened in waves, so that taking out a card became a reflex of professional survival more than an ideological choice. In Linz, a showcase town over-industrialized around the Hermann Göring works, the pressure on railwaymen and workers was particularly intense. This is therefore not the fate of a single named man, but a documented collective behavior: the majority went along, a minority resisted, and the massive participation of Austrians (subsequently overrepresented in the SS and the repressive apparatus) would feed both the postwar purges and the myth of the "first victim" after 1945.
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