The Treaty of Saint-Germain

At eleven in the morning on 10 September 1919, in the château of Saint-Germain-en-Laye outside Paris, State Chancellor Karl Renner signed the peace treaty between Austria and the Allied and Associated Powers. The ceremony took place in a hall of the château’s museum of national antiquities, among its Stone Age collections. Renner, a Social Democrat who had led the government of the new republic since the autumn of 1918, had come to France as the representative of a state that called itself German Austria and regarded itself as part of Germany. He returned to Vienna with a document that took millions of German speakers away from that state, required it to call itself the Republic of Austria and forbade it to unite with Germany without the consent of the League of Nations. The Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye formally closed the history of the Austrian half of the Habsburg monarchy. Austrians called it a dictated peace, and almost everything in it that angered them became, twenty years later, the slogans of Adolf Hitler’s policy.

A state nobody had planned

The Austro-Hungarian monarchy fell apart in October 1918, before the war had even ended. Czechs, Poles, Slovenes, Croats and Serbs proclaimed states of their own or joined existing ones, and after the Aster Revolution Hungary broke its union with Austria. On 21 October 1918 the 208 German-speaking deputies of the last Austrian parliament, the Imperial Council (Reichsrat), met in Vienna as the Provisional National Assembly of German Austria. On 30 October it formed a government with Renner as State Chancellor. When Emperor Charles I renounced any part in affairs of state on 11 November, the assembly proclaimed a republic the following day. Article 2 of the law of 12 November 1918 declared German Austria a constituent part of the German Republic.

At that time all three great political camps favoured union with Germany: the Social Democrats, who saw a republican Germany governed by their sister party as a guarantee of socialism; the German nationalists, for whom it was a long-standing aim; and, with more hesitation, the Christian Socials. There was an economic argument too. Vienna, once the capital of an empire of more than 50 million people, now held close to two million inhabitants in a country of little more than six million; it was cut off from Czech coal and Hungarian grain, and in the winter of 1918/1919 it went hungry. Few people believed such a country could survive on its own.

German Austria laid claim to all the lands of the former Austrian half of the monarchy with a German majority. That meant the northern and western borderlands of Bohemia and Moravia, where the local Germans had set up the provinces of Deutschböhmen and Sudetenland in the autumn of 1918, the German towns of Moravia such as Brno and Olomouc, and South Tyrol. Reality was different. The Czechoslovak army occupied the German borderlands of Bohemia and Moravia at the turn of 1918 and 1919, and Italian troops had stood on the Brenner Pass since November. The Sudeten Germans were unable to take part in the elections to the Constituent Assembly held on 16 February 1919. When they took to the streets in protest on 4 March, the day the new parliament convened in Vienna, Czechoslovak soldiers opened fire in several places. More than fifty people were killed. In Carinthia, from December 1918, local units fought troops of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes over the disputed lands south of the Drava.

On 12 March 1919 the Constituent Assembly reaffirmed its declaration that German Austria was part of the German Reich, and the State Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Otto Bauer, held secret talks in Berlin on the terms of union. The Western powers, France above all, had no intention of allowing Germany to emerge from a lost war enlarged by six million people and the Alpine passes. Italy, which did not want a greater Germany on its northern border, followed France’s lead.

Negotiations on paper

In mid-May 1919 the Austrian delegation, led by Renner, arrived at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Like the Germans at Versailles, the Austrians were not admitted to the deliberations. On 29 May they were informed that the powers recognised their state under the name “Republic of Austria”, and on 31 May that negotiations would be conducted exclusively in writing. At noon on 2 June the delegates received the first part of the peace terms. The next day Renner met the President of the Constituent Assembly, Karl Seitz, Vice-Chancellor Jodok Fink and Bauer at Feldkirch in Vorarlberg. They agreed that under such terms the state could not live.

Throughout the summer the Austrians sent notes and memoranda to Georges Clemenceau, the president of the conference. Their central argument was a legal one: the Republic of Austria was not the successor of the monarchy but a new state, like Czechoslovakia or Poland, and should not be held responsible for a war it had not declared. The powers rejected it, treating Austria as the heir of the empire and the new Slavic states as its victims. The delegation tried to save at least some of the Sudeten Germans, South Tyrol and parts of Carinthia and Styria, demanded plebiscites and brought in experts from the individual provinces. On 20 July it received the second, supplementary part of the terms. A few days later Bauer, whose policy of union with Germany had failed, resigned, and Renner took over foreign affairs as well.

On the borders the Austrians achieved little. As early as the spring the powers had agreed to leave Czechoslovakia the historic boundaries of Bohemia and Moravia – and with them some three million Germans – and to give Italy the Brenner frontier promised in the Treaty of London of 1915. President Woodrow Wilson, whose Fourteen Points had promised Italy frontiers “along clearly recognizable lines of nationality”, accepted this even though more than two hundred thousand Germans and Ladins lived south of the Brenner. The changes in the final text concerned mainly economic matters and a few stretches of the border, and above all the award to Austria of the western fringes of Hungary.

The ultimatum

On the afternoon of 2 September 1919 Renner received the final text of the treaty with a covering letter signed by Clemenceau. The powers gave Austria five days to declare that it would sign without amendment, later extending the deadline to 9 September. Refusal might mean a renewed blockade, and the country was living on Allied food deliveries and credits.

Renner returned to Vienna and on 6 September laid the treaty before the Constituent Assembly. The debate was stormy. Deputies from Carinthia, Styria and Lower Austria, parts of whose constituencies the treaty handed to neighbouring states, read out a solemn protest against the “robbery” of the right to self-determination. They predicted that the treaty would create “new Balkans” in the heart of Europe and that these lands threatened a new world conflagration “on the very day peace is concluded”. In the end the Christian Socials and the Social Democrats authorised the government to sign; the Greater German nationalists voted against. The assembly also adopted a resolution protesting “before the whole world” against the denial to Austrians of the right to self-determination and union with the “German motherland”, and describing the economic terms as impossible to fulfil. It called the treaty nationally unjust, politically ruinous and economically unworkable.

Renner travelled back to France and on 10 September signed as Austria’s sole representative. On the other side the signatories were the United States, the British Empire, France, Italy and Japan, together with the smaller allies, among them Poland, for which Ignacy Jan Paderewski and Roman Dmowski signed. Romania and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes did not sign. Both protested against the treaties on the protection of national minorities that the powers had linked to the Austrian treaty. The Romanian prime minister, Ion Brătianu, preferred to resign rather than sign them. The two countries added their signatures only in December 1919. On 10 September itself, at Saint-Germain, the powers also signed a minorities treaty with Czechoslovakia.

The terms

The treaty had 381 articles. Like all the Paris treaties, it opened with the Covenant of the League of Nations. Austria recognised the independence of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes and renounced its rights to the lands of the former monarchy outside its new borders.

Czechoslovakia received Bohemia, Moravia and most of Austrian Silesia, including the German borderlands that later came to be called the Sudetenland, as well as a few municipalities of Lower Austria, among them the area around Valtice and the railway station at Gmünd. Italy received Trentino and the German-speaking South Tyrol (PL) up to the Brenner, the Carinthian Kanaltal with Tarvisio, Trieste, Gorizia and Istria. The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes received Carniola, southern Styria with Maribor, most of Dalmatia and two small pieces of Carinthia, while the fate of disputed southern Carinthia around Klagenfurt was to be settled by plebiscite. Romania received Bukovina. The treaty did not decide the fate of Galicia: Austria placed its rights to territories not otherwise allocated at the disposal of the powers, which did not finally confirm that Eastern Galicia belonged to Poland until 1923. The borders in Cieszyn Silesia were drawn separately in 1920. Austria’s only gain was the German-speaking western fringe of Hungary, which later became the province of Burgenland.

The most important article for the future was Article 88: “The independence of Austria is inalienable otherwise than with the consent of the Council of the League of Nations.” Austria undertook to abstain from any act that might compromise its independence, directly or indirectly. Since decisions of the League Council required unanimity and France held a permanent seat on it, this amounted in practice to a ban on union with Germany. The same was laid down from the other side in Article 80 of the Treaty of Versailles, in which Germany undertook to respect strictly the independence of Austria. The name “German Austria” could no longer be kept.

The Austrian army was limited to no more than 30,000 volunteers, officers included. Conscription was abolished; Austria was allowed no military aviation and no tanks, had to hand over the ships of the former Austro-Hungarian navy to the victors and destroy or surrender its surplus weapons. Like Germany at Versailles, in Article 177 Austria accepted responsibility, for itself and its allies, for the losses the victors had suffered in a war “imposed upon them by the aggression of Austria-Hungary and her allies”, together with an obligation to pay reparations. Their amount was never fixed, Austria paid practically nothing, and in 1929 the victors formally waived them. Austria also had to return to Italy, Czechoslovakia and other states works of art and archives once taken to Vienna. The treaty obliged it to protect national and religious minorities, and its minority provisions still have constitutional rank in Austria today.

More than 60 per cent of the territory of the former Austrian half of the monarchy lay outside the republic’s borders, and of the roughly ten million Germans who had lived there, more than three million. The remark attributed to Clemenceau that “Austria is what is left” was most probably never made in that form, but it was repeated in Vienna throughout the interwar years.

From signature to ratification

On 17 October 1919 the Constituent Assembly approved the treaty. On 21 October it passed a law on the form of the state: German Austria, within the borders laid down at Saint-Germain, became the Republic of Austria. The instrument of ratification was signed in Vienna on 25 October. The treaty came into force on 16 July 1920. The United States, whose Senate had rejected the treaties containing the League Covenant, concluded a separate peace with Austria in August 1921.

Some border questions were settled only later. On 10 October 1920, in Zone A of disputed southern Carinthia, about 59 per cent of voters, many Slovenes among them, opted for Austria, making a plebiscite in the second zone, which included Klagenfurt, unnecessary. Hungary delayed handing over Burgenland, whose transfer was also confirmed by the Treaty of Trianon, signed on 4 June 1920. In the autumn of 1921 Hungarian irregulars fought the Austrian gendarmerie there. A compromise reached in Venice provided for a plebiscite in Sopron and its surroundings, which Hungary won in December 1921. Burgenland lost its natural capital.

In Austria itself the idea of union with Germany did not die. In the spring of 1921, in unofficial votes in Tyrol and Salzburg, more than 98 per cent of participants came out in favour of joining Germany. Further votes, announced among other places in Styria, were stopped under pressure from the powers. In 1922 Chancellor Ignaz Seipel, in return for an international loan that saved the Austrian currency, once again pledged in the Geneva Protocols (PL) to preserve Austrian independence.

The long shadow of Saint-Germain

The treaty created a state whose durability most of its citizens doubted. The Austria of the First Republic was impoverished and divided between the armed camps of the Social Democrats and the right, and the call for union with Germany returned with every crisis. In 1931, during the Great Depression, Vienna and Berlin announced a plan for a customs union. France regarded it as a veiled breach of the ban; in September 1931 the Permanent Court of International Justice ruled by eight votes to seven that it was incompatible with the Geneva Protocol, and the plan collapsed. In 1932 a further loan was again made conditional on confirmation of the ban.

For the Austrian-born Hitler, the union of the two countries was a goal from the very beginning. The first point of the NSDAP programme of February 1920 demanded the union of all Germans in a single state, and the second the abrogation of the Treaties of Versailles and Saint-Germain. The first page of “Mein Kampf” proclaims that the Germans of Austria must return to the great German motherland. Paradoxically, when Hitler came to power in 1933, Austria, by then ruled in authoritarian fashion by Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, became his opponent, and the Saint-Germain ban was defended against him not only by France but also by Benito Mussolini’s Italy. When Austrian Nazis murdered Dollfuss during an attempted putsch in July 1934, Mussolini sent divisions to the Brenner. Only the rapprochement with Italy in 1936–1937 opened the road to Vienna for Hitler. On 12 March 1938 the Wehrmacht crossed the border, and the following day the Anschluss was proclaimed. None of the powers moved to defend Article 88. In the plebiscite of 10 April 1938 Renner too – the same man who had signed the ban in 1919 – declared for union.

The second great wrong that Austrians and Germans laid at the treaty’s door met the same fate. The more than three million Sudeten Germans whom the treaty had left in Czechoslovakia became Hitler’s instrument in the Sudeten crisis (PL) of 1938. The Sudetenland, annexed to the Reich after the Munich Agreement, was the second step towards war, followed by the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. Hitler never laid claim to South Tyrol, because he needed Mussolini. In 1939 the two dictators concluded an agreement under which the inhabitants of the province were to choose between resettlement in the Reich and remaining in Italy as Italians.

After the Second World War the victors returned to the Saint-Germain settlement. Austria was reborn within its 1919 borders, and in 1945 the provisional government was once again formed by Karl Renner. In the State Treaty of 1955 Austria again undertook never to unite with Germany. This time most Austrians accepted it without regret.