International: Austria’s Fate

Austrians used to joke affectionately about their late, great, little Engelbert Dollfuss, saying that when he was worried he used to spend all night pacing up & down under his bed. If the stouthearted little Chancellor, murdered eleven years ago by the Nazis, had been alive last week, he would have paced up & down all night and every night.

At the Moscow conference the Big Three had proclaimed their intention to help a “free and independent Austria . . . find that political and economic security which is the only basis for lasting peace.” But at that time the Big Three labored under the false hope that Austria might rise against her German masters. As it turned out, Austria was too tired and too impotent. At Yalta the Big Three did not even consider her, left her fate to their European Advisory Commission.

The Commission’s sentence was partition — partition on the same sort of quartering machine as Nazi Germany’s. Austria was to be divided into three or perhaps four occupation zones.

A London dispatch to the New York Times said that Russia would occupy the richest industrial and mineral areas (Lower Austria and the upper part of Styria, including the factory-studded Vienna basin) and the richest agricultural province (Burgenland); the U.S. would get Upper Austria (scenery, orchards, cereals, salt, timber, water power); Britain would occupy Carinthia, the Tyrol, Vorarlberg and the lower part of Styria (Alpine scenery, water power, cattle). Unmentioned were the famed province and city of Salzburg (winter sports, music), which might go to France as a sop to its Big Power ambitions.

The details of that report might be incorrect, but there appeared to be no doubt about the general intention: Austria, which after World War I was too small an economic unit to get along, after World War II would be divided into still smaller fragments. Presumably the partitioning would be a temporary measure, but its effects would last long after the period of occupation was over.