The fall of Vienna

On the morning of 13 April 1945 Soviet paratroopers crossed the Danube from the Prater side and, together with the infantry, seized the Reichsbrücke – the last intact bridge over the river in Vienna. The wires to the demolition charges were cut before the Germans could blow the bridge. In the evening the last Waffen-SS units withdrew northwards from the city, and Moscow celebrated the capture of the Austrian capital with an artillery salute. A week of fighting that had begun on 6 April in the southern suburbs was over.

The fall of Vienna decided the outcome of the Soviet offensive in Austria, but did not formally end it. The Vienna offensive, launched on 16 March in western Hungary, lasted according to Soviet records until 15 April, when the troops of the 3rd Ukrainian Front reached their assigned lines west of the city and went over to the defensive. Some accounts, however, end it on 13 April, the day the city was taken.

Gallows at Floridsdorfer Spitz

The last days of German rule in Vienna were a time of terror. The Radetzky plan, by which officers conspiring in the headquarters of Military District XVII around Major Carl Szokoll intended to hand the city over without a fight, was betrayed, and arrests began on 6 April. After a drumhead court martial, Major Karl Biedermann, Captain Alfred Huth and Lieutenant Rudolf Raschke were hanged on 8 April from lamp-posts at Floridsdorfer Spitz in Floridsdorf, with placards branding them as traitors. Szokoll survived in hiding and after the war became one of the icons of the Austrian resistance.

Drumhead courts also sentenced deserters and people who hung out white flags. On 12 April, with the Red Army already in the city centre, SS men burst into a tenement on Förstergasse in Leopoldstadt, the old Jewish quarter, and shot nine Jews who had survived the entire war in hiding there. The victims of those last days became a symbol of the crimes the regime committed even when its defeat was already certain.

The cathedral fire

From 8 April Soviet units forced their way into the inner districts from the west, while the Germans blew up one bridge after another: two railway bridges fell on 9 April, and the crossings over the Danube Canal in the days that followed. In the east and south, especially in Simmering, along the Gürtel and on the Danube Canal, the fighting went on house by house until 13 April.

During the night of 11/12 April the roof and belfry of St Stephen’s Cathedral, Austria’s most important church, burned down. The great Pummerin bell, cast in 1711 from Turkish cannon captured at Vienna, fell and shattered on the floor; the collapsing roof also destroyed the organ. For decades the blame was laid on Soviet or German shelling. Today, on the basis of eyewitness accounts, it is accepted that the fire spread to the cathedral from nearby houses set alight by looters, and that the continuing fighting made it impossible to put out. The rebuilding of the cathedral, funded by contributions from all over the country, was completed in 1952, and the recast Pummerin became one of the symbols of post-war Austria.

The battle for the bridges

On the right bank of the Danube the defenders – the remnants of General Wilhelm Bittrich’s II SS Panzer Corps – now held only bridgeheads around the bridges: the Reichsbrücke and the Floridsdorfer Brücke. The Reichsbrücke, prepared for demolition, was their only line of retreat. Opposite them, on the left bank in Donaustadt, stood units of the Soviet 46th Army, which had crossed the Danube at Hainburg and were closing the ring from the north.

On 11 April the Soviet command decided to take the bridge by a ruse and from the water. Fifteen armoured boats of the Danube Flotilla forced their way through fire from both banks and landed a party that seized the southern approach to the bridge and for two days beat off German counter-attacks, including at night. On 13 April an attack by the 80th Guards Rifle Division broke through from the south to the Danube and split the German defence, while soldiers of the 7th Guards Airborne Division crossed the river from the Prater side and, together with the infantry, took the bridge. According to German accounts, Lothar Rendulic, commander of Army Group South since 7 April, repeatedly held back the demolition so as not to cut off his own troops, and when he finally authorised it, it was too late. The Reichsbrücke was the only Viennese bridge over the Danube to survive the war; in 1946 it was named the Bridge of the Red Army, and its old name was restored after the occupying forces left.

That same day the last defenders of right-bank Vienna laid down their arms or fled. In the evening the remnants of the SS divisions withdrew north-west through Floridsdorf and Brigittenau; the city commandant, Rudolf von Bünau, and Bittrich had left Vienna earlier. Gauleiter Baldur von Schirach, who only a few days before had been calling for a fight to the last round, left for the west, for the Tyrol. On 13 April Moscow fired an artillery salute in honour of the victors, and on 9 June the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR instituted the Medal “For the Capture of Vienna”. The news came on a day when the world was absorbed by the death of President Roosevelt, who had died the previous afternoon at Warm Springs; four days earlier Königsberg had fallen, and nine days earlier Bratislava.

Losses and destruction

The losses suffered in Vienna itself cannot be established precisely. Austrian estimates speak of some 20,000 killed in the city and about 5,000 in the Vienna Woods, of whom roughly a fifth are said to have been civilians; other sources give a total of about 37,000 Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS soldiers killed in the Vienna area, while in August 1945 the city council counted only about 5,000 soldiers’ graves. Russian publications speak of some 18,000 Soviet soldiers killed in the fighting for the city and its approaches. The whole Vienna offensive cost the Red Army – according to the statistical study edited by Grigory Krivosheev – nearly 168,000 killed, missing, wounded and sick.

Even so, Vienna suffered far less than Budapest or Warsaw. Part of the buildings in the city centre and the suburbs were destroyed, as were the cathedral, the State Opera, already hit in the air raid of 12 March, and most of the bridges over the Danube and the Danube Canal. For several weeks the city was left without water, electricity, gas or transport, and the food supply collapsed completely.

Liberation and violence

For many Viennese, especially opponents of the regime, Jews in hiding, prisoners and forced labourers, the arrival of the Red Army meant the end of Nazi terror. For many others it was the beginning of a new fear. Soldiers, local people and liberated forced labourers alike took part in looting; shops, warehouses and flats were plundered. The deepest trauma was caused by mass rapes committed by Soviet soldiers, which – as earlier in Burgenland and Lower Austria after the Red Army entered Austria – affected women of all ages. According to many accounts the perpetrators were above all soldiers of second-echelon units, less disciplined than the assault formations. The scale of the violence cannot be established precisely: Austrian historians who study the Soviet occupation cite estimates of the order of 70,000–100,000 victims for Vienna alone, and stress that these are highly uncertain, since most women never reported what had been done to them. In 1945 the Austrian health authorities temporarily permitted the termination of pregnancies resulting from rape. The Soviet command punished some of the perpetrators, but the phenomenon died down only slowly and long coloured Austrians’ attitude to the occupier.

The rebirth of Austria

The Soviet military authorities set about rebuilding the administration at once – under their own control. The retired general and Social Democrat Theodor Körner, later President of Austria, became mayor of Vienna. On 14 April, the day after the city fell, the Social Democratic Party of Austria was re-established at the City Hall under Adolf Schärf; on 17 April the Christian democratic Austrian People’s Party was founded in the Schottenstift (the Scottish Abbey), its founders including Leopold Figl, a former prisoner of Dachau; and the Communist Party of Austria resumed legal activity under Johann Koplenig, who had arrived from Moscow. On 15 April a non-partisan trade union confederation (the ÖGB) was also founded.

The war in Austria, however, went on. After 13 April part of the 3rd Ukrainian Front moved west and took St. Pölten, while north of the Danube the oilfields near Zistersdorf, the last oil deposits left to the Reich, were captured. On 15 April the front stabilised along the line of the Vienna Woods, the Lower Austrian Alps and eastern Styria, and there, despite local fighting, it remained until Germany’s surrender.

On 27 April 1945 the provisional government of Karl Renner, made up of Social Democrats, People’s Party members and Communists, met in Vienna. It issued a declaration of independence: the restoration of the democratic Republic of Austria and the nullity of the Anschluss, in accordance with the Moscow Declaration of 1943. The Communists took, among others, the ministries of the interior and of education. Joseph Stalin counted on the 74-year-old Renner, who had not stinted on flattery in a letter to him, being an obedient figurehead. The Western Allies, distrustful of a government formed under Soviet tutelage, recognised it only on 20 October 1945, after it had been enlarged to include representatives of the federal states in the western zones.

Significance

The fall of Vienna settled that it was the Red Army, not the Western Allies, that occupied the Austrian capital and the eastern part of the country. The division of the country and the city into four occupation zones, agreed in July 1945, lasted ten years. Stalin did not turn Austria into a satellite state – the Communists suffered a heavy defeat in the elections of November 1945 – but the Soviet presence continued until the Austrian State Treaty of 15 May 1955, which restored the country’s full sovereignty in exchange for permanent neutrality. As early as August 1945 a monument to the Soviet soldiers who fell in the fighting for the city was erected on Schwarzenbergplatz – for some a symbol of liberation, for others a reminder of occupation and violence.

In Austrian memory April 1945 became both a liberation and a defeat. This duality, combined with the Moscow Declaration’s description of Austria as the “first victim” of Hitler’s aggression, allowed the post-war republic to build a narrative of itself solely as a victim – a narrative that for decades obscured the part many Austrians had played in the crimes of the Third Reich and was challenged only in the 1980s. For the course of the war, the capture of Vienna meant that three days before the start of the last great offensive against Berlin the Reich had lost its second-largest city, and its southern wing was now falling back towards the Alps.