After the Reich (6 page)

On 25 October 1944 the Soviets asked for an acceleration of the Austrian solution. They wanted to stipulate their future zone. At that point the French were neither particularly interested in Austria nor included in the handing out of the spoils. It was only later, when they located some of their own industrial base in Austria, that they started to clamour for reparations along with the Russians.
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As far as territory was concerned, the Soviets plumped for Burgenland and the eastern half of Lower Austria. They also wanted to keep the eastern half of Styria together with Graz, where the main industries were located - many of them outhoused from Germany at a safe distance from Anglo-American bombers. The British would have to be satisfied with the western half and Carinthia; the Americans would have the rest. The Viennese
Sachertorte
would be cut in three, but Russia would take the inner-city 1st Bezirk or district, the 3rd Bezirk and the northern parts that abutted the Danube. Even then they intended to control traffic on the river. The other slices would go to the Anglo-Americans.
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Meanwhile Austrian exile groups met to discuss the future. In Britain there were as many as 30,000, of whom 90 per cent were Jews.
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The Austrian Centre was based in Westbourne Terrace in Paddington and had its own restaurant, library and reading room, as well as a newspaper,
Zeitspiegel
. Before the full horror was known and even as late as April 1945, there was an active campaign among exiles to make the Jews return. That month appeared the pamphlet
Vom Ghetto zur Freiheit. Die Zukunft der Juden im befreiten Österreich
(From the Ghetto to Freedom: The Future of the Jews in a Liberated Austria). It called for the punishment of those who had committed crimes against the Jews and the restitution of their property.
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Austrian exile groups began to plan for a non-Nazi, independent Austria even before the war started. In June 1939 a discussion group had called itself ‘Das kommende Österreich’ (The Coming Austria). It was not just among the British exiles that such discussions took place. One of the most influential figures was Ernst Fischer, who led the Austrian Communist Group in Moscow. In 1944 he published
The Rebirth of my Country
in which he advocated the complete economic divorce of Austria and Germany after the war and suggested alliances with Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.
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With the establishment of the provisional government in the autumn of 1945 he was made minister of education.
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F. C. West, president of the Austrian Centre, brought up the question that loomed largest in the minds of most exiles with his lecture ‘Zurück oder nicht zurück - das ist keine Frage’ (To return or not to return, that is not the question). Most Jews had reservations, and these were positively encouraged by Zionist groups. Willi Scholz (who was not a Jew) was at pains to reassure Jews that not only would the new Austria welcome them, they were needed there - ‘Österreichische Juden, geht nach Österreich zurück!’ (Austrian Jews, go back to Austria!).
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In 1941 the Free Austrian Movement (FAM - it became the FAWM, or Free Austrian World Movement, in March 1944) was founded as the political voice of the Centre. It was dominated by the communists, and very soon the monarchists and even the social democrats withdrew their support.
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Young Austria with its slogan ‘Jugend voran’ (youth forward) was a dynamic movement for those under twenty-five. At its height it had a thousand members, and a hundred of these fought in the British armed forces.
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Jews, social democrats and communists signed up. The communists had been declared illegal by Dollfuss in February 1934 and had been driven into exile even before the Jews. Austria’s biggest party before the Anschluss was the Christlichsozialen or Christian Socialists, but these were as good as unrepresented in the exile colony. They were often antisemites, and would have been put off by the heavy Jewish presence. Monarchists, supporting the candidature of Otto von Habsburg, were not without influence, but this bore fruit with the Gentiles, not with the Jews.
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Otto von Habsburg had tried to raise an Austrian battalion in America in 1942, and the recreation of a post-war independent Austria gave monarchists leave to hope.
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Legitimists such as Baron Leopold Popper von Podhragy were pushing for a National Committee and an Austrian fighting force. The legitimists were often noblemen (nobles figured largely in the early Austrian resistance groups) and were among the first to fall out with the Nazis, who treated them with disdain, and vice versa. The British Foreign Office was lukewarm about the creation of an Austrian force. Eden’s response was merely to stress that German influence was to be removed; besides he did not think that he had the proper cadre among the 30,000 Austrians in London.
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A year later the Foreign Office was able to invoke bad experiences in America as a reason for not raising such a battalion. A document dated 15 March 1943 shows how divided Austrians in London were.
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The leaders of Austrian Social Democracy, Viktor Adler and Otto Bauer, had also fled from Paris to New York. At first the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had thrown a predictable spanner into the works, but the position altered after Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union and the Russo-British Alliance, and it was once again respectable to be left-wing. The Social Democrats had traditionally taken the line that Austria was not capable of a wholly independent existence and had tarred their image by supporting union with Germany. Initially Young Austria stood for the liberation of ‘Germany’: ‘Ohne ein freies demokratisches Deutschland - kein unabhängiges Österreich’ (Without a free, democratic Germany, no independent Austria). They encouraged a worldwide levée-en-masse to overthrow the Nazis with violence. The most important thing was to make the British authorities recognise their right to fight - their right to possess, like the Poles and the Czechs, their own fighting units.
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Communists were powerful behind the scenes in almost all the British-based organisations. Their plan was that Soviet Russia would form the basis of a system of security that would prevent further warfare and protect the smaller states of south-eastern Europe from German aggression.
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Towards the end of the war there were sheaves of publications describing the political form of the new Austria, though in order not to frighten the monarchists - who had been liable to Nazi persecution from 1942 - the word ‘republic’ was avoided .
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They had no desire to fall out until Hitler was beaten.

The communist journalist Alfred Klahr was a leading theorist of a new Austria divorced from Germany. Klahr advocated a rewriting of recent Austrian history to emphasise unity and resistance to Hitler. It was necessary to tread gently when it came to the Ständesstaat or Corporate State, which replaced democratic government in Austria in 1934, to limit the traitors to a mere handful of high-ranking collaborators. Germany could not sell itself as a victim - it did not possess this card.
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One of the tactics used was to describe Austria as a culturally separate entity to Germany, which meant concentrating on writers who were anti-German, like Grillparzer. Music was also big: Austria could claim to be more international, that musicians from all over the world had lived in Vienna; that the Beethoven of the Ninth Symphony and the setting of the Ode to Joy was a Viennese incarnation. The nationalistic, antisemitic Wagner was billed as a purely German phenomenon.

On 19 February 1942 Churchill promised to free Austria from the ‘Prussian yoke’. He had actually overstepped the mark, and his speech was disowned by the Foreign Office, but it had an encouraging effect in exile circles. Finally, the independence of Austria did become a war aim, as recognised by the colonial secretary Lord Cranborne in the Lords in May 1942 and Eden in the Commons in September. This line of argument was eagerly lapped up by the Austrian exiles, who were more anxious than ever to put the blame on the ‘Piefkes’, ‘Preussen’ or ‘Nazipreussen’. The Austrians who occupied positions of power, they argued, were denatured opportunists: true Austrians had nothing to do with the regime.
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Any small act of resistance or non-cooperation was held up in triumph. When they returned to Austria after the war, they had to admit that they had been living in cloud-cuckoo land.
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In their hearts and minds, Foreign Office officials remained unconvinced by the exiles. In November 1942 Roger Makins spoke in his master’s voice and cast doubt on the importance of a group principally composed of Jews and royalists, while others pointed to the communist influence and were sceptical as to whether Austrians would accept its decisions. The presence of so many Jews on the committee could only damage its credibility.
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On the other hand some progress was made through their champions in Britain like Sir Geoffrey Mander, and there were voices raised in Parliament for the creation of Austrian fighting units in the Allied armies.
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Austrian exiles had the French example before their eyes after June 1944. The French were rapidly accorded the right to organise their country behind the lines and escape from the threat of military occupation and government. The exiles were deluding themselves in making this comparison, but this did not prevent their dreaming.

The non-political Jews, who made up the bulk of the exiles, were less likely to be convinced of Austria’s lamb-like innocence, because many of them had witnessed the barbarity of the Austrian Gentile population in 1938. They were also unconvinced by attempts to ‘relativise’ the atrocities perpetrated against the Jews by including them in a host of other brutalities as a way of focusing on the general monstrosity of the Germans. They were also doubtful of the Austrian Centre’s picture of the Jews as loyal Austrians. Their ideal would have been a popular uprising against the Nazis. At the very end they were successful and there was a small-scale mutiny when the Russians loomed at the border. Hitler sent the Austrian-born Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the SD, or Sicherheitsdienst, the Security Service of the SS, to put it down, and three officers were publicly hanged in Floridsdorf.
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Soviet Russia clung to the idea of an independent Austria within its 1938 borders, but the power in east central Europe was to be Czechoslovakia. Austria was to be ‘neutralised’ and also to be refused any form of confederation with its neighbours, as the Russians feared a revival of a Catholic or Austro-Hungarian empire. Nor were there to be any concealed unions, of the NATO or EU sort; in return Austria was not to be brought into the communist camp. The zones were also mapped out: the Soviets wanted the industry (particularly the arms industry) in the east. The east also had the railway hubs for their planned satellites in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.
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The Allies connived at the ‘myth’ of Austria’s victimhood,
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but this was largely dictated by their own convenience. For the Jews the ‘liberation’ was the moment of truth. The Marxists had failed to come to terms with the genocide because such things had nothing to do with class struggle. When they were faced with the facts, they were speechless. The Anschluss and the war nonetheless strengthened the Austrian sense of independence. In the 1930s this had been at best half formed. Now all Austrians accepted the idea of the independent state, and rejected the notion of Grossdeutschland. It is an attitude which colours Austrian minds to this day, to the degree that the flirtation with Germany that started with the pan-German antisemites like Schönerer and Lueger and reached its height between the wars is all but forgotten. It was being put away in the recesses of the Austrian collective memory as the Red Army mustered at the gates of Vienna.

PART I

Chaos

1

The Fall of Vienna

14 April 1945 A shocking view from the Graben: the marvellous high-pitched roof of the cathedral with its eagle-motif has disappeared and the lefthand incomplete tower has been burned out. The finials and gables appear miserable and black against the heavens. Only the tower is still standing, the symbol of my beloved city.

Josef Schöner, Wiener Tagebuch 1944/1945, Vienna, Cologne and Weimar 1992, 160

A
s the Russians approached the former Habsburg capital the Austrian Centre and the BBC together tried to dispel the fears of the population. The Austrian Centre even went so far as to stress the Red Army’s reputation for good behaviour. Marching from the Hungarian town of Koszeg the 3rd Ukrainian Front under Marshal Tolbukhin crossed the frontier on Maundy Thursday, 29 March 1945, at Klostermarienberg in South Burgenland, and moved towards Rechnitz. Graz lay at the end of the Raab Valley, but the Red Army predictably wheeled right towards Vienna. On 1 April the battle for Wiener Neustadt began. After a fight lasting a week, the capital ceded and the Red Army entered Hitler’s ‘Fortress Vienna’ on 8 April. The Austrian Centre was jubilant:
Zeitspiegel
described the brotherly greeting given to the conquerors, with both the Red flag and the red, white and red flag of Austria on prominent display. Once more they were out of touch with reality.