After the Reich (9 page)

The Germans and the Russians were still fighting on the outskirts, in the industrial areas along the Danube. Marshal Tolbukhin issued a proclamation on 12 April: the Russians were not fighting the Austrian people; they had come to restore the country as it had been before 1938. Simple Nazis, it said, would not be prosecuted; private property would be respected!
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Meanwhile the city was putting together a form of government. Schöner heard a rumour that Schärf had been named mayor. Two men wearing red-white-red armbands had indeed been to see Schärf and told him he was needed urgently at the Palais Auersperg. He found the place filled with ‘feverish activity’. The man in charge was Raoul Bumballa, head of the resistance group O5. The Russians found the Austrian resistance hard to quantify: they dissolved O5 and packed a number of military opponents of Hitler off to the Soviet Union.

It was decided that Tolbukhin could not restore the Austria of 1938 without bringing back the ‘Austro-fascists’. The men in the Palais Auersperg wanted a return to 1933. Schärf was not offered the mayor’s job - that eventually went to the Russian-speaking socialist General Körner. He was offered instead the subaltern position of mayor of Josefstadt, which he declined.
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Körner learned who the real bosses were when he tried to take possession of the Rathaus on 18 April. He found his path blocked: the Russians were searching the vast building for weapons. He was obliged to sit on a park bench until they had finished.
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The Muscovites had also checked in: Ernst Fischer, Johann Koplenig, Franz Honner and Friedl Fuernberg. For the past few years they had been living in Moscow’s Hotel Lux with the privileged German communists. Honner was an ex-intern of Wöllersdorf. He had left early to raise two ‘freedom’ battalions to form the Green Division of some 2,000 men, which had campaigned alongside Tito’s partisans in Yugoslavia. He was a former miner and shoemaker from Grünbach who had fought in the Spanish Civil War. Fischer was the intellectual and poet - the Austrian equivalent of the later cultural commissar of the Russian Zone in Germany, Johannes R. Becher - and was the son of a colonel and a staunch patriot. Fischer was expecting Stalin to allow him and his fellow communists to play a major role. He was apparently furious when he heard that the Russians had sought out the former chancellor Karl Renner and were going to allow other parties, like the hated socialists,
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to coexist with them.
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The Western Allies were also eagerly awaited: there were rumours that they would be in Vienna as early as 22 April. Schöner had heard that the Americans were already in nearby Mauer and had flown into Baden-bei-Wien.
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On 13 April the Russians had reached Linz: ‘the city that had nurtured the Führer was evacuated without a fight’. The Schöners had managed to bury a small part of their cellar in the garden. Locking the door no longer kept the Russians out - they blew in the windows. The first wave came with a Viennese gunwoman who directed them down to the cellar where they found more wine, breaking some two-litre
Doppler
bottles in the process. The next wave came through another window accompanied by cries of ‘Wino!’ The Russians had been to the banks and forced the clerks to open the safes. One of the Russians gave Schöner a RM1,000 note for a roll-up. When the family at last ran out of wine the Russians took eggs, bread and butter.
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They were still heady times. On one of his walks around the city Schöner was struck by the sight of a female Red Army soldier directing traffic in the Wiedner Hauptstrasse dressed in a very short skirt. Margarétha had admired these women too, particularly the blondes. The traffic in question was Russian carts loaded with booty. These lined the Rennweg. Cows and foals were tethered behind and the vehicles were piled high with suitcases, balalaikas, sewing machines, radios and gramophones: ‘it was the picture of a gypsy train’. The Russians had even stolen the tyres and engines of the cars. As Schöner walked on he witnessed a horse being skinned on the Wollzeile. The Stephansplatz was all burned out from the Haas Haus to the Rotenturmstrasse. The Hotel Bristol near the Opera had been gutted by fire. There were no fire engines to extinguish the flames. When the Viennese found a pump it was so weak that the water hardly made it to the first floor.
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Cardinal Innitzer’s palace had been pillaged, and the primate had fled. Schöner doffed his cap at the sight of the cathedral, denuded of its roof. It had been set alight after the departure of the Germans. ‘It is a sight that grabs everyone by the heart.’
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The Palais Auersperg had become the place to jockey for power in the provisional government. Not all the solicitors were respectable. Schöner noted that Vinzenz Schumy had swum with the tide after the Anschluss, and was more or less compromised. Yet he too was looking for a ministerial portfolio. Schöner thought the palace was full of Nazi spies. Former Pgs were looking for victims of the Nazis in the hope that they would give them a good reference once the witch-hunt started. Margarétha had been dismissed from his job, and his son had married a Mautner-Markov, a member of a prominent, ennobled, originally Jewish family. Schöner went back to his old job at the Foreign Office. The building had been badly damaged in the bombing, but it was still functioning. They put him in charge of the grandfather clocks. There were more and more signs that life was returning to normal.
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Margarétha was obliged to join a work detail. Along with the rest of the men he had to clear streets of obstacles and repair bridges. The first stint was not so bad. He worked all day and found it no more tiring than doing four hours in the garden. He came to the conclusion that the Russians were kinder to civilian workers than the Nazis had ever been. It got tougher. While he was working near his house his wife brought him a snack of a couple of sandwiches. The bread was already two weeks old, and he had to drink a lot of black coffee to swallow it. The detail worked for twenty-four hours this time. When they let him go he slept for ten hours.
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With the hostilities at an end and the Nazis gone, Margarétha and his wife joined the resistance. This presumably meant no more than that they could prove themselves to have been consistently anti-Nazi during the Third Reich. Once they had signed the register they were issued with red-white-red armbands. There was a political opening for Eugen in the fledgling, Christian democrat Austrian People’s Party or ÖVP. This was being formed from a wide base: the white- and blue-collar workers were under Leopold Kunschak and Lois Weinberger, the peasants’ league was being led by Leopold Figl and Schumy, and the middle class by Julius Raab. For the time being it was respectable to be on the left. The ‘Liberation Movement’ was made up of 50 per cent socialists, 40 per cent communists and just 10 per cent ‘bourgeois’ parties.
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Schärf was one of the men behind the recreation of the Austrian socialists. At their session on the 14 April they rejected the idea of calling it the Social Democratic Party and plumped for the Austrian Socialist Party, or SPÖ instead. That way it was hoped people would forget that it had condoned the Anschluss. It very quickly fended off Soviet-backed moves to amalgamate with the communists. Fischer had returned from Moscow with instructions to eschew Marxism-Leninism for the time being. The stress was to be on Austria: ‘The glorious Austrian past must be given its true worth . . . The Radetzky March must become a national song, sung in schools.’
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The economist Margarétha noticed that most of the shops in the 1st Bezirk were boarded up, with ‘Empty’ written on the shutters. Foreign workers were free-wheeling their carts piled high with loot. Both the Parliament building and the Ministry of Justice were partly burned out.
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Schöner too resumed his walks. On the 18th he stopped to admire a fresh Russian grave on the Heldenplatz which was festooned with flowers. Drunken Russians in the Burggasse were pummelling on doors, but the Viennese knew their game by now, and no one opened up. There were long queues outside the butchers and bakers: meat had virtually disappeared and bread was a rarity. A day or two later the Austrians’ mouths began to water when they saw a hundred or so Hungarian cows with strange horns driven through the centre of the city by Red Army soldiers.

The Viennese were making trips out to the woods with prams and wheelbarrows to gather wood and to look for wild mushrooms or crayfish. The Café Fenstergucker had been plundered again, but the raiders had not taken the schnapps. Schöner concluded that they had been robbed by the Viennese: the Russians would not have left the alcohol, and some precious tea had gone. It was generally easy to tell who robbed you for that reason. The Russians wanted drink, gold or watches. If anything else went, the authors were civilians. At the Hotel Astoria, Aunt Mili was driven to distraction by the nightly hunts for chambermaids. The Astoria was more fortunate than the Hotel Metropol, which burned down on the 19th. It had ceased to be a hotel in 1938, when it became Gestapo Headquarters.
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No one regretted its passing.

On 20 April, Hitler’s birthday, the eighty-three-year-old Graf Albert Mensdorff came into the Foreign Office to offer his services. He had been Austro-Hungarian ambassador to the Court of St James’s in 1914. Schöner recalled the count expressing very Nazi views in the Jockey Club two years before.
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He died of starvation on 15 June 1945. The Austrian Foreign Office was ready for action, although it was touch and go whether the Russians would allow its officials to do anything. Schöner had been given a pass by the city council, but another diplomat who had presented his to the Red Army sentry had seen it rudely tossed into the canal.
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The following day Schöner learned that the Americans had reached Pilsen in Czechoslovakia. Everyone was looking forward to the arrival of the Western Allies. They had all had enough of the Russians, who were certain to install Karl Renner as chancellor. Everyone chose to remember the open letter in which he had pledged his support for the Anschluss in 1938. On 23 April news of the arrest of the former German ambassador to Austria, Franz von Papen, was a cause of jubilation. He had been in Vienna in 1938: ‘he deserved something for Austria’s sake’, wrote Schöner.
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The refurbishment of Renner was Stalin’s idea. As Austria was being discussed one day he asked, ‘Where is that social democrat Renner now, the one who was a disciple of Kautsky? For years he was one of the leaders of Austrian social democracy and was, if I recall, president of the last Austrian Parliament.’
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No one knew the answer at the time, but as soon as the dust had settled the Russians had gone looking for the vintage socialist who had brought in the First Republic. They considered him the sort of soft ideologist who would allow their men to move safely behind the scenes. They didn’t trust him, and were aware that he had voiced his support for the Anschluss. They found him on 3 April when, as luck would have it, he protested about the behaviour of Soviet troops to the Russian commander in the Lower Austrian village of Gloggnitz. Gloggnitz was close to Wiener Neustadt, where the Red Army met heavy resistance for the first time. The Russians scooped him up with his family and installed him in the nearby Schloss Eichbüchl.
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Renner proceeded to heap praise on the Soviet system, and claim that ‘liberation’ by the Russians was all they - and he - had ever dreamed of. The Social Democrats, together with the Communist Party, of course, would now be in a position to provide the necessary political security.
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His puppet-status inspired distrust in the West, and he played innocent when the Americans asked him later how big a role the Russians had had in his appointment. He insisted that the Russians did not interfere with his decisions, but the American agent who saw him in August 1945 was all too aware of the Russian captain who sat in on their interview.
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There was a meeting at Renner’s Viennese home in the Wenzgasse in Hietzing on 23 April. The idea was raised of freely distributing the under-secretaries of state among the three interested parties: socialists, communists and conservatives. Renner made his first stab at a cabinet on the 24th. A controversial choice was the Muscovite Honner for minister of the interior and chief of police. It was, however, standard Stalinist practice to place a communist in this role. Joham at finance was controversial in a different way: he had been friendly with the Nazis during his time at the Credit Anstalt. Dr Gerö was nominated minister of justice. Schöner noted that he was a ‘Mischling’ - he had Jewish blood. That other Muscovite, Ernst Fischer, was also to be given a job.
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Schöner was not so unhappy about Honner. It was a ‘thankless and difficult post’ and with any luck he would prove unpopular. The Russians were pushing for the reopening of the theatres and cinemas. Because of the war damage, most of Vienna’s great cultural institutions had to make do with what space they could find. The Burgtheater performed in the Ronacher.
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The Opera had been bombed out. Klemens Krauss was appointed chief conductor amid widespread disappointment. Krauss had blotted his copybook in 1934 when he had emigrated to Germany at the time of Dollfuss’s assassination by the Nazis, and his scandalous behaviour had not been forgotten. The first post-Nazi newspaper came out, but that was a disappointment too, as it looked too much like Goebbels’s
Völkische Beobachter
- short on news and big on propaganda. It was no surprise that the editor was the communist Fischer.
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