Even before Spain, Austria witnessed the first skirmishes of the people’s war when in 1934 the working class in Vienna rebelled against fascist dictatorship. The background to this event was the collapse of the Austrian Empire after the First World War and the Wall Street crash. The ruling class was bitterly divided over how to cope. One wing favoured Anschluss – caving into Hitler’s demands for a merger. Another believed independence could still be viable if it leaned on Mussolini’s Italy as a counter-weight to German influence.1 The latter faction, the Austrofascists, adopted Italian methods, suspended Parliament and outlawed strikes.
So sharp was the conflict between the two wings that pro-Nazis murdered the Austrofascist Chancellor, Dolfuss, and attempted to seize power. Though they failed, Dolfuss’ successor, Schuschnigg, was in a precarious position. Despite their differences, however, both sides agreed that the weakness of Austrian capitalism required an intensified exploitation of labour through dictatorship.
Resistance began on 12 February 1934, when Vienna’s workers took to the barricades. Their slogan was: ‘Strike fascism down, before it crushes you …Workers, arm yourselves.’2 Four days of fighting followed during which the army bombed council housing estates and eventually quelled the opposition. A participant drew up the balance sheet: ‘Despite its defeat, the February struggle had great historical significance well beyond the borders of Austria. The German working class had capitulated to Hitler without a struggle.
Now, for the first time, workers were mounting resistance to fascism weapons in hand. They lit a beacon!’3
And in spite of the repression it burned on. For example, the August–September 1937 edition of the illegal union paper Gewerkschaft (Union) reported strikes at Austro-Fiat, a wagon works, a steel plant, glass factory, textile mill and 12 other establishments.4
Austrofascism was fatally undermined when Italy joined the Rome–Berlin Axis and gave Hitler carte blanche to take over. In
1938 Hitler made his move. He summoned Schuschnigg to his mountain retreat in Berchtesgaden and demanded annexation.
The stakes were high. As a conservative historian has suggested, even ‘24 hours of resistance, the launching of a general strike, and spontaneous mass demonstrations could have generated a common defensive struggle …’.5 Workers’ representatives were calling for exactly that. Ten days before the Anschluss they took a considerable risk and emerged from the underground to beg Schuschnigg to mobilise popular resistance to Nazism.6 All they asked was that left-wing political prisoners be freed and anti-union laws lifted.
Schuschnigg, however, recalled a fateful point Hitler made at their meeting in Berchtesgaden. Referring to the Spanish revolution, the Führer asked him: ‘Do you want to make another Spain of Austria?’7 Schuschnigg did not, and refused to co-operate with the workers’ leaders, saying this would be equivalent to ‘conspiring with Bolsheviks’.8 This left his regime isolated and unable to defend itself.
On 12 March 1938 Hitler’s forces flooded across the border. One left activist saw workers with ‘weapons in hand’ ready to fight ‘to the death’ for Austrian independence. They were met by police who taunted them: ‘Why are you still demonstrating? Schuschnigg has already abdicated.’9 This finally destroyed any hope of a united resistance. The depth of capitulation was illustrated by the fact that unlike every other country occupied by Germany, Austria had no government in exile.10 Even Karl Renner, the Socialist Party leader, advocated a ‘yes’ vote in the referendum Hitler held on annexation, to the disgust of many of his comrades.
A ‘people’s war’ against Nazism developed nonetheless, though it was conducted by a small minority for the benefit of the masses, rather than by the people themselves. Following Renner’s treachery the once solid and influential Socialist Party split.11 The breakaway Revolutionary Socialists grouped around the veteran Otto Bauer attracted some members, but most went to the Austrian Communist Party (KPÖ). Indeed six out of seven communist resisters were former socialists and they constituted 75 per cent of those tried for political opposition.12 As one historian puts it: ‘on the basis of a large sample of active members of all types of underground resistance groups … almost every Austrian actively resisting the Nazis was affiliated to the KPÖ.’13 What was left of the remaining opposition was generally Catholic orientated.14 Indeed, the only large demonstration against Nazism after Anschluss was in October 1938 under the slogan ‘Our Führer is Christ’ (rather than Hitler).15
In spite of great heroism, Austrian resistance remained splintered and weak. An example of this was the O5 organisation which made contact with the Allies towards the end of the war. Like the conservative opposition in Germany, its track record was not promising. There were many Austrofascists and monarchists in its ranks who outmanoeuvred those members who were on the left. Only partisans in Carinthia Province (who consisted mainly of Slovenians aided by Tito’s forces in Yugoslavia), and the working class resistance, gave the Nazis any real problems.
The opponents of Nazism had to deal with the additional handicap of Allied policy. In 1943 the Foreign Ministers of the USA, Russia and Britain issued this joint declaration: ‘Austria was the first free land to fall victim to Hitler’s aggression.’16 Perhaps they hoped to encourage an Austrian breakaway from Germany, but their position had dire long-term consequences. As one commentator has put it: ‘You gave us a historical out, and we grabbed it.’17 Granting all Austrians victim status meant, when the war ended, that former Austrofascists or Nazis were accorded equal status to anti-fascist resisters, in a situation where the former greatly outnumbered the latter. Post-war denazification investigators calculated that there were 100,000 Nazi members in Austria before the Anschluss, and 700,000 by 1945.18 Over the same period 5,000 Austrian resistance fighters had been killed and 100,000 arrested.19
Even before 1949, when ex-Nazi Party members were permitted to vote and became an important electoral factor, prominent politicians were using the Allies’ ‘victim theory’ to whitewash fascist crimes.
In 1945 the country’s Foreign Minister exonerated local Nazis by insisting: ‘The persecution [of Jews] was ordered by the German Reich authorities and carried out by them.’20 Renner, now elevated to Chancellor by the Russians, described Austrian anti-semitism as
‘never very aggressive’.21 Those who, in 1938, had been forced to clean Vienna’s pavements with toothbrushes under a hail of abuse from passers-by might have disagreed; but the 70,000 Austrian Jews who perished in gas chambers could not object. With such politicians in charge, it was small wonder that in 1946 an opinion poll recorded 46 per cent of Austrians opposed to the return of the tiny remnant of the Jewish population that had survived.22 There was a certain cold logic to this. Many pro-Nazi Austrians had profited from ‘Aryanisation’ of Jewish homes and property.
The disbanding of the Wehrmacht saw many thousands of Hitler’s soldiers being welcomed home to Austria as tragic victims, while resisters received little recognition, and often found it extremely
difficult even to return. An oral history of Austrian resisters records numerous examples of the US, for example, delaying travel home (because they were so frequently communists).23 Once back they had pariah status. A telling example of this was during the dedication of a ‘monument to the fallen’, an event addressed by the highest officer in the Army. He refused to allow the memory of resistance fighters to be associated with the ceremony, because ‘such people died as oath breakers and do not belong at this monument’.24
Denazification was less than thorough in Austria. In the amnesty of 1948 90 per cent of those under investigation escaped punishment.25 Post-war Austria never underwent the re-education process that occurred in Germany, and the outcome has been shocking. In 1983 a man implicated in the killing of some 10,000 civilians in the Ukraine was only blocked from becoming President of the Parliament by a petition campaign. Worse still, Kurt Waldheim, known to have been charged of war crimes by the Yugoslavs, and on the US list of suspected war criminals, was elected President in 1986.26
Testimonies by two Austrian resisters show how anti-fascists viewed the ‘victory’ of the Second World War. The first is from Josef Hindels, a prominent trade union leader who found exile in Sweden:
Despite the great, great joy I felt at the defeat of Hitler and liberation, I had many grounds to be depressed … I had hoped to return home immediately. But right through 1945 I failed, despite great efforts to get the necessary permission to return the Austria. It was only in 1946, and even then required the strenuous intervention of Kreisky [a future Chancellor] to obtain permission for me. That was the first disappointment. The second was that a provisional government was created in Austria with Karl Renner at its head. I had considered that utterly impossible
… To me Renner was the man who, in 1938, had welcomed the annexation of Austria by Hitler’s Germany. Ever since then I had considered him to be politically dead.27
The second comes from Bruno Furch who was released from a concentration camp in 1945:
A damned, truly vile game began to be played by the two main parties in Austria [the Socialist and People’s Parties]. I say it quite bluntly. They used the legacy of Nazi rule and fascism in their heads and their hearts for the purposes of fighting the Cold War in the West. The game was to use the fundamental
legacy of anti-Communism and anti-Sovietism for their own anti-Communist ends, by keeping it alive, if not in power. It was not merely to court the votes of 600,000 Nazi Party members – because that only happened in 1949 during the next election. No, it had already begun in 1945. So it was not only about votes but about harnessing this force from the very beginning.
In one of the housing estates we had a young Jewish comrade who in 1946 returned from exile in England to his home. But he committed suicide. What happened was he had fallen in love with the daughter of a high up socialist official... Her parents were against the relationship and against any marriage because he was Jewish. The young man simply could not cope with the idea that after the victory over Hitler, that anti-Semitism of this sort could still exist in the higher ranks of the re-born Socialist Party.28 It is difficult to imagine a wider gulf between the goals of imperialism and of anti-fascism. The readiness of the Allies to collaborate with both the pre-Anschluss Austrofascists, and former Nazis in the Cold War era, would poison post-war Austrian politics for decades.