Austria opens "painful" exhibit on Nazi annexation

By Paul Bolding

VIENNA (Reuters) - Austria opened an exhibition on Monday showing how Jewish employees of the State Opera were purged under Nazi rule as the nation began solemn commemorations of its annexation by Hitler's Germany 70 years ago.

Vienna's opera house is one focus of post-World War Two Austria's feelings of guilt about the way it quickly accepted the Nazi takeover and, after the war ended, reinstated few of those persecuted during the Third Reich.

The exhibition at the ornate State Opera House, then as now an important part of Viennese life, details the fate of 92 members of the company -- many of them Jewish -- who were excluded, persecuted or murdered after the "Anschluss".

"The Opera is one of the institutions ready to face up to its past even if it was painful at times," Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer said in opening the exhibition. "Such institutions in Austria in 2008 are sadly still the exception."

The display, which includes newly discovered documents, shows in grim detail how administrators broke off links with artists, often Jews, who were deemed unacceptable by the Nazis.

Scenes of German troops being greeted like saviors when they marched in on March 12, 1938 still haunt many Austrians.

Austrians long tended to portray themselves as victims of Nazism. But recognition of complicity in Nazism, and gestures to atone, grew after it emerged in the 1980s that then-President Kurt Waldheim hid his past in Hitler's wartime officer corps.

Austria had some 200,000 Jews at the time of the Anschluss. Many fled but about a third perished during the war. The country has around 10,000 Jews today.