Spring, 1945: caught between the advancing Allied armies, Austria was temporarily transformed into a political no-man’s land. There was chaos, hope and fear. Drawing on the everyday lives of ordinary people, Kurt Bauer vividly explores this tumultuous year. There is the Wehrmacht soldier who takes a long and winding road home; the Jewish emigre forced into exile in 1938, returning to his home town as part of the victorious army—only to find that the old Vienna of his childhood is gone; the Jewish woman who survived the war in Vienna and now wants to get to the USA as quickly as possible … a multifaceted and gripping book.

A scientific sensation! Kurt Bauer clears up the many myths that surround the July Putsch of 1934 in Austria. He is the first to prove that the coup d’état was ordered by Hitler himself. At 12.53 pm on July 25, 1934, 150 SS troops stormed the chancellery in Vienna. Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, self-proclaimed leader of the authoritarian Austro-fascist state, was heavily wounded and subsequently died. The rebels in Vienna gave up by nighttime, but a bloody upheaval of Nazis escalated in the provinces. At the same time, Hitler was listening to Wagner in Bayreuth's festival hall. But things were far from calm in the dictator’s box, as he was impatiently awaiting news from Austria…