The Red Army in Austria. Группа авторов
policy, it was for a long time not clear to Washington that a commitment to Austria would be so extensive. Initial disinterest in Austria during the Second World War gradually gave way to the increasingly identified strategic importance of Austria in Central Europe for the entire “old continent.” In the early Cold War Austria was a gateway between East and West and in this way a direct setting for disputes between the systems. Following the founding of NATO in 1949, the Alpine region took on a varied importance in the strategic defense plans of the alliance. After initial neglect of Austria in the defense concepts, this changed above all as a result of French pressure. For Paris it was first and foremost a question of being able to commence with military defense as far as possible from French territory in the event of an attack from the east, in order to prevent a repeat of the trauma of the Second World War. In the years after 1948, NATO’s defense line moved year for year further forward—initially from the Pyrenees and the Atlantic coast to the Rhine and then the East German border. Following the so-called putsch attempt in October 1950 in Austria, the strategic importance of the Austrian Alpine region for the defense of NATO territory also became clear for the American military in Austria and the Pentagon planning. Bischof traces the significance of Austria in these strategic considerations and in American policy and thus embeds Austrian post-war history in the East-West confrontations of the early Cold War.
In the second part of the book, the contributions from Aleksei Filitov, Stefan Karner, and Peter Ruggenthaler provide an overview of Soviet planning on Austria during the Second World War and 1945. The main aim here was the reestablishment of Austria as an independent but “smaller and weaker” state in its pre-war borders, which was designed above all to bring about a weakening of Germany. The Soviet Union refused to be a party to plans to unite states in a confederation (with Vienna as a potential capital city), as propagated above all by Winston Churchill, in order not to create any significant power factor in the Balkans or Central Europe, who, like centuries before, could become a direct rival of Moscow. With the reestablishment of Austria as an independent (small) state, the Soviet leadership pursued above all the aim of a sustained weakening of Germany. The establishment of the provisional state government under Karl Renner on April 27, 1945, confronted the Western Allies with a fait accompli, as Stalin had acted in this matter independently and against the agreements reached in the European Advisory Commission. They suspected—correctly—an attempt to set up a people’s front government, like previously in the central and eastern European states, and believed that Renner ran the risk of degenerating into a Soviet puppet.
In his essay, Peter Ruggenthaler reconstructs Stalin’s Austria policy from the “Anschluss” in 1938 to his death in 1953. On the basis of documents mostly made available for the first time in the framework of the project on the “Red Army in Austria,” a clear picture emerges. From the beginning, the Soviet occupation of eastern Austria was for Moscow of strategic importance for its policy on Eastern Europe, guaranteeing as it did the maintenance of troops in Romania and Hungary. For this reason, the Austrian State Treaty was not signed in 1949, in spite of supposed preparations for a troop withdrawal. Stalin allowed negotiations to be broken off. The human factor also played a role here. The Soviet dictator was not prepared to render Tito a service. A withdrawal of Soviet troops from the vicinity of Tito’s Yugoslavia could have been celebrated by the Western powers as a great victory. In light of Soviet files, the benefit of the Soviet occupation is clearly shown, the maintenance of which was importance to the Kremlin as long as it remained advantageous. Thus, Stalin’s death should not necessarily be regarded as a break in Soviet policy on Austria.
Michail Prozumenshchikov addresses the closing phase of Soviet Austrian policy up to the signing of the Austrian State Treaty on May 15, 1955, in Vienna’s Belvedere; the withdrawal of occupation troops until October 25, 1955, and the neutrality decided on by the Austrian national council the following day. He emphasizes the economic importance of the Soviet occupation, which failed to yield any gains after 1953, however, and traces the discussion within the Soviet leadership, according to which Khrushchev was strongly supported by Foreign Trade Minister Mikoyan against Foreign Minister Molotov, who had long blocked a solution to the Austrian question.
In the third part of the book, several central aspects of the ten-year period of Soviet occupation in Austria are illuminated. Walter M. Iber first of all addresses Soviet economic policy toward Austria, which was governed by the pursuit of “booty” and by exploitation. This policy was initially characterized following the war by dismantling operations, from autumn 1945 by the establishment of exterritorial Soviet economic bodies (the Administration for Soviet Property in Austria, USIA, and the Soviet Mineral Oil Administration, SMV), which administered the “German property” confiscated by the occupying power in accordance with the Potsdam Agreements. Of particular importance was the SMV, as it administered in Lower Austria the third largest oil field in Europe (after the USSR and Romania). As a result of the Moscow Memorandum of April 1955 and the completion of the State Treaty on May 15, 1955, the Soviet economic administrations were ultimately transferred—for extensive release payments—to the Republic of Austria.
Harald Knoll and Barbara Stelzl-Marx examine in their contribution the fate of the around 2,400 Austrian civilians who were arrested by Soviet organs in eastern Austria. More than half of them were subsequently sentenced by military tribunals to generally long prison terms and taken to the USSR; more than 150 were executed. They were accused of illegal weapons possessions, war crimes, crimes against the Soviet occupying power, membership of “Werewolf” units at the end of the war, and especially espionage. Against the backdrop of the Cold War, the fourfold-occupied Austria, and above all Vienna, developed into a hub of espionage activity; here East clashed with West. A large proportion of those civilians convicted were rehabilitated by the Main Military Public Prosecutor of the Russian Federation in the 1990s, among them the vast majority of those Austrian victims of Stalin who were shot.
Barbara Stelzl-Marx addresses a topic that remains to this day taboo: after the Second World War, so-called “children of occupation” were born all over Austria and Germany as a result of voluntary sexual encounters between local women and foreign occupation troops, but also as a consequence of rape. They were often regarded as “children of the enemy” and—together with their mothers—frequently discriminated against. In accordance with Stalin’s policy, weddings between Soviet soldiers and Austrian women were practically impossible. Most soldiers or officers were even sent back to the USSR when their liaisons with local women became known. For several decades hardly any contact was feasible. Thus, the majority of “Ivan’s children” in Austria grew up as a fatherless generation. Many of them have been in search of their biological fathers for several decades, regardless of the difficulty of obtaining any reliable information. This is linked with the desire to explore one’s own identity and look for one’s personal roots.
NOTES
1. Manfried Rauchensteiner, Der Krieg in Österreich 1945 (Vienna: Donauland, 1985), p. 126.
2. On this see, among others, Stefan Karner and Karl Duffek, eds., Widerstand in Österreich, 1938–1945. Die Beiträge der Parlaments-Enquete 2005, Vol. 7 of Veröffentlichungen des Ludwig Boltzmann-Instituts für Kriegsfolgen-Forschung series (Graz/Vienna/Klagenfurt: Verein zur Förderung der Forschung von Folgen nach Konflikten und Kriegen, 2007).
3. Peter Sixl, Sowjetische Kriegsgräber in Österreich. SovetskiemogilyVtoroimirovoivoiny v Avstrii, Special Vol. 6 of Veröffentlichungen des Ludwig Boltzmann-Instituts für Kriegsfolgen-Forschung series (Graz/Vienna/Klagenfurt: Verein zur Förderung der Forschung von Folgen nach Konflikten und Kriegen, 2005); Peter Sixl, Sowjetische Tote des Zweiten Weltkrieges in Österreich. Namens- und Grablagenverzeichnis. Ein Gedenkbuch, Special Vol. 11 of Veröffentlichungen des Ludwig Boltzmann-Instituts für Kriegsfolgen-Forschung series (Graz/Vienna/Klagenfurt: Verein zur Förderung der Forschung von Folgen nach Konflikten und Kriegen, 2010).
4. On this see also: Günter Bischof, “Eine historiographische Einführung: Die Ära des Kalten Krieges und Österreich,” in Erwin A. Schmidl, ed., Österreich im frühen Kalten Krieg 1945–1958. Spione, Partisanen, Kriegspläne (Vienna/Cologne/Weimar: Böhlau, 2000), pp. 19–53.
5. The bilateral research project “Die Rote Armee