After the Reich

by Giles MacDonogh

  The American intelligence officer Martin Herz, who interviewed Fischer in August, understood him better. Fischer was a pragmatic communist. Unlike Ulbricht in Berlin, he admitted that the Russians had raped women during the occupation and that the emergency police they appointed contained ‘many of the lowest, criminal elements of the population’. They had been partly responsible for the looting. He was not in favour of the proscription of half a million Austrian Nazis. The number was just too large and doubtless included a great many hangers-on and nominal Party members: ‘To outlaw them and make pariahs out of them would not only be unwise, but also unjust.’ Fischer admitted candidly that National Socialism was ‘a terror machine that worked with deadly precision and exacted nominal acceptance from people who conformed only in order to be able to live’. The Nazi rank and file should be allowed to redeem themselves.51

  Clark had a little present for the Viennese before he went back to his hunting lodge in Hinterstoder. In a mine in the Salzkammergut the Americans had discovered the crown and regalia of the Emperor Charlemagne. Now they wanted to restore it to its rightful place. Unfortunately that meant the Hofburg, the imperial palace in the centre of Vienna, which was occupied by the Russians. Renner was very much opposed to the Americans letting it go anywhere near the Russians, so they kept it in the vaults of the bank building that served as their HQ.52 The Americans had armed it as if it were the Pentagon itself.53

  It was Koniev who put an end to the British intransigence. He announced on 27 August that he would withdraw his command over the Western sectors of Vienna as of 1 September and that these areas would then be ‘without masters’. The ploy worked, and the Americans, British and French took up their positions on the first of the month.54 They could now look closely at Vienna, which had been the Russians’ exclusive preserve since early April. Herz noted that 200,000 Viennese were eating at the soup kitchens set up by the Russians.cq It was hard not to give the Austrian communists some credit. They were not tainted by their Austrian past, only by their period in Moscow and the uncertainty of their instructions. The socialists were compromised by their support for amalgamation with Germany; the conservatives because they had been part and parcel of the anti-democratic Corporate State. The communists had their ‘Immediate Programme’ which called for a purge of the Nazis, three-party commissions to weed out fascists in the administration, administrative reform, nationalisation of industry and a democratic foreign policy. It was not meant to be a revolutionary programme.55

  The first meeting of the high commissioners took place under Koniev’s roof at the Imperial on 11 September. Clark thought it a shambles. It was Béthouart’s first chance to meet the charismatic American general, who he decided resembled a Sioux Indian. The agenda was based on the four-power arrangement decided in London before the end of the war. The Russians knew exactly what they wanted: mastery of the Danube, the big oilfields at Zistersdorf in the eastern Weinviertel, and the Austrian ‘bread-basket’ in Burgenland.They already had most of the infrastructure - control of the railway lines, the roads, the airfields and the telephone lines. All international calls passed through Vienna, giving the Russians the chance to monitor and control them. Similarly, the RAVAG, or Austrian radio network, was based in the Soviet Zone. The Soviet forces thus still oversaw important parts of the Austrian economic infrastructure, not just in the east of the country, but nationwide.56

  From 20 October 1945, the Western Allies thought it prudent to shift the meetings around the corner to the Chamber of Industry on the Schwarzenbergplatz (for the time being, Josef-Stalin-Platz). That meant throwing out the Margaréthas. They found new premises and were helped to move by black American drivers and Nazi forced labourers who were so weak from hunger that they could hardly carry the boxes of files. The Allied sessions took place once a month. They were stiff. For a while the British high commissioner refused to attend because the Soviets would not allow the West to bring in food supplies for the half-starved population. There was a tea afterwards and attempts were made to break the ice. Koniev talked to Béthouart about Balzac, which he had read in Russian.57

  Possibly his interest in French literature led him to invite Generals Béthouart and Cherrière, together with the civil administrator Alain de Monticault, to a lunch in his Baden villa. Once again the vodka flowed. Once again Koniev had an ulterior motive - he wanted to propose an alliance with the French that would serve both their interests on the Council.58 The communists were still a power to be reckoned with in French politics, and, of all the Western Allies, the Russians had the most empathy with the French.

  All the main receptions to commemorate important Soviet feast days were held in the Hofburg Palace. The feasts were as lavish as those held in the Russian embassy in Berlin. There was copious vodka and caviar and the Russians looked far more splendid in their Red Army dress suits than the Western Allies in their khaki.59 A certain style and an ability to entertain on an imperial scale may explain the gracious treatment accorded to the former Austrian ruling house. Franz Joseph’s nephew Hubert Salvator was told that the Russians would respect his property and person, and he was excused from the duty of billeting officers. Béthouart relates that the Russians even helped him put out his relics on Holy Days of Obligation.

  The British HQ was in Schönbrunn Palace, where the commander General Sir Richard McCreery occupied the room that had served Napoleon before him, a fact that caused the French general de Lattre de Tassigny considerable annoyance. McCreery, who had served with the British army in Italy, endured strained relations with Koniev from the outset. Soon after he moved into a villa near the palace in Hietzing the Soviets kidnapped his gardener. He was never seen again.60

  Each of the four powers was granted an hotel where they could put up their guests. The Russians took the Grand, opposite the Hotel Imperial, where the Russian commandant had his lodgings. It had also been Hitler’s favourite on his visits to Vienna. The portrait of the Emperor Franz Joseph had been replaced by one of Stalin. The Americans appropriated the smaller but grander Bristol. The French occupied the Hotel Kummer in the Mariahilferstrasse, and only later moved into the rather more impressive Hotel de France on the Ring. The British were in Sacher’s behind the Opera. The Western Allies all sponsored a newspaper which now joined the largely propagandist Russian press consisting of Neues Österreich, the Arbeiterzeitung, the Österreichische Zeitung and the Kleine Volksblatt. Now the Americans launched the Wiener Kurier, the British Die Weltpresse and the French Die Welt am Montag.

  Clark gradually took on the role of baiter of the Russian bear that was performed by Clay in Germany. He believed the Americans were ‘selling Austria down the Danube’.61 When the Russians staked a claim to all shipping on the river, Clark noted that the vital river barges were in the American Zone in Linz. Linz was on the border with the Soviet Zone, so Clark had them taken upstream to Passau, in the American Zone in Germany. It transpired there were Yugoslav barges among them, and the Yugoslavs began to complain. It was only when Clark had a direct order from the secretary of state, however, that he agreed to hand over the Yugoslav vessels.62

  The political scene was beginning to move, and it looked hopeful for Austria. On 11 September, the Allied Council gave permission for the re-establishment of the three main political parties: popular, socialist and communist. On 24 September Renner obligingly reshuffled his cabinet to include Figl, leading the Western Allies to recognise his government on 20 October. Renner took the hint and resigned following the elections, which took place on 25 November, eventually becoming federal president a few days before Christmas when the deputies unanimously voted him upstairs. On 3 December his place was taken by Figl.

  The results of the first free elections since 1930 were announced on 2 December. There had been a 95 per cent turnout. Margarétha, who was one of the founders of the People’s Party, the ÖVP, called them ‘brilliant’ and with good reason: communist hopes were dashed and his party headed the list with just over 1,600,000 votes, representing near
ly half the electorate. The SPÖ, the Socialist Party, won 1,434,898 votes. The communists, the KPÖ, limped home a long way behind with 174,255 or 5.5 per cent. Even in ‘Red Vienna’ they had come third with just six seats in the regional assembly. The SPÖ did best, with fifty-eight; the ÖVP won thirty-six. The communists achieved just four seats in the Federal Parliament. Women, it seemed, had been their undoing.

  Women were now 64 per cent of the electorate, and they had suffered unduly at the hands of the Red Army. The ÖVP campaigned with posters that also showed the Russians in their worst light: ‘Ur-Wiener und Wiener ohne Uhr, wählt ÖVP!’cr Another ruse was to put up posters telling the Austrians, ‘For all who love the Red Army, vote KPÖ!’63 Missing from the electorate were around a quarter of a million Austrian dead, 600,000 POWs, half a million Nazis and sundry other political undesirables. The ex-Nazis would not have helped the left much. Their half-million votes would probably have gone to the People’s Party. Margarétha thought the message would cause relief at home and abroad.64 He was right. The Americans reported that Austria was now finally aware of the meaning of democracy. The Figl government was recognised on 7 December 1946.65

  The Viennese were cold and hungry. The larger coffee houses had been taken over by the Americans. Margarétha and his wife had a modest Christmas: festive Paprikafisch came out of a tin. The British captain was kind enough to make Eugen a present of a dozen Havana cigars, and in turn he gave the Guards officer a little bottle of cognac.66 Figl, however, began his rule on fighting form. To thunderous applause he demanded the opening of the demarcation lines between the zones, the restoration of Austrian unity, the return of South Tyrol and the end of the Yugoslav threat to Carinthia. Austria had never been a second German state.67

  The communists were bitterly disappointed by the results of the elections, although they were granted the concession of a ministerial portfolio which went to Karl Altmann. As their Soviet-controlled newspaper, the Österreichische Zeitung, put it, ‘We have lost a battle, but we are just at the start of the battle for Austria, and that will be won.’68 Their failure to endear themselves to the Austrian people may have been behind Koniev’s departure: he was replaced by Vladimir Kurasov in the middle of 1946. Just as in the aftermath of the Berlin elections of 1946, the Russians began to show their teeth, creating petty difficulties for the Western Allies wherever they could. As far as the Austrians were concerned, they had learned nothing: the ÖVP were closet fascists misleading the public under a halo of martyrdom (Dachau and Mauthausen), and the SPÖ were tainted by their complicity in the Anschluss. Austria quite clearly could not be trusted to rule itself.69

  Feeding the Austrians

  When Dos Passos visited Vienna at the end of 1945 he was able to have a quick look round courtesy of American army public relations. He attended Mass in the Hofburg Chapel and noted the American, British and French ‘gold braid’ listening to Schubert. The famous cafés, uncleaned and unheated, served cups of ‘mouldy-tasting dark gruel called coffee’. The waiters ‘kept up a pathetic mummery of service’ providing the usual glass of water, but not the cream, although they still had the jugs. The writer plucked up the courage to ask a waiter what was in the coffee. ‘That’s our secret,’ he was told. He also wanted to know what the Viennese ate. ‘Bread and dried peas’ was the answer.70

  The winter had set in, provisions were at an all-time low, and there was no fuel to heat houses and flats. The Allies gave permission for the felling of large numbers of trees. Feeding Vienna remained a Western grievance. The Soviets had made off with the arable land and the roads into the capital. Their zone had produced 65 per cent of Vienna’s food before the war. Clark said the Americans intended to give the Austrians 1,550 calories (he said the average American had 3,000), but he admitted that the British had problems matching that figure.71 As it was, the diet varied considerably across Austria. In Vienna in May citizens received a piffling 833 calories, which they presumably supplemented with fresh fruit and vegetables. In the American Zone it was not much more, and the French complained they had no means of feeding the Vorarlberger or the Tyroleans.

  Desperation led the Austrian government to moderate the outward flow of Germans and grant citizenship to one, the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Friedrich Bergius, who had been trying to extract sugar from tree bark. Bergius was also promising to make meat from wood, a project that has now been dismissed as the purest alchemy. Bergius’s citizenship becomes all the more scandalous given that he was fully in collaboration with IG Farben during the war, and working for a Nazi victory. He fled to Buenos Aires and died there in 1949.72

  In order to receive foreign aid, Austria had to prove itself a proper enemy of Hitler. At first it was the Russians who made trouble, charging that the Austrians had not actively sought freedom from Hitler. After the war, it was Yugoslavia that vetoed Austria receiving aid from UNRRA (the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration). The aid was only forthcoming from March 1946. The previous December the British Foreign Office had been preparing a new four-power agreement for the administration of Austria that would result in granting the Austrians a degree of self-government, but holding them in check through vetoes. The Allies - particularly the British and the French - wanted to scale down their operations in Austria, for the simple reason that they were expensive.

  The agreement was long in the making. At first the British did not tell the other three of the draft; then the Americans opposed it. When it was finally signed on 28 June 1946 it was supposed to last for six months, but in reality it survived until the State Treaty was promulgated on 27 July 1955.73 The Austrian federal and state governments achieved a greater degree of liberty and were able to use quasi-total power to run their houses. Military government by the Allies was scrapped and replaced by ‘control missions’. That the Russians saw the opening of a new era is clear, perhaps, from the recall of Koniev and his replacement by Kurasov. Clark’s bugbear Zheltov, however, remained behind.

  As much as possible, the Western Allies sought to administer Austria with the help of apparent anti-Nazis. Ulrich Ilg, who had been a minister in the inter-war First Republic, was a typical appointee, much as the gerontocracy had returned to power in Berlin. The French set him up in the Vorarlberg. The British also worked to redraft Austrian law. An important British contribution to the re-establishment of a non-Nazi Austria was BALU - the British Austrian Legal Unit. The body had been formed in 1943 by pulling a number of Austrian lawyers out of the British army and putting them to work in the War Office. In 1945 they were packed off to Vienna where they formed part of the legal department of the Control Commission under the British-born (but of German Jewish origin) lawyer Claud Schuster. Schuster was assisted by George Bryant, né Breuer. BALU itself was run by the Viennese Lieutenant-Colonel Wolf Lasky, who had worked in the town hall until 1938. He was now claiming royalties for legal textbooks sold during the Nazi interregnum. The Austrians took fright and appointed him to the bench, so that he now enjoyed the curious position of being a judge in both Austria and Britain. He never practised in Austria and had no desire to settle there once his work was done. He later worked as a legal adviser to the British in Germany.74 The British legal division generally advised acceptance of the laws voted by the Austrian parliament. 75

  In March 1947 a poll taken among the Austrians indicated the popularity of the Allies - the Soviets, it seems, were not mentioned. The British were well liked, but the French were no more than ‘perfumed Russians’. Mark Clark was singled out for veneration for his tough stand against the Soviets, Figl going so far as to call him ‘a legendary national hero’. Dos Passos reported that he would wander around the streets of Vienna accompanied only by an interpreter at a time when the city at night was ‘as in mediaeval days’ - you went abroad at your own risk.76 The violence was normally down to the Russians or gangs of DPs. The Austrians voiced their opinions of the various DPs whose camps were scattered over their land: the Jews were liked least, followed by the Poles, Yugoslavs and Russians.
Quite a few of these had become lawless bandits, seeking revenge for the indignities of the lives they had led as KZler or forced labourers. The best loved now were ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia, Hungary and the Balkans.77

  With little food or fuel, Austria had around 600,000 extra mouths to feed. There were about 170,000 ‘Danube Swabians’, 151,000 Sudetenländer and 15,000 Hungarian Germans, as well as 15,000 Germans from the Siebenbürgen and the Banat and 170,000 Jews. It was only after 1949 that the figures began to drop. The Americans put the DPs into the care of Austrians, but the British thought they were better off under their own authority. The Allies used the RAD camps that the Nazis had built for their forced and volunteer labour force.78

  A constant stream of German Bohemians and Moravians gushed into Austria. The Russians had a camp for them in Melk on the Danube, but it was grossly overstretched and they ended up becoming a burden to all the Allied zones. The response was to demand the expulsion of ‘Reich’ Germans. Gruber was particularly vociferous here. By a highly specious argument ‘German’ was made to mean ‘Nazi’. The expulsion of the Germans from the Austrian body would purge it of its former evil. On 1 November 1945 the Americans stopped their ration cards in Salzburg. Austria made a point of celebrating its anti-German past - books were published, for example, that showed how gallantly Austria had resisted Prussia in the Seven Years War.

  In March 1947 there were hunger marches in Vienna and Lower Austria. The demonstrators shouted, ‘Down with Figl’s hunger regime! We want new elections! We are hungry!’ There was a sit-in at the chancellor’s office orchestrated by the communists. The Viennese police were too terrified of the Soviets to help. The latter even refused to allow the Allied ‘four-in-a-jeep’ patrols to interfere. The demonstrations were coupled with the failure of Gruber and the Austrians to make any headway towards independence in Moscow.79