Clark used a great deal of Cold War rhetoric in his account of his time in Austria, but his mission had largely come to an end before the big decisions were made. From 1947 the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan were both designed to stem the tide of communism, by liberal use of both stick and carrot - chiefly financial. Washington’s National Security Council was also founded at this time, and it was General Geoffrey Keyes, Clark’s successor, who was the man to enact the full range of Cold War options. As he pointed out, ‘Prague lies west of Vienna.’ The United States needed to arm for the Cold War and for the great ‘roll-back’ - the reclamation of Europe from the Soviets.142
The American authorities were slow to create a proper political structure in their zone. In October there was still no governor appointed for Upper Austria.143 They had to deal with the chaos in Austrian industry. Some of the bigger companies had had installations all over the country and now found themselves divided up among the Allied zones. The motor manufacturer Steyr was a case in point. The administration was in Linz, in the American Zone, but most of the works were in the Soviet Zone, with the exception of the plant making bicycles and motorbikes, which was in Graz - what was later to be the British Zone. The Graz factory also made tank engines and aeroplane parts, which were naturally of interest to the Red Army. The Russians ensured that they had taken all of these before the British came in July.144
Another industrial concern was the Hermann-Göring-Werke, an enormous conglomerate of sequestered businesses established in Hitler’s home town of Linz. The works were administered by a Pg called Hans Malzacher, but the Americans were forced to admit that Malzacher was universally popular, not only with the governor, Eigl, and the mayor, Koref, but also with the local communists. The pragmatic solution was to make an exception and leave him in the job.145
French Zone
The French Zone, which covered the Vorarlberg and most of the Tyrol, was originally run from French HQ in Lindau on Lake Constance in Württemberg. Despite the fraternising billboards set up by General Béthouart, Austrians and the Germans still nurtured fear and resentment of the French and their colonial troops - the Moroccans in particular.146 The French had the usual linguistic problems, as far too few of them spoke German, but they were able to find a few refugees and German and Austrian Jews in their Foreign Legion.147
The principal problems facing the French were their attitude towards the Renner government; the form of the constitution created after free elections; the ratification of the constitution; the revision of Nazi statutes; the reorganisation of the administration after the necessary purge of Nazi officials; and how to cope with the thousands of refugees, POWs and Austrian Nazis.148 The figure who emerged as the clear political leader in the Tyrol was Karl Gruber, who was credited with having organised a cell of military opposition to the Germans in the region. On 1 May 1945 he had managed to close down a number of Nazi organisations in Innsbruck. When the Americans marched in on 3 May they were offered the rare sight of an Austrian city festooned with red-white-red flags. The streets were filled with ‘resistance fighters’, often armed to the teeth.149
The French were also planning to reopen schools and universities in their zone in time for the new academic year that autumn. Before that was done, Nazi staff had to be purged and Nazi texts removed from the libraries. The University of Innsbruck was in a parlous state - all the windows had been blown out and the Faculty of Theology closed on Hitler’s orders. The French vowed also to restore liberties: individual, political, of assembly and of the press.
The French were reluctant to discharge all their POWs because they wanted to use them as slave-labourers, as elsewhere.150 On the other hand there was very little active pursuit of the Nazis. Paul Sweet visited the Vorarlberg in June 1945 and found that no one heeded the ban on frat: ‘everything seems to be much as normal’.151 Instead of the Nazis being locked up, they were attached as unarmed auxiliaries to troop units. Marauding DPs were a problem, the Russians in particular. Theft and murder was not unknown. Two found guilty of killing and robbery were executed by the French in the Vorarlberg.152
Two early difficulties that the French confronted were the arrival of Archduke Otto and the South Tyrol. Otto was the eldest son of Emperor Charles, who had abdicated in 1918 and died shortly afterwards. Otto had enjoyed a small émigré following during the war and he now saw his chance to push for a Habsburg restoration. He arrived in the Tyrol in September 1945 and left again at the beginning of 1946. The South Tyrol had been awarded to Italy in 1918 as a reward for fighting on the Allied side. As Italy had fought on the wrong side for most of the Second World War, some southern Tyroleans saw a possibility of returning to Austrian rule.
The Americans moved their troops out of the Tyrol on 7 July, to make room for the French. When Béthouart arrived in Innsbruck on the 18th he found a petition from Dr Gruber referring to the ‘bleeding wound’ inflicted on the Tyrol with the loss of the southern part of the region. On 4 September there was a demonstration in Innsbruck in which 25,000 to 30,000 people took part, 12,000 of them in their local costume.153 Archduke Otto arrived on 10 August. Béthouart reported his presence both to his own authorities and to the provisional government in Vienna. According to Béthouart, Renner entertained a degree of nostalgia for the great days of empire and merely shook his head, exclaiming, ‘Oh! But if he does nothing political!’ Renner put pressure on Béthouart to expel Otto, however, possibly because he had heard that the archduke had been conspiring with Gruber to convince the Western Allies to refuse to recognise his regime. Béthouart replied that he would not fetch and carry for Renner. Otto continued to rock the boat and his two brothers, Karl Ludwig and Robert, were in the French Sector of Vienna flirting with the monarchists in the Federal League of Austrians. Eventually all the Allies with the exception of the French expressed a desire to see the old Habsburg ban re-enacted. Otto received delegations during the time he was under the noses of the French. In the end the provisional government dealt with the problem by reintroducing the ban on the Habsburgs instituted in 1918. By that time Otto had left of his own volition.154
The first tranche of Nazis in the Tyrol had been eliminated by the Americans as they conquered the region. They had dealt with the more notorious cases. On 16 May 1945 all the councils in the Vorarlberg were sacked, as they were Nazi to a man. Councillors were appointed by the French until February 1947, when elected councils returned. Half the magistrates had to be dismissed as a result of Party membership, as were seven university professors.
It had been decided at Potsdam that all Germans who had entered Austria after the Anschluss were to be repatriated, together with any German Nazis. The French approached the task with zeal. Taking their cue from the expulsions of pro-German Alsatians after 1918, they allowed the Germans to carry just one case, weighing thirty kilos at the most. Germans were expelled willy-nilly at first, but the pace slackened off in 1946 after complaints from the British and American authorities in Germany that they could not accommodate them all. The French showed how partisan they were by releasing all Austrian POWs.155 The German minorities in Romania and Yugoslavia had not been included in the discussions at Potsdam, and they naturally gravitated towards Austria as former subjects of the Austrian Emperor. For the time being they were herded together in DP camps.
At the end of 1947 there were still 400,000 DPs in Austria, more than there had been in 1945. The South Tyroleans had been found homes in the Austrian northern part of the province. Many had fled from the Soviets, and the Red Army maintained small staffs with the Western Allies part of whose work was to track down their own people and repatriate them. The British had refused to countenance having Soviet officers in their camp at first, but the Russians had made life difficult for them in Vienna and they had had to give in. The French refused to agree to Russian requests to yield the refugees up.
France’s political commitment to its zone in the Tyrol-Vorarlberg quickly slackened. At the outset the governor, M. Voizard, had a staff of
1,600. A year later less than half that number remained. By the end of the decade it had sunk to ninety-three. In 1945 there were thirty-four offices in the Tyrol alone, in 1948 just eleven. Before the French went home, they performed their own demontage, removing 3,000 machine tools and 2,700 tons of different metals to compensate for the 35,000 machines taken by the Germans from France: a greater prize was the testing equipment for jet engines in Kramsach and the wind tunnel at Oetztal, which the French reassembled at Modane. Some French machinery had ended up in Kapfenberg in the British Zone. The British helped dismantle it and pack it up for shipment back to Alsace.156
11
Life in All Four Zones
Germany today is divided into four zones and within each there are
two worlds: an army of occupation and a conquered people.
The former are not just there to supervise and control, they must
also exert an influence; they are meant to stop up the spirit of aggression
and nationalism and eliminate it before leading the way to
democratic self government; civilisation should heal the smashed and
shaken land.
The first question that comes to mind is what do these two worlds
know of one another? How do they perceive one another? What is
the real relationship?
Naturally no one expects an army of occupation to become an
object of love and adoration, and on the other side, a conquered
people, whose leaders without question launched the war, cannot
expect to be treated at once with sympathy and trust.
But the task of reorientation, even successful administration,
requires an atmosphere of trust and respect on both sides.
Carl Zuckmayer, Deutschlandbericht für das Kriegsministerium der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika, Göttingen 2004, 71
Children
As a Viennese Jew returning to central Europe in British uniform, George Clare steeled himself against feeling pity for the conquered. At the railway town of Hamm in Westphalia, his mettle was put to the test by a swarm of infants who appeared under the train windows: ‘Eh Tommy . . . Please Tommy vat you got? Chockie, sandvich, sveets?’ Clare observed the ‘manna from Britain’ that was tossed out to the urchins: hard-boiled eggs, sweets, sandwiches, chocolate bars, oranges, apples, even tins of pilchards. The children fought with one another to get at the loot while the soldiers enjoyed the spectacle, like ‘throwing nuts to monkeys at the zoo’. Clare went back into the compartment and fetched his haversack rations. He jumped down from the train. The four children closest to the door ran away. ‘Hier bleiben!’ shouted Clare - Stay here! They turned back, curious to hear a Tommy speak German. He shared out his rations among the four of them. He wondered whether any German had done this in the Warsaw Ghetto and yet he felt that what he was doing was right: ‘I could not hate all Germans, as the Nazis had condemned and hated all Jews. No, I neither hated Germans nor - with the exception of the children - did I pity them.’1
Many German children had become feral. They had lost one or both parents, or had simply been estranged from them. In the big towns they lived in holes in the ground like the rest, begging or scavenging for food. At least one British high court judge began his life in this way, until he was rescued by a British soldier who took him back to Britain with him and sent him to school. James Stern remembered the vision of these curious guttersnipes, clothed in rags - ‘or rather, from head to foot they were perfectly camouflaged in filth, so that until they moved you could not tell they were there’. At the approach of an adult, especially a foreign soldier, they scattered like so many rabbits, disappearing into holes. When they re-emerged they sniffed and stared around them. ‘And then you’d see that they carried stones or sticks or bars of iron, and their teeth were black and broken, or that they had no teeth, that one had a single arm, another a crutch, and that the only clean spots on their bodies were the whites of their eyes.’ When he looked into their eyes, however, they were no longer rabbits to Stern - they were famished, diseased leopard-cubs ‘whose one enemy was man’.2
Some of these children had homes, but they nonetheless went out and hunted in packs, stealing what they could from the conquerors. When Stern’s major was alerted to some theft from their well-stocked larder, he decided that some children were to blame. The supposed criminals were hunted down to a dung heap where they had their camp and threatened at pistol point. The youngest of the boys was around five. The only evidence they found was a bottle containing some pink petrol: American petrol was dyed pink. That was enough to convict them. The major ordered a search of their parents’ lodgings. The flats were searched and at least one of the boys received a clip round the ear from his father, but no contraband was found, and the case against the boys was dismissed.3
Nor was it only working-class children who took to crime in this way. Zuckmayer met a certain Frau Doris von M., a former actress married to an elderly Prussian nobleman who kept a boarding house for American visitors to Berlin. ‘My son steals!’ she told the dramatist. ‘And we don’t know what we should do about it.’ Her son and his private-school-educated friends stole to trade, sometimes for pleasure, sometimes for sport: ‘The only true Commandment is the eleventh - thou shalt not get caught.’ Jürgen was the boy’s name. One day he returned with a pound of sugar that he had bought with cigarettes pinched from a teacher’s pocket. He also had some chocolate, taken from an American nurse. He proudly delivered these preciosa to his parents, believing that he had done something useful and that he was contributing to the family budget. He had two pilfered cigarettes for his father and was disappointed when he received no thanks. Jürgen had no religion: ‘The Lord looks after the “Amis”, because they can afford him. The Ivans don’t need any, because they worship vodka. The Germans are too poor for either.’
Jürgen’s parents were strict about his thieving, but it was not always so. Others welcomed a wheelbarrow filled with stolen coal or a pound of bacon.4 For many more indigent Germans they could hardly have done without a little help from their children, particularly teenage boys. Heinrich Böll’s short story ‘Lohengrins Tod’ (Lohengrin’s Death) of 1950 is about a boy who is shot at by Luxembourgeois soldiers while stealing coal from a train, falls and suffers appalling injuries. In the hospital they ask if his parents should be informed, only to find out that his mother is dead, and the head of the household is his elder brother. Stealing coal was hardly seen to be a sin: after all, Dr Fringscu had actually absolved the coal-stealers from his pulpit.5
Children were a considerable problem for the Allied authorities. There were over fifteen million of them in Germany. Of those born after 1930, some 1,250,000 had lost a parent in the war, and 250,000 had lost both. Up to a third had no more contact with their fathers as they were in POW camps, while a further million and a half were refugees from the east, with a little under half that number living in makeshift camps. In the case of a boy arrested for petty larceny in Munich in 1946, it transpired that his mother had been killed in an air-raid in Essen in 1943, that his father was missing in Russia, that he had been billeted with an aunt in Dortmund but had been evacuated to East Prussia. He had moved to Danzig to be trained to operate an anti-aircraft battery where he had been captured by the Red Army. The Russians had released him. He had gone to Berlin, but had been unable to locate the relative he was looking for. He had finally gone to Bavaria in search of food. Many female children resorted to prostitution to survive. Boys, too, performed a service for Allied soldiers. In Frankfurt their most prominent client was the infamous American major ‘Tante Anna’ (Aunt Anna).6
American schoolmasters thought the appropriate policy was to organise the children in sporting clubs and teach them democracy at the same time. It was believed that baseball and football might instil a sense of fair play in small Germans. The sporting life was lost on many of them, but jazz and dancing tended to succeed where baseball failed: the jitterbug and boogie-woog
ie were popular with German youth, as were Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. Attempts to extend musical re-education to Samuel Barber and Aaron Copeland proved less successful. The Germans had a musical tradition of their own. A camp was established at Compiègne near Paris to train German teachers.7 The Americans made the mistake of trying to herd German children together in these imitation summer camps. Hitler’s Volksgemeinschaft had emphasised the community in preference to the individual, and right-thinking German youth wanted nothing of the American idea. They loathed all notions of being ‘herded together once again’.
One visionary was Yella Lepman, a Jewish writer born in Stuttgart who returned to Germany in 1945 in an American uniform. From 1946 she built up an international children’s library in Munich which she ran until 1957. In December 1945 she went before incredulous American generals to demand cases of books for German children. She stood her ground and eventually received their blessing to import some. In her memoir she describes the sight of young children as she first encountered them playing in the bomb craters before the ruined station. Many were without shoes, and ran around in their socks or barefoot. It was hard to tell the difference between little boys and girls; ‘here and there they made an attempt to beg; a ten-year-old with one leg, the other certainly lost during a night of bombing, hops like a lame bird around the American canteen, clapping his hands imploringly. Occasionally a white or black soldier takes pity and throws the child something: a half chewed piece of chocolate out of his pack, a stale sandwich, a few cigarettes to barter: that produces a wild commotion, sometimes a fight, a punch-up.’8
After the Reich Page 43
