Nazi Party and SA Membership
According to documents obtained in 2003 from the Austrian State Archives by the Los Angeles Times, which was after the expiration of a 30-year seal of his records under Austrian privacy law, Gustav Schwarzenegger voluntarily applied to join the Nazi Party on March 1, 1938, two weeks before the country was annexed. Austria became part of the German Reich through the Anschluss on March 12, 1938. A separate record obtained by the Wiesenthal Center indicates he sought membership before the annexation but was only accepted one day of January, 1941. He also applied to become a member of the Sturmabteilung (SA), the NSDAP's paramilitary wing, on May 1, 1939, the year after the annexation of Austria, at a time when SA membership was declining. The troops had 900,000 members in 1940, down from 4.2 million in 1934 which was mostly due to the outbreak of the second world war.
Read more about this topic: Gustav Schwarzenegger
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