Travel diary entry of my mother, Herta Tautz, on 20 September 1977 in Krakov, Poland. On their 25th wedding anniversary my parents, Herta and Werner Tautz, the creators of travel slide shows to the East Bloc countries, clinked glasses with Russian champagne at the Holiday Inn hotel
“Austria island of the blessed”?
The writer Jörg Mauthe ironically called Austria the “island of the blessed”, because many Austrians considered the country as a kind of “special case” since the early Cold War, which could be kept out of any political and military crisis or conflict and some still believe this today. Unfortunately, this concept has always been imaginary and never realistic and it is just as illusionary today. Since 1945 Austria has always been an “object” in the international arena rather than a “subject”, an actor. Local knowledge about the early incidents of infringement of Austrian territory by foreign conflicts is rare. There were Ukrainian partisans crossing Austria in the spring of 1945, terrorist attacks in the late 1940s, military emergency plans of the Western Allies in case of a Soviet aggression during the early Cold War years and intensified secret service and spy activities of all four Allied occupation armies, the Soviets, the Americans, the British and the French. Furthermore, the Soviets secretly supported the October strikes in Austria in 1950, they militarily suppressed the Hungarian anti-Communist revolution in 1956, when a wave of refugees swept across Austria and there was the Lebanon crisis in 1958 with Western military jets violating the Austrian airspace – to name just a few incidents. In all these and the following foreign conflicts, which affected Austria, the country never played an active part on the international stage that could influence its destiny; except during the 13-year chancellorship of Bruno Kreisky from 1970 until 1983. The State Treaty of 1955 marked the resurgence of Austria as an independent state and the withdrawal of all occupying armies on the condition of Austria’s neutrality. The first test of this neutrality was the crisis in Hungary on the eastern Austrian border in 1956 and the threat of a Soviet invasion, imagined or real. Austria had to be aware that in this East – West confrontation it was well-advised to establish a fair balance between and a safe distance from the Soviets as well as the Americans. While Austria started out with a pronounced pro-American policy, yet in the face of multiple international crises Austria approached the Soviet Union as well and tried to style itself as a hub in the Cold War and a crossroads between East and West. Bruno Kreisky, first as foreign minister and then as chancellor, developed a form of “active neutrality”, different from the Swiss one, and put it into practice as a “policy of the possible”. With the end of the Cold War in 1989 Austria had to re-define its neutral position in Europe, which led to Austria joining the European Union in 1995. The concept of the “island of the blessed”, which had always been just fiction, was consequently obsolete.
Until the coming down of the Iron Curtain, Austria bordered Communist dictatorships along more than 1,000 km. The frontier to Hungary and Czechoslovakia was hermetically sealed off with electric fences, trenches, and guard posts, a true “Iron Curtain”, as the British prime minister Winston Churchill had called it in a speech in 1946 already before the start of the Cold War. Due to the many Cold War crises, such as the building of the Berlin wall in 1961, the Cuban crisis in 1962, the uprising in Prague 1968, the Polish upheavals in 1980/81, Austria had to re-define its neutrality progressively. In 1955 the British predicted that Austria would act “neutralistically” – this negative term was used because Moscow had insisted on Austria’s neutrality, although the Western Allies had been against it – and that Austria would be a “double agent between East and West”.
Werner’s contemporary photo impressions of everyday life in Vienna during the early Cold War
The start of the Cold War
After the end of World War II, the process of a formation of two fiercely competitive blocks – East and West – started the Cold War in 1947 in Austria. This was the beginning of the establishment of a bi-polar world and a new international order after the break-down of a European system of states which had been created by the National-Socialist expansion of the “Third Reich”. This culminated in a military power struggle and an ideological confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. The two contrasting poles developed their own unique social, political, and economic orders, which they tried to impose on the rest of the world in a competitive manner. The atmosphere between the two power centres was characterised by a constant fear that the opposing side could infringe on the influence sphere they claimed for themselves and by that threaten their security interests. This led to the political division of Germany and Europe and a mentality of permanent siege and fierce competition for spheres of interest and military presence world-wide. In this so-called “Cold War” there was no clearly defined aggressor and no clearly defined defender. The ideological confrontation was characterised by a constantly changing situation that was dictated by the actions and reactions of the other side. Objectively it cannot be stated without doubt who started the Cold War. While immediately after the end of the war, the USA acted in a rather circumspect way towards its former ally, the Soviet Union, Stalin already exercised an aggressive expansionary policy in Eastern Europe. After a phase of permanent mutual mistrust, the United States reacted much more aggressively to the new post-war Soviet “security policy” at the beginning of 1946. Both world powers progressively stepped up their willingness to go into a geopolitical confrontation between 1945 and 1947. Despite its own military and economic capacities, the USA progressively perceived the Soviet Union as a threat to Europe and the rest of the world.
Towards the end of World War II, the British Foreign Office had expressed ideas for a post-war resurrection of the state of Austria as independent from Germany and the British found that this independence could best be guaranteed by an “ultimate association of Austria with some form of Central or South-East European Confederation”. Yet the Soviets were strictly against any confederation of Austria with Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, which would in their eyes create a Catholic conservative alliance that could threaten the Soviet Union. When Winston Churchill launched his idea of an independent Central European block of states, Stalin rejected this concept categorically, because he feared a resurrection of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as a “Danube Confederation” of Austria, Bavaria and other neighbouring Catholic states under Otto Habsburg, the successor to the throne of the abolished Habsburg Empire, which could as a result form a block with other Catholic European states, such as Spain, Italy, France, and Poland.
The Soviets wanted to exploit the Austrian economic capacities as a compensation for the massive war damage, which had been caused by the German “Wehrmacht” in the Soviet Union. Tens of thousands of Austrians had served in the German “Wehrmacht”. At the conference of the ministers for foreign affairs in Moscow in April 1947, US General Mark W. Clark blocked an agreement for a State Treaty for Austria, because he feared that the huge Soviet reparations demand would politically destabilise Austria. Earlier in spring 1945 the US had shown very little interest in the future political development in Austria and had concentrated on their projects for post-war Germany, but when in October 1945 the Soviets tried to take over the two biggest financial institutions in Austria, the “Creditanstalt-Bankverein” and the “Länderbank”, the US started to be alarmed. The US had already promoted an “Austrification” of the media and had launched the radio broadcasting station “Rot-Weiß-Rot” (RWR) and the newspaper “Wiener Kurier”, both with a rather pronounced anti-Communist tendency. When the first post-war elections in Austria in November 1945 resulted in a devastating defeat of the KPÖ (Austrian Communist Party) with only 5.41 per cent, the Soviet political officers were not amazed because they had never believed in the predicted 20 per cent for the KPÖ, as the Communist party had not achieved more than 10 per cent in the works council elections despite excessive Soviet election campaigning. From now on the Soviet policy in Austria became much more rigid. The Soviets demanded from the newly elected Austrian government a strict persecution of Nazis and the dismissal of all NSDAP members and former Austro-Fascists from official positions. Before the start of the Cold War in Austria the Soviets were prepared to forego the seizure of “German property”, if it had been Jewish business property that had been robbed by the Nazis and if it was economically not too important for Soviet Union. They either tried to return it to the original owners or put it under provisional administration. After the election in November 1945 the Soviets confirmed the importance of the continued stationing of Soviet troops in Austria and blamed the Western Allies for the failure to come to an agreement on the Austrian State Treaty. They hoped that the KPÖ would profit from the negotiations concerning Austrian sovereignty and independence, but to the contrary. The Austrians put the sole blame on the Soviets for the continuing presence of Allied occupational troops in Austria in the end. Access to Russian archives after the coming down of the Iron Curtain in 1989 proved the strong dependence of the KPÖ on the Soviets, but these researches also showed that the Soviets recognised the special geographical position of Austria as a “country between the two blocks”, Surprisingly, the data showed that they did neither favour a Communist coup d’état in Austria nor a separation of the country into an eastern and a western part like Germany.
Left: Viennese children in the early 1940s. Right: Herta Kainz, my mother, in 1946Post-war recreational stay in Austria. Right: Herta on the very left
Introduction
During and after the First and Second World War the food supply was severely hampered in Vienna, which resulted in famine, undernourishment and malnutrition-related diseases, especially among the Viennese young. Children and young people of impoverished and not so well-off families were most affected and consequently suffered from rachitis, tuberculosis and osseous tuberculosis. After the First World War measurements of Viennese apprentices of every age group showed that they weighed 10 kg less than the same age group before the war and their hight was 10 cm less as well. Already during the war poor undernourished Viennese children were sent on recreational holidays to the country and in 1917 the Viennese municipal councillor Heinrich Löwenstein organised a recreational stay in Switzerland for a few children. In May and July 1918 72,000 Viennese children were sent to farmers in western Hungary – then part of the Habsburg Empire – via the “Kaiser Karl Wohlfahrtswerk”, an imperial charity. 90 per cent of the children were more or less malnourished. Unfortunately, the positive effect of this summer holiday dwindled away within a few weeks. After the end of World War I and the break-down of the Habsburg Empire, its capital city Vienna was cut off from its traditional food supply chains and the newly established small Republic of Austria was destitute. During the disastrous winter of 1918/1919 the population of Vienna and other big cities in Austria was starving, most of all the young. The international press reported about the atrocious conditions under which the poor Viennese children had to live. Men like Max Winter with “Expeditions into the Darkest Vienna” and Emil Kläger with “Across the Viennese Quarters of Destitution and Crime” had already earlier in the new century pointed to the excruciating conditions under which the Viennese poor were scraping by. The international community was so shocked that in 1919 the first children relief programmes were launched, which not only provided the Viennese children with urgently needed food, clothing and medication, but organised recreational stays abroad as well. In 1919 13,366 Viennese children were invited to Switzerland, Italy and Southern Germany for a few weeks. From 1920 on more countries joined in the effort and financed longer recreational stays abroad from several months up to a year or more. These recreational holidays at foster families’ or in children’s homes abroad were organised by non-governmental charities, such as the Red Cross or the Caritas. Between 1918 and 1924 312,255 Viennese children were sent to the Netherlands, Hungary, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Italy, Yugoslavia, Romania and other European countries. The children were registered for such a stay abroad at school, at the local parish or the youth welfare office and then medically examined. They were assembled at the train stations in Vienna, where they were equipped with a little cardboard sign around their neck, which stated their names and the names and addresses of their future foster parents. Already during the long train rides, they received provisions because they only had a small backpack with a change of underwear and a second pair of trousers or a second dress or coat with them. Sometimes the foster parents invited the children a second or more times to come back and stay with them, which resulted in life-long friendships. When the children arrived in their country of destination, they did not understand a word of the language spoken there (except when they came to a German-speaking canton in Switzerland or to Southern Tyrol or Southern Germany), but when they returned, they had mostly forgotten their mother tongue. It is amazing that rather poor countries such as Italy and Sweden offered generous humanitarian help to the destitute Viennese children and that is the reason why one focus of this article is on the post-World War I children emergency programmes “I bambini di Vienna” of Italy and “Rädda Barnen” of Sweden.
The so-called “children’s trains” initiatives were terminated in 1924 and only 20 years later the Viennese children were suffering under the same devastating conditions again, aggravated by the trauma of bomb attacks and Nazi persecution, until finally in April 1945 the Second World War was ended, the Nazi regime defeated and the city of Vienna liberated by the Allied Forces. Yet in 1945 the food supply of Vienna collapsed completely once more and the especially harsh winter of 1946/47 further aggravated the situation for the children in the city. The Viennese writer who had to emigrate to England when the Nazis took over, Robert Neumann, published his novel “The Children of Vienna” in his English exile in 1946. The book was translated into 25 languages and Neumann himself later published it in German. This novel portrays the destiny of poor children in Vienna in the days and weeks after the end of the war. In a humorous, bitter-sarcastic style he tells the story of six children living in the cellar of a bombed-out house in Vienna, trying to scrape by a living. He describes their special art of survival from the children’s point of view and tells of adults who try to interfere with them, such as a black US army pastor, who wants to send them to Switzerland, but whose plans fail, when the Russians take over the administration of their quarter. This novel raised international awareness for the plight of the Viennese impoverished children after World War II.
Post-World War I
During the First World War Viennese children whose health was affected by the consequences of the war were sent on recreational holidays, as already mentioned in the introduction. The priests in the country were asked to appeal to rural parishes to accept poor and sick urban children and care for them, cosset them and nurse them back to health for some weeks. The organisations who tried to set up a structure for recreational holidays for Viennese children in need who came from poor families or lived in slums were underfunded and inefficient. Only very few children profited from such recreational stays. In 1917 it was decided to set up a youth welfare office in Vienna, which initially included Lower Austria. 14 branch offices were opened in Vienna and its surroundings; the organisation of recreational holidays was one of their tasks, but little was done because of a drastic lack of funds after the war had ended in 1918. That’s when foreign countries stepped in. Tens of thousands of Viennese children were saved from hunger, sickness and death by these recreational stays abroad. In 1919 the youth welfare office sent 13,366 Viennese children to Switzerland, Southern Tyrol, Italy and Southern Germany for several weeks. Until 1924 the Netherlands welcomed 28,523 Austrian children, for example. The aim was, of course, to nurse the Viennese children in Austria, but the extremely poor new republic lacked the resources. So, in 1920 the American food aid programme was used to send 25,000 children to holiday homes and farmers in Austria. When in 1922 Vienna was separated from Lower Austria and was turned into an independent federal state, the city of Vienna launched its own youth welfare office. Due to the desperate financial situation of the city, municipal funds for recreational holidays for Viennese children only made up one eight of the arising costs per year. The City of Vienna reacted with donations campaigns, “Child Rescue Week” (Kinderrettungswoche), and a lottery. What’s more, parents who could afford it, were asked to make a contribution. In this way annually 30,000 to 35,000 Viennese children spent the summer holidays in the country. On top of that, 20 recreational day-care centres were opened on the outskirts of Vienna, where the children arrived in the morning, spent the day there in the natural surroundings of the Vienna Wood, were fed, participated in games and sports and in the evening, they returned to their homes. Furthermore, the city of Vienna acquired a few recreational children’s homes, which were operational the whole year round. Already in April 1916 the Vienna City Council had passed a law on “recreational care” due to the food shortage in the city, which stipulated that famished children should be cared for during the day in four leafy areas in the green belt around Vienna, which were bought by the city: Laaerberg, Girzenberg, Schafberg, and Kobenzl, between 1916 and 1919. In August 1916 the first recreational day-care centre for children was opened on Laaerberg, where some wooden military shacks were set up for the children. In 1918 1,200 children were cared for there on a daily basis. In the summer of 1918, the children’s day-care centres on Kobenzl and Girzenberg were opened and welcomed, respectively 400 and 100 children. In 1918 the Bellevue castle was acquired by the city on Kobenzl and was restructured as a day-care centre and in 1919 the centre on Schafberg followed. Undernourished Viennese children in need of recreation were fed and cared for in these day-care centres for four weeks. The 6- to 12-year-old children were examined by schools’ doctors before and at the end of their stay. All in all, in 1928 the city of Vienna owned five such day-care centres and it had set up another one on the banks of the Danube, the “Gänsehäufl”. They were run either by the WIJUG (“Wiener Jugendhilfswerk” since 1922) or the “Kinderfreunde” and “Volkshilfe”, private charities linked to the Social Democratic party, which was ruling the city from the end of World War I until the Austro-Fascist take-over of Austria in 1934. Immediately after the war around 1,200-1,500 children were sent to homes in the vicinity of Vienna, to Ober-Hollabrunn and Pottendorf, as well. Overall, 5,474 Viennese children benefitted from these domestic recreational stays in 1919. In 1923 2,575 Viennese children, who were threatened by tuberculosis and other diseases linked to malnourishment, were sent to ten children’s homes in other parts of Austria. It is obvious that this was completely insufficient in the face of starvation. An extensive famine relief programme was needed.
Let’s return to the situation in Vienna after the end of World War I in 1918. Hermine Weinreb, an eminent pedagogue and co-founder of the Social-Democratic children’s organisation “Kinderfreunde” started in 1918 an initiative for recreational stays of Viennese children in a home in Gmünd, Lower Austria, with the help of the American children relief programme, where 1,400 children were cared for during a six-week summer holiday. She was involved in the cooperation with Italy, too, “I bambini di Vienna”. The famine crisis in the city was somehow alleviated by emergency food transports from abroad. The French and the British sent “food trains” with urgently needed basic food rations to prevent starvation in the city in 1919. Denmark and Sweden set up public kitchens which tried to feed the famished masses. But what really remained in the memory of the Viennese was another international emergency programme: the recreational holidays for Viennese and other urban Austrian children abroad. Tens of thousands of poor and famished Viennese children were invited in 1919 and 1920 to stay with foster families or in children’s homes for several months in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, England, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Spain and Italy. These were private initiatives and one of the first transports left Vienna on 3 February 1919 with the destination Switzerland. The primary school teacher Oskar Kahn from Ottakring, a working-class district of Vienna, accompanied a group of Viennese children and he remembered that the children had to sleep in the train carriages and ate only cheese and bread because of the straitened circumstances. Yet as soon as they had crossed the border to Switzerland, the experience of hunger was a past memory. In the border town Buchs the children received for the first time a warm meal, chocolate and cake – and “the food was abundant and excellent”. At the same time, they were given little presents by the locals, mostly chocolate. Unfortunately, as the small stomachs were used to fasting only, they could not digest the large amounts of sweets. The group finally reached Bern, the capital city of Switzerland, and the reception there was marvellous, too. The population awaited the children and had to be kept back by policemen, when they wanted to storm the train carriages to welcome the children who were given presents once more.
These children emergency programmes met with a wide response in the Austrian public. The press reported about the departures of “children’s trains” carrying children to their recreational holidays abroad. Apart from rare memoirs this is now the most important historical source for the aid programmes of 1919/1920. The famous Austrian writer and journalist Joseph Roth wrote for the Viennese paper “Der Neue Tag” and described the parents who were taking their children to the train station. They were poor working-class parents who stood tightly packed on the platform, thin and emaciated, “resembling squeezed-out lemons”. “Wiener Bilder”, a Viennese weekly magazine, reported about the cheery warmth with which Viennese children were welcomed in England in October 1920. In March 1920 “Das interessante Blatt” published an article about the departure of Viennese children to the Netherlands from the North Station. Furthermore, the Viennese journalist Max Winter who for years had been publishing very well-researched articles on the plight of the Viennese poor in the “Arbeiterzeitung”, the Social-Democratic paper, launched an international media appeal for the rescue of the famished Viennese children of the underprivileged. He is today seen as the innovator of social reporting, the inventor of which is considered Egon Erwin Kisch. Max Winter went much further, though, and painted devastating pictures of the underground of the glamorous capital city of the Habsburg Empire. He raised awareness for the destitution of the homeless who lived in the canal system of Vienna. He dressed up as a homeless person and spent time in the canal system, in shelters and the slums of the city. By that he reduced the distance between the journalist and the subjects of his research. He was trying to be close to the poor, to understand their living conditions, their language and he sympathised with them. His meticulous research and analysis under which the children of the poor lived in Vienna after World War I provoked a public outcry and triggered widespread international concern, which contributed to the start of various private aid initiatives.
Neglect and abuse of children had spread before and during the First World War in Vienna among the poor, which the first Children’s Congress of 1907 confirmed. At that time neglect of children was linked to criminal activity, juvenile delinquency and anormal behaviour of the young. When the war broke out, fathers were drafted and working-class mothers were called to fatigue duty, so the situation worsened as the children were left to themselves. When the food supply was drastically cut in Vienna, working-class mothers were preoccupied with the daily fight for scraps of food to feed their children and no time was left for caring for these children. Teachers documented the bad health of the pupils und described under which disastrous conditions the children lived at home; in one dirty, mouldy room where several people had to eat, sleep and live. In September 1917 the “Arbeiterinnenzeitung” wrote that a teacher reported that she did not know where to store the pupils’ hats and coats because they were full of lice. A doctor who had examined these pupils found that 90 per cent were ridden with lice. Everywhere on the walls and benches of the school rooms vermin crawled; they were even stuck to the teaching aids and bugs were swimming in the ink pots. Scabies was so widespread that even the teacher was affected by it. Due to the war the school hours were reduced and these children then spent most of their time in the streets of Vienna. Several were orphaned due to the war or had lost contact to their families. The Viennese police tried to find their parents via appeals to the public, mostly in vain. This phenomenon is documented in contemporary police statistics which categorise the roaming children as young criminals. Complaints of juvenile delinquency up to 14 years of age rose from 1,848 cases in 1913 to 5,926 in 1917 and 4,972 in 1919 and those between 14 and 18 years of age increased from 4,314 to 8,995 in 1918 and 8,059 in 1919. Stealing in order to procure some food was rampant and the children sold everything possible on the black market to be bartered for food, even the family’s own scarce furniture. Max Winter appealed to the government in 1915 that it was unsupportable that children in Viennese working class districts started to queue in front of shops at 10 pm to receive some flour when the shop opened at 7 am. Many women and children had seriously fallen ill due to the night-long queuing in the freezing cold. The Viennese paediatrician Clemens von Piquet documented the effect of the social and moral neglect and the widespread famine on the health of Viennese children at the “Wiener Kinderklinik” in 1918. Of the 498 children treated there 90 per cent were severely undernourished. Boys had 20 per cent less weight than normal and girls 18 per cent, which meant on average 6 kg less for boys and 5 kg less for girls in the age groups of 6 to 14. Yet during adolescence the weight loss was even more drastic: 14-year-old girls weighed 8 kg less and 14-year-old boys 10.7 kg less than normal. Due to these deficiency symptoms their bodies were drastically underdeveloped and the process of growth was retarded. Unfortunately, this affected their brains and their psyche, too. The children showed apathy, were exhausted and feeble, which sometimes resulted in an inability to walk and those children were then bed-ridden. Their fecklessness made them susceptible to infectious diseases; famine oedema, rachitis and tuberculosis were rampant among them. The increase in tuberculosis cases was most drastic in the age group of 5 to 20, Piquet found. His hospital recorded a doubling of related deaths during the war years. The Viennese statistic of death rates of children of school age showed 1068 in the year 1914 and 1995 in 1918. Max Winter documented in 1916 in “Der Kinderfreund” that the destitution of Viennese children was now incomparable to the destitution before the war; so many lost, neglected and famished children in Viennese streets as never before, so many soldiers’ children whose mothers could not procure enough food and so many working-class children whose parents had to work in ammunitions factories and still could not feed their families due to the catastrophic inflation. Heinrich Löwenstein stressed that it was necessary to reduce the mortality rate among children, which was 43 per cent in the age group of 5 to 10 and 26 per cent in the age group of 10 to 15 and he pleaded for recreational holidays of Viennese children in the Vienna city council. Löwenstein had already organised recreational holidays in Switzerland in 1917 and then coordinated the Danish relief effort in 1920. The Spanish flue in 1918 further exacerbated the situation in Vienna and pushed up the mortality rate in all age groups because due to their weakened health conditions the children quickly succumbed to the Spanish flu and had no defences.
