After the Reich (54 page)

In London Austria’s territorial ambitions were given short shrift. The European Advisory Commission limited itself to the job of dividing Austria up into four zones of occupation. Access to Vienna from the Western zones, however, was held up until June. In the meantime exiled political groups continued to put pressure on the Allies, who in turn paid them scant attention. After Otto von Habsburg returned to Europe in 1944, London was the centre of legitimist agitation. He had not been a sparkling success. His agitation in America had upset the governments in exile and the State Department had had to issue a statement in April 1943 that it had no desire to reinstate the Habsburgs.
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A leading monarchist was the Jewish nobleman Baron Leopold Popper von Podhragy. In June Podhragy wrote a pamphlet attacking Renner under the title
An Experiment in Socialism
using his pseudonym ‘Florian George’.
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Renner had laid himself open: he was Austria’s ‘vicar of Bray’, a communist toady who had begun life as a pan-German, a disciple of the same antisemite Schönerer who had exercised a seminal influence on the young Adolf Hitler. In 1918, when Austria had been divested of its subject states, he wanted it hitched to the German Reich. In this he felt much as the rest of his people felt at the time. He had also been implicated in the socialist uprisings of 1919, 1927 and 1934. Podhragy was pro-Dollfuss, the Austrian chancellor gunned down by the Nazis who himself brutally put down the socialist revolt. Dollfuss had also scrapped democracy in Austria, establishing the Corporate State. In Dollfuss’s Austria the press was censored and arrest arbitrary.
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Podhragy might have had reason to suspect that both Dollfuss and his successor Schuschnigg had monarchist leanings. In 1938 Renner had publicly supported the Anschluss with Germany, where other ‘German Austrians’ had been more reticent about the Nazis.

Renner had been quite open in giving his reasons for supporting the Anschluss and had urged Austrians to do the same. In an article published in London in May 1938 he had accused Dollfuss of ‘monarchism and mediaeval clericalism’. ‘German-Austria’, a word of his own coinage, was and remained in his view a component part of the German Republic.
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After April 1945 he did not go back on this and he was as keen as ever to remove the trappings of the Corporate State. He had also become a Russian puppet. American intelligence reported that it was almost impossible to get anywhere near him, as he was always flanked by Russian minders.
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Seven years of German rule had wrought many changes. Whereas in 1938 most Austrians would have supported some sort of bond with Germany - not necessarily with the Nazis - in 1945 no one would have openly admitted a pan-German bias. German behaviour in Austria immediately following the Anschluss - the deporting of large numbers of ministers and government officials to Dachau; the brutal revenge against anyone who had been instrumental in repressing the Nazis during the time they were illegal; the confiscation of over half of the Austrian industrial base;
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the deportation of the Jews (although many Austrians were not just indifferent here, they actively joined in); the privations of war; the deaths of near ones and dear ones; and finally the capital crime, defeat - had all served to sever any bonds of affection that might have united the peoples on either side of the Inn. If there were pro-German Austrians after 1945, they kept mum or sought some other way out.

The Soviet authorities were playing their usual game and delaying the entry of the Western Allies. As the American commander General Mark Clark put it in the hard-hitting Cold War idiom of 1950: ‘They were busy looting Austria at the time, and didn’t want to be bothered.’
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On 4 July 1945 the Allies came together again to decide the form of the Control Council. The Western missions were headed by the DMGs: General Winterton for Britain, General Gruenther for the US, and General P. R. P. Cherrière for France. The Russian commander was allegedly ill,
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and the Soviet Union was represented by Colonel General A. S. Zheltov, a political commissar who was high up in the NKVD and who was famed for his entirely negative attitude.
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Tolbukhin was actually in the doghouse and was replaced by Koniev on the 7 July. Stalin was cross because he had allowed the Red Army to give a negative image of the Soviet Union.
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Fischer was angling for a German-style SED: a united front of communists and socialists. He had been inspired by the communal elections in France, which had returned the communists as the largest party in the country. Schärf feared that if the Western Allies did not arrive soon there would be a communist putsch.
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The zones were not finalised until 9 July. The Soviet Union clung to its bastions in the east: Burgenland - abolished by the Nazis and recreated for the Russians - Lower Austria and Upper Austria north of the Danube. The United States faced them across the Danube in Upper Austria, as well as taking on the Salzkammergut. Britain was anchored in the south, with Carinthia, Styria and the eastern Tyrol. France was left with the rest of the Tyrol and the Vorarlberg. As in Germany, this meant some adjustment of the lines. The Russians, for example, had occupied the eastern half of Styria. Margarétha would have expressed the views of most Viennese in voicing his unhappiness at the settlement. The Russian slice of the cake ‘meant that the land around Vienna will be further leeched by the Russians, and that we will receive no potatoes, no fruit, no milk, no eggs . . .’
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Under the Allied agreement, the city was divided into four sectors like Berlin. The difference was that the 1st Bezirk, which occupied the medieval city bordered by the famous Ringstrasse, was managed by all four powers, a different victor taking on the role every month. Command was represented by four generals who reigned supreme in their sectors, and who administered the 1st Bezirk communally. They were the military commissars, whose presidency was also subject to monthly change. The 1st Bezirk was patrolled by the famous ‘four in a jeep’: a military policeman from each of the occupying powers.

Beyond the 1st Bezirk, the Allies all had their sectors, each of which included a slice of the inner city within the Gürtel as well as some more suburban areas. The Russians had the old Jewish quarter in the second, and Floridsdorf bordering the Danube, helping them to maintain their control of the waterway, Wieden and Favoriten; the Americans received Neubau, Alsergrund, the Josefstadt, Hernals, Währing and Döbling with its vineyards; the French had Mariahilf with its famous shopping street, Penzing, Fünfhaus and Ottakring. Their offices were in the old Military Academy. General Béthouart was billeted in the villa of Frau Petznek in Hütteldorf. She was the only child of Crown Prince Rudolf who, after her marriage to a Prince Windischgraetz, had wedded a socialist politician. The Russians had been in the villa before him. They had removed much of the furniture and ripped the crowns off the books in the library. The British controlled Landstrasse, with its important communications to their airport at Schwechat, Margarethen, Simmering and Hietzing.

The Allies were the custodians of Austrian sovereignty. According to the London Agreement, drawn up by the European Advisory Commission in January 1944, they would continue to exercise executive power until independence was restored by a state treaty. The Austrian government had to submit proposals to the four powers, whose decisions had to be unanimous. The Soviet Union fought off the notion of granting Austria its sovereignty for ten years, although it was first suggested by US Secretary of State Byrnes in February 1946, and the project had full British backing. The Russians’ pretext for their veto was that the country had been insufficiently purged of its Nazis, although they were notoriously lazy about pursuing culprits.
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Renner had never been trusted by the Western powers. His chief rival was the Dachauer Leopold Figl, who was the first to advocate a return to the 1929 Federal Constitution. Figl, patronisingly described by Mark Clark as ‘a courageous and competent little fellow’,
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was the first great political figure of the Austrian Second Republic. A
vigneron
from Lower Austria, he had headed the Bauernbund or Peasants’ Union before 1938. He had received a rough but effective political education in Dachau, spending a total of sixty-two months in Nazi captivity along with a number of other important political figures in post-war Austria. His hard peasant head proved an asset when it came to dealing with Koniev, and he was often seen reeling out of the Hotel Imperial (requisitioned by the Russian commandant), his belly full of vodka, after some tough trading. Another
Septembriste
was Dr Karl Gruber, who was only
de facto
foreign minister, because Austria officially had no right to conduct its own foreign affairs.

Figl was freed on 6 April 1945. On the 17th he went to the Imperial to make his peace with the conquerors.
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He emerged as the Landeshauptmann, or governor, of Lower Austria. The Russians had no fondness for Figl, and his conservative ÖVP,
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but they were hedging their bets, waiting to see if Austria would fall into the communist bloc, and in the meantime they were backing a multi-party system. Just to make sure the Austrians did not have it too easy, however, they also gave credence to Yugoslav demands for reparations and border changes.

Once the Americans had their feet under the desk in Vienna they too took stock of the political situation. Renner had moved out of his old home and into a former SS radio station in the Himmelstrasse in Grinzing. The Americans knew about his pan-German past and his support for the Anschluss. His persistent attacks on Dollfuss had angered Figl, who insisted that the murdered chancellor had been a democrat at heart.
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The situation was not an obvious one: socialists like Renner had managed to stay out of concentration camps during the Nazi years, while the leaders of the Corporate State - which might have been sympathetic to Hitler had it played its cards right - had spent long, sometimes fatal, spells in Dachau and Mauthausen. It was not until 6 September that the OSS recommended that the American government recognise Renner’s regime.

The British were also playing hard to get. On 26 September they told the Americans they were unwilling to recognise Renner because he was too much under the thumb of the communists.
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The British thought the communists wanted to extend their influence over the whole of Austria. The dashing British political adviser Jack Nicholls (who was known to smuggle women at risk from the Russians out in the boot of his car) had also expressed his doubts about Renner’s self-important ways. With time the British fell in behind Clark, whose view it was that Renner had to be given time to clean out his stables and make the government more representative.
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The British remained obdurate about their entry into Vienna, the Russians having stolen a march on them once more. They had left the issue to Churchill to sort out at Potsdam, which he had failed to do. Their refusal to advance to their sector was ‘almost destructive’.
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It resulted in Stalin agreeing to feed the Viennese population for the time being, but it was hardly a humanitarian solution, unless the Russians could be relied upon to do it properly. As it was, poor Austria was feeding a large number of strangers. There were around a million refugees within its pre-1938 borders and around 350,000 troops. The bulk of these were Russian, but there were also 50,000 Americans, 65,000 British and 40,000 French. That figure had been reduced to some 65,000 soldiers all told by the end of 1946.

The meeting of the victors at Potsdam in the summer of 1945 failed to rule on the Austrian question. One thing was agreed, however - that in the light of Austria’s ‘victim’ status, there were to be no reparations paid. The French defied this by shipping home some valuable portions of Austrian industry they found in their zone, but the Russians had a better way of dealing with it. The day the conference opened, the
Daily Telegraph
reported the hypocrisy behind Soviet behaviour. The Russians had already carried away every machine, all cars and buses and cattle from the city: ‘Austria is free but looted of all that can sustain or rebuild life.’ For six weeks there had been no food delivered to the city, and half the newborn children had died. The corpses of the city’s defenders still lay under the ruins of the buildings they had fought over.
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The Allies had appointed their own high commissioners to govern their zones. Under these men there were a number of committees dealing with particular problems such as denazification, the restitution of sequestered property, DPs, POWs, military issues and disarmament. Once the Austrian government was recognised after the 1945 elections, the Allied high commissioners were invested with the rank of ministers in their respective governments. In fact, despite the reports in the British press, there was some small degree of co-operation between the Western and Eastern Allies at the beginning, and some of the ‘German assets’ were run well, while others were handed back to their original owners. The Allies jointly administered the country’s oil industry at first, and Marshal Tolbukhin was in favour of the removal only of Austrian heavy industry.
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