According to documents obtained in 2003 from the Austrian State Archives by the
Los Angeles Times, which was after the expiration of a 30-year seal of his records under Austrian privacy law, Gustav Schwarzenegger voluntarily applied to join the
Nazi Party on 1 March 1938, two weeks before the country was
annexed. Austria became part of the
German Reich through the
Anschluss on 12 March 1938.
[3] A separate record obtained by the
Wiesenthal Centerindicates he sought membership before the annexation but was only accepted in January, 1941. He also applied to become a member of the
Sturmabteilung (SA), the
NSDAP's
paramilitary wing, on 1 May 1939, the year after the annexation of Austria, at a time when SA membership was declining. The SA had 900,000 members in 1940, down from 4.2 million in 1934. This decline in SA membership was the result of
The Night of the Long Knives which was a political purge carried out by Hitler against the SA which was seen as too radical and too powerful by senior military and industrial leaders within Nazi Germany.