To paraphrase an old joke: The largest trick Austria ever pulled on the world was to convince them that Beethoven was Austrian and Hitler was German.
There’s a lot of truth in that, as Nazi Germany is often just equated with, well, Germany, as Hitler would have wanted probably. It also made it easy for post-war Austria to style itself as the first victim of Hitlers expansion and shuffle all the blame over there. I’m not defending the position, but it helps explain the innocent image in other countries.
Didn’t work so well with Israel though (duh) and to a lesser extent the US.
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