Allied-occupied Austria in the context of "Allies of World War II"

World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies and the Axis powers. Nearly all of the world's countries participated, with many nations mobilising all resources in pursuit of total war. Tanks and aircraft played major roles, enabling the strategic bombing of cities and delivery of the first and only nuclear weapons ever used in war. World War II is the deadliest conflict in history, causing the death of 70 to 85 million people, more than half of whom were civilians. Millions died in genocides, including the Holocaust, and by massacres, starvation, and disease. After the Allied victory, Germany, Austria, Japan, and Korea were occupied, and German and Japanese leaders were put on trial for war crimes.

The causes of World War II included unresolved tensions in the aftermath of World War I, the rise of fascism in Europe and militarism in Japan. Key events preceding the war included Japan's invasion of Manchuria in 1931, the Spanish Civil War, the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, and Germany's annexations of Austria and the Sudetenland. World War II is generally considered to have begun on 1 September 1939, when Nazi Germany, under Adolf Hitler, invaded Poland, after which the United Kingdom and France declared war on Germany. Poland was divided between Germany and the Soviet Union under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. In 1940, the Soviet Union annexed the Baltic states and parts of Finland and Romania. After the fall of France in June 1940, the war continued mainly between Germany, now assisted by Fascist Italy, and the British Empire, with fighting in the Balkans, Mediterranean, and Middle East, the aerial Battle of Britain and the Blitz, and the naval Battle of the Atlantic. Through campaigns and treaties, Germany gained control of much of continental Europe and formed the Axis alliance with Italy, Japan, and other countries. In June 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, opening the Eastern Front and initially making large territorial gains.

Japan was occupied and administered by the Allies of World War II from the surrender of the Empire of Japan on September 2, 1945, at the war's end until the Treaty of San Francisco took effect on April 28, 1952. The occupation, led by the American military with support from the British Commonwealth and under the supervision of the Far Eastern Commission, involved a total of nearly one million Allied soldiers. The occupation was overseen by the US General Douglas MacArthur, who was appointed Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers by the US president Harry S. Truman; MacArthur was succeeded as supreme commander by General Matthew Ridgway in 1951. Unlike in the occupations of Germany and Austria, the Soviet Union had little to no influence in Japan, declining to participate because it did not want to place Soviet troops under MacArthur's direct command.

This foreign presence marks the only time in the history of Japan that it has been occupied by a foreign power. However, unlike in Germany, the Allies never assumed direct control over Japan's civil administration. In the immediate aftermath of Japan's military surrender, the country's government continued to formally operate under the provisions of the Meiji Constitution.

The Iron Curtain was the political and physical boundary that divided Europe from the end of World War II in 1945 until the end of the Cold War in 1991. East of the Iron Curtain were the smaller states controlled by the Soviet Union, in 1955 formally allied by the Warsaw Pact. Many nations to the west of this geopolitical divide were NATO members. Over time these economic and military alliances developed into broader, more entrenched, cultural barriers that deepened widespread distrust on both sides. Initially, the term "Iron Curtain" was a literal description of physical barriers such as razor wire, fences, walls, minefields, and watchtowers along the borders of the opposing powers. But the term eventually took on a broader, symbolic meaning perceived as a generalized "differentness" of ideology, economy, government, and way of life that emerged when the Cold War severed earlier cultural connections between European populations.

The term's origin is often attributed to the speech "Sinews of Peace" delivered by Winston Churchill on 5 March 1946 in Fulton, Missouri where he said: "an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe." In fact, the phrase was originally used by Queen Elisabeth of Belgium, when in 1914 when she described an "Iron Curtain" descending between her people and the nation of Germany.

The Federal State of Austria (Austrian German: Bundesstaat Österreich; colloquially known as the "Ständestaat") was a continuation of the First Austrian Republic between 1934 and 1938 when it was a one-party state led by the conservative, nationalist, corporatist, clerical fascist and Catholic Fatherland Front. The Ständestaat concept, derived from the notion of Stände ("estates" or "corporations"), was advocated by leading regime politicians such as Engelbert Dollfuss and Kurt Schuschnigg. The result was a authoritarian government based on a mix of Italian Fascist and conservative Catholic influences.

It ended in March 1938 with the Anschluss, the German annexation of Austria. Austria would not become an independent country again until 1955, when the Austrian State Treaty ended the Allied occupation of Austria.

The Allied Control Council (ACC) or Allied Control Authority (German: Alliierter Kontrollrat), also referred to as the Four Powers (Vier Mächte), was the governing body of the Allied occupation zones in Germany (1945–1949/1991) and Austria (1945–1955) following the end of World War II in Europe. Following the defeat of the Nazis, Germany (less its former eastern territories) and Austria were occupied as two different areas, both by the same four Allies. Both were later divided into four zones by the 1 August 1945 Potsdam Agreement. Its members (Four-Power Authorities) were the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, the United States, and France. The organisation was based in Schöneberg, Berlin.

The council was convened to determine several plans for postwar Europe, including how to change borders and transfer populations in Central Europe. As the four powers had joined themselves into a condominium asserting supreme power in Germany, the Allied Control Council was constituted the sole legal sovereign authority for Germany as a whole, replacing the civil government of Germany under the Nazi Party. In 1948, the Soviets withdrew from the ACC due to its conflict with the western Allies, who then established the Allied High Commission. In 1949, two German states (West and East Germany) were founded.

The Austrian State Treaty (German: Österreichischer Staatsvertrag [ˈøːstɐraɪçɪʃɐ ˈʃtaːtsfɐˌtraːɡ] ) or Austrian Independence Treaty established Austria as a sovereign state. It was signed on 15 May 1955 in Vienna, at the Schloss Belvedere among the Allied occupying powers (France, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union) and the Austrian government. The neighbouring Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia acceded to the treaty subsequently. It officially came into force on 27 July 1955.

Its full title is "Treaty for the re-establishment of an independent and democratic Austria, signed in Vienna on 15 May 1955" (German: Staatsvertrag betreffend die Wiederherstellung eines unabhängigen und demokratischen Österreich, unterzeichnet in Wien am 15. Mai).

Austria was part of Nazi Germany from 13 March 1938, an event known as the Anschluss, until 27 April 1945, when Allied-occupied Austria declared independence from Nazi Germany.

Nazi Germany's troops entering Austria in 1938 received the enthusiastic support of most of the population. Throughout World War II, 950,000 Austrians fought for the German armed forces. Other Austrians participated in the Nazi administration, from Nazi death camp personnel to senior Nazi leadership including Hitler; the majority of the bureaucrats who implemented the Final Solution were Austrian.

The victim theory (German: Opferthese), encapsulated in the slogan "Austria – the Nazis' first victim" (Österreich – das erste Opfer der Nazis), was the 1949–1988 Austrian ideological basis formed by Austrians themselves under Allied occupation and the independent Second Austrian Republic. According to the founders of the Second Austrian Republic, the 1938 Anschluss was an act of military aggression by the Third Reich. Austrian statehood had been interrupted and therefore the newly revived Austria of 1945 could not be considered responsible for the Nazis' crimes in any way. The "victim theory" that had formed by 1949 insisted that all of the Austrians, including those who strongly supported Adolf Hitler, had been unwilling victims of the Nazi regime and were therefore not responsible for its crimes.

The "victim theory" became a fundamental myth in Austrian society which allowed previously bitter political opponents – e.g. the Social Democrats and the conservative Catholics – to unite and bring former Nazis back into social and political life. For almost half a century, the Austrian state denied the existence of any continuity between it and the political regime that had existed in Austria from 1938 to 1945, actively kept up the myth of Austrian self-sacrificing statehood, and cultivated an image of national unity. Postwar denazification was quickly wound up; veterans of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS took an honorable place in society. The struggle for justice by the actual victims of Nazism – primarily Jews – was deprecated as an attempt to obtain illicit enrichment at the expense of the rest of the Austrian nation.