After the Reich (7 page)

The women of Vienna were not so enthusiastic, to say the least. Joseph Goebbels had made it abundantly clear what would happen to them. Some people dismissed his warnings as ‘terror propaganda’, but it was sadly true that the Red Army raped wherever they went. They even raped Russians and Ukrainians. The worst and most aggravated rapes were perpetrated against the women of the enemy - first the Hungarians, then the Germans. Bulgarian women, however, were spared some of the worst excesses, possibly because Russians and Bulgarians generally feel empathy for one another. The Red Army raped Yugoslav women too, although they were on the same side. It was not likely that they would spare the Viennese just because the Moscow Declaration had made them ‘victims of fascism’.

There has been much discussion of why the Russians raped and murdered so many women on their march to the River Elbe. They were certainly egged on by Ehrenburg and other Soviet propagandists who saw rape as an expression of hatred, and therefore good for morale. Soviet soldiers had also been shown pictures of the Nazi victims of Majdenek, where the dead had simply been identified as ‘Soviet citizens’. The Germans had been in Russia; they had burned their towns and villages and posed as a
Herrenvolk -
a nation of lords.
^g
The Slavs were racially inferior, no better than helots.
^h
In the circumstances rape must have seemed an irresistible form of vengeance against these ‘superior’ women and the best way to humiliate them and their menfolk. The worst offenders, it seems, were soldiers from Belorussia and the Ukraine - areas invaded by the Germans. The older soldiers and those having higher education were the least likely to rape. The higher the standard of living the Russian soldiers encountered, the more they raped. They were disgusted by the plenty, the comfortable houses and the well-stocked larders they found, which stood in such contrast to the poverty they knew from home.
¹
The manor house or castle was particularly prone.

Commanders generally turned a blind eye to the rapes. When the Ukrainian Jewish intellectual Lev Kopelev tried to intervene to save a German woman from a group of rampaging soldiers, he was accused of ‘bourgeois humanism’ and imprisoned for nine years.
²
It was only much later that any punishment was handed out. The reason why Russian generals accepted such appalling lack of discipline was that rape was condoned at the very top. Stalin told the Yugoslav communist leader Milovan Djilas, ‘Can’t he understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometres through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle?’
³
Added to the semi-official sanction, the Red Army was sex-starved. Its soldiers had been fighting for four years, and in most cases they had not received compassionate leave. The raping became worse again after 23 June 1945, when many female soldiers were sent back to Russia. It became a part of everyday life in the remote villages of Burgenland and Lower Austria where it continued until the end of 1946 or the beginning of 1947.
⁴

The Germans had been pulling out from the 6 April 1945, and they took most of the police with them. They had been made up of elderly soldiers anyhow, mostly unfit for service at the front. The real Viennese police had been incorporated into the SS and sent to Russia. The departure of the ersatz police exposed the city to even greater dangers when the looting started. Later an auxiliary squad was formed by the Russians and issued with armbands, but by then the damage had been done. It was not only the police who had vanished: the prudent Nazis had also quit the city, leaving their homes at the mercy of the plunderers.
⁵

The Red Army appeared in the wake of the retreating Germans. The Viennese were in the dark. The wireless had ceased to function and the last newspapers appeared on 7 April - some were printed on the 8th, but they were not distributed. There was then a total news breakdown until communications were restored with the issue of the communist-backed
Neues Österreich
on the 15th. All that remained was Mundfunk - a play on
Rundfunk
or radio station, but meaning word of mouth, or gossip.
⁶
‘On the 7th the Red Army occupied the giant Anker bakery in Favoriten, cutting off the city from its main source of bread. For the next ten days the Viennese were reduced to 250 grams of bread each daily. It got worse: citizens had to make do with 500 grams to a kilo of bread a week: ‘A slice of bread was a considerate present.’
⁷

On 8 April there was a rumour that the Russians had reached the Zentralfriedhof or main cemetery. On that day the economist Eugen Margarétha was still living off his well-stocked larder: he had a slap-up Sunday lunch of ‘wonderful’ potato soup with vegetables and meat, a plain pork schnitzel, which was a little too salty, and
risipisi
,
ⁱ
which his wife had not salted, to compensate for the pork. There was a cream dessert and Turkish coffee. After that he smoked a Swiss cheroot.
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Margarétha lived in the Bossigasse in St Veit in the plush suburb of Hietzing. There were still SS units operating in the centre. The next day he noted a Russian scratching at the door opposite. Then he heard the sound of rifle butts hammering on his own door. The Czech-speaking housekeeper Franek was sent to deal with them. A whole troop of Russians came in carrying their heavy machine guns. They disappeared into the cellar and then went upstairs, where they took up positions, firing at the SS from the windows.

Margarétha noted in his diary that they were ‘nice chaps’. A Russian NCO gave Franek six cigars after he had assured him the householders were not ‘Germanski’ but Czechs. One of the soldiers took a fancy to Franek’s watch. The housekeeper pleaded that he was a poor man and had but one watch. Another soldier told his comrade to give it back. Most of the shooting came from the Russians. There was just a little desultory gunfire from the SS. When the Russians departed, Margarétha went upstairs to find they had broken around twenty window panes. They had helped themselves to food and cigarettes. They had also wrecked Margarétha’s precious typewriter, and broken the wireless set and the bathroom scales. In one bedroom the mirror on the dressing table had been smashed with a bayonet. They had cut the wires on the telephone and smashed it. It hadn’t functioned for six weeks. They had taken two bicycles. ‘All in all the soldiers were not wild but disciplined . . . Really many worse things might have occurred.’ Later he was able to replace some of the broken panes with the glass from his picture collection, and his ‘remembrance certificate’ from the Great War.
⁹
Elsewhere the first wave of Red Army troops considerately warned Austrian civilians about the occupation troops that followed. They advised them to bury their valuables.
¹⁰

The Viennese received the Red Army with a degree of innocence. It was to be their first experience of occupation since Napoleon’s time. In the Josefstadt the Russians were ‘joyfully and amicably’ greeted ‘by women and girls who sometimes kissed or embraced them, a warm-heartedness that was often misunderstood’.
¹¹
Josef Schöner had been a member of Austria’s diplomatic corps before March 1939, but his distaste for the Nazis led to his retirement. The new broom retained very few of the Austrian elite: in the Foreign Office only 10 per cent of the officials continued to serve under the Nazis. Schöner survived by working for his parents, who had a number of restaurants and cafés in the city. They had made the mistake of applying for Nazi Party membership. Schöner did not. After the war he was ambassador to Bonn and finally London.

On 10 April Schöner noticed a brace of Russians wearing fur hats in the Siebensterngasse in the 7th Bezirk. The German army was withdrawing from the centre. He watched the behaviour of the locals. They tried to speak to the new arrivals using any Slavic language they knew, generally Czech, and offered them cigarettes, which the Russians refused. ‘The longing for peace is so widespread that no one believes there will be prolonged resistance in Vienna.’
¹²
Schöner was struck by the appearance of the Russians. Many of them carried swords, but none seemed to possess a scabbard. The Viennese were remarkably at ease: ‘everywhere gay, warm faces, there is not a hint of fear or mourning’. The Russians asked if the houses in the street concealed any soldiers or Germans. The Viennese replied with the pride of the liberated: no, just Austrians.
¹³

As soon as it became clear that the German army had abandoned an area, looting would begin. Margarétha thought it had started in Penzing, in the 14th Bezirk, but it spread to neighbouring Hietzing where the ‘mob’ emptied the grocer Meinl and the fashion shops Wallace and Oser. A neighbour, the engineer Kienast, complained they had also stolen his gold watch, and given him an inferior one in return.
¹⁴
There were relatively few Austrian men about: those aged between twenty and fifty were generally away and there were huge numbers of foreign workers in the city who had been drafted in by Hitler’s labour organisation to allow all good Germans to go to war. They were suspected of playing a major role in the looting. In Favoriten or Floridsdorf, on the north bank of the Danube, you were more likely to hear French or Greek than German. After 9 April the foreign workers were armed, and sometimes identifiable by armbands. The communist Franz Honner estimated there were as many as 700,000 of these in Vienna in April 1945 and that the bulk of the looting had been carried out by them, but he did not discount the Viennese population. Together with Austrian natives the foreigners formed the ‘mob’ that performed ‘various acts of violence’. Sometimes they would strip the premises clean, at other times they were more selective. A building used by the Hitler Youth was denuded even of its decorations. The veteran socialist politician Adolf Schärf
^j
was anxious to point out that the looters were often men of good standing, ‘even people who prided themselves on their titles of nobility in their everyday life’.
¹⁵

Schöner noticed it first at the department store Herzmansky in the Mariahilferstrasse. He thought the Viennese more reprehensible. A few foreign workers joined in. They had already been active in sacking the outlying suburbs.
¹⁶
Schöner watched sick at heart as bales of cloth, suits and women’s dresses came flying out of the building. One man was not in the slightest embarrassed to try on a stolen suit in a doorway. The day before the same mob had attacked the food shops on the Gürtel, the ‘belt’ road surrounding the inner boroughs or
Bezirke.
‘So it wasn’t the Russians, but the dear Viennese themselves.’
¹⁷
A boon to the Russians and the looters were the big wine houses in Döbling and Heiligenstadt. The Russians emptied the great tun in Klosterneuburg and then sprayed it with machine-gun fire when it would provide them with no more solace.
¹⁸
People were seen carrying off wine from Heiligenstadt in large vessels.
¹⁹

Schärf had been in hospital when the city fell. The patients had been transferred to the hospital cellars. He noted the mendaciousness of his fellow citizens during those days. One of his fellows was a butcher from Ottakring, who later put it about that he had been a leading member of the resistance and had shot at the SS from under a car. The truth was that he had been lying on his back at the time, like Schärf. There was a gentle ‘revolution’ in the hospital: pictures of Hitler were taken off the walls and the hospital’s administration was arrested. The military personnel had discarded their uniforms and fled. On 10 April a Russian soldier appeared in the courtyard. The war was over.
²⁰

Schärf made his way home on his daughter’s arm. All the jewellers’ shops in the Alserstrasse had been looted. A curfew had been imposed, starting at 8 p.m. No one was clear as to whether Vienna had fallen. In the morning of the 9th the Russians had advanced to the Gürtel. By the evening German soldiers had abandoned the city centre. This gave the Austrian resistance movements their cue and they proudly emerged from the woodwork wearing red, white and red armbands. The most active of these had been the small group headed by Major Carl Szokoll, three of whose members had beenf hanged shortly before the Red Army occupied the city. Szokoll takes the credit for saving Vienna from Hitler’s ‘Nero Order’, which required the city’s destruction, but in reality the German army was in no position to carry out the order. Sepp Dietrich joked that his Sixth Tank Army was so named because he had but six tanks. Most soldiers had no more than a few rounds of ammunition.
²¹

The resistance made the Palais Auersperg their headquarters. The red-white-red Austrian flag flew from the roofless Rathaus. In the Schöner household they ‘ate in a very light-hearted mood at midday and drank a toast to our beloved Austria’. That afternoon the main body of Red Army troops followed the advance guard into the city. Again it was a remarkable sight. They came in every form of transport, horse-drawn coaches and dogcarts. They held harmonicas and waved to the people as they passed. The Viennese waved their handkerchiefs and doffed their hats. The Russians shouted and blew kisses at the women.
²²