In the years that followed the end of the First World War successive German governments toyed in principle with the idea of annexing Austria. Long-standing concerns about increasing the Catholic proportion of the population, which had persisted as a deterrent during the Second Empire, now appeared less important. The concept of annexation acquired additional and to some extent new perspectives in the wake of Adolf Hitler's appointment as chancellor of Germany in 1933. Hitler was an advocate of the annexation of Austria, had called for it on the first page of his book Mein Kampf, and had consistently urged such a step – although neither because he felt an overriding affection for his native land nor because many Austrians were suffering economic hardship in the postwar years. He set his sights on annexation because he wished to increase the national substance of the German Reich as a preparatory step to implementing his plans for territorial aggrandizement.

Long before he came to power he had realized that Italy's concerns with regard to the Brenner frontier posed a serious impediment to the annexation; in Mein Kampf he called for South Tyrol to be abandoned and had the relevant chapter reprinted as a separate pamphlet with a preface dated February 12, 1926, obviously hoping thereby to acquaint a larger reading public with his view that an alliance with Italy, entailing the abandonment of South Tyrol, was a desirable objective. Today we know that he also went into this question in some detail in his second book, written in 1928 but not published at the time.