ABSTRACT
The accelerated Westernization of both the Austrian economy and business during the postwar occupation is well known. It is less often appreciated that this process already started when the Third Reich incorporated Austria hook, line, and sinker into its advanced war economy and pressed forward with its modernization program. Whereas Austria's postwar polity and economy were Westernized, or better "Western Europeamzed," its military and popular culture were Americanized. In Western Austria, the American, British, and French occupation powers aimed at building a democratic Austria based on a reconstructed capitalist economy. The Marshall Plan unintentionally produced the outcome of making the Iron Curtain a basic prosperity gradient running through Europe. United States Marshall planners were less successful in "Americanizing" Austrians in their basic productivity and business philosophy. Austria's secret rearmament by the West after World War 2—fuelled and largely paid for by Washington—can only be understood against this specter of communist takeover threats in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
