WThe city of Vienna in Austria was bombed 52 times during World War II, and 37,000 houses of the city were lost. Only 41 civilian vehicles survived the raids, more than 3,000 bomb craters were counted.
WThe Battle for Castle Itter was fought in the Austrian North Tyrol village of Itter on 5 May 1945, in the last days of the European Theater of World War II.
WFebruary Shadows is a 1984 historical novel by award-winning Austrian author Elisabeth Reichart. She wrote it as a response to her discovery of the Mühlviertler Hasenjagd, a massacre on 2 February 1945 at the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in Upper Austria. In the Mühlviertler Hasenjagd, the civilian inhabitants of the Mühlviertel hunted down and killed almost 500 prisoners, including men, women and children, who escaped from Special Barracks Number 20.
WThe Hartheim Euthanasia Centre was a killing facility involved in the Nazi programme known as Action T4, in which German citizens deemed mentally or physically unfit were systematically killed with poison gas. This was initially a programme of involuntary euthanasia permitted under the law ostensibly to enable the lawful and painless killing of incurably ill patients; these killings continued even after the law was rescinded in 1942 and extended to include Jews, Communists and others considered undesirable by the state. Concentration camp inmates who were unfit for work, or otherwise deemed troublesome, were also executed here. The killing centre was housed in Hartheim Castle in the municipality of Alkoven, near Linz, Austria.
WLake Toplitz is a lake situated in a dense mountain forest high up in the Austrian Alps, 98 km (61 mi) from Salzburg in western Austria. It is surrounded by cliffs and forests in the Salzkammergut lake district, within the Totes Gebirge. The Toplitzsee water contains no oxygen below a depth of 20 m. Fish can survive only in the top 18 m, as the water below 20 m is salty, although bacteria and worms that can live without oxygen have been found below 20 m.
WThe South Tyrol Option Agreement was an agreement in effect between 1939 and 1943, when the native German speaking people in South Tyrol and three communes in the province of Belluno were given the option of either emigrating to neighboring Nazi Germany or remaining in Fascist Italy and being forcibly integrated into the mainstream Italian culture, losing their language and cultural heritage. Over 80% opted to move to Germany.
WThe Vienna Offensive was launched by the Soviet 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Fronts in order to invade Vienna, Austria, during World War II. The offensive lasted from 16 March to 15 April 1945.