I’m watching (kind of) the Sound of Music for about the ten millionth time, and it occurred to me–Captain von Trapp is a military officer in a country that was a rickety multi-ethnic empire at his birth, collapsed in a heap when he was a young man, and he’s now a naval officer in a country that no longer has a seaport due to losing a war in which he fought valiantly as an ally of Germany. How likely is it that he’d be violently opposed to the Anschluss?
I know Sound of Music is fiction, and I’m not even really asking about Georg von Trapp specifically so much as I am how much sentiment there was in Austria against union with Germany. The related question is, how much did pro-German sentiment overlap with anti-Semitism in Austria? Or was it more “we’re Germans, we belong together, Hitler’s an Austrian anyway?”
I doubt if one can generalise about a mixed pattern of attitudes. In the immediate aftermath of WW1 there were both left-wing/republican and right-wing/nationalist/anti-Semitic attitudes in favour of unifying German Austria with Germany (if only because the various peace treaties forbade it), but by 1938 for some years, Austria had been run as an authoritarian Catholic clericalist state which the local Nazis had been trying to overthrow in favour of Anschluss, including a failed coup in 1934 during which the Austrian Chancellor was murdered. So yes, an old-school Catholic royalist conservative would have had a sense of historical identity that rejected Nazism as much as social democrat republicanism.