New York Jewish Week — For decades after 1945, Austrians often emphasized their own victimhood under Nazi Germany. Only in the 1980s and ‘90s did they formally and informally acknowledge the role of Austrians as perpetrators and supporters of Nazi crimes. In 1998, at the peak of this reckoning, the Austrian Service Abroad program was established to provide young Austrians the chance to work with nonprofit organizations that preserve the memory of the Holocaust and its victims.