After the Reich

by Giles MacDonogh

Margarétha was obliged to join a work detail. Along with the rest of the men he had to clear streets of obstacles and repair bridges. The first stint was not so bad. He worked all day and found it no more tiring than doing four hours in the garden. He came to the conclusion that the Russians were kinder to civilian workers than the Nazis had ever been. It got tougher. While he was working near his house his wife brought him a snack of a couple of sandwiches. The bread was already two weeks old, and he had to drink a lot of black coffee to swallow it. The detail worked for twenty-four hours this time. When they let him go he slept for ten hours.51

  With the hostilities at an end and the Nazis gone, Margarétha and his wife joined the resistance. This presumably meant no more than that they could prove themselves to have been consistently anti-Nazi during the Third Reich. Once they had signed the register they were issued with red-white-red armbands. There was a political opening for Eugen in the fledgling, Christian democrat Austrian People’s Party or ÖVP. This was being formed from a wide base: the white- and blue-collar workers were under Leopold Kunschak and Lois Weinberger, the peasants’ league was being led by Leopold Figl and Schumy, and the middle class by Julius Raab. For the time being it was respectable to be on the left. The ‘Liberation Movement’ was made up of 50 per cent socialists, 40 per cent communists and just 10 per cent ‘bourgeois’ parties.52 Schärf was one of the men behind the recreation of the Austrian socialists. At their session on the 14 April they rejected the idea of calling it the Social Democratic Party and plumped for the Austrian Socialist Party, or SPÖ instead. That way it was hoped people would forget that it had condoned the Anschluss. It very quickly fended off Soviet-backed moves to amalgamate with the communists. Fischer had returned from Moscow with instructions to eschew Marxism-Leninism for the time being. The stress was to be on Austria: ‘The glorious Austrian past must be given its true worth . . . The Radetzky March must become a national song, sung in schools.’53

  The economist Margarétha noticed that most of the shops in the 1st Bezirk were boarded up, with ‘Empty’ written on the shutters. Foreign workers were free-wheeling their carts piled high with loot. Both the Parliament building and the Ministry of Justice were partly burned out.54 Schöner too resumed his walks. On the 18th he stopped to admire a fresh Russian grave on the Heldenplatz which was festooned with flowers. Drunken Russians in the Burggasse were pummelling on doors, but the Viennese knew their game by now, and no one opened up. There were long queues outside the butchers and bakers: meat had virtually disappeared and bread was a rarity. A day or two later the Austrians’ mouths began to water when they saw a hundred or so Hungarian cows with strange horns driven through the centre of the city by Red Army soldiers.

  The Viennese were making trips out to the woods with prams and wheelbarrows to gather wood and to look for wild mushrooms or crayfish. The Café Fenstergucker had been plundered again, but the raiders had not taken the schnapps. Schöner concluded that they had been robbed by the Viennese: the Russians would not have left the alcohol, and some precious tea had gone. It was generally easy to tell who robbed you for that reason. The Russians wanted drink, gold or watches. If anything else went, the authors were civilians. At the Hotel Astoria, Aunt Mili was driven to distraction by the nightly hunts for chambermaids. The Astoria was more fortunate than the Hotel Metropol, which burned down on the 19th. It had ceased to be a hotel in 1938, when it became Gestapo Headquarters.55 No one regretted its passing.

  On 20 April, Hitler’s birthday, the eighty-three-year-old Graf Albert Mensdorff came into the Foreign Office to offer his services. He had been Austro-Hungarian ambassador to the Court of St James’s in 1914. Schöner recalled the count expressing very Nazi views in the Jockey Club two years before.p He died of starvation on 15 June 1945. The Austrian Foreign Office was ready for action, although it was touch and go whether the Russians would allow its officials to do anything. Schöner had been given a pass by the city council, but another diplomat who had presented his to the Red Army sentry had seen it rudely tossed into the canal.56

  The following day Schöner learned that the Americans had reached Pilsen in Czechoslovakia. Everyone was looking forward to the arrival of the Western Allies. They had all had enough of the Russians, who were certain to install Karl Renner as chancellor. Everyone chose to remember the open letter in which he had pledged his support for the Anschluss in 1938. On 23 April news of the arrest of the former German ambassador to Austria, Franz von Papen, was a cause of jubilation. He had been in Vienna in 1938: ‘he deserved something for Austria’s sake’, wrote Schöner.57

  The refurbishment of Renner was Stalin’s idea. As Austria was being discussed one day he asked, ‘Where is that social democrat Renner now, the one who was a disciple of Kautsky? For years he was one of the leaders of Austrian social democracy and was, if I recall, president of the last Austrian Parliament.’58 No one knew the answer at the time, but as soon as the dust had settled the Russians had gone looking for the vintage socialist who had brought in the First Republic. They considered him the sort of soft ideologist who would allow their men to move safely behind the scenes. They didn’t trust him, and were aware that he had voiced his support for the Anschluss. They found him on 3 April when, as luck would have it, he protested about the behaviour of Soviet troops to the Russian commander in the Lower Austrian village of Gloggnitz. Gloggnitz was close to Wiener Neustadt, where the Red Army met heavy resistance for the first time. The Russians scooped him up with his family and installed him in the nearby Schloss Eichbüchl.59 Renner proceeded to heap praise on the Soviet system, and claim that ‘liberation’ by the Russians was all they - and he - had ever dreamed of. The Social Democrats, together with the Communist Party, of course, would now be in a position to provide the necessary political security.60 His puppet-status inspired distrust in the West, and he played innocent when the Americans asked him later how big a role the Russians had had in his appointment. He insisted that the Russians did not interfere with his decisions, but the American agent who saw him in August 1945 was all too aware of the Russian captain who sat in on their interview.61

  There was a meeting at Renner’s Viennese home in the Wenzgasse in Hietzing on 23 April. The idea was raised of freely distributing the under-secretaries of state among the three interested parties: socialists, communists and conservatives. Renner made his first stab at a cabinet on the 24th. A controversial choice was the Muscovite Honner for minister of the interior and chief of police. It was, however, standard Stalinist practice to place a communist in this role. Joham at finance was controversial in a different way: he had been friendly with the Nazis during his time at the Credit Anstalt. Dr Gerö was nominated minister of justice. Schöner noted that he was a ‘Mischling’ - he had Jewish blood. That other Muscovite, Ernst Fischer, was also to be given a job.62

  Schöner was not so unhappy about Honner. It was a ‘thankless and difficult post’ and with any luck he would prove unpopular. The Russians were pushing for the reopening of the theatres and cinemas. Because of the war damage, most of Vienna’s great cultural institutions had to make do with what space they could find. The Burgtheater performed in the Ronacher.q The Opera had been bombed out. Klemens Krauss was appointed chief conductor amid widespread disappointment. Krauss had blotted his copybook in 1934 when he had emigrated to Germany at the time of Dollfuss’s assassination by the Nazis, and his scandalous behaviour had not been forgotten. The first post-Nazi newspaper came out, but that was a disappointment too, as it looked too much like Goebbels’s Völkische Beobachter - short on news and big on propaganda. It was no surprise that the editor was the communist Fischer.63

  News reached Schöner on the 24th of a new Andreas Hoferr fighting the Nazis in the Tyrol. The man gave his name as Plattner. He seems to have been a flash in the pan, although it was true that the Tyroleans were pushing the Nazis out before the arrival of the Americans. With Austria the ‘victim’ and Italy a former Axis power, ‘everyone was waiting for the return of the South Tyrol’ to Austri
a. There was a rumour that reached the ears of both Schöner and Margarétha that the former chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg had been poisoned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. As it was he was on the way to the South Tyrol himself.s On 26 April, an interim government was formed under Karl Renner.

  It was an attempt to balance the interests of the Christian socialists, the socialists and the communists, albeit dominated by moderate socialists like Renner and his vice-chancellor, Adolf Schärf. Of the communists, Fischer was given the important portfolio of ‘popular enlightenment, education and culture’ and Honner was made minister of the interior. The Christian Democrat minister Kunschak was a notorious antisemite, which made the Jews who formed the bulk of the Austrian Centre reluctant to go home.64 Margarétha heard about it when a girl gave him a copy of the Soviet-sponsored Neues Österreich which contained the details of Renner’s cabinet and the proclamation. He thought the latter ‘excellent, a real masterpiece’. It declared that Austria would return to the constitution of 1920. The Anschluss, said the proclamation, had been involuntary; it had been imposed on Austria and was therefore null and void. Margarétha then repaired to the Naschmarkt, where he was able to purchase some precious root vegetables.65

  On Friday 27 April the representatives of the permitted political parties signed a declaration of independence from Germany. The Soviets recognised Renner’s regime, but only as far as the Danube, because Tolbukhin’s troops were still fighting in the Weinviertel. The Second Republic was born under the aegis of the Red Army. That afternoon Schöner abandoned his old coat and skiing trousers for a silk shirt and a dark suit. The Vienna Philharmonic was going to play its first concert since the liberation. At 4 p.m. there was a private performance at the Large Concert Hall, as the Musikverein building had been damaged. The hall was only three-quarters full, but a substantial number of Adabeis had gathered to watch the arrival of civil servants, communists and Russian army officers. The orchestra was heartily applauded, Krauss audibly less so. Some people even hissed. The programme was Schubert’s Unfinished, Beethoven’s Leonore 3 and Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony: ‘A tribute to the immortal spirit of Vienna and the great, classic time of Viennese music and to the musical genius of Russia.’ The Philharmonic played the Schubert ‘without soul’; they were better at the Beethoven. The Tchaikovsky was ‘brilliantly played’.

  In the interval the assistant mayor, the communist Steinhardt, made a speech in which he thanked the Red Army for liberating them from the ‘brown plague’. There was loud cheering. He then announced a full programme of cultural events: there was to be a performance by the Burgtheater company of Sappho on the 30 April and the State Opera company would do The Marriage of Figaro at the Volksoper. At the Akademie Theater they would have Nestroy’s Mäd aus der Vorstadt. The stress was clearly on ‘Austrian culture’ for the time being. The Raimund and Josefstadtt theatres were to reopen together with nine cinemas. In reality this meant showing a lot of Soviet films without subtitles.66

  It was only at the end of April that the Western Allies appeared at the Austrian border. The Americans took Innsbruck, Salzburg and Linz; the British came up through Italy on the 28th and marched into Carinthia and Styria before meeting up with Soviet forces. That same day the Nazi fellow traveller Joham was rejected as a member of the provisional government. Loudspeakers played ‘O Du mein Österreich’. The Russians stood by and tacitly blessed the regime they had ushered in. The British, however, had had their worst fears confirmed, and promptly refused to recognise Renner’s government. The Americans followed suit. Renner responded by hailing Stalin as the ‘greatest military commander of all time’. Later Schöner met a friend who had just returned from suburban Weidling. There had been persistent raping at his country house. A seventeen-year-old girl who had tried to defend herself had been shot. ‘On the periphery it is much worse than it is in the inner city.’67

  On the 29th five tramlines began to work again. Renner appeared in the company of two Russian officers at the Foreign Office dressed in a stiff collar, a tie with pearl pin, grey spats and an old brown hat. He had a white goatee beard stained with nicotine from his diet of cigars68 and boasted a small pot belly. He was ready for his detractors. He did not deny that he had been in favour of the Anschluss, only that he had wanted union with the Nazis. He was keen to do down the Austro-fascists of the Corporate State. He told the diplomats that Dollfuss people were as unwelcome in the new Austria as Nazis. He let it be known that he wanted the Austro-fascists excluded from the suffrage for ten years. As it was, it proved easy to restock the ministries with untainted civil servants: all they had to do was reappoint those prematurely retired in the time of the Corporate State.69 Naturally, most of them were socialists, and Wöllersdorf old-boys.

  It was May Day, and a big parade was laid on for the Russians. Austrian flags had been made out of old swastikas, and the women had fashioned headscarves out of the same material. The people wore red carnations and greeted one another with the word ‘Freiheit’ or ‘freedom’, rather than the usual ‘Grüss Gott!’ The Russians made the city a present of tons of provisions. The Viennese said it was all food they had plundered from them in the first place.70 The gift was supposed to last for a month. It meant a daily ration of 1,620 calories for heavy workers, 970 for white-collar staff and 833 for children.71 The French arrived in Bregenz on Lake Constance that same day. On 6 May they had established themselves in a small part of their zone, the Upper Tyrol. By the time of the German capitulation on 8 May, the whole of Austria was occupied. Just in case anyone was to forget, the French put up signposts for their own troops: ‘Ici Autriche, pays ami’ (This is Austria, these are our friends).72

  The Western Allies were still a long way off. There were rumours that the Americans were making difficulties for Austria because of Stalin’s sponsorship of the Lublin Poles. On 3 May a story did the rounds about the partition of Vienna. The British, it seemed, were going to receive the 1st Bezirk. It was the first time the Viennese had heard that the French too were to have their slice of the cake. Schöner was later told that the French were to receive central Vienna, and also the 7th Bezirk where he lived. The new communist police president, Hautmann, decreed that all foreigners and forced labourers had to leave Vienna. They were to assemble in Wiener Neustadt until transport could be arranged for them. The Schöners lost their two Ukrainian servant girls and an Italian cook.73

  The Führer had committed suicide on 30 April, but the Wehrmacht and the SS were still fighting. Schöner was appalled to see that the Austrians were among the most dogged. ‘In the end it is once again apparent that the Austrians, providing they are really Nazis, are also the most unremitting partisans of Hitler. German generals from the Reich are capitulating; the Löhrs and Rendulicsu in the south and the north are fighting on.’74

  The British and the Yugoslavs had finally come to blows over Trieste, which the former were keen to award to the Italians. Meanwhile the Russians had begun to deport 500 Austrians from Floridsdorf in the suburbs. Field Marshal Alexander was thought to be in Vienna, staying at the Hotel Imperial, and between Stockerau, Tulln and Korneuburg in Lower Austria the Wehrmacht and the SS were still holding out on 6 May. Vlasov’s army was leaving its positions in Prague and heading south to Lower Austria, and it looked as if fighting could flare up again. Vlasov and his Cossacks had been fighting alongside the SS, and he did not wish to be captured by the Red Army who would have executed him immediately as a traitor. His departure coincided with the Soviet-inspired uprising in Prague. On the 7th Schöner heard a distorted rumour that Hitler’s successor Admiral Dönitz had surrendered unconditionally in Copenhagen. Eisenhower had said the war was over, but there was still gunfire to be heard. Margarétha concluded that it was Vlasov’s army fighting a path to the Western Allies.75 The truce was pronounced at 2 p.m. that day, but there was no more champagne to celebrate with. They made good with meatballs, and in the evening ‘goulash, like in peacetime!’76

  2

  Wild Times: A Pictur
e of Liberated Central Europe in 1945

  On 8 May Germany had surrendered unconditionally and was occupied by the victorious powers. Everyone was freed from National Socialist tyranny. Those whose lives were in danger from the regime were finally spared. But for many others, however, the misery and risk of death had not disappeared. For countless people the suffering only began with the end of the war.

  Richard von Weizsäcker, Vier Zeiten: Erinnerungen, Berlin 1997, 95

  Liberation from the East

  What was true of Vienna applied, to a lesser or greater extent, to every town and city in Germany and Austria: if they had not been knocked flat, they had been at least partially destroyed. Many insignificant market towns and villages had been reduced to piles of rubble as well, victims of the Allied advance, and the process continued until the Allies believed they had wholly subdued the enemy. Besides the terrible loss of human life, much treasure was gone for good, and cities that had been the glory of central Europe were no more.

  There were the Residenzen, the former court capitals: Dresden had been smashed to smithereens as a Valentine’s Day present to the Red Army; in Munich the destruction of so many cultural monuments prompted Richard Strauss’s most moving composition, Die Metamorphosen; and the baroque gem of Würzburg, Dresden’s equivalent in the west, had been reduced to rubble by the USAAF in the last days of the war. The Welf capitals of Hanover and Brunswick had suffered the loss of their palaces;v Bayreuth was the victim of its Wagner-cult; two-thirds of Weimar was flattened on account of Goethe and Schiller. Cassel was so badly damaged that the ruins were bulldozed. The lack of any remaining infrastructure obliged the American army to plant its HQ in the spa town of Wiesbaden, which had come out of the war only slightly mauled, because bad weather had caused the air force to drop the bulk of its payload on the outlying woods.