After the Reich (61 page)

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.
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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.’
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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.
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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’.
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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.
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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.
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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’.
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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.
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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.
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Lapses were reported in the US denazification programme.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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’.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.