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
Famous quotes containing the words nazi, party and/or membership:
“We’ll build a democracy here, even if it’s with Nazi bricks.”
—Samuel Fuller, U.S. screenwriter. Samuel Fuller. Captain Harvey, Verboten! American Military Government officer explaining the practicalities of de-Nazification (1959)
“He said, truly, that the reason why such greatly superior numbers quailed before him was, as one of his prisoners confessed, because they lacked a cause,—a kind of armor which he and his party never lacked. When the time came, few men were found willing to lay down their lives in defense of what they knew to be wrong; they did not like that this should be their last act in this world.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people don’t acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead.”
—Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (b. 1922)