Situated in the very heart of Europe, German-Austria, pitiful remainder of the once glorious and powerful Habsburg empire, was in the immediate postwar period subject to influences from both the East and the West: from distant Russia, swept by revolution and civil war and anxious to spread the gospel of Bolshevism beyond her uncertain borders, and from the victorious democratic and capitalist West, especially France and Great Britain. The Entente seemed determined to protect Austria and Central Europe from the two chief dangers which loomed on the horizon: the thrust into neighboring Austria of the newly established Soviet Hungarian Republic—the second Soviet regime in the world—and Anschluss with the new German Republic—a union which would strengthen and aggrandize the Reich at a time when weakening the German colossus and preventing its resurgence seemed to the Western Powers to be imperative.
