After the Reich (10 page)

News reached Schöner on the 24th of a new Andreas Hofer
^r
fighting the Nazis in the Tyrol. The man gave his name as Plattner. He seems to have been a flash in the pan, although it was true that the Tyroleans were pushing the Nazis out before the arrival of the Americans. With Austria the ‘victim’ and Italy a former Axis power, ‘everyone was waiting for the return of the South Tyrol’ to Austria. There was a rumour that reached the ears of both Schöner and Margarétha that the former chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg had been poisoned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. As it was he was on the way to the South Tyrol himself.
^s
On 26 April, an interim government was formed under Karl Renner.

It was an attempt to balance the interests of the Christian socialists, the socialists and the communists, albeit dominated by moderate socialists like Renner and his vice-chancellor, Adolf Schärf. Of the communists, Fischer was given the important portfolio of ‘popular enlightenment, education and culture’ and Honner was made minister of the interior. The Christian Democrat minister Kunschak was a notorious antisemite, which made the Jews who formed the bulk of the Austrian Centre reluctant to go home.
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Margarétha heard about it when a girl gave him a copy of the Soviet-sponsored
Neues Österreich
which contained the details of Renner’s cabinet and the proclamation. He thought the latter ‘excellent, a real masterpiece’. It declared that Austria would return to the constitution of 1920. The Anschluss, said the proclamation, had been involuntary; it had been imposed on Austria and was therefore null and void. Margarétha then repaired to the Naschmarkt, where he was able to purchase some precious root vegetables.
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On Friday 27 April the representatives of the permitted political parties signed a declaration of independence from Germany. The Soviets recognised Renner’s regime, but only as far as the Danube, because Tolbukhin’s troops were still fighting in the Weinviertel. The Second Republic was born under the aegis of the Red Army. That afternoon Schöner abandoned his old coat and skiing trousers for a silk shirt and a dark suit. The Vienna Philharmonic was going to play its first concert since the liberation. At 4 p.m. there was a private performance at the Large Concert Hall, as the Musikverein building had been damaged. The hall was only three-quarters full, but a substantial number of
Adabeis
had gathered to watch the arrival of civil servants, communists and Russian army officers. The orchestra was heartily applauded, Krauss audibly less so. Some people even hissed. The programme was Schubert’s Unfinished, Beethoven’s
Leonore 3
and Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony: ‘A tribute to the immortal spirit of Vienna and the great, classic time of Viennese music and to the musical genius of Russia.’ The Philharmonic played the Schubert ‘without soul’; they were better at the Beethoven. The Tchaikovsky was ‘brilliantly played’.

In the interval the assistant mayor, the communist Steinhardt, made a speech in which he thanked the Red Army for liberating them from the ‘brown plague’. There was loud cheering. He then announced a full programme of cultural events: there was to be a performance by the Burgtheater company of
Sappho
on the 30 April and the State Opera company would do
The Marriage of Figaro
at the Volksoper. At the Akademie Theater they would have Nestroy’s
Mäd aus der Vorstadt
. The stress was clearly on ‘Austrian culture’ for the time being. The Raimund and Josefstadt
^t
theatres were to reopen together with nine cinemas. In reality this meant showing a lot of Soviet films without subtitles.
⁶⁶

It was only at the end of April that the Western Allies appeared at the Austrian border. The Americans took Innsbruck, Salzburg and Linz; the British came up through Italy on the 28th and marched into Carinthia and Styria before meeting up with Soviet forces. That same day the Nazi fellow traveller Joham was rejected as a member of the provisional government. Loudspeakers played ‘O Du mein Österreich’. The Russians stood by and tacitly blessed the regime they had ushered in. The British, however, had had their worst fears confirmed, and promptly refused to recognise Renner’s government. The Americans followed suit. Renner responded by hailing Stalin as the ‘greatest military commander of all time’. Later Schöner met a friend who had just returned from suburban Weidling. There had been persistent raping at his country house. A seventeen-year-old girl who had tried to defend herself had been shot. ‘On the periphery it is much worse than it is in the inner city.’
⁶⁷

On the 29th five tramlines began to work again. Renner appeared in the company of two Russian officers at the Foreign Office dressed in a stiff collar, a tie with pearl pin, grey spats and an old brown hat. He had a white goatee beard stained with nicotine from his diet of cigars
⁶⁸
and boasted a small pot belly. He was ready for his detractors. He did not deny that he had been in favour of the Anschluss, only that he had wanted union with the Nazis. He was keen to do down the Austro-fascists of the Corporate State. He told the diplomats that Dollfuss people were as unwelcome in the new Austria as Nazis. He let it be known that he wanted the Austro-fascists excluded from the suffrage for ten years. As it was, it proved easy to restock the ministries with untainted civil servants: all they had to do was reappoint those prematurely retired in the time of the Corporate State.
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Naturally, most of them were socialists, and Wöllersdorf old-boys.

It was May Day, and a big parade was laid on for the Russians. Austrian flags had been made out of old swastikas, and the women had fashioned headscarves out of the same material. The people wore red carnations and greeted one another with the word ‘Freiheit’ or ‘freedom’, rather than the usual ‘Grüss Gott!’ The Russians made the city a present of tons of provisions. The Viennese said it was all food they had plundered from them in the first place.
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The gift was supposed to last for a month. It meant a daily ration of 1,620 calories for heavy workers, 970 for white-collar staff and 833 for children.
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The French arrived in Bregenz on Lake Constance that same day. On 6 May they had established themselves in a small part of their zone, the Upper Tyrol. By the time of the German capitulation on 8 May, the whole of Austria was occupied. Just in case anyone was to forget, the French put up signposts for their own troops: ‘Ici Autriche, pays ami’ (This is Austria, these are our friends).
⁷²

The Western Allies were still a long way off. There were rumours that the Americans were making difficulties for Austria because of Stalin’s sponsorship of the Lublin Poles. On 3 May a story did the rounds about the partition of Vienna. The British, it seemed, were going to receive the 1st Bezirk. It was the first time the Viennese had heard that the French too were to have their slice of the cake. Schöner was later told that the French were to receive central Vienna, and also the 7th Bezirk where he lived. The new communist police president, Hautmann, decreed that all foreigners and forced labourers had to leave Vienna. They were to assemble in Wiener Neustadt until transport could be arranged for them. The Schöners lost their two Ukrainian servant girls and an Italian cook.
⁷³

The Führer had committed suicide on 30 April, but the Wehrmacht and the SS were still fighting. Schöner was appalled to see that the Austrians were among the most dogged. ‘In the end it is once again apparent that the Austrians, providing they are really Nazis, are also the most unremitting partisans of Hitler. German generals from the Reich are capitulating; the Löhrs and Rendulics
^u
in the south and the north are fighting on.’
⁷⁴

The British and the Yugoslavs had finally come to blows over Trieste, which the former were keen to award to the Italians. Meanwhile the Russians had begun to deport 500 Austrians from Floridsdorf in the suburbs. Field Marshal Alexander was thought to be in Vienna, staying at the Hotel Imperial, and between Stockerau, Tulln and Korneuburg in Lower Austria the Wehrmacht and the SS were still holding out on 6 May. Vlasov’s army was leaving its positions in Prague and heading south to Lower Austria, and it looked as if fighting could flare up again. Vlasov and his Cossacks had been fighting alongside the SS, and he did not wish to be captured by the Red Army who would have executed him immediately as a traitor. His departure coincided with the Soviet-inspired uprising in Prague. On the 7th Schöner heard a distorted rumour that Hitler’s successor Admiral Dönitz had surrendered unconditionally in Copenhagen. Eisenhower had said the war was over, but there was still gunfire to be heard. Margarétha concluded that it was Vlasov’s army fighting a path to the Western Allies.
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The truce was pronounced at 2 p.m. that day, but there was no more champagne to celebrate with. They made good with meatballs, and in the evening ‘goulash, like in peacetime!’
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2

Wild Times: A Picture of Liberated Central Europe in 1945

On 8 May Germany had surrendered unconditionally and was occupied by the victorious powers. Everyone was freed from National Socialist tyranny. Those whose lives were in danger from the regime were finally spared. But for many others, however, the misery and risk of death had not disappeared. For countless people the suffering only began with the end of the war.

Richard von Weizsäcker, Vier Zeiten: Erinnerungen, Berlin 1997, 95

Liberation from the East

W
hat was true of Vienna applied, to a lesser or greater extent, to every town and city in Germany and Austria: if they had not been knocked flat, they had been at least partially destroyed. Many insignificant market towns and villages had been reduced to piles of rubble as well, victims of the Allied advance, and the process continued until the Allies believed they had wholly subdued the enemy. Besides the terrible loss of human life, much treasure was gone for good, and cities that had been the glory of central Europe were no more.

There were the
Residenzen
, the former court capitals: Dresden had been smashed to smithereens as a Valentine’s Day present to the Red Army; in Munich the destruction of so many cultural monuments prompted Richard Strauss’s most moving composition,
Die Metamorphosen
; and the baroque gem of Würzburg, Dresden’s equivalent in the west, had been reduced to rubble by the USAAF in the last days of the war. The Welf capitals of Hanover and Brunswick had suffered the loss of their palaces;
^v
Bayreuth was the victim of its Wagner-cult; two-thirds of Weimar was flattened on account of Goethe and Schiller. Cassel was so badly damaged that the ruins were bulldozed. The lack of any remaining infrastructure obliged the American army to plant its HQ in the spa town of Wiesbaden, which had come out of the war only slightly mauled, because bad weather had caused the air force to drop the bulk of its payload on the outlying woods.

Not all Germany’s gems had been homes to small courts. There was Hildesheim, where the wooden houses burned for a fortnight before the flames could be extinguished, and where the two largest Carolingian churches went up in smoke. Hamburg had been the testing ground for Britain’s and America’s weapons of mass destruction in 1943: in two days of bombing, 50,000 had died. The ancient centre of Frankfurt-am-Main was gone; a few façades on the latter’s Römerberg recalled the glories of what had been before. Little remained of the centres of the former Roman cities of Cologne and Trier, or of Charlemagne’s capital, Aachen, where the baptistery lay open to the skies; the Bavarian cities of Augsburg and Regensburg had been pulverised. Leipzig, the capital of the German book trade, was badly bruised; Breslau smouldered long after the end of the war as the Russians lit fires in the ruins. The medieval cores of Stettin and Danzig had been levelled by Soviet artillery. The list is endless.

The inhabitants of urban Germany were dead or scattered. The survivors generally headed west, hoping to reach the Western Allies who - they believed - would treat them more fairly than the Red Army. Only a few brave souls ventured east. One of these was Ursula von Kardorff, who undertook a mission to Berlin in September 1945 and listed the shattered cities as she went: ‘Darmstadt, Mannheim, Hanau - a landscape of craters provoking extreme sadness. Add to this the prison camps surrounded by barbed wire and their watchtowers, the ruins, the detonated bridges and autobahn viaducts. Scorched earth, just as Hitler dreamed up for his people.’
¹

East Prussia

East Prussia was the first German region visited by the Red Army, and to some extent the worst treated. The first incursion, at Nemmersdorf on 21 October 1944, was to be a foretaste. In the course of a single night the Red Army killed seventy-two women and one man. Most of the women had been raped, of whom the oldest was eighty-four. Some of the victims had been crucified. Gauleiter Koch refused to allow the population to flee. Hitler wanted East Prussia to prove the resilience of the German people. That autumn the East Prussians watched the departure of the birds: ‘Yes, you are now flying away! And us? What is to become of us and our land?’
²