Austria in the Twentieth Century

Gino Germani, Gunter Bischof

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781412808545
• eBook ISBN: 9781351315180
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

These fourteen essays by leading Austrian historians and political scientists serve as a basic introduction to a small but sometimes trend-setting European country. They provide a basic up-to-date outline of Austria's political history, shedding light on economic and social trends as well. No European country has experienced more dramatic turning points in its twentieth-century history than Austria. This volume divides the century into three periods. The five essays of Section I deal with the years 1900-1938. Under the relative tranquility of the late Habsburg monarchy seethed a witch's brew of social and political trends, signaling the advent of modernity and leading to the outbreak of World War I and eventually to the collapse of the Habsburg Empire. The First Austrian Republic was one of the succession states that tried to build a nation against the backdrop of political and economic crisis and simmering civil war between the various political camps. Democracy collapsed in 1933 and an authoritarian regime attempted to prevail against pressures from Nazi Germany and Nazis at home. The two essays in Section II cover World War II (1938-1945). In 1938, Hitler's "Third Reich" annexed Austria and the population was pulled into the cauldron of World War II, fighting and collaborating with the Nazis, and also resisting and fleeing them. The seven essays of Section III concentrate on the Second Republic (1945 to the present). After ten years of four-power Allied occupation, Austria regained her sovereignty with the Austrian State Treaty of 1955. The price paid was neutrality. Unlike the turmoil of the prewar years, Austria became a "normal" nation with a functioning democracy, one building toward economic prosperity. After the collapse of the "iron curtain" in 1989, Austria turned westward, joining the European Union in 1995. Most recently, with the advent of populist politics, Austria's political system has experienced a sea of change departing from its political economy of a huge state-owned sector and social partnership as well as Proporz. This informed and insightful volume will serve as a textbook in courses on Austrian, German and European history, as well as in comparative European politics.

III. THE SECOND REPUBLIC

Reconstruction – A ” New Deal” for Austria: The Kaprun hydroelectric power plant built largely with Marshall Plan funds for the electrification and industrialization of the country.

Source: Austrian Institute for Contemporary History, Vienna

Allied Plans and Policies for the Occupation of Austria, 1938-1955

Bischof Günter

“There is no political entity in European history more dominated by forces from the outside than Austria” (Friedrich Heer)

A Case of Rape or Seduction? The 1938 Anschluβ and Its Aftermath

Allied wartime planning for postwar Austria had to confront a key problem early on: how to interpret the “Anschluβ” of March 1938 (the Nazi invasion and annexation of Austria). Undoubtedly, Hitler’s military invasion of Austria on 12 March was an act of force; international law was broken as it was in the invasion of Czechoslovakia and Poland in 1939. As such, it was an important event in Europe’s descent into World War II since democratic nations failed to confront Hitlerite aggression (a policy that would quickly be denounced as “appeasement”). During the war, Allied leaders felt that letting Austria down in 1938 was a fateful mistake which sent the wrong signal to Hitler; this needed to be corrected.

Careful historical study of the Anschluβ has demonstrated that it was a highly complex and confusing historical event. It needs to be understood at least on three levels. First, there was the seizure of power of local government by Austrian Nazis in the provincial capitals prior to the German invasion. Second, Austrian Nazi leaders, who had been appointed to the last cabinet of Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg upon direct pressure from Hitler in the infamous meeting at Berchtesgaden, seized power in Vienna on the evening of 11 March, hours before the German Wehrmacht crossed the border. Third, the imperialist invasion of the German Army on 12 March completed the fait accompli of the previous night. But the cheerful giddiness of untold numbers of Austrians welcoming the German Army columns and, later, Adolf Hitler himself left a bad impression. It suggested to the world that many Austrians supported the Anschluβ of Austria to the Third Reich, which Hitler announced to the world in Vienna on 13 March. Some scholars think that, given how ill-prepared the German Army was for an Austrian invasion and the chaotic advance of their divisions into Austria, determined resistance by the much smaller Austrian Army could have thrown the German invaders into even bigger disarray (Lassner). The German advance could have been retarded for a few days, if not stopped.

Provisional Chancellor Kar Renner, “founding father” of the two Austrian Republics, in an early meeting with the deputy high commissioners of the four occupation powers in Vienna (1945).

Source: National Archives, College Park, MD (#111-SC-220741)

Such resistance, of course, did not happen. Yet it would have made Austria ’s case for victimization during the war and independence after the war more credible.

At the time, international observers spoke of the “rape ” of Austria. Yet British voices of caution in particular proffered a more complex view: “It should be remembered that Austria yielded with so little opposition and afterwards accepted her violator with such enthusiasm that it was legitimate to wonder whether it was a case of rape or seduction.” Another high Foreign Office official remarked: “We may argue about the percentages in Austria that wanted or did not want the‘Anschluβ’ with a Germany Nazi or pre-Nazi, but we are always left with a more or less considerable residue that did want it” (both citations in Bischof/1999). The fact of the matter is that the British quickly recognized the Anschluβ de facto and de jure. The Americans recognized it de facto by not resisting Hitler’s incorporation of Austria into the Third Reich, but never explicitly de jure (Keyserlingk). This allowed the State Department to later proclaim pragmatically that the United States never recognized the Anschluβ. The French approached the Anschluβ with similar ambiguity. Even though the French had the strongest armed forces on the European continent, they failed to confront Hitler militarily over the invasion of Austria as they did in the case of Hitler’s pressure on Czechoslovakia in 1938 and invasion of Poland. Such failure of nerves in 1938, with its fateful consequences for the abysmal “fall of France” in June 1940 (French historians call 1940 “l’abime”), left the French with a deep-seated “Anschluβ trauma” for years to come (Angerer).

Austrians during the war were both victims of Hitlerite aggression and contributors and accessories to Hitlerite war crimes; they languished and died in the Gestapo’s jails and the T–4 euthanasia killing machine and were murdered in the SS’s concentration camps; Austrians were “sacrificed” in large numbers in the Wehrmacht’s war of aggression and perished under the hail of Allied bombs. A younger generation of scholars has vigorously pointed out in the past twenty years that Austrians were also often eager perpetrators of war crimes. Vienna after the Anschluβ became a “model” for dehumanizing its Jewish population for the Altreich. The Viennese expropriated (“ayranized”) Jewish property on a massive scale and Invented enormous skullduggery to force Jewish emigration—and thus radicalized German anti-Jewish policies. Austrians played a prominent role in the implementation of the “final solution.” Mauthausen concentration camp outside Linz, along with its dozens of subcamps, became one of the most murderous camp systems inside the Third Reich. In Castle Hartheim outside Linz, some 18,000 Austrian handicapped people were killed in the Nazi “euthanasia” program by Austrians. In the final weeks of the war, Jews were murdered in cold blood by ordinary Austrians. The Jews were employed as slave labor to build defenses against the Red Army, or embarked on “death marches” to Nazi concentration camps. These crimes committed in the final days and weeks of the war stand for one of the ghastliest chapters of Austria’s World War II history. Numerous Austrians were “bystanders” to these events as they had been in the course of numerous Nazi atrocities committed in the Ostmark throughout the war. A majority of Austrian public opinion supported the Hitler regime until its bitter end (Bukey). Half a million of Austrian fellow travelers in the Nazi party allowed Hitlerite Germany to build its firm grip on Austrian society during the war.

The Austrian government after the war quite understandably put the best spin on these ambiguous events of 1938 and Austrians’ subsequent roles during World War II. It eagerly jumped on the “rape-of-Austria” thesis (Austrians as victims and resisters) rather than acknowledge the “seduction-of-the-Austrian-coquette” view (Austrians welcoming the Nazi invasion and becoming accomplices of Nazi war crimes). Austrian history during World War II is marked by a complex mix of Austrians being both victims and perpetrators. It was never either/or. Austria was never the exclusive victim of Hitlerite Germany that the Allies maintained in their wartime Moscow Declaration and the Austrian government eagerly echoed after the war, taking the high ground. Austria’s best legal minds constructed the “occupation thesis” right after the war, shrewdly putting the best spin on Austria’s role during the war (Stourzh). It maintained that Austria was invaded in 1938 and occupied during the war and thus seized to exist as a state—it was wiped out on the map of Europe during the war. Austria was re-established as a state within its borders on 10 March 1938, with the “declaration of

independence” by the Provisional Government of Karl Renner. This new Austrian republic (Second Republic) rose like a phoenix from the ashes of history and could not be burdened with any Nazi war crimes (although Austrians who may have been involved committing such crimes would be punished individually like Ernst Kaltenbrunner and Arthur Seyss-Inquart at the Nuremberg Trials). Austria, therefore, would not have to pay reparations to states overrun by Hitlerite aggression or restitution to Jews and other victims of the Nazi killing machine. Legally, this “occupation doctrine” came to prevail over the “annexation thesis,” which held that Austria was “only” annexed in 1938—it maintained its existence as a state and international legal entity, but this statehood lay dormant during the war. As such it would have to shoulder responsibility for Nazi war crimes and pay reparations and restitution to victims.

The success of the occupation doctrine gave credence to an Austrian historical memory that arose after the war and dominated thought on the issue until the 1980s:

In March 1938 Austria was occupied and annexed by Germany against its will; it was liberated in April/May 1945 by Austrian resistance fighters and the Allies. The years 1938 and 1945 were described as a period of foreign rule and, as far as Austria’s role and participation in the war was concerned, these were portrayed as a period of resistance and persecution, of the nation’s fight for its liberation. (Uhl in CAS vol. 5)

Between Responsibility and Rehabilitation: Allied Planning for Postwar Austria, 1942-45

As the Allied armies marched into Central Europe towards victory, the Allied planners in Washington and London were cognizant of Austria’s ambiguous international status. They were aware of the Austrians’ modest resistance record and culpability in Nazi war crimes. But they also knew that they needed to ignore some of Austria’s contributions to Hitler’s war of aggression and extermination, if they wanted to re-establish an independent and viable Austrian nation. They were particularly interested in supporting “all appropriate means of fostering the growth of pronounced Austrian national feeling along democratic lines” (Mitten in CAS vol. X). Both reawakening Austrian identity and making the economy viable would effectively promote the revival of Austria. In negotiating Austria’s future international status, the Allied powers soon encountered serious disagreements among themselves.

Anglo-American wartime planning for postwar Austria was part and parcel of their rethinking the future of Germany and East Central Europe. It revolved around three basic options: 1.) in early plans, Austria was a sideshow in a Carthaginian peace with radical German dismemberment, 2.) Austria as part and parcel of Eastern European integration (con/federation and/or customs union schemes), or 3.) the re-establishment of an independent Austria. All options had in common both the goals of drastically weakening Germany after the defeat of National Socialism and containing communism in Eastern Europe. Anglo-American expert planning was started early in the war by the “sister institutions” the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London and the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. By 1942/43, these expert staffs were formally incorporated and broadened in the Foreign Office and the State Department—the “Foreign Office Research Department” and State’s “Advisory Committee on Postwar Foreign Policy.” There was a big institutional difference in the wartime governing processes in London and Washington. Whereas in Whitehall’s very structured wartime planning process, expert plans eventually filtered up into the highest policy-making bodies and most suggestions were eventually adopted by the Cabinet and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, in Washington’s chaotic wartime administrative environment and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s polycratic governing style, much of the planning expertise gathered dust in drawers and never was officially utilized by higher decision-making bodies.

The “Big Three” were on top of the policy-making pyramid, yet had very different approaches to reordering Europe after the war. Roosevelt had a tendency to procrastinate on difficult political decisions during the war. He wanted to win the war first and then embark on the political reordering of Europe. He was confident he could do business with “Uncle Joe” (Stalin) after the war. Churchill, on the other had, knew that the military advance of the armies would determine the political landscape of postwar Europe; he made old-fashioned spheres-of-influence deals with Stalin, which was repugnant to the Americans. Stalin certainly was convinced that armies in place would dictate political outcomes and fashioned his strategy accordingly.

By 1943 Austria was left “hanging between East and West” in Anglo-American planning. Should it remain part of a South German state, or a member of a future Danube confederation (“Danubia”)? While American wartime planners initially treated the Austrian question as an appendix to German dismemberment schemes, they soon came to accept that Germany should not be rewarded for its aggression by leaving Austria in the German sphere after the war. The various federation and customs unions’ schemes from the interwar period that American officials and experts dug up in their brain-storming sessions as models for a future Eastern European confederation did not hold much promise either, as the Soviets were expected to determine the future of East Central Europe once the Red Army liberated these areas. So Austrian independence emerged by 1943 as the most realistic option. Prescient State Department officials suspected that Austrian nationality might be crystallizing, and Austrians were learning their lessons about “Prussians” from their incorporation into the “Third Reich.” One American diplomat noted that “he looked forward to a future of Austria with a status possibly analogous to Switzerland” (Cannon cited in Bischof, Austria in the First Cold War 23).

It was the junior British Foreign Office diplomat Geoffrey Harrison who contributed the lion’s share to the notion of reestablishing a politically independent and economically viable postwar Austria. His basic 1943 memorandum “The Future of Austria” presented the most focused discussion of the Austrian question in World War II. The first sentence gave the cue other nations would follow in interpreting Austria’s role: “Austria was the first free country to fall victim to Nazi aggression” The memorandum envisioned a two-staged process (Stourzh): first, the re-establishment of an independent Austria after the war; second, the possibility of Austria joining an East Central European (con) federation sometime in the future, which was Churchill’s favorite option. In 1943 many British officials in the propaganda departments thought that Germany was ripe for collapse. With a major statement

in favor of an independent Austria, they hoped to rouse the spirit of resistance in Hitler’s “Danube and Alpine Gaus” and thus hasten the collapse of Germany. But by dangling the carrot of postwar independence, they also used the stick of reminding the Austrians that their fate would largely depend on their own actions.

These ambiguities about Austria’s postwar position were carried into the major Allied wartime statement on postwar Austria, the key “Moscow Declaration.” The initial British drafts reflected the equivocations of planners and the progress from a major propaganda statement to a basic political document (Stourzh). Austria was termed the “first free country to fall victim to Nazi aggression.” Even though the British had recognized the Anschluβ, for postwar purposes they now considered it “null and void.” They wished to reestablish a “free and independent” Austria, but wanted it later to associate with neighboring states. But after the carrot came the stick: “The Austrian people must, however, remember that they have a responsibility which they cannot evade, and that in the final settlement account will taken of the part they play in assisting to expel the German invader.” While historians later christened this final paragraph the “guilt clause,” British diplomat Geoffrey Harrison who drafted this declaration on Austria, rejected that interpretation. It was simply “a warning to the Austrians that they must earn the restoration of their independence.” The American State Department accepted the British draft, but cautioned the British that future Austrian independence should not be conditioned on future “association with neighboring states.” The Soviets rejected any reference to future Eastern European federations outright just as the Americans had anticipated.

The amended British draft declaration was discussed in the crucial Moscow Conference of Foreign Ministers in later October 1943. A drafting subcommittee deliberated the British draft without any references to Eastern federations or Danubian schemes like the Soviets had demanded. But the Soviet representative also put further teeth in the draft by insisting that “Austria” and not “Austrians” had to shoulder responsibility. The Anglo-American representatives recognized that the Soviets indeed tried to saddle the international legal subject Austria with “full political and material responsibility for the war.” Moscow was laying the groundwork for demanding

reparations from an independent Austria after the war. The Foreign Ministers accepted the revisions and published their Declaration on Austria as Annex 6 of the Moscow Conference Protocol on I November 1943.

When the Soviet archives began to open after the end of the Cold War, it became clear that the wartime Soviet Foreign Ministry set up a small planning staff of its own, headed by former Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov. These planners rejected all British Eastern European confederation plans because they correctly suspected that the Western powers were trying to build a conservative-Catholic glacis as a new cordon sanitaire against Communist expansionism. All such Western political and economic Danubian blocs “would be instruments of anti-Soviet policy.” Stalin expected the continent fragmented and weakened at the end of the war. This would make him the arbiter of the Europe (Zubok et al.). Even before the Red Army created faits accomplis, he expected Eastern Europe to be the Soviet sphere of influence. In the infamous “percentage agreement” of October 1944, Churchill accepted this Soviet sphere and sealed the fate of Eastern Europe by conceding it to Soviet influence (Roosevelt, who did not come to this Moscow meeting, tacitly accepted this division of Europe as well). Austria was not part of the “percentage agreement,” for Moscow did not expect it to be in its sphere of influence. Austria would be independent; Moscow’s planners expected it to be part of a mid-European neutral zone.

The French were not represented during the Moscow meetings but Charles de Gaulle, the leader of the “Free French” committee in Algiers, acted as if France, which in 1943 was still occupied by Hitler’s armies, were a great power. De Gaulle was determined to reestablish France’s great power status. De Gaulle also accepted that Stalin would control Eastern Europe. Independent of De Gaulle, a study group of diplomats in Paris were thinking about the postwar order. In the case of Austria, they hoped to re-establish an independent and neutral Austria. Two weeks after the Moscow Conference of Foreign Ministers (where the French were not represented), De Gaulle’s Algiers Committee issued its own statement on Austria on 16 November 1943. The French declaration was positive and unambiguous. Without any “responsibility clauses,” the French were looking forward to the re-establishment of an

independent Austria. The French intended to treat Austria much better than Germany after the war and insiste...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• I. WORLD WAR 1 AND THE FIRST REPUBLIC
• II. WORLD WAR II
• III. THE SECOND REPUBLIC
• Select Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Index