The Red Army enters Austria

On 29 March 1945, Maundy Thursday, the spearheads of General Andrei Kravchenko’s Soviet 6th Guards Tank Army crossed the old Austro-Hungarian border near Klostermarienberg – a hamlet that today belongs to the municipality of Mannersdorf an der Rabnitz in the Oberpullendorf district. Austrian accounts even give the time: 11.05 a.m. The army belonged to Marshal Fyodor Tolbukhin’s 3rd Ukrainian Front. So began the Red Army’s entry into Burgenland, and after it into Lower Austria and Styria – in a country that had not existed as a state for seven years, having been part of the Third Reich since March 1938.

The border crossing was no great battle. It was the consequence of the defeat the Wehrmacht had suffered two weeks earlier at Lake Balaton and of the Soviet offensive under way since 16 March, which historians call the Vienna offensive. In less than two weeks the front had moved more than 150 kilometres west from the Székesfehérvár area, and Hungary, Hitler’s last ally in Central Europe, had come almost entirely under Soviet control. The road to Wiener Neustadt and Vienna was opening up before the Red Army.

After the defeat at Lake Balaton

At the beginning of March 1945 Adolf Hitler threw his last armoured reserves into Hungary. Operation Frühlingserwachen (“Spring Awakening”), launched on 6 March, was intended to drive the Soviet forces back across the Danube, recapture Budapest, which had fallen in mid-February after a long siege, and secure the Hungarian oilfields around Nagykanizsa – after the loss of Romania and the bombing of the synthetic fuel plants, one of the last sources of oil left to the Reich. The main striking force was Josef “Sepp” Dietrich’s 6th SS Panzer Army, brought over from the Ardennes. After ten days of fighting in waterlogged terrain between Lake Balaton and Lake Velence, the offensive bogged down in the deeply echeloned Soviet defences without achieving any of its objectives.

On 16 March the right wing of the 3rd Ukrainian Front went over to the attack: the 4th and 9th Guards Armies, supported from 19–20 March by the 6th Guards Tank Army, transferred from Marshal Rodion Malinovsky’s 2nd Ukrainian Front. The blow struck north-west from the Székesfehérvár area towards Veszprém and threatened to cut off the German divisions still standing east of Lake Balaton. The SS panzer corps managed to escape encirclement, but at the cost of enormous losses in men and equipment. When Hitler learned of the retreat, he ordered the “Leibstandarte” and the other SS divisions of Dietrich’s army to be stripped of their cuff titles bearing the divisions’ names – a humiliating gesture that was received with outrage in the ranks of the SS and that shows better than anything how far the Reich’s leadership had lost touch with reality.

General Otto Wöhler’s Army Group South had at its disposal the 6th SS Panzer Army, General Hermann Balck’s Sixth Army, the Second Panzer Army on the Drava and the remnants of the Hungarian Third Army. All of them had been bled white, were short of fuel and had almost no reserves. Successive defensive lines – on the Sió Canal, in the Bakony hills, on the Rába – fell one after another. On the northern wing the 46th Army of the 2nd Ukrainian Front, advancing along the right bank of the Danube, had taken Győr and Komárom by 28 March, while on the left bank of the river the 7th Guards Army and the 53rd Army had been pushing towards Bratislava since 25 March. On the night of 27–28 March Tolbukhin’s right wing forced the Rába. Threatened from the north, the German Second Panzer Army began to withdraw from the Nagykanizsa area on 28 March, and in the south, along the Drava, the Soviet 57th Army and the Bulgarian First Army followed it.

Across the border

From the area of Szombathely and Kőszeg Kravchenko’s tanks headed straight west. Ahead of them lay Burgenland – Austria’s youngest federal state, joined to it from Hungarian territory only in 1921. After the Anschluss the Nazi authorities abolished it as a separate unit: the northern part was incorporated into the Reichsgau of Lower Danube (Niederdonau), the southern part into Styria. In the official language of the Reich, Austria as a whole no longer figured as a state but as a collection of “Alpine and Danubian Reichsgaue”.

Since the autumn of 1944 the so-called South-East Wall (Südostwall) had been under construction along the eastern edge of these Reichsgaue – a belt of anti-tank ditches, trenches and firing positions meant to stop the Red Army on the approaches to Vienna and Graz. It was built by the local population, members of the Hitler Youth, forced labourers from various countries and – in the harshest conditions – tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews, handed over to the Germans as forced labourers by the Arrow Cross authorities. They died of hunger, cold and disease, and guards from the SA, the Volkssturm and the Hitler Youth murdered them on the spot. As the front drew near, a wave of crimes began that Austrian research describes as “end-phase crimes”. On the night of 24–25 March, at Rechnitz, after a party at the local castle, some 180 Hungarian Jews were murdered in the Rechnitz massacre (PL). A dozen or so kilometres to the south, at Deutsch Schützen, SS men assisted by members of the Hitler Youth shot at least 57 Jewish forced labourers – according to the findings of Austrian historians and courts, on 29 March itself, the day the Soviet tanks were crossing the border a few dozen kilometres to the north: the Deutsch Schützen massacre. Several hundred survivors were driven on foot westwards towards the Mauthausen camp; many of them did not survive these death marches.

Militarily, the South-East Wall proved almost worthless. There were not enough men to garrison it, and the divisions retreating from Hungary reached it too battered to put up resistance. On 30 March the right wing of the 3rd Ukrainian Front broke through the German border fortifications on the move along a front of about 20 kilometres. While the German II SS Panzer Corps withdrew towards the Leitha to prepare the defence of Vienna, I SS Panzer Corps still tried to delay the enemy between Sopron and Kőszeg. The 9th Guards Mechanised Corps and the 5th Guards Tank Corps swung north towards Wiener Neustadt and Mattersburg, while the infantry of the 4th and 9th Guards Armies covered their flanks: the 4th Guards Army advanced on Eisenstadt and on towards the Danube, the 9th Guards Army through the hilly Bucklige Welt towards Gloggnitz. On 1 April, Easter Sunday, Sopron fell. On 2 April the Red Army took Wiener Neustadt, a city of aircraft factories and the home town of General Lothar Rendulic, who a few days later was to take command of the German army group defending Austria.

Austria in the Reich’s last weeks

The country the Red Army was entering had long remained on the sidelines of the war. Only from 1944 did Allied bombers from Italy begin to attack Vienna, Wiener Neustadt, Linz and Graz regularly – the first major raid on the Vienna area was carried out in March 1944. In the spring of 1945 the capital, which still had more than a million inhabitants, was crowded with refugees from Hungary, Slovakia and Yugoslavia, and tens of thousands of forced labourers had been herded into its armaments factories. The Gauleiter and Reich Governor in Vienna was Baldur von Schirach, the former leader of the Hitler Youth, who as Reich Defence Commissioner was responsible for preparing the city for battle. The Volkssturm was mobilised, barricades were built, and propaganda promised a defence “to the last round”.

The Austrians’ position was complicated by the way the Allies had announced their country’s future. In the Moscow Declaration of October 1943 the three powers declared the Anschluss null and void and called Austria “the first free country to fall a victim to Hitlerite aggression”, but at the same time reminded it that it bore responsibility for taking part in the war on Germany’s side and that in the final settlement account would be taken of its own contribution to its liberation. Hundreds of thousands of Austrians served in the Wehrmacht and the SS, many of them in senior positions; according to many historians, Austrians were also over-represented, relative to their share of the population, among the perpetrators of the Holocaust. At the same time war-weariness and the conviction that the war was already lost were growing.

The resistance and the Radetzky plan

In this situation the Austrian underground went into action. The most important group was O5 – the name was a code: “O” plus the fifth letter of the alphabet, “E”, gave “Oe”, the abbreviation for “Österreich”. It brought together people of various views, from conservatives to socialists, and made contact with the Western Allies. On the staff of the Vienna military district served Major Carl Szokoll, who – according to his later account and the findings of Austrian historians – prepared a plan code-named “Radetzky”: using the staff’s control over orders and the movements of replacement units, opponents of the regime were to help the Red Army take Vienna quickly and spare the city from destruction. At the beginning of April Szokoll’s emissary, Staff Sergeant Ferdinand Käs, made his way through the front line and met the Soviet command at Hochwolkersdorf. The conspiracy was betrayed, however. Three officers – Major Karl Biedermann, Captain Alfred Huth and Lieutenant Rudolf Raschke – were publicly hanged in Floridsdorf on 8 April, while Szokoll managed to go into hiding. The importance of the Radetzky plan for the course of the fighting for Vienna remains disputed: the Red Army took the city after heavy fighting regardless, and post-war Austria was keen to highlight the resistance in order to underline its claim to have been a victim.

The civilian population

For the inhabitants of Burgenland and Lower Austria the arrival of the Red Army meant the end of Nazi rule, but also the beginning of weeks of violence. News of the conduct of Soviet soldiers in Hungary and East Prussia, exaggerated by Goebbels’s propaganda, set off the flight of thousands of people westwards. Those who stayed fell victim to looting and rape. Austrian historians, drawing on hospital and official records and on witness accounts, estimate the number of women raped in the zone occupied by the Red Army in the tens of thousands, and in Vienna alone – according to various estimates – from several tens of thousands to more than a hundred thousand; the exact number cannot be established. The Soviet command issued orders against soldiers’ lawlessness but enforced them inconsistently. The memory of those months long weighed on Austrians’ attitude to the Soviet occupation, which in the eastern part of the country lasted until 1955.

Many people, however – Jews hiding in Vienna, prisoners, forced labourers, opponents of the regime – greeted the Soviet soldiers as liberators. In Burgenland, where in the last weeks SS men and local functionaries had been murdering Hungarian Jews, the arrival of the front meant rescue for the survivors. Both these experiences – of liberation and of violence – coexist in Austrian memory of the spring of 1945.

What the following weeks brought

The border crossing of 29 March opened the final stage of the Vienna offensive. In Hungary the fighting was coming to an end: at the beginning of April units of the 3rd Ukrainian Front took Nagykanizsa, and on 4 April Soviet communiqués announced that the whole country had been cleared of German troops – although fighting continued for a few more days in scraps of western Hungary. On the same day the 2nd Ukrainian Front took Bratislava. The Arrow Cross government of Ferenc Szálasi, which had resided in western Hungary for months, fled to the Reich; the only authority left in the country was the provisional government in Debrecen, which in December 1944 had declared war on Germany.

At the beginning of April the Soviet spearheads approached Vienna. On 6 April fighting began in the city itself, waged for every district, for the Arsenal, the Danube Canal and the bridges. Despite attempts by some officers to declare Vienna an open city, Schirach ordered it to be defended and himself left the capital. On 13 April the Red Army took control of the whole city; of Vienna’s bridges over the Danube only the Reichsbrücke survived. On 11–12 April the roof of St Stephen’s Cathedral burned – the fire spread to it from the surrounding buildings, which were being looted and shelled. By 15 April, which Soviet historiography regards as the end of the operation, the front had moved further west, towards St. Pölten and the border of Styria.

A political act was unfolding at the same time. At the beginning of April, near Gloggnitz, Karl Renner himself approached the Soviet command – the 74-year-old Social Democrat who had been the first chancellor of the republic in 1918. Stalin judged that a politician known in the West would make a better figurehead for the new authority than the Austrian communists. On 27 April Renner’s provisional government – of socialists, Christian democrats and communists – proclaimed the restoration of an independent Austria and declared the Anschluss null and void. The country, soon divided into four occupation zones, had to wait ten years for full independence, however, until the signing of the State Treaty in 1955.

The Red Army’s entry into Austria on 29 March 1945 thus closed the war in Hungary and began the last campaign on the southern wing of the Eastern Front. It deprived the Reich of Hungarian oil, opened the way to Vienna and to the oilfields at Zistersdorf, and pushed the German armies that only three weeks earlier had been attacking at Lake Balaton back into the Alps, where they were to surrender at the beginning of May. At the same time it ensured that it was the Soviet Union that first set foot in Austria and took its capital – a fact that shaped the country’s fate for a whole decade.