After the Reich (53 page)

The invited guests from the Anglo-American zones aside, the French kept themselves culturally aloof. Mainz newspapers could not be obtained in Frankfurt and vice versa.
³⁶
French art, literature and architecture remained popular into the 1960s and 1970s, despite the drubbing the Germans received during the first years of the occupation, and the French were not embarrassed to export their talent. In Mainz the French architect Marcel Lods, a pupil of Le Corbusier, drew up the plans to rebuild the city. French culture remained the legacy of the occupation - the rest has been forgotten.

10

Austria’s Zones and Sectors

The 8 May! The day, the hour when every bell in Vienna proclaimed peace and the end of the Second World War. I was lying on an upturned fridge, unwashed and unshaven, covered in filth in my ‘partisan uniform’ in a coal cellar in the Plösslgasse in the 4th Bezirk. The door to the cellar was guarded by a Red Army soldier speaking only a smattering of pigGerman, who played
ad nauseam
the first bars of the Volga Boat Song - he clearly couldn’t manage the rest.

Carl Szokoll, Die Rettung Wiens, Vienna 2001, 380

Vienna

O
n 9 May 1945 Cardinal Innitzer said Mass for Karl Renner’s new Soviet-backed administration. All the working bells in the city were set to chime and celebrate the end of the war in Europe. Vienna was still a sad, wrecked city. More than 80,000 homes had been wholly or partially destroyed and 35,000 people had nowhere to live. For the most part there was no gas, electricity or telephone. Large tracts of the 1st Bezirk had been turned to rubble in the last months of the war and in the wild looting that followed liberation. The commercial Kärntnerstrasse was among the worst hit. The French commander, Lieutenant-General Emile-Marie Béthouart, described it as a heap of ruins. At one end the gutted opera house, at the other the roofless cathedral, the Steffl.
¹

Unlike Berlin, Vienna was still recognisable under the dust and rubble. The American novelist John Dos Passos came at the end of 1945 and admitted that the city still ‘wears the airs and graces of a metropolis . . . Vienna is an old musical comedy queen dying in a poorhouse, who can still shape her cracked lips into a confident smile of a woman whom men have loved, when the doctor makes his rounds of the ward.’
²

The Russians were still the real power in the city, and Austrians were required to fetch and carry. When Graf Alfred Sturgkh turned up three-quarters of an hour late for a meeting at the Chamber of Commerce it was because the count had had to unload a delivery of potatoes from a lorry.
³
Anything might happen: in Hietzing people were being thrown out of their houses for the benefit of the Russian garrison. The Margaréthas had to move up to the attic to make room for a general. For the time being they had a courteous colonel lodging with them who brought them flowers and wine and went to the ballet.
⁴
The former Nazis were proscribed. Most Pgs tried to conceal their pasts, some tried to hide themselves, others committed suicide - such as Josef Schöner’s friend the dermatologist Professor Scherber and his wife, who came from Komotau in German Bohemia. Now that German-speakers were being slaughtered with impunity, there was no point in going home.
⁵

The cautious Eugen Margarétha thought it wrong to be too black and white about the Nazis. ‘However just the measure might be, it is possibly going to come down hard on some individual cases who are decent fellows in themselves . . . men who are hard-working in their domain and indispensable people will be excluded from the economy.’ There was a little mutual backscratching to be done. Margarétha’s greengrocer in the Naschmarkt wanted him to sign an affidavit to say that he had been a good man - despite membership of the Party. Margarétha received a lettuce for his pains.
⁶
He had little sympathy for most of the Austrian Nazis. Now they were saying that they had been forced to join the Party, and that they had been compelled to ‘torture hundreds of thousands of people to death, to gas them or kill them in some other way! I am not a vengeful sort, but I have no patience when I see and hear these now innocent lambs.’
⁷

There was another side to the coin. As the Germans were also well aware, the concentration camps had housed not just political prisoners and innocent Jews or gypsies; they had also been used for hardened criminals. Now all former KZlers were allowed to jump the queue for ration cards, flats and other benefits. Eighteen thousand homes in Vienna were made available to them, as well as to the bombed-out and the homeless. Margarétha’s office had had a visit from a couple of former inmates ‘who have now mastered the situation and are demanding jobs, accommodation, clothing etc’. They were ‘common criminals. Now you can’t tell the difference between this sort and the poor devils.’
⁸

Subsistence levels had dwindled to next to nothing. There were 1,500,000 people in the city and around forty lorries available to bring in supplies. Rationing was reintroduced on 6 May, and on 1 June the daily intake was fixed by the Russian authorities. The citizens were to have 250-300 grams of bread a day, with 50 grams of fat and 20 grams of sugar. When the refugees came flooding in across the Czech border the situation worsened. Starving German Bohemians and Moravians were not averse to robbing houses in the north-eastern Weinviertel in the hope of finding food. The Viennese looked to the Western Allies for succour.
⁹

They were making slow progress. On 11 May the Americans were reported in Amstetten, the Russians had gone into Graz. Later the Americans took Klagenfurt in Carinthia. The British were having to contend with unforeseen changes to their Austrian policy, because in their absence Tito’s partisans had moved into Carinthia and made it known that they intended to keep for Yugoslavia part of the territory earmarked for the British Zone. In Vienna on 16 May the mood was very low, because of the delay in seeing Western troops in the city.
¹⁰
After a month of looting and rape the Western Allies were needed to raise the tone of the occupation. The Viennese appreciated there might be disadvantages too: the Westerners would seek to control the administration down to the smallest detail, whereas the Russians had an ‘Asiatic liberality’ coupled with a sloppiness that allowed the inhabitants of their zone to get on with what they wanted.
¹¹
This was evidently the version edited for Austria. The Soviets did not behave like this in Germany. The Austrians were not the enemy, after all. The Russians were very little interested in the Austrian Pgs, for example. The Western Allies might just have dug a little deeper. Some people maintain that the Soviets were more interested in wiping out the opposition, because they impeded the smooth exercise of power in the zone.
¹²

As it was, a small advance party from the Western Allies did arrive on 3 June, just 186 of them in 140 cars. Field Marshal Alexander declined to go, and sent Major-General Winterton instead. General Flory represented the Americans and General Cherrière the French. They were spotted in the Lainzer Strasse and covered with flowers. The Viennese received them with jubilation. The Westerners took no notice of this effusion: the no-frat rule was still in force. The story was now ebbing out: the Allies were going to treat the Austrians ‘differently’, but not necessarily better. The Russians had allotted eleven Hietzing villas for the use of the Western Allies. The purpose of their visit was to work out the partition of the country, but although the Russians plied them with caviar, they proved truculent when it came to showing them airfields.
^ci
The Westerners were required to take their leave on the 10th, but did not depart until the 13th. The Russians were keen to reach an agreement - they were fed up with paying for the provision of the Austrian capital.
¹³

New problems were emerging for Austria: huge numbers of people were converging on the impoverished country. Around 100,000 Germans from Prague, Brno and southern Moravia were streaming across the frontier with their Czech tormenters in hot pursuit. The subject was on everyone’s lips that June. Austria had no border guards to turn them back; the Russians did nothing, and they had no food to feed them with. In Krems in Lower Austria the refugees were deeply resented.
¹⁴

Renner was in favour of letting them in, even if only 20 per cent of them had any claim to Austrian citizenship.
^cj
Renner was from Moravia himself, from just outside Nikolsburg,
^ck
where many of the local Germans had been massacred.
¹⁵
The rest of them, said Schöner, were Reich Germans, or German-speaking Czechs. The communist minister of the interior, Honner, was keen to throw them out, and - when they woke up to the fact that they had another 300,000 mouths to feed - the Russians were too. The question was where could they send them? The Czechs maintained they were leaving their country of their own free will - like those who were quitting Poland.
¹⁶

As regards the German-speaking Czechs, the attitude was less
sauve qui peut
than
on a pu nous sauver!
(and to hell with the rest of them). The future president of the National Bank, Margarétha, had a full report on the expulsions from a Dr Dyszkant who had visited Brno and Prague. Germans, ‘but Austrians as well, are being chased away and on the road from Brno to Vienna you see endless columns of refugees in a most miserable state who pluck the fruit from the cherry trees as their only form of nourishment. In Prague you hear not one word of German spoken any more.’
¹⁷

In exchange for the ‘ethnic Austrians’ Austrians wanted to see the backs of any German nationals left in their country. In 1945 there were 346,000 or them. Ten years later that number had dwindled to 18,600. They were ‘treated with no consideration, dispossessed, properly seen to and expelled’.
¹⁸
The new foreign minister, Dr Karl Gruber, was one of their most outspoken critics. They had once again asserted their superiority over the ‘sloppy’ Austrians. Gruber wanted revenge: ‘only with difficulty and full of fury did the Austrians put up with the long years of Prussian condescension and meddle-o-mania’. Gruber added that he thought that many of the Germans had come to Austria to escape from the consequences of their actions at home. There was possibly some truth in the assertion, but it sounded like a dangerously familiar game of putting the Allies off the scent.
¹⁹

Far from showing sympathy for their ethnic German brothers and sisters in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia, the Austrians now began to flex their muscles a bit to demand territory for their martyred state. These demands did not come from the federal government, but they had the backing of Gruber, especially in his capacity as governor of the Tyrol. If the Poles could have some more land, why not the Austrians? The newly recreated Burgenland still hankered after the city of Ödenburg (Sopron in Hungarian), which had been awarded to Hungary at Saint-Germain and had failed to come back with the rest of Burgenland because of a ‘falsified plebiscite’;
²⁰
from Josef Rehrl, the governor of Salzburg, came a call to detach Berchtesgaden and the surrounding region from Bavaria - despite its ominous past - as well as the Rupertiwinkel, which had been estranged from the archbishopric of Salzburg in 1809.

When they were not planning a merger with Switzerland (there was some talk of this in the Tyrol too), the Vorarlberger eyed the Kleine Walsertal, where the pastures made some of the best Bergkäse; the Tyroleans wanted their brothers and sisters to the south; Upper and Lower Austria looked enviously towards southern Moravia and Bohemia, despite the streams of wretched German-speaking refugees and the certain knowledge that the Czechs were purging the region of Teutons; finally there were even discussions in Styria and Carinthia about revising the borders, and not just to fend off the Yugoslavs, who were keen to wrest away areas of Austria where there were populations of Slovenians. The Carinthians even mentioned the Kanaltal and Gottschee,
^cl
where there were clusters of Germans who had come adrift from the fatherland and who felt insecure in the post-war world.
²¹
Renner gave a nod to the Foreign Office to pour a little cold water on these territorial claims; Gruber, however, even spoke of ‘reparations’.
²²
It is possibly in response that the story is told of the Germans offering to send back the bones of Adolf Hitler.

Margarétha, who failed to note Hitler’s death in his journal, referred to this overweening self-interest on the part of the Viennese in his entry for 14 August:

The Viennese are not interested in the atom bomb, nor the participation of the Russians in the war [in Asia] . . . nor Japanese surrender; all they are interested in are the questions: when will the unbearable demarcation lines within Austria be wound up? When will we be rid of the Russians? When will the new tram lines be finally ready? When are we going to get meat, when are we finally going to have something to smoke? When will we have coal and wood for heating, when gas? When will there be glass for the window panes? The Viennese are not in the slightest bit interested in elections . . .
²³