AUSTRIA: Austrian president Heinz Fischer has criticised the airbrushing of the country's Nazi past that allowed Austrians to see themselves just as victims of the Nazi era and not the willing perpetrators many also were.
Cliches and distortions in Austria's 1945 declaration of independence allowed Austrians to deny responsibility for Nazi era crimes, he said, but at the price of proper reconciliation with Nazi victims.
"In the National Socialist era, Austrians were victims, but also perpetrators. That is the full truth," he told Der Standard newspaper. "A part of the reality is missing."
Mr Fischer said the 1945 declaration marking the founding of the second Austrian republic misrepresents the "historical truth" of the circumstances of the 1938 Anschluss into the Third Reich.
"Naturally there were people who cried and who were shocked and horrified. But the documents that we have show that a not inconsiderable part of the Austrian population welcomed the Anschluss," he said.
He also criticised the suggestion that Austrians were unaware and unwilling witnesses to the coming war.
"Many people knew: Hitler means war. It was said openly," he said. "And many Austrians celebrated triumphantly Hitler's first war victories in 1939 and 1940."
The 1945 declaration pays tribute to the hundreds of thousands of Austrian soldiers who lost their lives "from the icy north to the deserts of Africa", a loss of life Mr Fischer said was "terrible and tragic".
"But there is no mention in this document of the Jewish victims, of those who died in concentration camps, those who fell victim to Nazi justice," he said.
The president's critical remarks about the gaps in Austria's collective memory have been welcomed by leading Austrian historians.
"A large part of the Austrian population has little idea of how integrated Austrian society was in National Socialist life," said Dr Bertrand Perz, historian at the University of Vienna.
The authors of the 1945 document wanted to build a new republic with a greater sense of Austrian nationalism than in the pre-war republic, he said, something that made political sense at the time.
In doing so, however, Dr Perz argues that their "uncritical Austrian patriotism" encouraged the isolation from that history, the Third Reich era with 600,000 Austrian Nazi party members and 65,000 Austrian Jews murdered in the Holocaust.
Austria has made strides in recent years, paying compensation to former forced labourers and returning art and property seized from Jewish families.
Austrian historians have also produced valuable research about the period, but it is all still a long way from the decades of discussion and debate in Germany.
President Fischer said that Austria still had outstanding debts towards those forced to flee the country and to those who died in exile, debts he said which would "sadly remain unsettled".
There was little public discussion of the 1938-45 era in Austria until the former UN secretary general Kurt Waldheim was exposed during his 1986 presidential campaign as a former member of the German army.
He had served in the Balkans and Greece, the scene of terrible Nazi atrocities, but he denied knowing about any massacres.
A government commission later cleared him, but noted that he probably knew more about the era than he was saying.
The rise of the populist Freedom Party six years ago prompted another round of historical discussion.
But leading historians and critics of chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel say he has little interest in clearing up historical questions.
"I will never allow that Austria is not seen as a victim," said Mr Schüssel in a newspaper interview last year.
"The country was, in its identity, the first military victim of the Nazis."