De-nazification files in the Austrian State Archive

“De-nazification” was a central event in terms of re-establishing a democratic Austrian state. Historical judgements of the approaches and results of de-nazification, let alone pseudo-historical everyday discourse, varies greatly, much as policy once fluctuated between punishment – initially collective punishment according to certain rank or function in the Nazi system – and the desire to draw a line under the affair. The fact that these judgements increasingly tend towards concluding that serious efforts to carry out de-nazification were lacking, indeed that in actual fact there was no de-nazification, is undoubtedly due to the inadequate familiarity with archival primary sources.

The purpose of this article is to list the files stored in the Austrian State Archives (Archives of the Republic), and which have been accessed barely or not at all, by content, with reference to their contexts and  their places in that multifaceted complex of administrative and judicial measures called “de-nazification”. The diversity of sources is all the more impressive, as the central procedure for de-nazification, “registration”, was carried out at district registration offices and was therefore not documented in the records of the Austrian State Archive on principle. But individual cases, documented either by following the judicial process or the plea for clemency, or at their departments at central offices (in the case of civil servants) in the Archives of the Republic, paint an often disparate yet detailed picture of “de-nazification”, which remains a fertile field of research.