Politics & Power Quote by Arthur Seyss-Inquart

A bureaucrat’s shrug disguised as plainspoken candor, Seyss-Inquart’s line works by laundering an aggressive project through the language of inevitability. “Never tried to hide” sounds like honesty; it’s really a preemptive defense. If the Nazi movement in Austria openly “inclined” toward a “greater Germany,” then Anschluss becomes less a coercive takeover than the fulfillment of a long-declared preference. The verb choice matters: “inclination” softens annexation into temperament, as if borders can be redrawn the way a person leans toward a taste.

The subtext is a bid to dissolve Austrian sovereignty without admitting to conquest. By framing the goal as public and longstanding, Seyss-Inquart implies consent: you can’t accuse us of deception, so don’t accuse us of illegitimacy. It’s a classic authoritarian move, replacing legal argument with a performance of transparency.

Context makes the sentence chillier. Seyss-Inquart was not an outside commentator; he became the vehicle for Nazi control in Austria, serving as chancellor for two days in March 1938 before the country was absorbed into Hitler’s Reich. His role in facilitating the annexation means this is not observation but self-exculpation, the kind offered after the fact to make collaboration sound like administrative tidying.

Calling him simply a “soldier” understates the method here: not martial bravado, but managerial rhetoric. The line’s power lies in its banality, turning ideological expansionism into something that allegedly required no masking - and therefore, in his telling, no resistance.