After the Reich (60 page)

Bankrupt, overstretched and reeling from the blows inflicted by the war, the British showed a reluctance to be saddled with Austria. From 1943 onwards they were active in seeking a solution that would mean Austrian independence.
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By October 1948 the British presence had declined to 7,000 men and a thousand civilians. In March that year Bevin had made it clear that it was ‘out of the question to defend Austria’.
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The British Zone was made up of Styria, Carinthia and a small part of the eastern Tyrol around the city of Lienz. Styria presented the new overlords with a problem of what to do with widespread sympathy for the Nazis, and Carinthia with a quite different conundrum: how to handle a large Slovenian minority. Besides these, there was the nagging Yalta Agreement. The British, like the Americans, had agreed to deport any Russian citizens within their zone of occupation. They had also told Tito they would return Yugoslav citizens who had opposed him.

Styria had been having a rough time under the Russians. At first the locals were merely grateful that the war had come to an end. The future governor, the farmer Anton Pirchegger, recorded the fact in a typically pious, Austrian-provincial fashion: ‘Christus lebt und wird wieder regieren’ (Christ lives and will rule again). A week later the Russians were banging on his door demanding schnapps.
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They proved less than welcome. During their tenure, the Russians had raped at least 10,000 women and dragged off anything up to 500 men aged between fifteen and sixty-one to work in Siberia. One eyewitness remembered the terrible scenes of looting, and hearing a German-speaking Russian NCO pronounce one word in justification: ‘Vergeltung!’ (Retribution!).
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While the Russians seized anything that appealed to them, the British sat in Bruck-an-der-Mur and waited until the night of 22-23 July when the Red Army pulled out, to be replaced by the 46th Division of the Eighth Army. The Oxford-educated military governor, the Australian Colonel Alexander Wilkinson, installed his military command in Graz, a town which had expressed a notorious fondness for the Führer. On 24 July General McCreery issued a proclamation from the town hall. The British regime was strict: Wilkinson expressed a certain Anglo-Saxon scepticism when he told his fellow officers that ‘some, at any rate, of the Austrians were fairly lukewarm Nazis’.
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The homes of all the Nazis who had fled the city were confiscated and the British continued the process of denazifying the schools. The Russians had made a fairly lame beginning. Wilkinson’s men removed a total of around 400 schoolteachers from a body some 3,130 strong.

The priority was to endow the zone with a stable political leadership. Carinthia had been given a Russian-approved cadre and governor in Reinhold Machold in May, and various self-styled resistance groups vied for recognition. The British now ‘liberated them from their liberators’. Wilkinson dissolved the lot. Henceforth Styria would have political parties, not resistance groups. He sacked Machold on 25 November and appointed Pirchinger of the ÖVP.
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A British observer sat in on every session of the provincial assembly or Landtag from now on and every measure had to be approved. It was very much occupation, not liberation.
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Austrian law as of 13 March 1938 was to be reinstated, but when that date was challenged (the Corporate State had done a few questionable things, such as bring in racial law in 1935) the 1929 constitution was made the fount of legal authority. A curfew was imposed for Austrians. On 1 August Styria received its own judicial overlord in the form of the jurist Lieutenant-Colonel H. Montgomery Hyde.
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The British were occasionally overbearing and arrogant, leaving at least one Austrian in no doubt about who the real ‘nation of lords’ were.
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One former British subaltern who entered the zone from Italy remembers thinking that ‘liberation’ was not quite the word: ‘In our eyes an Austrian was just a slightly different sort of German.’
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The arrival of the British nonetheless gave rise to considerable relief, as the Russians had run the province down. But it was a difficult situation. A local newspaper, the
Neue Steirische Zeitung
, was launched to express the British point of view. There was no food, and there was no transport to deliver bread to the suburbs and outlying villages. It was so warm that summer milk went bad on the carts leaving the dairies. There was very little meat or fat and no sugar. Potatoes were issued at a kilo a week. For anyone who had something to barter, supplements to this meagre diet could be obtained from the black market on the Volksgarten. The British authorities made several attempts to break this up.
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There was also a degree of lawlessness in what was normally a sleepy province. Over two hundred murders had been committed since the end of the war - about a quarter of these by Russians in incidents connected with rape. The historian Donald Cameron Watt served in the FSS (Field Security Service). During his time in the unit he vetted ninety-two petitions from local women wanting to marry British servicemen; investigated a
Third Man
-style theft of pharmaceuticals; and looked into the festering problem of white slavery in the DP camps.
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The character of the administration in the British Zone is lightheartedly summed up by Alan Pryce-Jones, then an intelligence officer in the British army. Austria, he said, was divided into eight zones, each one of them a separate state. Four of these were civilian states, four run by the army. ‘In the background is a ninth state, Austria, the chief function of which is to be talked about at meetings.’
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The government of the British Zone was part of John Hynd’s ‘Hyndquarters’. John Mair, who served on the Austrian Commission, is quick to point out that there was a huge difference in scale between the Austrian Commission and the German Control Council.
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Hynd was highly sympathetic but, as in Germany, largely impotent when it came to changing the government line. At a subaltern level he was supported by Sir Henry Mack, as well as by Peter Wilkinson, M. F. Cullis and N. J. A. Cheetham.
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McCreery went home in April 1946 and was replaced by General Sir James Steele.

The Graz Festival was slightly less spectacular than Salzburg, but it had a solid tradition. The British were careful to revive it in 1945, and that year Karl Böhm conducted and the Grazer were able to hear the voices of Julius Patzak and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. When the festival was staged the following year, the occupying power lent it a British flavour, and Sir Malcolm Sargent was brought in to conduct Elgar’s Second Symphony.
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Cossacks and
Domobranci

In Carinthia the British faced a thorny refugee problem resulting from the Big Three Conference at Yalta. Tito’s partisans had been fighting Croats and German- and Italian-backed
domobranci
or home guard in Slovenia. In both cases their Catholicism made them allergic to the ideologies proposed by Tito, and they thought fascism a lesser evil. When the war ended both the Croats and the
domobranci
justifiably feared reprisals. There was the usual spate of denunciations, and the wisest fled north across the revived Austrian border with their families, through the Ljubelj Pass to Viktring near Klagenfurt.
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According to one source, they went first to Hollenburg on the Drau, where they joined up with a number of Waffen-SS men.
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Tito’s partisans had also crossed the border in order to stake their claim to large parts of Carinthia.

The
domobranci
ran into their first dishevelled Tommies, who promptly exhibited the light-fingered approach most often associated with the Red Army and stole their watches.
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The British were torn between their sympathy for the Slovenians and their families, and their wartime alliance with Tito’s partisans who were now showing their colours by raping and pillaging around Klagenfurt.
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The
domobranci
thought the British would redeploy them to fight the communists. They had not reckoned with the secret arrangements made at Yalta. Sadly for them, the Cold War had not yet started.
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On 19 May 1945 the British and Tito’s men came to an agreement to repatriate all Yugoslav nationals. No differentiation was to be made. The Yugoslavs were not popular with the British and no one was prepared to stick his neck out for them.
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Under the Yalta arrangements, the British in Austria had to deal with 45,000 Cossacks requested by the Red Army, as well as the 14,000 Serbs and Croats who were being reclaimed by Tito. The Cossacks had been recruited by the Germans in southern Russia from POWs, and they had been joined by some former tsarist officers and their families. These last amounted to around 3,000 people. Some of them were not Soviet citizens, and therefore not covered by the Yalta agreement. As POWs they enjoyed protection under the Geneva Convention. This was waived.
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There was also the fact that most of the Cossacks had been fighting in the SS. Their last assignment was to fight with Schörner’s army near Prague. There were 60,000 in the British Zone: ‘They wore German uniforms, carried German arms, were commanded by German generals, and were an integral part of the German armed forces.’ One thing, however, complicated the humanitarian issue: ‘They had with them quite a few women and children.’
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Marshal Tolbukhin had asked for the Russians to be sent back and the British had agreed. The deportations were carried out by men of the 46th and 78th Divisions on orders from V Corps, following a brief visit by the minister resident at Allied HQ, Harold Macmillan, on 13 May. On 1 June, they were lured out of their camps in Spittal, Judenburg and Lienz under false pretences.
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Once they discovered what was going to happen to them they refused to budge, which led to some ugly scenes. Women and children said they preferred to be shot there and then to being handed over to the Soviets. Some of the women tied their children to their backs and jumped to their deaths in the River Drau. Tommies used rifles, bayonets and pickaxe handles to convince them to board the lorries that would take them to the frontier. When a warrant officer was bitten, the British soldiers beat some of the Cossacks unconscious. The Argylls were particularly brutal, to women and children as well.
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The British also ‘returned’ some 900 German officers, including the commander, General Helmuth von Pannwitz, who was publicly shot on Red Square in Moscow. The British were forced to use duplicitous tactics in expelling both the Cossacks and the
domobranci
, and this caused them considerable distress.

The British were in a difficult position in Carinthia anyway. All the Allies had confirmed Austria within its pre-1938 borders. On the other hand, it appears that Tito had actually backed down on the issue of repatriating the
domobranci
, but the British proceeded anyhow.
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There is a suggestion that the commanders of the British Fifth and Eighth Armies acted on their own initiatives here, fearing armed conflict with the local partisans. Nigel Nicolson, a British intelligence officer, later summed the matter up with cold-hearted clarity: ‘There were many people who felt “Well, so many millions of young men have died in this war, what does another 30,000 matter?”’
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No one, including Nicolson, knew the precise number of Cossacks in the British Zone. Only when the moment came to shove the home guardsmen into cattle trucks was he reminded of prisoners being despatched to a German concentration camp. As it was, they were told they were being transferred to camps in Italy, but they do not appear to have believed it. The British brought up tanks to make sure there was no trouble, and searched the men’s rucksacks: their last cameras, knives, fountain pens and other valuables disappeared into the Tommies’ pockets. The officers were sickened. The Welsh Guards, who had been given the job of forcing the 12,000 men back to their deaths, were reported to be on the brink of mutiny. The matter was later covered up.
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American Zone

When the Americans marched into Austria in the spring of 1945, they too saw it less as a ‘liberated’ land than as ‘a part of Germany’. Salzburg, for example, yielded without a fight on 3 May, but the Americans would tolerate no red-white-red flags. They were unsympathetic to Austrian complaints about their treatment and dismissed the stories of widespread rape as ‘Nazi propaganda’. The Austrians were an ‘enemy people’ and they had only themselves to blame.
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The famous American airman Charles Lindbergh noted in his diary that the American GIs had an interesting interpretation of the word ‘liberation’: it meant helping themselves to anything they could have without paying for it: cameras, weapons,
objets d’art
- ‘even women’.
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