Play as · WW2 1939 (Alt-History) · L1 · Counter-Anschluss
Austria - 1939
Historical Austria in 1939 was the Ostmark of the Greater German Reich - annexed in the March 1938 Anschluss, integrated administratively, and not a separate strategic actor. NationFall offers Austria as an alt-history starting position: Kurt Schuschnigg's plebiscite went ahead on 13 March 1938, the country chose continued sovereignty, the Anschluss was refused, and the Federal State of Austria enters 1939 surrounded on three sides by the Reich and looking for the guarantees the Italian rapprochement of 1936 had quietly let lapse. Population about 6.7M. The strategic identity is the small-state survival case - keep Vienna independent against a Germany that considers the question already settled.
Starting position
The Austrian Bundesheer of the First Republic is small - about 60,000 mobilizable, organized around Italian-style mountain divisions, equipped with a mix of locally produced Steyr small arms, French and Italian artillery, and a token armored component (a few dozen tankettes). The air force is minimal. Vienna's serious assets are the Alpine geography that complicates any invasion, the industrial-scientific base inherited from the Habsburg empire (precision optics, machine tools, chemicals), and the dense railway network that runs north-south from Czechoslovakia toward Italy. Diplomatic posture under the alt-history Schuschnigg government leans on the 1934 Stresa Front legacy with Italy and France, on Catholic-corporatist solidarity with Hungary and (until March 1939) Czechoslovakia, and on the British and French guarantees that were notably not extended in the historical 1938 crisis.
What turns the campaign
What Austria wants is an Italian guarantee restored to the 1934 standard - Mussolini moved divisions to the Brenner Pass during the 1934 Dollfuss assassination crisis to deter German intervention, then reversed by 1936, and the Austrian survival case depends on whether Rome can be brought back. France and Britain firming their position; the Hungarian relationship kept friendly; the German-speaking minority politics inside Austria managed against the National Socialist underground that the historical 1938 crisis surfaced. What Austria fears is exactly the historical answer: a German military move that calls the bluff, an Italian non-response that confirms the 1936 reorientation, and a Western reluctance to intervene over a country most foreign ministries privately regard as a German problem with a German solution.
Signature challenge
The Italian guarantee
Austria's central strategic problem in this alt-history 1939 is that its survival depends on a guarantee from a power (Italy) that has already, in the historical record, decided the guarantee is not worth the friction with Berlin. The 1934 deployment to the Brenner that Mussolini ordered after the Dollfuss assassination is the high-water mark of Italian commitment; everything since has been retreat. NationFall surfaces this as the Austrian campaign's defining tension: a country whose continued existence depends on whether a foreign capital decides to honor a promise the foreign minister there has already broken in private, played out in a Europe where every other small state's experience suggests the answer is no.
Try the Austria campaign
Free demo. Pick WW2 1939. Pick Austria. The country that refused the Anschluss.
Play Free Demo as Austria