British Zone
The British Zone of occupation was fraught with problems at the start. The Russians were camping in Styria, and emptying the region of any equipment of value; Bulgarians were dug in among the South Styrian vines; and the Yugoslavs had taken large parts of Carinthia. While the Bulgarians were relatively easy to control, the Russians and the Yugoslavs were a nightmare. Firstly the Yugoslavs had taken the Carinthian capital, Klagenfurt, and hoisted their flags over the city. When the local governor refused to fly a Yugoslav flag he was replaced by a more compliant figure. Posters announced that Carinthia was now part of Yugoslavia.ct ‘National councils’ were hastily formed on which Yugoslavs and members of the Slovenian minority sat. The British were helpless. They were in the second city of Villach, forty-seven of them: twenty officers and twenty-seven administrators. Even after the British forces arrived, there were still more partisans than Tommies. ‘Shooting was out,’ although the Yugoslavs had no heavy weapons.96
There was at least one comic moment reported by those pioneering officers in Villach. One of them was reconnoitring in the woods shortly after the British force arrived and ran into a woman in Luftwaffe uniform. She made it clear her unit was running out of food. The British officer followed her to a large underground bunker where women were pushing in and pulling out telephone plugs. It turned out to be the major military exchange for southern Austria. ‘They had known perfectly well what was happening, and had assumed that sooner or later someone would come along and give them some orders.’97
Carinthia not Styria was the lynchpin of British foreign-political aims in the region. The goal was to prevent Trieste from falling into the wrong hands - that meant Tito. At the end of the war the New Zealanders had been sent to take the port and keep the Yugoslavs out. Trieste was to be granted to Italy in 1947, and in the meantime it was needed to supply the British and Western Allied garrisons. It was left to Field Marshal Alexander to convince the Yugoslavs to withdraw. When they refused, the British printed their own posters, accusing Tito of methods similar to Hitler’s. Byrnes’s predecessor as American secretary of state, Edward Stettinius, threatened to withdraw aid from Yugoslavia. Alexander used a line of argument that was current at the time and assured Tito that territorial settlements would be left to the ‘peace conference’. The Yugoslavs finally consented to leave on 21 May.
Bankrupt, overstretched and reeling from the blows inflicted by the war, the British showed a reluctance to be saddled with Austria. From 1943 onwards they were active in seeking a solution that would mean Austrian independence.98 By October 1948 the British presence had declined to 7,000 men and a thousand civilians. In March that year Bevin had made it clear that it was ‘out of the question to defend Austria’.99 The British Zone was made up of Styria, Carinthia and a small part of the eastern Tyrol around the city of Lienz. Styria presented the new overlords with a problem of what to do with widespread sympathy for the Nazis, and Carinthia with a quite different conundrum: how to handle a large Slovenian minority. Besides these, there was the nagging Yalta Agreement. The British, like the Americans, had agreed to deport any Russian citizens within their zone of occupation. They had also told Tito they would return Yugoslav citizens who had opposed him.
Styria had been having a rough time under the Russians. At first the locals were merely grateful that the war had come to an end. The future governor, the farmer Anton Pirchegger, recorded the fact in a typically pious, Austrian-provincial fashion: ‘Christus lebt und wird wieder regieren’ (Christ lives and will rule again). A week later the Russians were banging on his door demanding schnapps.100 They proved less than welcome. During their tenure, the Russians had raped at least 10,000 women and dragged off anything up to 500 men aged between fifteen and sixty-one to work in Siberia. One eyewitness remembered the terrible scenes of looting, and hearing a German-speaking Russian NCO pronounce one word in justification: ‘Vergeltung!’ (Retribution!).101
While the Russians seized anything that appealed to them, the British sat in Bruck-an-der-Mur and waited until the night of 22-23 July when the Red Army pulled out, to be replaced by the 46th Division of the Eighth Army. The Oxford-educated military governor, the Australian Colonel Alexander Wilkinson, installed his military command in Graz, a town which had expressed a notorious fondness for the Führer. On 24 July General McCreery issued a proclamation from the town hall. The British regime was strict: Wilkinson expressed a certain Anglo-Saxon scepticism when he told his fellow officers that ‘some, at any rate, of the Austrians were fairly lukewarm Nazis’.102 The homes of all the Nazis who had fled the city were confiscated and the British continued the process of denazifying the schools. The Russians had made a fairly lame beginning. Wilkinson’s men removed a total of around 400 schoolteachers from a body some 3,130 strong.
The priority was to endow the zone with a stable political leadership. Carinthia had been given a Russian-approved cadre and governor in Reinhold Machold in May, and various self-styled resistance groups vied for recognition. The British now ‘liberated them from their liberators’. Wilkinson dissolved the lot. Henceforth Styria would have political parties, not resistance groups. He sacked Machold on 25 November and appointed Pirchinger of the ÖVP.103 A British observer sat in on every session of the provincial assembly or Landtag from now on and every measure had to be approved. It was very much occupation, not liberation.104 Austrian law as of 13 March 1938 was to be reinstated, but when that date was challenged (the Corporate State had done a few questionable things, such as bring in racial law in 1935) the 1929 constitution was made the fount of legal authority. A curfew was imposed for Austrians. On 1 August Styria received its own judicial overlord in the form of the jurist Lieutenant-Colonel H. Montgomery Hyde.105
The British were occasionally overbearing and arrogant, leaving at least one Austrian in no doubt about who the real ‘nation of lords’ were.106 One former British subaltern who entered the zone from Italy remembers thinking that ‘liberation’ was not quite the word: ‘In our eyes an Austrian was just a slightly different sort of German.’107 The arrival of the British nonetheless gave rise to considerable relief, as the Russians had run the province down. But it was a difficult situation. A local newspaper, the Neue Steirische Zeitung, was launched to express the British point of view. There was no food, and there was no transport to deliver bread to the suburbs and outlying villages. It was so warm that summer milk went bad on the carts leaving the dairies. There was very little meat or fat and no sugar. Potatoes were issued at a kilo a week. For anyone who had something to barter, supplements to this meagre diet could be obtained from the black market on the Volksgarten. The British authorities made several attempts to break this up.108 There was also a degree of lawlessness in what was normally a sleepy province. Over two hundred murders had been committed since the end of the war - about a quarter of these by Russians in incidents connected with rape. The historian Donald Cameron Watt served in the FSS (Field Security Service). During his time in the unit he vetted ninety-two petitions from local women wanting to marry British servicemen; investigated a Third Man-style theft of pharmaceuticals; and looked into the festering problem of white slavery in the DP camps.109
The character of the administration in the British Zone is lightheartedly summed up by Alan Pryce-Jones, then an intelligence officer in the British army. Austria, he said, was divided into eight zones, each one of them a separate state. Four of these were civilian states, four run by the army. ‘In the background is a ninth state, Austria, the chief function of which is to be talked about at meetings.’110 The government of the British Zone was part of John Hynd’s ‘Hyndquarters’. John Mair, who served on the Austrian Commission, is quick to point out that there was a huge difference in scale between the Austrian Commission and the German Control Council.111 Hynd was highly sympathetic but, as in Germany, largely impotent when it came to changing the government line. At a subaltern level he was supported by Sir Henry Mack, as well as by Peter Wilkinson, M. F. Cullis and N. J. A. Chee
tham.112 McCreery went home in April 1946 and was replaced by General Sir James Steele.
The Graz Festival was slightly less spectacular than Salzburg, but it had a solid tradition. The British were careful to revive it in 1945, and that year Karl Böhm conducted and the Grazer were able to hear the voices of Julius Patzak and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. When the festival was staged the following year, the occupying power lent it a British flavour, and Sir Malcolm Sargent was brought in to conduct Elgar’s Second Symphony.113
Cossacks and Domobranci
In Carinthia the British faced a thorny refugee problem resulting from the Big Three Conference at Yalta. Tito’s partisans had been fighting Croats and German- and Italian-backed domobranci or home guard in Slovenia. In both cases their Catholicism made them allergic to the ideologies proposed by Tito, and they thought fascism a lesser evil. When the war ended both the Croats and the domobranci justifiably feared reprisals. There was the usual spate of denunciations, and the wisest fled north across the revived Austrian border with their families, through the Ljubelj Pass to Viktring near Klagenfurt.114 According to one source, they went first to Hollenburg on the Drau, where they joined up with a number of Waffen-SS men.115 Tito’s partisans had also crossed the border in order to stake their claim to large parts of Carinthia.
The domobranci ran into their first dishevelled Tommies, who promptly exhibited the light-fingered approach most often associated with the Red Army and stole their watches.116 The British were torn between their sympathy for the Slovenians and their families, and their wartime alliance with Tito’s partisans who were now showing their colours by raping and pillaging around Klagenfurt.117 The domobranci thought the British would redeploy them to fight the communists. They had not reckoned with the secret arrangements made at Yalta. Sadly for them, the Cold War had not yet started.118 On 19 May 1945 the British and Tito’s men came to an agreement to repatriate all Yugoslav nationals. No differentiation was to be made. The Yugoslavs were not popular with the British and no one was prepared to stick his neck out for them.119
Under the Yalta arrangements, the British in Austria had to deal with 45,000 Cossacks requested by the Red Army, as well as the 14,000 Serbs and Croats who were being reclaimed by Tito. The Cossacks had been recruited by the Germans in southern Russia from POWs, and they had been joined by some former tsarist officers and their families. These last amounted to around 3,000 people. Some of them were not Soviet citizens, and therefore not covered by the Yalta agreement. As POWs they enjoyed protection under the Geneva Convention. This was waived.120 There was also the fact that most of the Cossacks had been fighting in the SS. Their last assignment was to fight with Schörner’s army near Prague. There were 60,000 in the British Zone: ‘They wore German uniforms, carried German arms, were commanded by German generals, and were an integral part of the German armed forces.’ One thing, however, complicated the humanitarian issue: ‘They had with them quite a few women and children.’121
Marshal Tolbukhin had asked for the Russians to be sent back and the British had agreed. The deportations were carried out by men of the 46th and 78th Divisions on orders from V Corps, following a brief visit by the minister resident at Allied HQ, Harold Macmillan, on 13 May. On 1 June, they were lured out of their camps in Spittal, Judenburg and Lienz under false pretences.122 Once they discovered what was going to happen to them they refused to budge, which led to some ugly scenes. Women and children said they preferred to be shot there and then to being handed over to the Soviets. Some of the women tied their children to their backs and jumped to their deaths in the River Drau. Tommies used rifles, bayonets and pickaxe handles to convince them to board the lorries that would take them to the frontier. When a warrant officer was bitten, the British soldiers beat some of the Cossacks unconscious. The Argylls were particularly brutal, to women and children as well.123 The British also ‘returned’ some 900 German officers, including the commander, General Helmuth von Pannwitz, who was publicly shot on Red Square in Moscow. The British were forced to use duplicitous tactics in expelling both the Cossacks and the domobranci, and this caused them considerable distress.
The British were in a difficult position in Carinthia anyway. All the Allies had confirmed Austria within its pre-1938 borders. On the other hand, it appears that Tito had actually backed down on the issue of repatriating the domobranci, but the British proceeded anyhow.124 There is a suggestion that the commanders of the British Fifth and Eighth Armies acted on their own initiatives here, fearing armed conflict with the local partisans. Nigel Nicolson, a British intelligence officer, later summed the matter up with cold-hearted clarity: ‘There were many people who felt “Well, so many millions of young men have died in this war, what does another 30,000 matter?”’125 No one, including Nicolson, knew the precise number of Cossacks in the British Zone. Only when the moment came to shove the home guardsmen into cattle trucks was he reminded of prisoners being despatched to a German concentration camp. As it was, they were told they were being transferred to camps in Italy, but they do not appear to have believed it. The British brought up tanks to make sure there was no trouble, and searched the men’s rucksacks: their last cameras, knives, fountain pens and other valuables disappeared into the Tommies’ pockets. The officers were sickened. The Welsh Guards, who had been given the job of forcing the 12,000 men back to their deaths, were reported to be on the brink of mutiny. The matter was later covered up.126
American Zone
When the Americans marched into Austria in the spring of 1945, they too saw it less as a ‘liberated’ land than as ‘a part of Germany’. Salzburg, for example, yielded without a fight on 3 May, but the Americans would tolerate no red-white-red flags. They were unsympathetic to Austrian complaints about their treatment and dismissed the stories of widespread rape as ‘Nazi propaganda’. The Austrians were an ‘enemy people’ and they had only themselves to blame.127 The famous American airman Charles Lindbergh noted in his diary that the American GIs had an interesting interpretation of the word ‘liberation’: it meant helping themselves to anything they could have without paying for it: cameras, weapons, objets d’art - ‘even women’.128
There were good men in their ranks. Paul Sweet was a university history teacher in the OSS. On 27 June he wrote that military government was inconsistent with the notion of a liberated country: ‘the sooner we give Austria back to the Austrians the better’. The OSS took the Moscow Declaration more seriously than some. Sweet outlined the reasons for the American presence - to demobilise, protect DPs and arrest Nazis. There should be a minimum of supervision. Austria was needed to stabilise central Europe.129 When he had been in the job a few months he changed his mind. Writing to his wife, he said the Austrian people were ‘morally and politically bankrupt. The only thing about which they seem to have a firm opinion is that the US should cut loose from the Russians, the sooner the better.’130
One of the most curious situations the Americans found themselves facing in Upper Austria was the provisional government set up by Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the Nazi RSHA (Security Service) and police chief, as an alternative to Renner. Kaltenbrunner had assembled a number of industrial magnates and enlisted the support of Schuschnigg’s minister Edmund Horst-Glaisenau and the archbishop of Salzburg, Andreas Rohracher. Talks had been held with the mayor of Linz, Franz Langoth, and the Gauleiter of the Tyrol, Franz Hofer. Some Christian Socialists were brought out of mothballs such as Karl Seitz, the former mayor of Vienna, and his Corporate State successor Richard Schmitz. Schmitz had sadly died after his incarceration in Dachau. Figl’s name was brought up as well. The Americans had no truck with the alternative government. Kaltenbrunner was hanged.131
The US Zone had outstanding political advisers at the second level resulting from the large German and Austrian presence in America itself. None of the other Allies possessed such linguists and experts with a first-hand knowledge of the conquered lands. One of the American experts was Martin Herz, whose father had emigrated to the United States from Moravia
but had returned to Vienna, so that his son’s entire schooling had been in the city. Herz was deeply involved in post-war planning for Austria. Certain things he found silly or preposterous: the ban on frat was one of these. It was ‘distasteful’ and ‘ineffective’. On the question of Austria’s ‘liberation’ he was of the view that it was a ‘psychologically reasonable and effective fiction’.132
The American commander Mark Clark has gone down in the annals of the Cold War as one of its biggest personalities, but he did not fall out with the Russians or abandon the idea of co-operation until early 1946.133 He revived the Salzburg Festival in August 1945, and his French opposite number General Béthouart was helpful in procuring the Clave Quartet and Jacques Février. He hoped to bash McCreery’s and Koniev’s heads together and make the British agree to go up to Vienna, but the British remained as stubborn as ever and Koniev cried off.134 Clark entertained in style, lodging his guests at his HQ in Schloss Klessheim (called Schloss Claessens by Béthouart) like Hitler before him. Clark was pleased with Klessheim, and was under no illusions about its previous role as a guesthouse for visitors to Berchtesgaden. It had been ‘wonderfully modernised and furnished with art treasures, mostly stolen from France’.135 The festival was a useful way of bringing the Allies together and impressing them with American hospitality. He invited them all for 19 August. Koniev sent Clark’s bugbear Zheltov in his place. Zheltov wanted to see what was left of Berchtesgaden, and they visited it in one of Hitler’s own cars.136
Clark had a number of issues to discuss between concerts. Before Austria could be allowed its independence again, there needed to be talks on DPs, food supplies (a particularly thorny issue), free elections, and ‘German’ assets.137 Lapses were reported in the US denazification programme. 138 With time the Americans came to the conclusion that it was not as easy as it had seemed at the outset. Many of the people they had seen as being as above suspicion were no more than common criminals.139 In the Salzkammergut Clark made use of a German interpreter who claimed to have been a big-shot in the resistance to Hitler. When the German learned that Clark was to take up residence in Vienna, this man offered him his flat there. Clark says that the locals eyed him with suspicion when they saw him sitting with Clark in his staff car. Counter-intelligence was asked to look him up. It transpired that he was no opponent of the regime, but a senior Nazi, and on the Americans’ own wanted list.140 Clark tells us that he foiled Russian attempts to reclaim their own citizens who were ensconced in DP camps in the American Zone. At one point there was a raid carried out by Soviet soldiers in stolen American uniforms. Clark laid a trap for them and caught them red-handed. There were 750,000 DPs in the American Zone, not all of them Russians by any means.141 Clark was being less than frank, of course, about the very limited protection that the Americans gave to Russians in their zones in Austria or Germany.
After the Reich Page 42
