On This Day: Allied military rule ends in Austria ten years after WWII finished

JULY 27, 1955: Allied military rule ended in Austria on this day in 1945 – a decade after World War II finished and six years since West and East Germany were granted independence.

The country, which was the birthplace of Adolf Hitler and had been an integral part of his Nazi Third Reich, had remained occupied due to a deepening Cold War dispute.

Like Germany, Austria had been split into four military zones that were separately governed by Britain, America, the USSR and France.

And, like Berlin, the capital Vienna, which was deep inside the Soviet sector, was also divided among the four Allied Powers – but with a jointly administered centre.

But, having agreed to treat Austria as the first victim of Nazi aggression despite its German-speaking inhabitants mostly embracing the 1938 annexation, the conquerors could not see eye to eye on how the country would be ‘liberated’.

Both the Western Allies and the Soviets did not want to copy the compromise made in Germany, which was split into two independent states with Berlin remaining occupied and mirroring the national East-West divide between communism and capitalism.

Yet neither side in the Cold War conflict wanted the other to dominate the new Austria.

The death of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and the passing of power Nikita Khrushchev ensured a thawing in the communist position.

To the surprise of the West, he proposed to let the Red Army leave Austria if UK, US and French troops followed suit and Austria promised perpetual neutrality.

So on May 15, 1955, the four Allied Powers signed the Austrian State Treaty, which, shown in a British Pathé newsreel, agreed to end the occupation.

It came into force on July 27 and the last of the forces left on October 25.

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The only person who was unhappy was West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who was upset by that fact Germany still remained divided.

He threatened to ‘send Hitler’s remains home to Austria’ and described the country’s preferential treatment as ‘the great Austrian scandal’.

Among the things he was angry about was that the treaty had, at the last minute, scrubbed the Alpine nation of its joint ‘responsibility and complicity’ for the war.

As a result, Austria failed to recognise its Nazi past, when its citizens had been among the most ardent supporters of the regime. Instead, it fostered a myth of victimhood.

‘The war generation rejected the pain of coming to terms with the dark chapter of their own history, and quite frequently the war damage suffered by the Austrian population was put on a level with the suffering of the Jews in the Shoa,’ wrote historian Maria Wirth.

Unlike the German states, Austria refused to apologise over its role in the Holocaust, compensate Jewish victims and return stolen art that had become public property.

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However, alongside Hitler, a host of other top Nazis were also Austrian, including the commandant and most of the senior SS men at the Sobibor Death Camp in Poland.

This was largely ignored or passed off as a ‘few rotten apples’ – and from 1970s onwards the state refused to investigate the wartime pasts of Austrian citizens.

It was only in the 1980s, when the hidden complicity in Nazi war crimes of former UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim was exposed, that attitudes began to change.

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Yet, despite new evidence emerging that he had lied about his Wehrmacht service and served as a lieutenant in a brutal unit that executed partisans and deported thousands of Greeks and Jews to death camps, he was elected Austrian president in 1986.

Nevertheless, the country has gradually become more at ease with acknowledging its past since his successor, President Thomas Klestil, apologised to Israel in 1994 for his country’s role in the Holocaust.