ABSTRACT
The world of the Deutsche Jugendbewegung, also called Bündische Jugend, goes back to the decade preceding World War I. Around the turn of the century the first groups of people formed what would today perhaps be numbered among the “Greens” or the ecologists. After World War I the Youth Movement became splintered to a great extent. Like the Legitimists, the Communists had foreseen the Hitlerian invasion of Austria and made their plans on that basis. Many of the Social Democrats who had gone into exile were very slow to change from an approval of the Anschluss and a democratic, anti-Nazi Greater Germany to advocacy of a free Austria. In August 1939 Molotov and Ribbentrop signed a non-aggression pact between the Soviet Union and the Greater German Reich. This treaty was bound to cause great confusion and uncertainty in the ranks of the Austrian sympathizers with the KP.
