From Traitors to Role Models: Rehabilitation and Memorialization of Wehrmacht Deserters in Austria

Abstract

Peter Pirker and Johannes Kramer offer a comprehensive account of 70 years of the politics of history and memory towards Wehrmacht deserters in Austria. Analyzing their social and legal discrimination after World War II, the chapter draws attention to the political and social processes that led to the rehabilitation of deserters and the erection of memorials commemorating the resistance and the persecution of disobedient soldiers, traitors, and other victims of National Socialist military justice. They discuss this conflictual transformation against the background of Cold War politics, the emergence of the peace movement and Green parties, and the general turnaround in European memory politics which has challenged national victim myths since the late 1980s. Finally, the study focuses on the campaign of a new alliance of actors from civil society, media, academia, and party politics which since 1999 has achieved two rehabilitation laws and the erection of a deserters’ monument in the political center of Vienna despite the opposition of right-wing parties and veterans’ associations.