FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - The Jewish Book Council of North America recently awarded University of Arkansas historian Evan Bukey one of its most prestigious national prizes for his book Hitler’s Austria: Popular Sentiment in the Nazi Era, 1938-1945.

Bukey recently attended the National Jewish Book Awards Ceremony at the Kaufmann Concert Hall in New York, where representatives of the Jewish Book Council presented him with the National Jewish Book Award for the year 2000. As the winner of the "Holocaust" category, Bukey’s book was among several honored that night.

"The Holocaust category receives more submissions than any other category we judge," said Carolyn Hessel, director of the Jewish Book Council. "For Dr. Bukey’s book to emerge as the winner in this category speaks very well for the book and its author. There was a great deal of competition for the award."

Founded in 1925, the Jewish Book Council works to promote the reading, writing and publishing of quality books of Jewish content in North America. For 51 years, the organization has issued awards to honor books in 17 different categories. A panel of three to five judges - each regarded as experts in their fields - reviews submissions within each category and allots the prizes.

"I was pleasantly shocked to learn that my book had won this award. The Jewish Book Council is a distinguished group. Its members place great emphasis on the importance of historical reading and scholarship in understanding the past," Bukey said.

In fact, judges of the award particularly noted Bukey’s book for its thorough scholarship. In the course of researching Hitler’s Austria, Bukey spent 15 years poring through archives in Germany, Austria, England and the United States. His search brought to light records that had lain hidden since the end of the Second World War - records that revealed a shadow over Austria’s past.

For more than half a century, Austria has characterized itself as the first nation to fall victim to Nazi invasion. "German troops marched into the country in 1938, carrying live ammunition," Bukey explained. But what ensued was no valiant resistance or struggle for freedom. "In actuality, these troops were met with rapturous enthusiasm," he states.

In the years that followed, Austrian citizens came to comprise 14 percent of the Nazi Security Service and 40 percent of those involved in Hitler’s extermination projects. But this collusion was obscured at the end of the war, when Austria scrambled to sever its association with Germany and to conceal its participation in Nazi crimes.

Bukey’s book answers the uncertainties that have since surrounded Austria’s role in the Nazi agenda by citing previously unexamined documents. Compiled by the German SS, these records provide detailed information about public opinion and morale in Austria after the German annexation. According to Bukey, the SS relied on a complex network of informers, agents and spies to compile weekly reports on the "mood and bearing" of the Austrian people.

Each week, these reports were forwarded to Berlin, where SS officials combined them with reports from all other regions of the Third Reich. They delivered the resulting digest to Nazi leaders, who scanned the reports for evidence of organized resistance and for information about popular attitudes.

"The Nazis were interested in morale, and they wanted an unvarnished view of what people actually thought," Bukey said. "If officials thought a certain criticism was reasonable, they tried to accommodate. If they thought it bordered on treason, they shipped the critic to a concentration camp."

For the Nazis, these reports acted as a lifeline to the general public, enabling them to tailor their propaganda and policies to maintain the highest possible morale. For Bukey, they represented a similar lifeline to the Austrian people - a portrait of their opinions and attitudes, unsullied by subsequent decades of denial.

Drawing from these reports, Bukey’s book reveals that, despite small bands of resistance, the majority of the Austrian populace welcomed the Nazi regime and embraced its anti-Semitic policies. In fact, the reports indicated that the Nazi government might have met far less resistance in Austria than it did in Germany itself.

Since the University of North Carolina Press published Hitler’s Austria in 2000, the book has received wide acclaim in periodicals and reviews. Both scholars and critics agree that Bukey’s analysis of the Nazi public opinion reports shines light into Austria’s shadowy past and illuminates the effects of that past on the nation today.

In the February 2001 issue of the American Historical Review, David Clay Large writes: "Bukey’s book is based on solid research in Austrian and foreign archives and on a mastery of the secondary literature. Now our best study on Austria’s embrace of Nazism, it makes especially instructive reading in light of the rise of Jörg Haider."

But Hessel perceives a more immediate and intimate use for Bukey’s work. "Every year when we prepare for the awards, we think nothing more can be written about the Holocaust, nothing more can be revealed. But every year there are more books published," she said. "I think that’s a strong statement for the fact that people want this knowledge, and they want to get at the truth of what happened. Dr. Bukey approached the subject in a way that promoted tolerance and the importance of teaching tolerance. His was simply the best book out there."

# # #