Austria's annexation by Nazi Germany, or the Anschluss, is the decisive turn in Hans Lazar's career: selected to help preserve Austrian independence, he instead became one of the annexation's most effective propagandists. The episode establishes a pattern that would carry into his later work in Spain, where press influence and political loyalty proved more consequential than diplomatic titles.

Lazar before the Anschluss

Born in Istanbul in 1895 to an Austrian diplomat and an Albanian mother of partly Jewish ancestry, Lazar moved to Austria as an adolescent. The outbreak of the First World War interrupted his education; he served in the Austro-Hungarian army, where severe wounds left him with chronic pain and a lasting morphine dependency. After returning to civilian life, he became a correspondent for Germany's official news agency in Bucharest in 1927, and married the Romanian aristocrat Elena Petrino Borkowska in 1937.

In 1938, Lazar moved with his wife to Berlin to take up a press attaché post at the Austrian embassy to Hitler. The Austrian government had chosen him for his public sympathy toward Nazism, believing his contacts might help protect the country's independence. That expectation was overturned almost at once: from Berlin, he worked against the very independence he had been appointed to safeguard.

Propaganda for annexation

Lazar had been a member of Hitler's party for years, despite his ancestry's conflict with Nazi racial laws. His background did not obstruct his rise. Working under Joseph Goebbels from the Austrian embassy, he became a fervent advocate of the Anschluss. When the annexation was completed, he announced in Vienna to foreign correspondents that the country of his ancestors had become another region of Hitler's Germany.

The reversal is central to the episode's significance. The Austrian government's attempt to use Lazar's sympathies and connections in the service of national independence instead placed a committed Nazi in a position from which he could help make annexation appear accomplished and legitimate. His work for the Reich brought him a debt that, the narrative observes, could never be repaid.

From Berlin to Spain

After his success in Austria, Hitler sent Lazar to Spain, where he would spend the rest of his life. In June 1938 he presented himself to the government in Burgos as a correspondent for Transocean, a German news agency established to spread the ideas of the new Germany in Spain and Latin America. After Franco's victory, Lazar became press attaché at the German embassy.

In Madrid, his influence reportedly grew until it exceeded that of the ambassador, Eberhard von Stohrer. Lazar's later work there—using news coverage and relationships with journalists to advance German interests—extends the method already visible in the Anschluss: political power exercised through the management of information, even when the official setting is a press office rather than a battlefield.

Narrative significance

The Anschluss is not narrated as a battlefield episode but as the outcome of political work conducted through diplomacy and propaganda. Lazar's appointment, his reversal of purpose, and his announcement to foreign correspondents make the annexation legible through the career of a single intermediary. The personal contradiction is sharp: a man of partly Jewish ancestry could prosper within a regime whose racial laws excluded people like him, while his political usefulness outweighed that contradiction.

The episode also foreshadows Lazar's importance in Spain. The official role and the actual work do not coincide: the press representative becomes an instrument of ideological expansion, and the diplomatic post becomes a base for influence. The annexation thus marks both Austria's loss of independence and the beginning of Lazar's longer service to the Nazi cause abroad.