The present collection of sources relating to Austria's political history between 1945 and 1953 was created in the mid-1990s as part of a project funded by the Jubiläumsfonds der Oesterreichischen Nationalbank (Anniversary Fund of the Austrian National Bank). It was made possible not least by the opening of the archives of the Austrian Peoples’ Party (ÖVP) and the Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ), which were thus made accessible to historical research for the first time. In the course of the time-consuming and labor-intensive process of viewing and indexing, it was decided to supplement the records from the two political party archives with selected private documents from high-ranking politicians such as Adolf Schärf or Karl Waldbrunner. The subsequent subdivision into ten subject areas resulted not only from the thematic foci but also from gaps in the surviving documents. In a final step, a scholarly commentary was prepared for each of the ten thematic areas. After nearly a quarter century, the original project results proved to be outdated, both in form and content: Formally, because the publication on the Internet that had occurred in the meantime was based solely on the existing documents in paper form, which had merely been transferred one-to-one from an analog to a digital format. In terms of content, the commentary on the topic “reparations” might even be described with some justification as largely obsolete because the comments no longer corresponded to the current state of research. In order to make the collection accessible to an interested public in an appealing and contemporary form, it therefore seemed necessary to create a separate project page on which the digitized sources could be presented together with newly written commentaries. The result of these efforts is now before you. Finally, we would like to thank Traude Pietsch and Johannes Schönner for their labor-intensive research and editing work, which was the foundation for the source collection. Thanks are also due to the authors of the original commentaries, who included, in addition to Traude Pietsch, Maria Mesner, Oliver Rathkolb, and Helmut Wohnout. The current redesign of the project took place under the leadership of Maria Mesner and Johannes Schönner and with the collaboration of Matthias Trinkaus and Gregory Weeks. Gerhard Sinnhuber, to whom we would also like to express our thanks, was responsible for the creation of the project page.

Vienna, December 2020