In 1946, the provisional Austrian government, recognised by the Allies after the previous year's surrender, published the Red-White-Red book, an attempt to show that Austria was culturally completely separate from "Prussian" Germany, and should be treated as "the first victim" of nazism, "left in the lurch by the whole world", rather than as a perpetrator of atrocities. The book was an early step in a deliberate national policy of obscuring Austria's Nazi history, and the flag, with its connotations of violence, religious faith, purity and innocence, has played a role both in cementing the Austrian second republic as a cohesive nation state, and in burying many things the country's elite would rather forget about the Anschluss, the war and the subsequent decade of allied occupation.