After the Reich

by Giles MacDonogh

  There were other nations which expected to be in the running for something at the peace, principally the Poles and the Czechs. They placed their hopes on the tit-for-tat cessions and annexations that had become a feature of the twentieth century. The process had started with the population transfers between the Bulgarians and the Turks in 1913. In that instance 50,000 people had voluntarily switched lands. In 1923 the exchange of Greeks and Turks was more acrimonious, and the figures more disturbing: 400,000 Turks went east, and 1,300,000 Greeks took their place in what was to become a mono-racial homeland. In the spring of 1943 Roosevelt told Anthony Eden, the British foreign secretary, that the transfer of Germans from East Prussia would be similar to the business with the Turks and Greeks. In 1945 Stalin wanted revision of the Treaty of Riga of 1921, which had created three Baltic states out of Russia’s old Baltic territories. The expulsion of the Germans from the lands east of the Oder and Neisse rivers came down to that, and the fact that Roosevelt had always been prepared to give Stalin what he wanted: Russo-American cooperation was to become ‘the cornerstone of the new world order’. Britain tagged along in the hope of hanging on to its great-power status.39

  Stalin was not going to relinquish Poland east of the Bug. With a blank cheque from the Russians as far as their western borders were concerned, the Poles were keen to recoup as much as they could by acquiring German territory. The idea of advancing to the Oder - and beyond - went back to the neo-Piast thinkers, Roman Dmowski and Jan-Ludwig Popławski.40 As Germany walked into Poland again, the idea became more and more attractive. Hitler was seen as Prussia, and Prussia needed to be docked. Berlin was mentioned as a fitting ‘showplace for Prussia’s death’.41 In London Władysław Pałucki began clamouring for the Oder-Neisse line as early as 1942. It can have been no surprise when Stalin adopted this view too, at Yalta.

  Poland’s eastern borders, with the Soviet Union, presented a trickier problem. At Yalta Churchill and Roosevelt were slightly at variance over the Curzon Line, first proposed by the British foreign secretary Lord Curzon in 1920. Roosevelt held out for Lvov, a city that was chiefly Polish. Churchill was prepared to abandon Lvov to the Russians. As regards the western borders, Stalin made his feelings abundantly clear. When the Anglo-Americans expressed their doubts about the size of the German population to be evicted, he stood up and in an impassioned voice declared: ‘I prefer the war should continue a little longer although it costs us blood and to give Poland compensation in the west at the expense of the Germans . . . I will maintain and I will ask all friends to support me in this [that] . . . I am in favour of extending the Polish western frontier to the Neisse river.’ It was at this point that Churchill uttered his line about stuffing the Polish goose so full that it died of indigestion. The figure of six million Germans was conjured up as the number who would be required to move. In private Churchill told Byrnes that it was more like nine million. 42 Poles would have to be resettled too, from Lvov and the lands east of the Bug, but the population was mixed, with the Poles in the towns and owning the big estates, which was hardly the case in East Prussia, Pomerania or Lower Silesia.

  Edvard Beneš, head of the Czechoslovak government in exile, had taken a long time to recover from the humiliation of Munich. He had spent seven years in exile. It was his plan from the beginning to reduce the size of the minorities in the young republic: Hungarians and Germans in Bohemia and Moravia. The Germans made up some 23 per cent of the Czechoslovak population. Other lessons he had learned from the rape of his country were the need to co-operate with the Poles (who had grabbed the region of Teschen while the Czechs were prostrate and defenceless), and to secure the patronage of the Soviet Union. The Poles could be accommodated in Freistadt (Fryštát) and he would expel two-thirds of the Hungarians in Slovakia. As for the Germans, his ‘5th Plan’ provided for the cession of certain border regions with an overwhelmingly German population. That would relieve him of a third of his Germans; a third more would be expelled. He would keep the Jews, democrats and socialists.43

  Later the plans were adapted. The three cantons he was prepared to cede to Germany - Jägerndorf, Reichenberg and Karlsbad - grew smaller. The border adjustment would still leave him with 800,000 Germans. He decided that some of these would flee, some would be expelled and the rest ‘organised for transfer’. When the peace came he quite forgot about the idea of losing territory and actually claimed land from Germany, but the Allies did not respond.44 For much of the war Beneš had clung to the idea of a reduction in the number of his German subjects. He had the backing of the British. On 6 July 1942 the war cabinet ruled that the Munich Accords were invalid and agreed in principle to the idea of a transfer of the German populations of central and south-east Europe to the German fatherland in cases where it seemed ‘necessary and desirable’. Ten months later Roosevelt also came round to this view, although American military planners thought it could be done more humanely by transferring six small territories to Germany. Stalin too agreed to the transfer on 12 December 1943 after the Czech ministers Jan Masaryk and Hubert Ripka spoke to the Soviet ambassador to the exile regimes, Bogomolov.45

  Austria

  Hitler’s armies went into Austria on 12 March 1938. Very soon the Germans made the place intolerable for certain groups of people. The Jews were an obvious target, and the Nazis introduced a regimen that was far more extreme than that current in Germany - at least until November that year, when Berlin turned up the heat with the ‘Reichskristallnacht’, when mobs throughout Germany smashed Jewish properties. Adolf Eichmann was placed in charge of antisemitic activities in Austria and went about his business with all the diligence that Himmler expected of him. But it was not just Jews: in two great trainloads the ‘Prominenten’ were also shipped out to Dachau. These were the members of the governing elite who had banned the NSDAP or Nazi Party and thrown its members into Austria’s own concentration camp at Wöllersdorf in Lower Austria. They had executed a few of these Nazis for their part in the murder of Chancellor Dollfuss four years before. It was time for Nazi revenge. The fates of the Austrian elite are in part recounted in Bruno Heilig’s book Men Crucified: ministers, civil servants and magistrates, most of them of an age when they were no longer capable of hard labour, were physically broken and beaten to death. Some of them went on to Buchenwald, others to Mauthausen. Those who survived returned as martyrs. No one begrudged them that title.

  Despite the treatment of their leading politicians, many on the right and left in Austria might have been prepared to back Hitler. Perhaps 10 per cent of the country’s adult citizens joined the NSDAP, but a certain Teutonic heavy-handedness failed to win them all the friends they might. Austrian industry was appropriated by Göring’s Four Year Plan and increasing numbers of Germans swanned about their newly acquired territory all the while, treating Austrians with a disdain they have yet to forget. Worse, Austrians tended to be despatched to the toughest theatres of war. For the Allies, however, Austria was now part of Greater Germany and they were at war. Exiles tried to guide their hands, and plead that the Austrian case was different. Many Allied leaders found that hard to take, but for political reasons they evolved the idea of Austria as a victim. Although no one had seriously considered granting it a government in exile, the Allies had to entertain the idea that Austria had an exile community that wished to meet and discuss the country’s future, and there might be added benefits if their discussions caused problems for the German administration.

  There were five possible solutions for a post-war Austria. The first was a simple reversion to the independent state it had been between 1918 and 1938. The second proposed leaving Austria in bed with Germany. A third involved making some sort of Danube Confederation based loosely on the most positive side of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; and a fourth was that favoured by the Morgenthau plan: a separation of Austria’s provinces with perhaps the Vorarlberg going to Switzerland, the Tyrol and Salzburg to Bavariaf (which would then be detached from Germany) and the eastern parts attached to a federati
on of Danubian lands. A fifth possibility was simply to roll up Austria and Bavaria together to make a Catholic south-German state.46

  The Allies probably felt that a little confusion would do some good - it did not pay to let the Austrians feel they were completely off the hook. They would have to labour to show their love before they could receive the prize of renewed independence. This ambivalence was enshrined in the Moscow Declaration of 30 October 1943: ‘Austria, which was the first victim of Nazi aggression, must be liberated from German domination.’47 The Anschluss, the annexation of 15 March 1938, was declared null and void: ‘Austria is nonetheless reminded that it bears a responsibility from which it may not escape, for having participated in the war on the side of Hitler’s Germany and that, in the final reckoning, the role that it plays in its own liberation will inevitably be taken into account.’48 The Austrians were not so much to be exonerated from the roles they had played in the ‘Movement’ and war as encouraged to rebel against the Germans.

  The pretender to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Otto von Habsburg, blamed the Russians for the mealy-mouthed nature of the Declaration, but it is likely that Edvard Beneš had a hand in it too.49 The Declaration also rejected the idea of a Danubian Federation and put paid to the hopes of a Habsburg restoration. This was Stalin’s work. Otto himself had left for America in 1940, leaving his brother Robert in London to campaign for the cause there. Otto’s name figured on a Nazi hit-list. He went first to New York and then to Quebec. Naturally he was hoping that the Allies would look favourably on a Habsburg restoration, but there was little chance of that. He found certain figures remarkably unsympathetic in their attitude to Austria. One of these was Churchill’s foreign secretary Eden, who had apparently defined the country as ‘five Habsburgs and a hundred Jews’. Otto wanted to change Roosevelt’s mind. It will be recalled that the president was smitten with the Morgenthau Plan at Quebec. Otto claims that he was able to bring both Churchill and Roosevelt round.50

  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.51 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. 52

  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.53 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. 54

  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.55 With the establishment of the provisional government in the autumn of 1945 he was made minister of education.56

  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!).57 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. 58

  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.59 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.60

  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.61 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.62 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.63 64

  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.65 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.66 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 .67 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.68 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.69 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.70