The battle for Vienna

On the evening of 2 April 1945 Soviet tanks rolled into Wiener Neustadt, a town of aircraft factories ruined by bombing, lying less than 50 kilometres south of Vienna. That same day Vienna radio denied rumours that the capital of the former Austria had been declared an open city. Over the next four days the troops of Marshal Fyodor Tolbukhin’s 3rd Ukrainian Front approached Vienna from three sides, and on 6 April fighting began in its southern suburbs which, a week later, ended with the capture of the city.

The beginning of April was not, however, the beginning of the offensive itself. The advance that Soviet historiography calls the Vienna offensive had been under way since 16 March: it had broken the front in western Hungary and on 29 March crossed the former Austrian border in Burgenland. In early April the offensive entered its final phase – the battle for the Austrian capital itself.

The road to Vienna

The Red Army entered Austria on the heels of the shattered Sixth SS Panzer Army. The last great German offensive at Lake Balaton had collapsed in mid-March, and the Soviet counter-offensive turned the retreat of the Waffen-SS divisions into a rout. There was no one to man the South-East Wall (Südostwall), a chain of trenches and anti-tank ditches dug since the autumn of 1944 by forced labourers, among them thousands of Hungarian Jews. Along the whole sector from the Danube to Styria, the German command had nothing left but the remnants of divisions, alarm battalions, Volkssturm units and military schools.

On 1 April, after the capture of Sopron, Tolbukhin received a new directive from the Stavka: the Front’s main forces were to take Vienna and, between 12 and 15 April at the latest, reach the line Tulln – St. Pölten – Neulengbach, while the left wing was to take Gloggnitz, Bruck an der Mur, Graz and Maribor. According to some historians, Joseph Stalin deliberately entrusted Vienna to Tolbukhin rather than to Rodion Malinovsky, commander of the neighbouring 2nd Ukrainian Front, whose armies were advancing north of the Danube towards Bratislava and Brno – the glory of taking yet another capital was to go to the commander the dictator considered less dangerous.

On 2 April the 9th Guards Mechanised Corps and 39th Guards Rifle Corps broke through the defences of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler division between Walpersbach and Frohsdorf, while the 5th Guards Tank Corps crossed the Leitha and by evening had taken Wiener Neustadt. The town, with a pre-war population of several tens of thousands, was one of the most heavily bombed in Austria: from August 1943 American bombers, first from North Africa and later from Italy, repeatedly attacked its aircraft factories, and when in 1944 the raids extended to the Vienna area as well, Wiener Neustadt was turned into a field of ruins. To the south-west the 9th Guards Army moved through the Bucklige Welt towards Gloggnitz; on the right wing the 4th Guards Army advanced through Eisenstadt and Gramatneusiedl on Schwechat.

The city as a “defensive area”

Vienna, with some 1.5 million inhabitants in the spring of 1945, had been the second-largest city of the Third Reich since the Anschluss of 1938. Until 1944 the war had passed it by almost entirely; then came the air raids, and in March 1945 refugees from Hungary and columns of prisoners and forced labourers being driven west. Adolf Hitler declared the city a “defensive area” and forbade its surrender. The Reich Governor and Gauleiter of Vienna, Baldur von Schirach, thwarted successive initiatives by officers who wanted Vienna declared an open city, and publicly called for a fight to the end.

But there were not the forces to defend it. The city’s combat commandant, General der Infanterie Rudolf von Bünau, and the commander of the Sixth SS Panzer Army, Josef “Sepp” Dietrich, agreed that the defence had no chance; they disagreed only on how to conduct it. According to Austrian estimates, at most 20,000 German soldiers fought in the city itself and about 8,000 in the Vienna Woods. Dietrich’s army had only around fifty serviceable tanks and assault guns in the area. To the south stood the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich and the 3rd SS Panzer Division Totenkopf, to the east the Wehrmacht’s 6th Panzer Division. The gaps were filled with units of the Volkssturm and the Hitler Youth, and the anti-aircraft guns on the concrete flak towers were turned on ground targets. The Soviet armies advancing on Vienna numbered – according to estimates cited in Austrian literature – some 400,000 men; their superiority was at least ten to one.

On 7 April Hitler dismissed the commander of Army Group South, General Otto Wöhler, and replaced him with Colonel General Lothar Rendulic, an Austrian born in Wiener Neustadt, reputed to be a specialist in defence to the last. But a change of commander could no longer alter anything.

Encirclement

Tolbukhin had no intention of storming the city from the front alone. On 3 April Colonel General Andrei Kravchenko’s 6th Guards Tank Army drove the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend out of Bad Vöslau and reached Baden. There the Soviet forces divided. On 4 April Kravchenko’s tanks turned north up the Helenental valley, through the Vienna Woods towards Heiligenkreuz and Alland, to outflank Vienna from the west; the 4th and 9th Guards Armies continued the advance directly on the city, between Inzersdorf and Schwechat.

On 6 April four Soviet spearheads reached the city limits from the south. That same day the 5th Guards Tank Corps, meeting no resistance, reached the Danube near Tulln and entered Klosterneuburg, cutting Vienna off from the west. In the east, as part of Malinovsky’s offensive, the 46th Army began crossing the Danube between Haslau and Hainburg; Rear Admiral Georgy Kholostyakov (PL)’s Danube Flotilla ferried more than 70,000 men to the northern bank within five days. This army was to close the ring from the north, across the Marchfeld, and cut off the defenders’ line of retreat across the river.

Plan Radetzky

The approach of the front revived the Austrian resistance. Under the code name “O5” – a zero and the fifth letter of the alphabet, that is “Oe” for Österreich – operated a loose network of conservative, Social Democratic and communist groups. At the headquarters of Military District XVII in Vienna a group of officers conspired around Major Carl Szokoll, who was responsible for deploying replacement units. The conspirators prepared a plan named Radetzky, after the 19th-century field marshal: when the Soviet attack came, the units under their control were to seize key points in the city, prevent the demolition of bridges and factories required by Hitler’s Nero Decree, and open the way for the Red Army from the west, so as to spare Vienna street fighting. By an irony of fate Bünau, unaware of Szokoll’s role, appointed him as his liaison officer.

In early April two emissaries of the conspiracy, Staff Sergeant Ferdinand Käs and Corporal Johann Reif, crossed the front line and, at Tolbukhin’s headquarters in Hochwolkersdorf, agreed with the Soviet command on the directions of attack and agreed signals. The plan was betrayed, however, and on 6 April the Gestapo and the military police began arresting the conspirators; Szokoll managed to go into hiding. The role of the resistance in the capture of Vienna is disputed in the historiography. Some researchers, especially those associated with the Austrian resistance documentation community, believe that the conspirators helped to steer the Soviet attack in from the west and save part of the city. Others, such as the military historian Manfried Rauchensteiner, stress that the Red Army was planning to outflank Vienna anyway, and that the betrayal paralysed the operation before it began.

A political drama was unfolding at the same time. In Gloggnitz – a town through which the 9th Guards Army was passing – lived the 74-year-old Karl Renner, the first chancellor of the republic in 1918–1920. In early April he presented himself to the Soviet command to intervene over looting and offered his help in rebuilding the Austrian state. He was taken to the headquarters of the 9th Guards Army and the 3rd Ukrainian Front, and Moscow quickly decided that the old Social Democrat could head a government. Even while the fighting for Vienna was going on, the Soviet command assured the inhabitants in proclamations that the Red Army had come not to conquer Austrian soil but to liberate the country, in line with the foreign ministers’ declaration at the Moscow Conference of 1943, which had declared the Anschluss null and void.

The first days of fighting in the city

Fighting in Vienna itself began on 6 April in the southern suburbs. The 39th Guards Rifle Corps pushed the Das Reich division back through Mödling towards Hetzendorf and Vösendorf, while units of the 4th Guards Army broke into the Simmering district and on 7 April, after taking Schwechat, fought their way through to the Danube. That same day the western Soviet spearhead reached the city limits and advanced along the line of the Western Railway towards the city centre. From 7 to 9 April the heaviest fighting raged for the Arsenal – a vast complex of former barracks and armament workshops defended by Totenkopf units, where the attackers suffered heavy losses. On 8 April the Germans withdrew the fresh Führer Panzergrenadier Division, which had arrived only two days earlier, to the northern bank of the Danube to hold off the 46th Army, and on 9 April they blew up two railway bridges over the Danube. That day the troops advancing through the Vienna Woods reached Sievering, Grinzing and Nußdorf.

For the inhabitants the first days of fighting meant life in cellars, without water or electricity, under artillery fire and in fear of both sides. SS and Wehrmacht drumhead courts sentenced to death deserters and people who hung out white flags, while rumours circulated among the population about what was happening in the towns and villages of Burgenland and Lower Austria taken by the Red Army, where looting and rape occurred on a mass scale.

What the following days brought

The battle for Vienna lasted a week. The resistance of the defenders, squeezed into the city centre, Leopoldstadt and the last intact bridge over the Danube, collapsed on 13 April, when Soviet paratroopers and infantry captured the Reichsbrücke. In those days Vienna lost the roof of St Stephen’s Cathedral and most of its bridges, and three officers of Szokoll’s conspiracy were publicly hanged. The fall of the city effectively closed the Vienna offensive and opened the Red Army’s road to St. Pölten and the Danube valley, and it gave Stalin the upper hand in the contest over post-war Austria: Renner’s government was formed under Soviet tutelage before the Western Allies entered the country.

For the Reich it was another blow at a time when its defences were collapsing on every front. The Sixth SS Panzer Army, to which Hitler had entrusted in March the defence of the last oilfields and the road to Austria, could not hold even Vienna; its remnants fell back through the Vienna Woods and towards the Alps, where they fought on until the surrender. More than two months earlier, after the siege of Budapest, the Hungarian capital had fallen – now the second great capital on the Danube was passing into Soviet hands, and Tolbukhin’s armies stood at the gates of the Alps and southern Bohemia.