Читать книгу The Red Army in Austria - Группа авторов - Страница 15

The new administration of Harry S. Truman,¹⁶ successor to the deceased President Roosevelt, had been in office for barely three weeks when the Provisional Government of Karl Renner under the aegis of the Soviet occupation power proclaimed Austria’s independence on April 27, 1945. The British government was very upset over this unilateral act against all wartime agreements. Churchill and his advisors in the Foreign Office considered the Renner government a Soviet puppet regime—like the ones established in Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria in the previous months. Whitehall did not recognize the Renner regime. The United States and its representative in Austria, General Mark Clark, acted more pragmatically and mediated throughout the summer of 1945 in what looked like an emerging Soviet-British “cold war” over the future of Austria.¹⁷

Four-power Allied control of Austria slowly emerged in the summer and fall of 1945. In July, the four occupation powers moved or retreated into their zones agreed upon in the European Advisory Commission. The powers began to implement the first Control Agreement in early July. In August, the Western powers moved into their assigned sectors in Vienna. In early September, the Allied Council began to meet in Vienna. In late October 1945, the Western powers finally recognized the provisional Renner Government. In late November, free elections were held out of which there emerged a conservative-socialist coalition government; in spite of the very disappointing vote count for the Communists (5 instead of the expected 25 percent of the vote), one Communist minister was included in the Cabinet too. Leopold Figl from the People’s Party (ÖVP) was the first elected post-war Austrian chancellor.¹⁸

The Soviets acted piqued and began to put serious economic pressure on the new Austrian government. They seized most of the important industrial assets in their zone (“German assets”) in the winter/spring of 1946 and thereby sparked the outbreak of the Cold War in Austria. The US government started to pour considerable economic aid into Austria (including the Soviet zone) to counter Soviet economic pressure and ensure the survival of Austria. Initially, much of the aid was foodstuffs, as Austrians experienced serious food shortages and famine. Eventually during later 1946 and 1947 this became financial aid to balance the trade deficits and revive industrial production and rebuild the infrastructure after the massive destruction the war had left, particularly in the cities.¹⁹

While the United States concentrated on economic recovery and the spiritual and mental renewal of the post-Second World War nation (“denazification”) during this initial phase of the Austrian occupation, the Americans increased in 1946 efforts to write an Austrian treaty (“peace treaty,” “state treaty”) to end the occupation and release the country into full independence. The chances of writing an Austrian treaty were discussed on the periphery of the Foreign Minister negotiations in Paris in the summer of 1946 when the treaties were written with Hitler’s five satellites. Austrian treaty negotiations seriously took off during the initial round of negotiations by the Deputies of the Foreign Ministers for an Austrian treaty in London (January/February 1947).²⁰ The Foreign Ministers met in Moscow (March–April 1947) to negotiate Austrian and German “peace” treaties. In the Austrian treaty talks the most difficult issues were the “German assets” questions. The Soviets wanted the Austrians to pay for the “German assets” they seized in 1945/1946 as part of their “reparations” settlement with the Western Allies at the Potsdam conference. The other unbridgeable issue in 1947 was Yugoslav border demands in Carinthia/Styria.²¹ In the 1948 Deputy negotiations in London, progress was made on both these issues. After the Tito-Stalin split, Moscow no longer supported Yugoslav territorial demands against Austria. In Austrian treaty negotiations, the Truman administration and the American negotiators strongly supported Austrian positions against maximum Soviet demands intended to weaken Austria economically.²²

The United States played a key role both in defending Austria against Soviet economic depredations and in continuing to pour extensive economic aid into Austria and Europe. During the spring of 1947 the Truman administration reacted to Communist pressure on Greece, the Communist coup in Hungary, and the ongoing negative trading balance of Western European nations (including Austria) by announcing a major initiative toward economic recovery of the continent—the European Recovery Program. Better known under the name of Truman’s new Secretary of State George C. Marshall, the “Marshall Plan” began to pour twelve billion dollars into Western Europe in 1948; the program lasted until 1952. Austria turned out to be one of the principal recipients of Marshall Funds on a per capita basis. Without the American pre-Marshall Plan and ERP economic aid, Austria would not have recovered as quickly from its wartime destruction.²³

The arrival of the Marshall Plan gave the Soviets convenient cover to consolidate their bloc in Central Europe. With the formation of the military bloc came the militarization and nuclearization of the Cold War.²⁴ As a result of the Communist coups in Hungary (1947) and Prague (1948), along with the Berlin crisis (1948–49), Western European governments felt threatened and launched a military organization—the Brussels Pact (1948). In 1949, the United States and Canada joined Western European defense efforts and initiated the North Atlantic Treaty Pact (1949). After the detonation of the first Soviet atomic device in late August 1949 and the victory of the Communists in the Chinese civil war in October 1949, the United States responded with a reassessment of its entire national security strategy, culminating in the document NSC 68. The United States quadrupled its defense spending after the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 and built an awesome nuclear arsenal alongside an increase in the conventional forces.²⁵

The militarization of American Cold War policies and strategies also proliferated into the Austrian occupation. American fears of Communist subversion in Austria gravely increased after the Czech coup (“Prague is west of Vienna”) in the American occupation element in Austria.²⁶ There were recurrent fears of a Communist putsch attempt among Austria’s political elite and these were duly reported to the American High Commission. In October 1950, the Communists tried to launch a general strike that the Austrian government considered a “putsch attempt.” The “Korean scenario” of a direct Communist attack in Austria was deemed less likely.²⁷ US High Commissioner Geoffrey Keyes began planning for building the “core” of a future Austrian Army as early as 1948. In the basic National Security Council document for Austria NSC 38/5 military security considerations became prevalent, like in the case of NSC 68.²⁸

It was the “October 1950 general strike” attempt, however, that allowed General Keyes to move forward with the “militarization” of Austria too. In 1951, the Austrian government with the help of the United States launched the “B-Gendarmerie.” Police officers were trained to become the “core” of a future Austrian Army once the State Treaty had been signed and the occupation powers withdrawn. The CIA also placed almost 100 secret arms caches in the Austrian Alps. These were designed to be activated by Austrian “guerilla forces” in the event of a Communist attack on Austria. Western military planning included a withdrawal of Western occupation forces in Austria from the Alpine region into Northern Italy in case of a Soviet attack. By the time the Austrian State Treaty was concluded in 1955, some 9,000 Austrian policemen had been trained in the “B-Gendarmerie” to constitute the core of the Austrian Army launched in 1956. Austria had become a “secret ally” of the West.²⁹ Even though through the American occupation element the Austrians came to liaise closely with NATO and NATO planning for Central Europe, the Austrian leaders never seriously considered joining NATO since the Soviets would never have evacuated their Austrian zone had Austria become a NATO member. NATO defense planning moved from a peripheral strategy on the European continent (withdrawal behind the Pyrenees and to England) in the early phase toward an eventual forward defense on the Rhine and then on the GDR border. Austrian defense planners seemed to have operated with the tacit assumption that in the event of nuclear war NATO would cover Austria too in case of a Soviet attack.³⁰

As a result of both unreasonable Soviet demands in State Treaty negotiations in 1950 (the unrelated Trieste issue and the Austrian “dried peas” debt from 1945) and an ice age in East-West relations as a result of the Korean War, Austrian State Treaty negotiations likewise entered an “ice age” of no progress. The Austrian political elites and public opinion were extremely frustrated over this lack of treaty progress and demanded an end to the occupation (“to be liberated from the liberators”).³¹ The US State Department launched the “abbreviated treaty” initiative in the winter of 1952 in order to signal to the Austrians that they had not been forgotten. In early March 1952 the “short treaty” draft was presented in a diplomatic note in Moscow. The Americans hoped that with a much shorter and simplified treaty draft the Soviets could be persuaded to sign. But given that the “short treaty” contained no provisions any more to compensate the Soviets for the “German assets” (including the vast oil industry assets) they had seized in 1945/1946, this treaty initiative was stillborn. The Soviets simply ignored the Western abbreviated treaty proposal, and the Eisenhower administration elected to office in the fall of 1952 quietly withdrew the short treaty draft in 1953 to jump-start Austrian treaty negotiations again.³² The presentation of the Austrian short treaty draft was also overshadowed by Stalin’s German initiative in March 1952 (“Stalin notes”) that promised to unify and neutralize Germany. The Austrian question was still linked willy-nilly to the resolution of the larger post-war German issues.³³

In the summer and fall of 1952 the United States experienced a very contentious presidential campaign. The Republican Party made a desperate effort to regain the White House after twenty years of presidents from the Democratic Party. The Republicans crowned the moderate Dwight D. Eisenhower as their standard bearer. Eisenhower had just returned from Europe, where he had served as NATO commander, turning NATO into an effective military alliance during his two-year tenure in Europe. In order to pacify the Republican stalwarts and anti-Communist hardliners, Eisenhower picked Richard Nixon as his running mate and John Foster Dulles as his foreign policy adviser and prospective Secretary of State. Nixon was supposed to act as the go-between with Senator Joseph McCarthy and get his anti-Communist crusade under control; McCarthy and his supporters in Congress were looking for communists inside the US government. Dulles also had a reputation as a tough ideological hardliner. During the 1952 campaign he announced a campaign to “roll back” communism and promised the “liberation of the captive peoples” in Eastern Europe. Eisenhower promised to end the war in Korea. Eisenhower was elected president in November 1952 and assumed control of the White House on January 20, 1953.³⁴