Remorse for everything connected with the Holocaust and admitting Austria's share in the blame was a "permanent task" for Austrian Christians in order to prevent "the power of hatred and inhumanity ever again gaining the upper hand," Cardinal Christoph Schönborn declared on the seventieth anniversary of the Anschluss last week. German columns entered Austria on 12 March 1938, and Hitler formally proclaimed the annexation of the country three days later. It was "shameful" that, due to a centuries-old tradition of anti-Judaism "adorned with religious trappings", Christians in Austria had not been morally equipped to oppose a pseudo-scientific, nationalistic anti-Semitism with sufficient decisiveness, Cardinal Schönborn said at the unveiling of a memorial for Jewish doctors at Vienna University's medical faculty.

Cardinal Schönborn warned against downplaying the evil that had occurred and recalled that those who wanted to forget historical facts were condemned to re-experiencing them. Only a change of heart could guarantee that human dignity would never again be violated to such an extent and "trampled to the ground". More than two-thirds of the doctors who taught at the then world-famous medical faculty had been expelled for racial reasons in 1938, the cardinal recalled. It was also shameful that Austrian politicians had not managed to invite those who had survived back to Austria after the war, he said. For many years after 1945, suppressing and forgetting the Nazi period was the rule in Austria and "many doctors with a dark past" had been kept on at the faculty. This had fortunately changed in recent years, he said. Austria was beginning to face its past "openly and honestly" and that was a sign of hope.

The cardinal's words contrasted sharply with those of Otto Habsburg, 95, who only two days previously while addressing the Austrian People's Party had said that Austria had been "Hitler's first victim" and had suffered more than any other country in Europe under the Nazis.

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