The Anschluss was not an invasion that Austria resisted.

Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg had called a plebiscite on Austrian independence. On March 11, 1938, Hitler demanded that he cancel it, resign, and hand the chancellorship to the Austrian Nazi Arthur Seyss-Inquart. Facing the threat of invasion, Schuschnigg gave way. That evening he went on the radio, announced his resignation, and told Austrians not to resist.

German troops crossed the border at about five the next morning. They were not met with armed resistance. They were met with cheers and flowers. On March 13 Seyss-Inquart signed the law that folded Austria into Germany.

About 170,000 Jews lived in Vienna in 1938, and roughly 80,000 more people of mixed Jewish and Christian background. Together they were more than a tenth of the city, and Vienna was one of the great centers of Jewish life in Europe.

It is worth being specific about what was there. Vienna was an important center of Jewish culture and education. Many of its Jews were well integrated into the life of the city, and Jews made up significant proportions of its doctors and lawyers, its businessmen and bankers, its artists and journalists. Theodor Herzl had studied at the university there.

The violence began on March 11, the night Schuschnigg resigned, before German troops had crossed the border.

Among the people forced to scrub the sidewalks was Israel Taglicht, then in his seventies, the rabbi of the Leopoldstädter Tempel since 1932. He was made to carry a placard that read "I am a Jew," and he was beaten. Foreign pressure got him out to England.

The community's offices were shut and its board members were imprisoned at Dachau. By the summer of 1939 hundreds of factories had been closed and thousands of Jewish-owned businesses confiscated.

Adolf Eichmann, then an SS captain, set up a Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna with Walter Stahlecker. Its purpose was forced emigration: Jews were pushed out of the country and stripped of most of what they owned as they went, and it was efficient enough that it became the model exported back to Germany. By May 17, 1939, nearly half of Austria's Jews had emigrated, leaving about 121,000 behind.

Leaving meant standing in long lines, night and day, outside municipal, police and passport offices, paying an exit fee, and registering almost everything you owned, which was taken as you went.

Kristallnacht, eight months after the Anschluss, was particularly brutal in Vienna. Most of the city's synagogues and small prayer houses were set on fire, and many burned to shells while the public and the fire department looked on. The Leopoldstädter Tempel was set on fire on the morning of November 10. Thousands of Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps.

The deportations began in the autumn of 1939, when about 1,500 Jews were sent from Vienna to Nisko in occupied Poland. By October 1942 only about 8,000 Jews were left in Austria. In the end some 47,555 Austrian Jews were deported east, and the vast majority of them were murdered.

A new plebiscite was held on April 10, after the fact, and returned about 99 percent in favor of the union. Two things about that number.

And between 300,000 and 400,000 people were barred from voting altogether: Jews, Roma, and political opponents, who were the people the vote was about.