After the Reich (56 page)

The Viennese were cold and hungry. The larger coffee houses had been taken over by the Americans. Margarétha and his wife had a modest Christmas: festive
Paprikafisch
came out of a tin. The British captain was kind enough to make Eugen a present of a dozen Havana cigars, and in turn he gave the Guards officer a little bottle of cognac.
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Figl, however, began his rule on fighting form. To thunderous applause he demanded the opening of the demarcation lines between the zones, the restoration of Austrian unity, the return of South Tyrol and the end of the Yugoslav threat to Carinthia. Austria had never been a second German state.
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The communists were bitterly disappointed by the results of the elections, although they were granted the concession of a ministerial portfolio which went to Karl Altmann. As their Soviet-controlled newspaper, the
Österreichische Zeitung
, put it, ‘We have lost a battle, but we are just at the start of the battle for Austria, and that will be won.’
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Their failure to endear themselves to the Austrian people may have been behind Koniev’s departure: he was replaced by Vladimir Kurasov in the middle of 1946. Just as in the aftermath of the Berlin elections of 1946, the Russians began to show their teeth, creating petty difficulties for the Western Allies wherever they could. As far as the Austrians were concerned, they had learned nothing: the ÖVP were closet fascists misleading the public under a halo of martyrdom (Dachau and Mauthausen), and the SPÖ were tainted by their complicity in the Anschluss. Austria quite clearly could not be trusted to rule itself.
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Feeding the Austrians

When Dos Passos visited Vienna at the end of 1945 he was able to have a quick look round courtesy of American army public relations. He attended Mass in the Hofburg Chapel and noted the American, British and French ‘gold braid’ listening to Schubert. The famous cafés, uncleaned and unheated, served cups of ‘mouldy-tasting dark gruel called coffee’. The waiters ‘kept up a pathetic mummery of service’ providing the usual glass of water, but not the cream, although they still had the jugs. The writer plucked up the courage to ask a waiter what was in the coffee. ‘That’s our secret,’ he was told. He also wanted to know what the Viennese ate. ‘Bread and dried peas’ was the answer.
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The winter had set in, provisions were at an all-time low, and there was no fuel to heat houses and flats. The Allies gave permission for the felling of large numbers of trees. Feeding Vienna remained a Western grievance. The Soviets had made off with the arable land and the roads into the capital. Their zone had produced 65 per cent of Vienna’s food before the war. Clark said the Americans intended to give the Austrians 1,550 calories (he said the average American had 3,000), but he admitted that the British had problems matching that figure.
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As it was, the diet varied considerably across Austria. In Vienna in May citizens received a piffling 833 calories, which they presumably supplemented with fresh fruit and vegetables. In the American Zone it was not much more, and the French complained they had no means of feeding the Vorarlberger or the Tyroleans.

Desperation led the Austrian government to moderate the outward flow of Germans and grant citizenship to one, the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Friedrich Bergius, who had been trying to extract sugar from tree bark. Bergius was also promising to make meat from wood, a project that has now been dismissed as the purest alchemy. Bergius’s citizenship becomes all the more scandalous given that he was fully in collaboration with IG Farben during the war, and working for a Nazi victory. He fled to Buenos Aires and died there in 1949.
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In order to receive foreign aid, Austria had to prove itself a proper enemy of Hitler. At first it was the Russians who made trouble, charging that the Austrians had not actively sought freedom from Hitler. After the war, it was Yugoslavia that vetoed Austria receiving aid from UNRRA (the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration). The aid was only forthcoming from March 1946. The previous December the British Foreign Office had been preparing a new four-power agreement for the administration of Austria that would result in granting the Austrians a degree of self-government, but holding them in check through vetoes. The Allies - particularly the British and the French - wanted to scale down their operations in Austria, for the simple reason that they were expensive.

The agreement was long in the making. At first the British did not tell the other three of the draft; then the Americans opposed it. When it was finally signed on 28 June 1946 it was supposed to last for six months, but in reality it survived until the State Treaty was promulgated on 27 July 1955.
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The Austrian federal and state governments achieved a greater degree of liberty and were able to use quasi-total power to run their houses. Military government by the Allies was scrapped and replaced by ‘control missions’. That the Russians saw the opening of a new era is clear, perhaps, from the recall of Koniev and his replacement by Kurasov. Clark’s bugbear Zheltov, however, remained behind.

As much as possible, the Western Allies sought to administer Austria with the help of apparent anti-Nazis. Ulrich Ilg, who had been a minister in the inter-war First Republic, was a typical appointee, much as the gerontocracy had returned to power in Berlin. The French set him up in the Vorarlberg. The British also worked to redraft Austrian law. An important British contribution to the re-establishment of a non-Nazi Austria was BALU - the British Austrian Legal Unit. The body had been formed in 1943 by pulling a number of Austrian lawyers out of the British army and putting them to work in the War Office. In 1945 they were packed off to Vienna where they formed part of the legal department of the Control Commission under the British-born (but of German Jewish origin) lawyer Claud Schuster. Schuster was assisted by George Bryant, né Breuer. BALU itself was run by the Viennese Lieutenant-Colonel Wolf Lasky, who had worked in the town hall until 1938. He was now claiming royalties for legal textbooks sold during the Nazi interregnum. The Austrians took fright and appointed him to the bench, so that he now enjoyed the curious position of being a judge in both Austria and Britain. He never practised in Austria and had no desire to settle there once his work was done. He later worked as a legal adviser to the British in Germany.
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The British legal division generally advised acceptance of the laws voted by the Austrian parliament.
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In March 1947 a poll taken among the Austrians indicated the popularity of the Allies - the Soviets, it seems, were not mentioned. The British were well liked, but the French were no more than ‘perfumed Russians’. Mark Clark was singled out for veneration for his tough stand against the Soviets, Figl going so far as to call him ‘a legendary national hero’. Dos Passos reported that he would wander around the streets of Vienna accompanied only by an interpreter at a time when the city at night was ‘as in mediaeval days’ - you went abroad at your own risk.
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The violence was normally down to the Russians or gangs of DPs. The Austrians voiced their opinions of the various DPs whose camps were scattered over their land: the Jews were liked least, followed by the Poles, Yugoslavs and Russians. Quite a few of these had become lawless bandits, seeking revenge for the indignities of the lives they had led as KZler or forced labourers. The best loved now were ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia, Hungary and the Balkans.
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With little food or fuel, Austria had around 600,000 extra mouths to feed. There were about 170,000 ‘Danube Swabians’, 151,000 Sudetenländer and 15,000 Hungarian Germans, as well as 15,000 Germans from the Siebenbürgen and the Banat and 170,000 Jews. It was only after 1949 that the figures began to drop. The Americans put the DPs into the care of Austrians, but the British thought they were better off under their own authority. The Allies used the RAD camps that the Nazis had built for their forced and volunteer labour force.
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A constant stream of German Bohemians and Moravians gushed into Austria. The Russians had a camp for them in Melk on the Danube, but it was grossly overstretched and they ended up becoming a burden to all the Allied zones. The response was to demand the expulsion of ‘Reich’ Germans. Gruber was particularly vociferous here. By a highly specious argument ‘German’ was made to mean ‘Nazi’. The expulsion of the Germans from the Austrian body would purge it of its former evil. On 1 November 1945 the Americans stopped their ration cards in Salzburg. Austria made a point of celebrating its anti-German past - books were published, for example, that showed how gallantly Austria had resisted Prussia in the Seven Years War.

In March 1947 there were hunger marches in Vienna and Lower Austria. The demonstrators shouted, ‘Down with Figl’s hunger regime! We want new elections! We are hungry!’ There was a sit-in at the chancellor’s office orchestrated by the communists. The Viennese police were too terrified of the Soviets to help. The latter even refused to allow the Allied ‘four-in-a-jeep’ patrols to interfere. The demonstrations were coupled with the failure of Gruber and the Austrians to make any headway towards independence in Moscow.
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German Assets

The restitution of stolen property was part of the work of the Control Council. The various Allies pursued property claims pertaining to their own people. The French, for example, were anxious to trace the library of the former prime minister Léon Blum, which had gone missing in Austria. It was last seen in Carinthia, but was never found. As regards stolen Jewish property, restitution was effected only in certain cases and in others the awards were only partial.
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Restitution was complicated by several factors. One was that the Soviet authorities were patently uninterested in the fate of the Jews, and were determined to mop up as much property and money as they could. On 27 June 1946 the Russians seized all ‘German’ assets in their zone in contravention of the Potsdam Accord. It followed on from similar measures taken in Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Finland. When the West protested, the Russians contradicted the spirit of the Moscow Declaration and said that the Austrians had ‘fought with Germany’.

‘German’ assets accounted for around a fifth of Austrian industry: more than 62 per cent of Germany’s capital abroad. The total sums for other countries - Finland, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia - totalled 188 million dollars, while for Austria the figure was a staggering 1.5 milliard.
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Some of these assets had no connections with the Germans whatsoever. Others were businesses legitimately built up and developed by Germans. The Russians interpreted these matters very freely. Of 120 industries taken over in their zone, only 47 were actually ‘German’; and of the seventy-six agricultural properties they took over, only one had previously been in German hands. They expressed their intention of taking over the 27,000-hectare Esterházy estate based in Burgenland, for example, which could hardly be described as German and which would have fed (according to the Americans) between 80,000 and 100,000 people. They had 72 per cent of Austria’s oilwells and half the country’s refinery capacity.
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Soviet Russia’s determination to grab all German property included businesses that had been filched by Germans from Austrian Jews, who had been either driven into exile or murdered in the camps. The Russians also swiped a lot of things the Germans had stolen from the Austrian government and foreign nationals. The demands for compensation by certain very rich Jewish families such as the Rothschilds were used by the Russians as a justification for their actions, as they claimed that the Americans would beggar the Austrians were such claims to go through. They were much fairer in their approach in that they shared their spoils with the people of their zone. They sequestered the oilwells, although the equity had been mostly held by Britons and Americans before the war. Their argument was that the foreign interests had been legitimately sold to the Germans in 1938 and that the Anglo-Americans had no right to claim them back.
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They took what ships they found on the Danube. Some of the companies seized were simply stripped of anything of value that could be sent home to Russia. Others were run at a profit. USIA (Upravleinje Sovetskogo Imuščestva v Avstrii - Administration of Soviet Property in Eastern Austria) was the company the Russians created to administer their spoils. In 1949 USIA was running 250 factories with 50,000 workers and controlled a third of industrial production within the Soviet Zone. These factories made all Austrian locomotives and turbines, half of the nation’s glass, fuel and pharmaceuticals and around 40 per cent of its iron. They also had 157,000 hectares of land. The Russians continued to exploit Austria though USIA for a decade and their profits over that period are estimated at over a milliard dollars. The Western Allies protested, but, as no one wanted war, their protests remained hot air.

Russia was anxious to snatch ‘German’ assets in the west too, but that came to nothing. Not all the industry was in the east. VOEST was originally the Hermann-Göring-Werke in Linz. After Potsdam’s ruling on former German property the huge steelworks, one of the most modern in Europe, fell to the Austrian state. In the light of Soviet behaviour in the east, the Western Allies demonstratively waived their right to reparations - in the French case, somewhat reluctantly.
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