Soldiers, Spies, and the Rat Line

by James V Milano

  Perhaps they did not know it, but their kind gesture had been strictly illegal. For the first few weeks of the occupation, the High Command tried to impose a policy of "nonfraternization" on the Allied troops, who were not allowed to talk to Austrian civilians. The order failed from the start and was soon abandoned. American soldiers, like Jim Milano and Sergeant Porter on the Brenner Pass, instantly started handing out candy and chewing gum and other goodies to children, out of pure altruism, and cigarettes and food to adults, for various and different reasons. Tobacco was the first, universally recognized unit of currency in liberated Europe, and American soldiers discovered at once that many Austrian women, like the Italian women they had encountered in their march north, were quite ready to exchange their favors for a pack of Camels. And not only Austrians: the American zone was awash with other refugees, fleeing the Soviets.

  Milano and Porter reached Innsbruck that evening and drove on to Salzburg in the morning. An officer had gone ahead to requisition quarters for the unit, which was to arrive later in the day. A villa had been commandeered for the officers and a hotel for the rest of the troops. Milano installed himself, for the first night, in the Munchnerhof Hotel, while the troops moved into the Stein Hotel. There were about fifty of them, and at four in the morning, Milano was awakened by military police and told that there was serious trouble. He hurried into his uniform and rushed over to the Stein, where he found the place in an uproar. The billeting officers had failed to notice that two floors of the hotel were still occupied by women in the German Army. They were drivers, stenographers, secretaries, and telegraphists who had been gathered together to await their discharge. Milano's men had been delighted to make their acquaintance. They had brought large supplies of Italian wine and spirits, not to mention American cigarettes, C rations, and more enticing goodies from the PX. The German women had seen nothing of the sort for years. In no time at all, and in flagrant disregard of the rules on nonfraternization, the American (male) and German (female) soldiers had established the ground rules, and a party was under way. The military police had arrived and, after attempting to separate the two groups and bring the party under control, had concluded that discretion was the better part of discipline. Milano's men were armed, drunk, and not at all inclined to miss this heaven-sent occasion to celebrate the Allied victory in the company of their former enemies, whom, perhaps, they considered the spoils of war. As for the German women, they, too, had no objections to ending the war on a joyous note.

  The MPs therefore searched out Major Milano, the errant soldiers' commanding officer. He saw at once when he reached the hotel and observed the party in full swing that restoring order would be a matter of tact, time, and considerably more authority than he could muster on his own. He therefore returned to the villa where his officers were billeted and summoned them to do their duty, and they went reluctantly to work. Their sympathies were entirely with their men, and if they had been quartered in the same hotel, faced with the same temptation, who is to say that they would have resisted? In any event, by degrees and aided by the natural exhaustion that overcomes soldiers of both sexes after such encounters, Milano and his officers succeeded in pushing all present back into their own quarters. By morning some of the men had bad hangovers, but all had delightful memories and every intention of resuming the party at the first opportunity. The authorities had other ideas. At eight in the morning Milano was summoned by the officer commanding the military police and told that his unit would be moved immediately to a German barracks that had been requisitioned at the edge of town. He was also informed that the nonfraternization policy was a strict order coming from Army Headquarters and must be respected. It was unfortunate that the billeting officers had put the men in the way of temptation, but the wayward soldiers must be punished for their infractions. The MP officer would not himself suggest what form that punishment should take. Indeed, he had not the faintest idea. Major Milano, as commanding officer, must assume that responsibility. Milano saluted smartly and left.

  That evening, with the unit safely installed-much to their regret-in their new barracks, Milano called the men to formation. He delivered a short, stern lecture on the nonfraternization policy and insisted that it must be obeyed. As for the events of the previous evening, he said he assumed that the men had learned their lesson and the violation would not be repeated. Therefore he would content himself, on this occasion, with issuing a verbal reprimand. Years later he recalled dryly that they looked at him as though he had lost his mind.

  One of them, at least, had a sense of humor. A couple of nights later, Milano was in his hotel room having a drink with a few of his officers. The window was open, and they were suddenly interrupted by shouts from the apartment building across the street. A woman was calling "Major Milano, kommen sie and schlafen mit mir!" "Jim, please, kommen sie and schlafen mit mir!" ("Jim, please come sleep with me!") Soon an audience, mostly Austrian, formed in the street, attracted by the show. But there were also GIs, and some of them entered into the spirit of the thing and yelled "Come on, Major, give her a break!" Milano resisted temptation and did not respond. The woman was probably drunk, anyway. In due course, the MPs arrived and the shouting abruptly stopped. The gallant major took care not to inquire what had happened and the next day watched suspiciously for a smirk on the face of any of his staff. If any of them was guilty, however, he kept both a -straight face and the secret.

  We have another account of the Americans' arrival from a different perspective. Princess Marie Vassiltchikov, a Russian aristocrat whose family had fled the Bolsheviks in 1918, spent most of the war in Berlin, working for the Foreign Ministry (and associating with the anti-Hitler resistance). Her diaries are one of the best sources about that frightful period. She gives an unforgettable account of a firestorm that engulfed the city after an Allied air raid. In May 1945, after working as a nurse in Vienna, she was washed up by the retreating tide of war in Gmunden, near Salzburg. The first Americans she met tried to seduce her, but then Major John Chrystal of the Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC), one of Milano's staff, took her under his wing. She had been billeted in a palace nearby, while working in a local hospital. Chrystal needed interpreters and briefly employed the princess (she spoke excellent English, French, and German, as well as Russian), though the rudimentary bureaucracy of those days found that it had no category for Russian refugees from the Bolsheviks. The palace was being used for rest and recreation by American troops, and a constant stream of women came through to provide the recreation. Chrystal protected the princess from any unwelcome attentions and then shepherded her safely through the de-Nazification process. Though she was, indeed, a refugee from the East, she could tell them nothing of the Soviet armies. She was, however, one of the first of a long list to be interrogated by the CIC.

  The Americans settled rapidly into their new role as an occupying army. There was a lot of tidying up to do and a lot of easy money to be made: a day or two after he arrived in Salzburg, Milano was presented with a large cardboard box filled with American currency, mostly twenty- and fifty-dollar bills. It had been found by one of Milano's task forces at a Salzburg bank, which was unable to account for its presence there. Milano was temporarily in charge of it until it could be handed over to the Finance Section of the Military Government, which was settling into Innsbruck. He decided to have the loot counted separately by two men, who were to compare their totals at the end of the exercise. Then, when it was handed over, he would get a receipt for the full amount. It came to some $185,000, a very large sum indeed in 1945, and in due course was handed over to the Finance Section. He thought no more about the matter until two years later, when the Criminal Investigation Division came to call: somewhere between Milano's office and the money's final arrival at the finance office, the sum had shrunk to less than $100,000. Milano could offer no clue to what had happened to the missing money-or, rather, to who might have stolen it. He had kept the original receipts, which he produced from his files, thanking his lucky star
s for the moment of official pedantry that had led him to count the money before handing it over.

  That was the lighter side of the Americans' first days in Austria. Their time was dominated by much more serious matters and conditioned by the situation they found when they arrived.

  The Russians got there first. They took Vienna in the closing days of World War II, on April 12, 1945, while Hitler was still railing against his fate in his bunker in Berlin, ordering his last soldiers to fight to the death for the dying Reich. There was a last, frightful six-day battle for the capital of Austria, one of the most beautiful cities in Europe, as the Red Army drove tanks and infantry through the ruins: the city had been severely damaged by earlier air raids. Then the Soviet troops paused to regroup before moving west, into the Alps.

  The Americans and British had by then reached the heart of Germany and had halted their drive on Berlin. General Dwight D. Eisenhower had decided to let the Soviets take Hitler's capital while he sent General George Patton's Third U.S. Army south through Czechoslovakia into Austria. He was afraid that Hitler planned to make a last stand in Obersalzburg and Berchtesgaden, high in the Alps. Meanwhile, in northern Italy, the Allies were negotiating with the German Army. Its commander, General von Vietinghoff, surrendered on April 29. The day before, Mussolini had been caught by partisans while trying to escape into Germany. He had been shot, along with his mistress, Clara Petacci, and other Fascist leaders. Their bodies had been strung up by their feet at a gas station in Milan, the partisans carefully tying Petacci's skirt between her legs to preserve the decencies.

  Patton drove unresisted through the remnants of the German Army. There was no last Nazi stronghold in the Alps. Hitler shot himself in his bunker on April 30, and the American and British armies rolled through northern Italy and over the Brenner Pass into Austria as Patton swept down from the north. They found the Red Army entrenched west of Vienna, in the zone it had been allotted.

  The Allies had agreed at Yalta, early in 1945, that Austria should be revived as an independent country, thus reversing one of Hitler's early victories, the Anschluss, Austria's unresisted unification with Germany in 1938. It would be divided temporarily into three zones of occupation, Soviet, American, and British. The same principle was applied to Germany, and in both countries the French were allocated a zone after the Potsdam Conference in the summer of 1945. Vienna was to be shared among the occupying powers. Like Berlin, which was in the Soviet zone in Germany, Vienna was behind Soviet lines, and months passed before the Western Allies were able to establish themselves there. In the meantime, the Americans moved to Salzburg, Linz, and Innsbruck, the surviving cities in western Austria (Innsbruck was later given to the French). Their first tasks were to feed the people, to round up the German troops who were still at large, and to gather together the large numbers of refugees who had flooded into Austria from the East. Then they set about establishing an administration.

  Salzburg was damaged but not destroyed. The dome of the cathedral where Mozart had played was gone, but the church had survived. The town was fortunate. Linz, the major city in the American zone, had been severely damaged. Hitler had grown up there, and he had intended to make it the artistic capital of Europe, filling it with museums and monuments to the Nazis, as well as the loot of a continent. In the spring of 1945, there was little left but rubble. Bombs had demolished the buildings, and fires had consumed the wreckage. Roads were impassable and the railways were destroyed, and the people of Linz and tens of thousands of refugees huddled in cellars or tents or under the few fragments of ruins that were still standing.

  The arriving Americans might have expected hostility from the Austrians, bitter resentment at the well-fed, well-clothed armed forces that had destroyed their country. But in fact there was very little enmity. The GIs were well received, almost as liberators. The war, particularly the last year as the Soviets had closed in from the east while American and British bombers, based in Italy, had poured fire and death on the cities, had been so frightful, such a long nightmare, that there was nothing but relief when at last it ended.

  The country was destitute, ruined, and starving. The enduring image of those few years immediately after the war is The Third Man, Carol Reed's film of a Graham Greene tale set in Vienna. The story concerns petty crooks and corrupt Americans who have set up a black market in diluted penicillin, but the theme is the all-pervasive despair and misery and the corruption caused by fear and hunger. It ends, symbolically, in a chase through the sewers. Vienna in 1945 was claustrophobic and squalid.

  The intelligence specialists who came with the occupying armies were first of all concerned with capturing senior Nazis and sorting out the German soldiers and the refugees. They found that the Wehrmacht's discipline had survived the debacle. Once the war was officially over, there was no suggestion of continuing the fight, even by the SS. The soldiers wanted to get home as quickly as possible. All the Americans had to do was to round them up, arrest the senior officers, check on the records of the soldiers, and set them free.

  All but a handful of the most senior Nazis were easily captured. Hermann Goring, for instance, had been arrested on Hitler's order in the last days of the war for proposing negotiations with the Allies. He was now detained by Patton's troops near Salzburg. Those German soldiers who did not make their own way home were collected in prisoner-of-war camps, where they were held for a while before being released. The refugees (known in those days as displaced persons, or DPs) were also put into camps, some of which lasted much longer. The camps for Polish, Hungarian, Yugoslav, and other Eastern European DPs were filled with people who had no wish to return home to countries that had fallen under the sway of the Soviet Union or its Communist allies. Some of them had served in the Wehrmacht or in national armies raised by the Germans to fight the Soviets, and immediately after the war many of these unfortunate veterans were sent back to Stalin's tender mercies. Others languished in the camps: twelve years after the end of the war, there were still Polish and other DP camps scattered across West Germany and Austria, often in barracks that they shared with the western armies of occupation.

  The Americans assumed, when they arrived in Austria, that the Soviets would cooperate with them in administering the country. They supposed that practical matters such as the provision of food and medical supplies, and the restoration of the railways and the power grid, would be undertaken jointly and that the division of Austria into zones of occupation would be a temporary arrangement. It made no sense to partition a small country like Austria, whatever might be done with Germany itself. But from the start the Soviets put up a blank wall of noncooperation. For months they even delayed admitting American, British, and French troops into their zones of Vienna. Behind this barrier, they started a systematic witchhunt for their enemies, not only Nazis and their collaborators from the East who had escaped into Austria but also anti-Nazi Social Democrats and conservatives who had survived the Nazi terror. The Americans were struck by the bitter hostility the Soviets showed toward the general population. Red Army soldiers in Austria, like their comrades in Germany, did not forget what the Germans had done to Russia and held the whole population responsible. As a matter of political expediency, the Allies had decided that Austria was a liberated country, like Czechoslovakia or Poland, and should be treated differently from Germany. They decided to ignore the enthusiasm with which Austria had welcomed Hitler when he sent in the troops in 1938, although there was not much reason to doubt that a majority of Austrians had supported their incorporation into the Reich. They had participated as enthusiastically as all the other Germans in the Reich's conquests and crimes, and they had followed Hitler to the bitter end. The Austrians had made large contributions to the Nazi regime: there were many Austrians among prominent Nazis, besides Hitler himself, including Eichmann, who had managed the Holocaust, and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the head of the Gestapo. All the same, the Allies decided that they would overlook these matters, to the ends of simplifying their postwar problems and br
eaking up Hitler's Reich. The Americans were perfectly ready to accept the consequences of that decision and treat Austrians as liberated victims of the Third Reich. The Soviets were incapable of these nice distinctions.

  The Americans who encountered the Soviets on the ground in Central Europe could comprehend, though they might not share, the implacable hatred the Russians felt for the Germans and Austrians. They did not, however, understand Soviet official hostility to the United States and Britain and came first to resent it, then to fear it as a real danger to their security. The higher reaches of the U.S. Army saw no reason to feel threatened by the Soviet Union in 1945, whatever they may have thought three years later. They judged that the USSR had suffered so severely during the war that it would be quite incapable of aggression against the West-quite apart from the military folly of taking on the United States. In hindsight, this judgment was obviously right for the time. It is now clear enough that Josef Stalin never intended a direct military challenge to the West. His tactic, until he died in 1953, was to pick off Western countries, one at a time, with a combination of military bluff and internal subversion. Stalin started the cold war: he did not intend to become involved in a hot one.