After the Reich (70 page)

On 26 February the trial of Chancellor Schuschnigg’s foreign minister Guido Schmidt opened in Vienna. This was the moment to review the behaviour of the Corporate State and to discover who was responsible for the Anschluss. Schmidt had come home from Nuremberg, where he had appeared as a prosecution witness in the case against Schuschnigg’s successor Arthur Seyss-Inquart.
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The trial lasted 107 days but failed to prove that Schmidt had acted behind the back of his chancellor. There had been much finger-waving on the part of the Dachauer because Schmidt had been spared incarceration in a camp. Although he had been ousted from politics by the Nazis, he was nonetheless made a director of the Hermann-Göring-Werke. He was acquitted.

The efficacy of the courts altered from zone to zone. The OSS reported on a trial in Vienna of four criminals and Jew-murderers: three were convicted and sentenced to hang.
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As in Germany capital sentences were often commuted. The courts awarded ten death sentences and thirty-four terms of life imprisonment. The tribunals delivered another 13,600 guilty verdicts. The punishments for major culprits were chiefly pecuniary: up to 40 per cent of their property and a 10 per cent fiscal surcharge over a certain number of years. In all Austria 42,000 people were treated in this way. Lighter measures were imposed against a further 481,000. The punishments were fairly trifling, but 72,000 to 100,000 government employees lost their jobs. This, it seems, was in no way consistent, and 40,000 Nazi civil servants continued in their functions in the Tyrol and the Vorarlberg.
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Nazis were debarred from a certain number of professions as well: journalists, university chairs, physicians; they could neither vote nor stand as candidates in elections.

Some of the Allied commanders considered that harsh. The Frenchman Béthouart, for example, felt that the law was cruel to small-time Pgs and that it eliminated valuable experts from the workplace while ‘closing the door to national reconciliation’.
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He does not allude to Austria’s Jews, who had been robbed and murdered, and who were wary of a state that had not actively sought their return. Few but the main activists even thought of coming back.
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After the delusions current during the war years, it was now clear that the majority of the Austrian people were party to their expropriation. Nonetheless, Béthouart pushed for and succeeded in attaining a moderation of the statute that amnestied the youngest Nazis.

Béthouart was not alone in forgetting the Jews. Of the 120,000 or so who had managed to escape from Austria after the Anschluss, only 8,500 had returned by March 1947. With time the number was to go down, not up. There were other Jews in Austria - around 42,000 DPs, living mostly in the American Zone. The Americans made sure they received larger rations than the others: around 2,000 calories as opposed to the standard 1,550. It was said that Austrian antisemitism was the reason why so many Jews were reluctant to come back. The charge was bitterly resented by the mayor of Vienna, Theodor Körner, who said he had issued an invitation to Jewish artists to return. In a dazzling
non sequitur
he said, ‘The Austrians are cosmopolitan and therefore not antisemites.’ The notion of Austrian antisemitism amounted to ‘deliberate lies or thoughtless babble’.
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The British approach to the Nazi problem in Austria was markedly different to the approach in the British Zone in Germany, where denazification was at best limp-wristed. The enforcement squad was the Field Security Service or FSS, which had instructions to identify and arrest all those on the pre-prepared Allied lists, and which depended on the Intelligence Corps at home. One former member described the force as a ‘secret service in uniform’.
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Nazi lawyers were suspended - twenty-six in Carinthia and seventy-six in Styria.
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The FSS also had to deal with brigands, gangs of non-German SS men and Cetniks who terrorised isolated farmhouses close to the Yugoslav border. It had a more strategic role on the Carinthian border, controlling a twenty-kilometre-broad strip otherwise accessible only to residents. This was used not only for the defence of the region against Tito but also to keep the Yugoslavs out of Venezia-Giulia. Those involved in the hunt for war criminals worked from lists drawn up by the Atrocities Committee Austria.
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In the British Zone the courts examined the case histories of 31,517 Nazis. Of those only 2,623 were acquitted. The British maintained three internment camps for Nazis at Wolfsberg, Weissenheim and Wetzelsdorf. The first named became a synonym - along with Glasenbach in the American Zone - for the rough treatment of political prisoners. The higher courts dealt with around another hundred cases. These meted out fifty-three death sentences, forty-two of which were carried out.
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The main atrocities committed in Styria concerned the death marches to Mauthausen at the end of the war. These gave rise to a number of high-profile cases in 1946. The Eisenerz Trial dealt with the SS guards who killed off 162 Hungarian Jews in the village of that name because they were in no condition to make it to Mauthausen. Ten of the eighteen defendants were sentenced to death, and were shot on 21 June.
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Shooting gave way to hanging when the gallows was set up in the Provincial Court on 24 September 1946 and eight men were despatched by the British master, Albert Pierrepoint. The British had brought in a Herr Zaglauer and his two assistants to learn the ropes. Pierrepoint expressed his confidence in these hangmen, who were deemed ‘now fully competent officially to conduct executions themselves in the approved British manner’.
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The People’s Courts then took over from the British. In Austria as a whole they meted out forty-three capital sentences. Vienna naturally took the lead with twenty-eight, but Graz came second with twelve; Linz, in the American Zone, passed only three; French Innsbruck, none.
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The Soucek Case examined by the People’s Court dealt with an important group of neo-Nazis. The court also handled the trial of the Leoben Gestapo chief Johann Stelzl and those responsible for the euthanasia programme in the lunatic asylum in Klagenfurt. Four men were condemned to death. Sometimes the tariffs handed out seem light: the main culprit in the Stremer Jewish Murder Case, in which the defendants were proved to have killed fifty Jews, received twenty years.
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The following year, on 27 February 1948, the Russian general Kurasov proposed a bigger amnesty. The consequence two months later was the law of 21 April which struck 487,000 names from 524,000 on the original lists. This added half a million electors to the roll, most of them on the right.

Once the former Nazis had been included again within the pale of the constitution, a new party came on the scene in the guise of the Union of Independents. Anti-Nazi politicians sought to ban the Independents in the Western zones. The Soviets, however, refused to follow suit, and the Independents promptly took 12 per cent of the vote in the elections of 9 October 1949. The ÖVP once again topped the poll.

Punishment by Starvation

Once it had been decided that all Germans were guilty, the next job was to punish them. Despite the propaganda rations meted out by the Russians in Berlin, the Potsdam Conference decided that the Germans were not to be over-fed. Requests by the Red Cross to bring in provisions were waved aside, and in the winter of 1945 donations were returned with the recommendation that they be used in other war-torn parts of Europe - although the Irish and Swiss contributions had been specifically raised with Germany in mind. The first donations to be permitted reached the American Zone in March 1946, to some degree thanks to the intervention of British intellectuals such as Bertrand Russell and Victor Gollancz.

Gollancz had published a polemic with the title
The Ethics of Starvation
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in the middle of 1946. As a Jew whose family had settled in Britain from Germany, Gollancz had no reason to love the Germans. What he objected to was the inhumane and unethical treatment of German civilians:

I am a Jew: and sometimes I am asked why, as a Jew, I bother about people in whose name infamies have been committed against my race, the memory of which, I fear - though I would wish it otherwise - may never die. I am sometimes asked this, I regret to say, by fellow-Jews who have forgotten, if they ever knew, the teaching of the Prophets . . . It is indeed a fact that I feel called upon to help suffering Germans precisely because I am a Jew: but not at all for the reason imagined . . . It is a question . . . of plain, straight common sense, undeflected by that very sentimentality that deflects the judgement and corrupts the spirit of so many. To me three propositions seem self-evident. The first is that nothing can save the world but a general act of repentance in place of the present self-righteous insistence on the wickedness of others, for we have all sinned, and continue to sin most horribly. The second is that good treatment and not bad treatment makes them good. And the third is - to drop into the hideous collective language which is now much the mode - that unless you treat a man well when he has treated you ill you just get nowhere, or rather it will give further impetus to evil and head straight for human annihilation.
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Despite the great wrong perpetrated against his people, Gollancz could not sanction another crime: ‘The plain fact is . . . we are starving the Germans. And we are starving them, not deliberately in the sense that we definitely want them to die, but wilfully in the sense that we prefer their death to our own inconvenience.’
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Over and over again in his letters to his wife, he is struck by the fact that these suffering infants might have been his own children.

From newspaper reports Gollancz prepared a chilling indictment: seven-tenths of people in the now British city of Hamburg had no bread for two weeks of every month. He quoted the UNRRA figure for daily subsistence - 2,650 calories. The minimum needed to sustain life was 2,000. In March 1946 the average for the British Zone had fluctuated between 1,050 and 1,591. This consisted of four and a half slices of dry bread, three middle-sized potatoes, three tablespoons of oatmeal, half a cup of skimmed milk, a scrap of meat and a tiny dollop of fat. At those levels you could survive in bed, but could not work. Then at the end of February the rations had been cut to 1,014 for those not doing heavy work, that is women. Infant mortality was now at ten times the rate of 1944. In Dortmund in February 1946 forty-six out of 257 children born that month perished.
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Politicians and soldiers - like Sir Bernard Montgomery - insisted that no food be sent from Britain. Starvation was punishment. Montgomery said that three-quarters of all Germans were still Nazis - although he did not reveal the source of his information. The Germans had only themselves to blame, and they should be last in the queue. The economist and chancellor of the Exchequer Hugh Dalton argued that the cost of the occupation was tantamount to paying reparations to the Germans.
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Britain itself was recovering from the wartime dearth, however. The food minister John Strachey had proudly announced that meat consumption was at 98 per cent of pre-war levels, and that the British were eating 50 per cent more fish.
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As Gollancz presciently wrote, Germany had been stripped of its bread basket cum milk-churn in the east, the pastures of Pomerania and East Prussia.
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Meanwhile the British authorities in Germany were proposing to cut the rations back to 1,000 calories. The French were already at 950, while the Americans were not much more generous at 1,270. Gollancz pointed out that the inmates at Belsen had 800, which was not that much less.
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In Baden-Baden, Alfred Döblin was suspicious: if they really had so little food they would be dead. He thought most of them were managing to supplement their diet from the black market.
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That didn’t necessarily help the old and infirm, however.

Gollancz followed
The Ethics of Starvation
with a further tract in January 1947.
In Darkest Germany
was the result of a six-week tour of the British Zone which the publisher made in October and November 1946, just before the frost. It consists of eighteen letters and articles he had written to belabour the government. He regretted he had been unable to make it to Berlin. On the other hand he suggested that his performance was slightly superior to that of Hynd, who in the past year by his own admission had spent no more than twenty-eight days in Germany.
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Gollancz had gone to Germany with the ‘attitude of a sceptic’. He nonetheless armed himself with a photographer, and to allay any scoffing at the veracity of his reports, he backed up everything he said with a picture. Most of the photographs include the figure of a benign elderly man in a dark coat and hat: standing behind naked boys suffering from malnutrition; holding up a particularly awful apology for a child’s shoe; or comforting a crippled communist in his festering hovel. The point was to show that he had seen these things with his own eyes and taken nothing on trust.
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Hunger oedema was not confined to the new Russian colony of East Prussia. Gollancz thought it affected up to 100,000 people. He saw some telling cases in the hospital, with the usual waterlogged legs. His photographer took a picture of a dying man. The death-rattle had already started. Another had a scrotum that stretched a third of the way down to the ground. On second thoughts Gollancz had this picture omitted from the finished text.
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Tuberculosis was at four to five times its 1939 level. There was no penicillin available for the hospitals, because the Germans did not have the money to pay for it.
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The Third Man
said it all.