Introduction
In 2006 my family and I visited Austria. It was a whirlwind trip that didn’t allow for extensive exploration, so I wanted to fill in the holes in our itinerary by reading a good account of the combat in Austria during the Second World War, my favorite era of history and the one I’ve devoted my life to writing about and studying. Much to my surprise I couldn’t find such a work.
Plenty of books mentioned the battle for Vienna in passing. A few devoted a chapter to it, but only one specialized work covered it in detail, Georg Maier’s splendid Drama Between Budapest and Vienna, The Final Battle of the 6. Panzer-Armee in the East, 1945. And while Maier’s work gives the best account we have in English of this combat, it remains flawed in several ways. For my purposes, not the least drawback is that it only covers one of Heeresgruppe Süd ’s four armies.
Books in German did exist but had not been translated into English, the most definitive being Manfred Rauchesteiner’s Krieg in Österreich. Friedrich Brettner wrote extensively on this topic, also in German, but again the strategic narrative was incomplete. Once I realized there was a major gap in the historiography of the war, I decided that since such a book didn’t exist, I would write one. Little did I understand the vast scope of the project I’d undertaken.
Work on this book started in late 2006. Writing it took longer than the Third Reich existed. The idea for my book was to write a comprehensive history of Heeresgruppe Süd starting on 1 January, 1945. To that end, during the next eight years I wrote something over 100,000 words. In September 2014, completely without warning, everything changed when I sat down and wrote two novels back to back, Standing The Final Watch and Standing In The Storm. They were meant to be fun diversion, but both became major hits and I had a brand new career on my hands as a fiction writer. Even as I type these words I am getting messages on social media wanting to know when the next book will be out. It was only in spring of 2017 that I once again began work on this book.
However, rather than spend another decade bringing the concept for the original book to life, I decided to complete the last part of it first, the Battle for Austria. This was, after all, the part that didn’t already have a good history written about it, and the reason I had been inspired to tackle this project in the first place. Time permitting, and if the market demands it, I’ll get back to the rest of it later. There’s some good stuff already there.
I knew from the start I didn’t want my history to be just dry facts. This or that battalion moved here and attacked there, and then moved 22 miles to attack so and so at such and such village. There would have to be a lot of that, of course, because that’s what writing military history entails, but I wanted the book to encompass more. What was the geography of the region, who were the people, what did they produce? When one day your home is within the Third Reich and the next day the Russians are your overlords, then your life has undergone a major change. I wanted the reader to feel part of this massive campaign, at least as much as such a thing is possible.
But this is a military history, not a social history, and I also knew that I wanted to weave the story of lesser known formations, such as 37. SS-Freiwilligen-Kavallerie-Division Lützow, SS-Kampfgruppe-Division Böhmen und Mähren and 14. Waffen-Grenadier-Division-der-SS Galizien (Ukrainische Nr. 1) into the narrative, using whatever information is available. The death struggle of III Panzerkorps in the mountains of East-Central Austria is virtually unknown in the west, particularly the incredible defensive work of 1. Volks-Gebirgs-Division , or the remarkable counterattack of 117. Jäger-Division. Some books written in German do exist with personal histories
of many such units, but these are mostly unavailable from either primary or secondary avenues of acquisition, and costly. In other words, they’re hard to find, expensive, and written in German.
There are too many obscure Wehrmacht units to count, and surely more whose existence have passed without notice into history. Sometimes only a name exists, with no information. Rather than cataloguing every short-lived formation I chose those who either had a significant impact on the fighting, or for which reliable information could be found. The reader should imagine many unnamed others who are represented by those I write about.
Scattered throughout this narrative are intense but localized battles for small towns and villages, and again these should be considered representative of all the other towns and villages whose story could not be told for lack of time and space. The experiences of a division like 118. Jäger-Division may not be covered in detail, but those of its fellow divisions that are shared should be considered similar. But I do see this book as being something alive, something shared by the larger community of those who continue to be fascinated by the Second World War, and therefore something subject to expansion. By putting out the name of some unknown unit it might bring forward information known only to a few. Perhaps someone, somewhere, has a diary kept by a member of the formation, or anecdotes passed down through the family. In such a case I could use this evidence to expand the narrative for future editions or bonus online content.
The book centers mostly on the German defense, but I did want to cover the major Russian personalities and formations to give the reader a picture of the other side. Including a comprehensive look at the Red Army experience would stretch the book I envisioned past a reasonable length. Long-term plans include such a book from the Russian viewpoint.
War crimes that may, or may not, have been committed by the various Nazi agencies and organizations is beyond the scope of this book, except as it might enter the narrative concerning the defense of Austria. For example, in 2009 a former member of 5. SS-Panzer-Division Wiking was accused of murdering 58 Jews in the Hungarian border town of Deustsche Schütze on 29 March 1945, after first forcing them to dig a defensive trench. The accused man died before trial, so whatever evidence had been collected was never presented in court. Had this incident fallen within the time frame of this book it would have been included in the main text, as it was allegedly a direct result of the fighting.
Likewise, the massacre of Jews at Rechnitz when the Russian Twenty-Sixth Army was closing in occurred as a consequence of the fighting, but not during the period of the book. Nor did it have direct impact on the military situation. It happened, and I’m aware of it, but it falls outside the parameters of this work.
Nor is the ongoing debate about possible war crimes of the 14. Waffen-Grenadier-Division der SS Galizien covered. That topic could be the issue of an entire book by itself, and in trying to cover as much ground as I am with this work it would make the task I have set myself impossible to achieve, instead of merely difficult. I try to dismiss the notion of impossibility, but some things really are impossible. The same could be said for 2. SS-Panzer-Division Das Reich, or 3. SS-PanzerDivision Totenkopf. When dealing with Nazi Germany in general and SS formations in particular, these questions must either be the topic at hand, or compartmentalized lest they take over the narrative. Perhaps another writer could manage all of this simultaneously, but this one cannot.
The same caveats apply to both alleged American and Russian war crimes since the same rules apply: except where it affects the narrative these fall outside the scope of this work. One such example is the allegation that hundreds of members of Das Reich were simply gunned down by US soldiers after surrendering in Czechoslovakia, but that nobody cares because they were SS men. The men of Totenkopf make the same claim. There also seems no point in dwelling on the mass rapes that accompanied the Red Army across Europe. Some two million women were said to have been victimized, but except where combat troops came across evidence this is for a different book than mine. Indeed, it has already been covered in many other worthy works. There are a few
incidents mentioned about what happened in Austria, because hard numbers are available in many towns, but it may safely be assumed this was the norm in newly conquered areas.
The most difficult part has been disentangling contradictory references and details, which happened on every single page on this book. Every…single…page. Misidentified units, unknown units, conflicting dates, missing reports…literally hundreds, if not thousands, of hours were spent trying to determine where the weight of evidence lay in those countless contradictions. In the end I made the decisions that made the most sense to me, but I anticipate friendly debate on some of these subjects. After all, we learn best by defending our beliefs to others. To that end I have a place for errata on my website, www.thelastbrigade.com.
I also made considerable effort to determine unit strengths at any given moment during the course of the battle. I have always appreciated this when reading military history, so that unit names aren’t simply ambiguous titles but have numbers to flesh them out in the reader’s mind. Of course, German unit strength returns after March 1945 are few and far between. In some places I’ve made estimates to give the narrative flavor, but these aren’t wild guesses. I’m confident these numbers are very close to accurate.
Lastly, anyone writing about the Wehrmacht has to decide what nomenclature they’ll use to list the dizzying array of units, sub-units, alarm units , Kampfgruppe, etc., used by the Germans in the Second World War. For a variety of reasons the book sticks with the exact German designation. So there you have it. This book exists in its current form because it’s what I would want to read. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it, but make no mistake; if this work has merit, it’s because I stand on the shoulders of the giants who came before me.
The Army divisions suffered a similar fate during the Konrad attacks, including 1. PanzerDivision , 3. Panzer-Division and 6. Panzer-Division. Their authorized strengths were smaller than their Waffen-SS counterparts to begin with.
Meanwhile, January had been a disastrous month for the Germans everywhere else. The Ardennes Offensive, better known in the west as the Battle of the Bulge, ended in ruinous defeat. Losses had been catastrophic, especially in panzers and Schützenpanzerwagen , SPWs, which Americans called half-tracks, and which couldn’t be replaced. The two armies that participated in the attack, 5. Panzerarmee and 6. SS-Panzerarmee,6 lost most of their offensive power in the month-long battle, and yet 6. SS-Panzerarmee still represented the most powerful formation Germany had left, even after the battle. So the pressing question of the moment was what to do with it?
Against all advice and logic, Hitler decided to send it to Hungary. To the generals this made no sense, but Hitler wasn’t interested in defending Berlin or anywhere else. He still thought in terms of winning the war, and victory could only be achieved through attacks. This was true as far as it went, but the real truth was that Germany had irretrievably lost the war no matter what they did. Nevertheless, Hitler was determined to go down fighting.
Like all twentieth-century militaries the Wehrmacht ran on oil-based fuels, and two of the last sources of natural oil in German hands were the Hungarian fields around Nagykanitzsa and the Austrian fields at Zistersdorf.7 Keeping these was vital to the war effort, even though their production was small compared to the needs. However, the German synthetic oil industry had been bombed into oblivion by the B-17s of the US Eighth Air Force and the Halifaxes and Lancasters of Britain’s Bomber Command. Fuel shortages already crippled the Wehrmacht but at least with these fields there was some production.
Another reason for sending 6. SS-Panzerarmee south was that once pumped out of the ground, oil had to be refined before it could be used, and most of Germany’s remaining refineries were in Austria, particularly near Vienna. Once the oil was refined it then had to be transported by rail before the panzers, aircraft and ships of the Wehrmacht could use it, and by this point in the war the German rail system was in a shambles. What was simpler than bringing the fuel to the panzers and SPWs of 6. SS-Panzerarmee was to bring the panzers to the fuel.
A third excuse for this redeployment was that when Hitler made the decision to transfer SS-Oberstgruppenführer Sepp Dietrich’s command to Hungary, the Budapest garrison was fighting hard against the Russian siege. It seemed possible to use the panzer army to relieve the city. By the time Budapest fell on 13 February it was too late to reroute the army back to the north.
The fourth reason has to do with Hitler’s understanding of history and his interpretation of the life of Frederick the Great. The Prussian king never gave up, never stopped being aggressive and was finally rewarded by the dissolution of the alliance facing him. Hitler saw himself as being in a similar situation, but his relentless focus on attacking makes it clear that he didn’t believe a nation could win a war by remaining on the defensive. A decisive defeat could only be inflicted on the enemy by attacking.
Understanding this critical point is the key to understanding Hitler’s motives for both disastrous offensives late in the war, Unternehmen Wacht am Rhein, the Ardennes Offensive, later renamed Unternehmen Herbstnebel , and Unternehmen Frühlingserwachen, Operation Spring Awakening. Conventional wisdom, both at the time and in hindsight, is that saving those precious forces for counter-offensives and reserves was their proper usage. The General Staff remembered devastating
6 6. Panzerarmee d id not have the SS designation until much later in the war. However, in the intervening years it has become widely known as 6. SS-Panzerarmee, and that designation is used here to avoid confusion.
7 In a January military conference Hitler mentioned having the Zistersdorf fields shut down to deny their use to the Russians.
counter-blows earlier in the war, such as Manstein’s backhand blow to retake Kharkov in early 1943. The Red Army forces facing him were crushed by the attack, stopping the momentum of the post-Stalingrad westward movement. But Manstein had achieved this against Hitler’s direct orders and his relief in 1944 could be traced back to this disobedience as a key moment when Hitler turned on him. Most people would rather be rich than right, but Hitler would have rather been right.
In 1945 Hitler was still fighting to win the war. We’ll never know if he truly believed it was still militarily possible, wanted to prolong the fight in hopes of a miracle similar to Frederick the Great’s salvation, or simply wanted to extend his own life as long as possible, regardless of the cost. Did he truly believe himself to be the savior of Europe and so his own life was more valuable than millions of others? Or was he a pathological narcissist who had no empathy for the misery he caused? Again, we can never truly know for sure.
Finally, Hitler made a curious remark when justifying moving 6. SS-Panzerarmee to Hungary and, by extension, Austria. General der Artillerie Walter Warlimont quotes Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm Keitel as saying that Hitler declared Vienna more important than Berlin.8 This altogether bizarre remark interjects the possibility of sentimental reasons for Hitler’s decision. He was, after all, Austrian, and despite repeated declarations of how much he hated Vienna, he always looked back on those years of struggle with nostalgia.
Was he a sentimental monster? Based on a variety of factors, there was definitely a hint of this in his decision to protect Austria above Berlin. But whatever the reason or reasons, whether this theory holds water or not, there’s no doubt that 6. SS-Panzerarmee found itself secretly transported to Hungary.
Meanwhile, February saw sporadic heavy fighting all along the front lines of Heeresgruppe Süd , Army Group South, especially at Sékesfehérvár, as the Russians probed for weak spots. Both sides knew that city was the key to Western Hungary, but the Red Army had long since perfected its tactics for capturing heavily defended cities. Beginning in November of 1942, with attacks at both Velikiye Luki and Stalingrad, they first launched direct attacks on those cities to keep the defenders tied down, followed by attacks on the weaker flanks where the Germans typically deployed the less reliable elements of their allies, or German forces that were stretched too thin. In Western Hungary that allied formation was the Hungarian Third Army north of Sékesfehérvár.
During the night of 11-12 February the surviving members of the Budapest garrison launched a desperate breakout to reach German lines. Between 17,000 and 28,000 Germans and Hungarians9 attacked to the northwest out of their last positions in Buda’s Castle District. But the Russians learned of their plans and zeroed in a massive amount of firepower on the escape route. The resulting slaughter left thousands of dead men strewn in heaps along streets clogged with shattered vehicles and ruined buildings. Fewer than seven hundred Germans made their way back to friendly lines. Budapest officially surrendered on 13 February. * * *
Regardless of this loss, Hitler still insisted on attacking in Hungary. The name given to the offensive was Unternehmen Frühlingserwachen, Operation Spring Awakening. The concept was to clear the Soviets entirely from Western Hungary and to re-establish the Danube River as a defensive
8 Warlimont, General Walter, Inside Hitler’s Headquarters 1939-1945 (Novato: Presidio Press, 1990), p.499.
9 Sources differ on the exact number.
Himmler’s abject failure as commander of Heeresgruppe Vistula , Hitler didn’t hesitate to single out the Waffen-SS for rebuke.
On 27 March Hitler ordered the SS divisions of 6. SS-Panzerarmee to remove the honorific cuff title from the sleeves of their uniforms. In essence, this was like ordering men to disassociate themselves from their families. There was no greater insult and Hitler knew it.
If the Führer had any real friends, Sepp Dietrich could be counted as one of the few. But as happened with Ernst Röhm, the rare man with whom Hitler used the German familiar term du , the Führer had no compunction against punishing his friends. When the order came into the headquarters of 6. SS-Panzerarmee Dietrich’s anger at this betrayal was obvious. He ordered it suppressed but it leaked out anyway, some say by Hermann Balck himself. One persistent legend is that the fury of the SS men supposedly led Dietrich and his officers to throw their medals into a spittoon or cook pot and send them to Hitler, but this never happened. Nor were any remaining cuff title ordered removed. Dietrich wouldn’t allow it, even though most cuff title had been removed for security reasons during the transfer to Hungary, and had never been sewn back on.
Hitler said the SS men had not fought hard enough in Hungary. In particular, he accused Dietrich of disobeying orders by leaving 30,000 men behind in Germany, anticipating a transfer to the Berlin front. This was pure fantasy, fueled by Balck’s incessant negativity, Otto Wöhler’s15 backing of the 6. Armee commander and the Army generals who had Hitler’s ear, and the unending rivalry between the regular Army and the SS. However, there is one kernel of truth that could have been the inspiration for exaggeration into a major issue. When the LAH shipped out to Austria, it left behind a battalion’s worth of men from SS-Panzer-Regiment 1 at Osnabrück, in Northwest Germany. These men didn’t have panzers and would soon be formed into infantry companies and shipped to Austria. The number involved was probably 300-400 men.
What seems likely to have happened is that someone at Führer Headquarters heard about these men and saw a chance to elevate the Army at the expense of the Waffen-SS. We can never be certain, of course, but we do know that even in the dying days of the Reich Hitler’s paladins fought each other harder than ever for their position at his court. In his increasing paranoia, Hitler would blame anybody except himself for failure, and now it was Dietrich’s turn.
Himmler was ordered to personally reprimand Dietrich. In late March he traveled to Vienna, ostensibly for this purpose. While there he reportedly spoke with Von Schirach about evacuating the last Jews in Vienna to Mauthausen, but to treat them well and keep them safe, apparently in a last-minute attempt to mitigate all that came before. But he and Von Schirach were never friendly, and Von Schirach ignored his wishes. Moreover, his influence with the Waffen-SS itself had waned.
No men had sacrificed more to advance the regime through military means than the Waffen-SS , who were often shot on sight even after surrendering. Once news of the cuff title order got out to 6. SS-Panzerarmee the SS men’s personal loyalty to Adolf Hitler was severely damaged and many looked on Himmler with contempt for not defending them. They would continue to obey orders as well as they could, but standing fast in suicidal situations just because Hitler told them to would never happen again. On his word they had fought their way across Europe, bled and died on a thousand battlefields and incurred the undying enmity of their foes, only to be betrayed in the final weeks. The SS men would still fight for each other, and to protect civilians, but not for the higher leadership.
The long-simmering rivalry between the Army and the Waffen-SS permeated all levels of the Wehrmacht, not just the high command. One example from Heeresgruppe Süd in 1945 is the case of SS-Obersturmbannführer Walter Klein from 16. SS-Panzergrenadier-Division Reichsführer SS . Put in charge of an alarm company in southwest Hungary, on 29 March Klein was accused
15 Commander of Heeresgruppe Süd.
of retreating without orders by an Army court-martial. Three days later he was executed by the Army.16 The staff of 16. SS-Panzergrenadier-Division Reichsführer SS would certainly have been enraged by this incident as the Waffen-SS prided themselves on disciplining their own men.
Stavka17 Directive for April 1945
The Soviet High Command issued new orders for Second and Third Ukrainian Fronts on 1 April, along with a new boundary between the two army groups. Third Ukrainian Front contained First Bulgarian Army and the Twenty-Sixth, Twenty-Seventh and Fifty-Seventh Soviet Armies on its left wing, with orders to advance toward Graz and Gloggnitz by 12 April at the latest. Its right wing comprised the Fourth, Sixth and Sixth Guards Armies, and was given the task of capturing Vienna. By 15 April it was supposed to hold a line 15 miles south of Sankt Pölten, up to Sankt Pölten and then north to Tulln.
Stalin frequently pitted one commander against another in a competition for honors and stature, and so, just as happened with Berlin, Stavka also gave Second Ukrainian Front the mission of taking Vienna. The Front contained Forty-Sixth Army, reinforced by II Guards Mechanized Corps and XXIII Tank Corps. South of the Danube it was ordered to advance through the Bruck Gap, at the city of Bruck an der Leitha, and from there to drive on and take Vienna. North of the Danube, it was to capture Bratislava and then drive west toward Stockerau, Znaim and Brno.18
Notes on names and numbers
The term Wehrmacht refers to all German armed forces, the Kriegsmarine, Luftwaffe, and Heer. The German Heer, the German Army, on the Eastern Front on Easter Day, 1945, consisted of Heeresgruppe Vistula in Poland, followed by Heeresgruppe Mitte in what was previously called Czechoslovakia, Heeresgruppe Süd in Western Hungary and Eastern Austria, and Heeresgruppe E in the Balkans. Heeresgruppe F had been recently dissolved and absorbed by Heeresgruppe E. Heeresgruppe C held northern Italy and will crop up late in this narrative.
The Germans had two words for ‘army,’ heer and armee. Heer generally refers to the larger organization while armee means the individual field armies, such as 6. SS-Panzerarmee. Heeresgruppen , Army Groups, were precisely what the name implies, a collection of two or more armies, Heeresgruppe Süd had four armies, but it could just as easily have had three, or five. In theory a Heeresgruppe could have no less than eight divisions. In practice they often had more than or, as in 1945, less. Manpower in a heeresgruppe could be anything from 100,000-500,000 or more, counting supply, medical, veterinary and other miscellaneous components.
Although the Germans and Russians shared unit nomenclature, there was a difference in the authorized strengths represented by those designations. For example, a German battalion equaled a Russian regiment, a German regiment equaled a Russian brigade, and so on. A Soviet tank corps might have 150-170 tanks and self-propelled guns, which is roughly the same authorized strength as a Waffen-SS Panzer Division. A German corps could contain two such divisions, doubling its strength, while a similarly upgraded Russian unit would be called an army.
16 Landwehr, Richard, ‘Waffen-SS Miscellany’ Siegrunen 55 ( January 1994), p.85.
17 The Soviet High Command.
18 Ma ier, Georg, Drama Between Budapest and Vienna, The Final Battles of the 6. Panzer-Armee in the East-1945 (Winnipeg: J.J. Federowicz, 2004), pp.342-343.
During 1945 authorized unit strengths were largely irrelevant. The few Wehrmacht units up to strength are labeled as such in the narrative, but most were in the same position as 5. SS-PanzerDivision Wiking. Despite being authorized to have close to 190 armored fighting vehicles, it had so few that it disbanded its panzer regiment. Nor did Orders of Battle matter anymore, or replacement and supply channels, which were violated with regularity as units began to look after their own needs. Examples abound of combat troops appropriating what they needed outside the hitherto rigid logistical channels.
Perhaps the most misleading figures of them all are those for available combat strength. Some units showed they were actually over-strength in manpower, yet those new replacements generally had no basic training and quickly became casualties once committed to battle. The name 1. SS-Panzer-Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler might seem impressive, but if the division had no panzers and half its men were untrained for combat, then its combat value would be much lower than its reputation might imply.
The Russian term for a collection of armies was ‘Front’. Like the German term Heeresgruppe, Army Group, a Front had more than one army. Also like the German, it was an amorphous concept. A Front might have two or three armies, or it might have six. The Russian Fronts involved in the assault on Austria were the Second and Third Ukrainian Fronts. Second Ukrainian Front, fighting mostly on the north side of the Danube, was commanded by the young, energetic and very skilled Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, while Third Ukrainian Front’s leader was Marshal Tolbukhin. Tolbukhin was unusual in the Red Army because he was not overly ambitious and did everything he could to keep casualties low while achieving his objectives, unlike men such as Georgi Zhukov who were indifferent to losses as long as the mission was accomplished. Both Russian commanders were first-rate military leaders and Tolbukhin is generally considered one of the best Soviet officers of the Second World War.
Units of Second and Third Ukrainian Front were lower on the supply chain than other Fronts, such as Zhukov’s First Belorussian Front facing Berlin. Consequently, their equipment tended to be more of a hodge-podge than higher-priority units. For example, a large number of the tanks used in the Austrian campaign were either American Shermans, affectionately nicknamed Emcha by their Russian crews,19 or British Valentines.20 One Rumanian unit even drove old French Renault R-35s, a pre-war light tank, and First Bulgarian Army drove German Mark IV panzers and other Wehrmacht vehicles. Russian crews tended to like the western-made tanks for their greater comfort levels and radios, but overall combat capabilities lagged behind newer Soviet tanks such as the T-34/85.
Heeresgruppe Süd
Heeresgruppe Süd was the headquarters responsible for defending Austria. On its northern flank stood Heeresgruppe Mitte and to the south was Heeresgruppe E . On 1 April the Heeresgruppe Süd area of responsibility ran from near Zlin, in what is now the far eastern region of the Czech Republic, through Slovakia to the eastern suburbs of Bratislava, then across the Danube to the area of the Neuseidlersee and along the Austrian border until arcing southeast to near Nagikanizsa, Hungary. On its southern border it connected with Heeresgruppe E in extreme southwestern Hungary.
19 The first letter for its Russian designation, the M-4.
20 Although the Valentine was quickly outclassed during the war by other designs, the Soviet High Command specifically asked for its continued production for their use.
Sunday, 1 April
Not a single meter of ground is permitted to be given up anymore.
Adolf Hitler, 1 April 1945
Vienna
Hints of smoke swirled on the gentle winds of a bright Easter Sunday morning in Vienna, former capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Bits of ash drifted around the grim faces of the people gathered at the Heldenplatz. A bitter smell hung over the city that had become all too familiar to its citizens. Around the sprawling metropolis buildings slid into the street as if the ground beneath them had liquefied, their facades and roofs smashed to ruins by the rain of American bombs that started the previous June and intensified in February and March. The powdered rubble and skeletal walls of buildings both magnificent and ordinary inflicted a shared and classless destruction the former capital of empire had never known before.
The Allies treated the Brown Plague , the derisive Viennese name for Nazism, like an infection needing high-explosive antibiotics, and were not shy about the dosage. After fifty-one previous attacks on all districts of the city, the attack on 30 March 1945 was the last. The Americans were finally done battering one of Europe’s great cultural centers, because it was also one of Europe’s great industrial centers. The destruction wrought by the B-24s and B-17s of the US Fifteenth Army Air Force left Vienna a broken shell of its former glorious self.
Vienna exists because of the Danube River. The area was conquered by the Romans during the reign of Augustus around 15 bce. Except for brief periods when the Romans pushed northward into the Germanic territories, such as during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, the Danube marked the northern boundary of the Roman Empire. Vienna became an important center of trade and, eventually, capital of the empire of the Hapsburgs.
But the Danube could be temperamental. One branch ran through the city itself, and had a propensity to flood and erode its banks. To combat this, the Viennese worked the river branch into a canal with quays and reinforced sides, as well as several methods of controlling water levels and keeping the canal free of floating ice. Named simply the Danube Canal, it runs through the city and creates a huge island containing the Second District, Leopoldstadt, and the Twentieth District, Brittgenau.
After the joining of Germany and Austria in 1938, the Anschluss, Vienna was expanded from 21 to 26 districts, and today has 23, but the soul of the city has always lain within the Ringstrasse, the semi-circular boulevard around the Innere Stadt, the inner city, which was also the First District. Districts two through nine spiraled in a clockwise rotation around the First District, starting with the Second District, Leopoldstadt, across the Danube Canal and including the Prater, with the Ninth District adjacent to the First on its northwest corner. From there the numbering was more haphazard.
Contained within the inner city were the traditions which had always made the Viennese heart beat faster. The grand opera houses, the promenades, St Stephen’s Cathedral, the Spanish Riding
School, the Parliament Building and, facing the city’s most famous square, the Heldenplatz, which was the center of power of the Austrian Emperors who resided in the Hofburg. On 12 March 1945, a huge wave of bombers aiming for the Floridsdorf Oil Refinery instead bombed the inner city, causing massive damage.
On that Easter Sunday the normal bustle of the city was louder than usual as those who could leave, did. They fled in every imaginable type of vehicle, from sedans to garbage trucks. In quieter moments the faint thunder of artillery fire could be heard as the Red Army reached the Austrian frontier, but instead of heading east to fight for the Reich, as they urged and forced others to do, most Party officials were headed west wearing civilian dress and not their uniforms.
The Russians were coming and only the most delusional fanatic believed Vienna could be saved. Twice before had Vienna stood as the last bulwark of European culture and religion against invasion from the east, stopping Turkish invasions in both 1529 and 1683. Both times a mighty warrior had stepped forward to lead the defense, first in the person of the German Nicholas, Count of Salm, and later by John III Sobieski, King of Poland. To defeat the Russians in 1945 Vienna needed another such man to lead the defense, a hero of the people who could rally them to achieve the impossible. Instead, the man they got was the hated Gauleiter 1 of Vienna, Baldur von Schirach.
It wasn’t just the citizens of Vienna who despised Baldur von Schirach; Joseph Goebbels loathed him, too. To be sure, Goebbels hated a lot of people, but the diminutive Reichsminister held a special contempt for the Gauleiter and Reichsstathalter 2 of Vienna that went back a long way. For years Goebbels had complained that von Schirach was, among other things, incompetent and unequal to the task of being a Gauleiter. Although he never put it this way, it was plain that he thought of von Schirach as an effete dilettante. It must have been cold comfort to be proven correct as the situation worsened and his opinion was borne out.
As broken German units streamed into Austria during late March of 1945, problems of command became almost untenable. Gauleiters had been given nearly plenipotentiary powers to resist the enemy, regardless of the brutality of their methods. This enforced the power of the Nazi Party in matters of defense, which sometimes made for a confusing chain of command. Hitler’s method of staying in power was to have multiple layers of authority at all levels of government, so in Vienna von Schirach became the ultimate arbiter of all territorial disputes. That inherent inefficiency had crippled the war effort for years, including during the recent fighting in Hungary, and would rear its ugly head over and over again in the coming fight for Vienna.
Throughout the brief life of the Third Reich this relentless infighting drained the energy of the nation away from its primary task of fighting for survival. At every level, from Hitler’s private war conferences to the lowest levels of civil service, full cooperation between rivals was hard to find.
This counter-productive bickering applied to Goebbels and most of the Nazi inner circle, and to von Schirach, too. Their rivalry dated from the early days of the Nazi Party. The handsome and urbane von Schirach was everything Goebbels was not. Goebbels joined the party in 1924 on the heels of the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich in November of 1923, and von Schirach joined in 1925.
Despite the crippling deformity of his right foot, the frail-looking Reichsminister was every inch the ruthless street fighter. He had clawed his way to the top of the Nazi hierarchy over the bodies of his enemies, both figuratively and literally. After the debacle at Stalingrad he called for Total War and showed no public empathy with the plight of the common folk. For him, the state towered
1 National Socialist Leader of a city or district.
2 Reich Deputy. This meant more or less the same thing as Gauleiter, giving the person control of a region’s local governments.
at being confronted with the truth of the Holocaust in his own home, Hitler left the room. And although the von Schirachs were thereafter banned from the Berghof, he remained Gauleiter of Vienna.
Nor was Hitler blind to his deficiencies. In his diary entry for 24 April 1943, Goebbels recounts a conversation between Hitler and Reichsminister Albert Speer concerning von Schirach’s views on the conduct of the war: “Von Schirach hasn’t the faintest idea about total war and tries again and again to torpedo it. The Führer…fears that Von Schirach has fallen into the clutches of the Viennese reactionaries and no longer sees the interests of the Reich clearly.”5
Goebbels then showed how viciously petty he could be toward his enemies: “The Führer has a low opinion of von Schirach… He has not shown any political sense and is no grown-up Nazi. He now suddenly speaks with an American accent and rolls his ‘rs’ like an actor”.6
Among his myriad failures, von Schirach had been responsible for construction of the Southeast Wall, the so-called Reichsschutzstellung. The plan was to have fortifications similar to the West Wall7 along the Austrian border which retreating German forces could occupy and use to stop the oncoming Russians. Construction materials and manpower were in short supply but von Schirach only paid it lip service, anyway. It wasn’t in his nature to pay attention to details, so by the time it was needed the Reichschutzstellung was nothing more than a few trenches and tank traps. Goebbels’ skeptical opinion of his leadership had proved correct.
The Gauleiter of Vienna made for a terrible Nazi. He was an early admirer of Hitler’s, joining the party in 1925. Yet he didn’t start learning German until age five. His father was a member of the German nobility, a theater director, ducal chamberlain and retired cavalry captain, Carl Baily Norris von Schirach.
He was a man of stark contradictions. Von Schirach undoubtedly had organizational talents, as his creation of the Hitlerjugend , the Hitler Youth, clearly shows. He was rabidly anti-Semitic, with 65,000 Jews deported from Vienna after he became Gauleiter in 1940. He was personally brave, yet terrified of air raids, which drew the scorn of the Viennese. They joked that he scurried into his fortified bunker and left them to fend for themselves.
Many in the Nazi hierarchy shared Strasser and Goebbels’ opinion of him as a dilettante. Patronage of the arts was a major part of his life and fueled his feud with Goebbels, who believed Viennese cultural life fell under his jurisdiction but was opposed by von Schirach. In photographs he often had a startled look, like a mouse caught foraging in a pantry.
With the Red Army bearing down on Vienna, von Schirach’s uncanny ability to make a bad situation worse did just that. Rumors had circulated for months that Vienna might be declared an open city, much like Rome, and would not suffer further damage through houseto-house fighting. So when, on 30 March, he declared martial law, it only served to panic the public, since the government already had all the power it needed to enforce order. Then, on 1 April, in a typical von Schirach move, he banned all private vehicles from leaving Vienna. This was not only unnecessary, it was stupid. By this point there effectively were no private vehicles left, and fuel for the handful remaining was unobtainable anyway. Government vehicles that did have access to fuel were not covered by the ban anyway, leading to an Easter Sunday where the roads leading west out of Vienna were already clogged as any government
5 Lochner, Louis, editor and translator, The Goebbels Diaries (New York: Popular Library, 1948), p. 392.
6 L ochner, Goebbels, p. 414.
7 Commonly known as the Siegfried Line, the Westwall was a series of fortifications built between 1938 and 1940 along Germany’s western border.
few blocks from the Danube Canal and photographic evidence shows what appears to be bullet damage around a balcony that would have made a perfect machine gun position.
The University of Vienna wasn’t spared, either. Although its campuses were spread over the city, the main complex, affectionately known as Die Uni, sat in a prominent spot on the Ringsstrasse, adjacent the Rathaus,10 and two blocks down from Parliament. Gaping holes were left in the main building and the Anatomical Institute, where the Lecture Hall was gutted. The Zoological, Law and Chemical Institutes all suffered heavy damage.
With historical irony to make even a hardened skeptic wonder if the gods of war might be inflicting their sense of humor on humanity, the balcony on the Hofburg from which Adolf Hitler spoke to the masses after the Anschluss11 had sheared off during a bombing raid. The Hofburg was the Imperial Palace at one end of the Heldenplatz. Flanked by the incredibly well appointed Museums of Natural History and Art History, with the soaring statue of Archduke Charles in its center, the Heldenplatz was the crowning jewel of the Ringsstrasse, the worthy center of a mighty empire. But the Art History Museum had been struck by 24 bombs over the course of time, with the memorial statue of Viennese painter Moritz von Schwind having its head and limbs blown off. Fortunately for posterity, the Nazis had evacuated the art displayed in the museum and it was not damaged.
The world famous Donnerbrunnen fountain in the Neuer Markt wasn’t so lucky. Baroque in design, with traces of ancient influences, it was one of two fountains sculpted in Vienna by Raphael Donner in 1737-39, and was near the Imperial Crypt in the Capuchin Church. It took a direct bomb hit and lay in pieces around the market.
The Viennese did not take their art lightly, and went to extraordinary lengths to protect what they could. Monuments too large to move were sometimes encased in bricks to protect them, such as the Prinz Eugen Monument. But some of their most cherished places could not be saved. The Imperial Palaces were all badly hit, with the front of the Schwarzenburg sliding downward like a lava flow and Schönbrunn looking more like ruins in the Roman Forum than the former residence of Emperor Franz Joseph. To the Viennese, however, nothing hurt worse than destruction to the Zoo, where more than half the animals died in the bombing and many more were let loose in the city. Many more succumbed to the hunger pangs of the population.
One loss that seemed appropriate was the Hotel Metropole. After the Anschluss it became Gestapo Headquarters, but when the bombers were done with it not one wall remained standing. The Rathaus and Parliament also took hits in the same attack that smashed the University, although the Rathaus Bells survived.
The city’s utilities weren’t so lucky. By 1 April the gas was shut off and electrical service was sporadic at best. The Municipal Gas-Works were a wreck, with the pipe-lines punctured in more than 2,000 places and even the largest underground pipes severed by bombs. The Municipal Electric Works were no better off with 90 percent of the grounds either damaged or destroyed, causing electricity to be off most of the time. This made cooking and storing food problematic, assuming there was food to be had in the first place. And the ground fighting was yet to come.
Garbage was no longer collected. The main building of the Vienna Fire Brigade took direct hits and three fire houses were destroyed, hampering the city’s limited ability to fight fires. That no longer mattered, however, since the remaining fire fighting teams would be ordered out of the city. And the rail network had come in for particular attention by the bombers. Before it was all over
10 Town Hall.
11 The u nion of Germany and Austria in 1938. Ostensibly this was voted on by the Austrians, but in the eyes of the world it was a conquest by the Germans. This distinction would later lead to Austria’s being treated as a liberated country, not a conquered one.
more than half of the passenger cars would either be damaged or destroyed, and the rail lines cut in countless places.
On that Easter Sunday, damage was apparent throughout the city, a constant reminder of the war. As far as the eye could see there were nothing but houses without roofs, or lonely chimneys stretching skyward like accusing fingers.
Even buildings showing little exterior damage could be burnt out hulks behind their facades, such as the Heinrichshof, across the street from the State Opera House. A nearby apartment block, the Philliphof, collapsed and buried some two hundred people. They are still entombed there to this day. Kärtnerstrasse, the city’s famous shopping district, suffered more than most, where the opulent Hotel Grand Duke Charles was a total loss.
Fifty movie theaters were wiped out and damage to the fabled Prater, Vienna’s park area, was nearly total. The Prater was then, as now, something of a tree-lined wonderland north of the Danube Canal in Leopoldstadt. Colorful pennants and striped awnings attracted the Viennese for a pleasant holiday outing, and under normal circumstances a sunny Easter Sunday, such as the one in 1945, would have attracted overflowing crowds. But that year Vienna had far more dangerous concerns.
An estimated 3,506 homes were destroyed in the bombing, and another 8,742 damaged. This doesn’t include the military targets, such as rail yards and oil refineries, or the damage yet to come in the street fighting. Nor does it include the destruction of some of Vienna’s most iconic landmarks.
The Zircus Busch, a multi-purpose structure opened in 1882 for a different purpose but converted to a circus in 1892, featured a variety of acts and stations, where the citizenry could see everything from a traveling Rumanian circus to plays. In 1895 Gabor Steiner created Venice in Vienna, which included an artificial lagoon to simulate the famous canals. But perhaps nothing symbolized the Prater more than the iconic Riesenrad , the giant Ferris wheel erected in 1897 which stood as the tallest in the world until 1985.12
On 30 March the Americans called off the bombings as the Russians approached. During the last raid the fire brigades were overwhelmed and couldn’t fight all the fires as the streets were clogged with rubble. Even the Schwarzenburg Palace was hit. For the Viennese life underground in the air raid shelters had become common. Railroads and street cars shut down, or were overturned as makeshift tank barriers. A total of only 41 civilian vehicles survived the attacks.
A lthough the US Fifteenth Air Force was finished with Vienna by 1 April, it had other targets within Austria, most notably the transportation network behind German lines. On Easter Sunday that target was Bruck an der Mur, an important rail junction in Styria on the main line from Graz to Vienna.13
Twenty-seven B-24 heavy bombers took off from their base in Italy and crossed over the Adriatic in glorious spring sunshine. Over Yugoslavia they faced a building wall of clouds and circled as far east as Lake Balaton to try and get around it, but were forced to turn back and land with their bombs still aboard. For one small Austrian town, at least, Easter Sunday would pass in a peace its enemies didn’t intend to happen.
Other targets throughout Austria weren’t so lucky, as bombers struck marshalling yards in a number of places, and P-38 fighters shot up a railroad bridge and roamed the countryside looking
12 One of the most famous scenes in the legendary movie set in Vienna after the Second World War, The Third Man, takes place on the Riesenrad. Of note are the gondolas used, since none of the originals survived the war, and how quickly this attraction had been put back in service.
13 There are two towns in Austria named Bruck, both fairly close together. One is Bruck an der Leitha, near Vienna, but Burck an der Mur was the target on 1 April.
for targets to strafe. Twelve precious locomotives went up in flames under the guns and rockets of the marauding Fork-Tailed Devils.14 With the Red Air Force also flying behind German lines, the air space over Austria was becoming crowded with Allied aircraft.
O-5 and the Austrian Resistance
Throughout Austria, resistance groups had sprung up like mushrooms as the war progressed, but particularly in 1944 and 1945. Most had no power to act, but within Vienna one did. O-5 was the generic sign of the Austrian resistance, and in Vienna it represented a coalition of civilians and Wehrmacht officers who wanted to avoid street fighting in the city. They believed the city was lost anyway and saw no point in having it further damaged.
The symbol O-5 represented the word Österreich, where the O was the first letter of the word and the 5 meant the fifth letter of the alphabet, E. Together, OE was the abbreviation in German for Österreich, Austria. By the middle of March O-5 was convinced Hitler would fight for Vienna instead of declaring it an open city, as had happened with Rome. If he declared it a festung, a fortress, as he had done with Königsberg and Breslau and dozens of others, it would lead to the city’s total destruction. As fighting raged in Hungary and the splintered units of Heeresgruppe Süd dodged and weaved to avoid being surrounded, Major Carl Szokoll informed a meeting of O-5 that if Vienna were defended it would meet the same fate as Budapest, that it would be destroyed in the fighting, and the only way to save it was to allow the Red Army to seize it without a fight: “If they accept our terms, we must offer to hand over the city to them.”15
Szokoll was assigned to Wehrkreis XVII, Military District XVII Headquarters, and was tasked with building the defensive line around Vienna. In such a capacity he had quietly placed several Volkssturm battalions loyal to O-5 in the Vienna Woods, south and west of the city. At the right moment he would simply order those units withdrawn, he explained, near the spa town of Baden fourteen miles to the south. The Soviets could then march through the gap straight into the city and take the remaining defenders from the rear. In return, the Russians would look upon O-5 as the new voice of Austria. This scheme was dubbed Unternehmen Radestky, Operation Radetsky. The Volkssturm battalions he raised for his plan were therefore called Radetsky units.
His plan was accepted with enthusiasm. Like so many others before and after them, the members of O-5 seemed to believe the Soviets could be trusted. As it turned out, they were wrong.
Although implicated in Unternehmen Valkyrie, the assassination attempt on Hitler on 20 July of 1944, Szokoll somehow talked his way out of being arrested and kept his job. With the Russians nearing Vienna, Szokoll got the last thing he needed to put Unternehmen Radetsky into action: the exact positions and passwords for I SS-Panzerkorps. He called an emergency meeting of O-5 leaders for the next night, 2 April.
In the meantime, at 10:00 p.m. on 1 April, Feldwebel Ferdinand Kas, Szokoll’s top aide, left Vienna with a driver to make contact with the Russians concerning Szokoll’s plan to help them take Vienna from the rear and avoid street fighting. Artillery flashed on the horizon like a distant thunderstorm, but unlike tens of thousands of others jamming the roads leading west, Kas and his driver rode toward the sound of the guns, not away from it.
14 The specific German nickname for the Lockheed P-38 Lighting. Fighter bombers in general, such as the P-51 or P-47, were generically referred to as Jabos, short for Jagdbombers, or, literally, hunter bombers. 15 Toland, John, The Last Hundred Days (New York: Bantam, 1967), p. 374.
