AUSTRIA: The Road Back

It would be a bitter winter, and many people would die. Yet in disfigured Vienna and the eight other Bundesländer of Austria, men found cause for hope.

The Allied Council agreed to end press and postal censorship, warning publishers to toe the anti-Nazi line. It restored a limited sort of rail service, relaxed the galling ban on travel between the U.S., Russian, British and French zones. Now food, fuel and people could begin to move between those drum-tight compartments. Finally the Council sent secret “recom mendations” to the four Governments on recognition of the newly broadened Provisional government.

At a rally in the Konzerthaus, earnest, 75-year-old Dr. Karl Renner, provisional Chancellor, gave 10,000 Viennese some stirring news: Socialist, Communist and Volkspartei leaders had united to demand return of the South Tyrol, which Italy had taken after World War I. The Big Five Foreign Ministers had tabled the appeal at London, but at least they had not killed it.

The Renner government, sponsored by the Russians, still lacked the endorsement of the U.S., Britain and France. But U.S. General Mark W. Clark, in the rotating Allied Council chairmanship, had approved Dr. Renner’s plan for a conference of provincial representatives from all three parties.

Meeting in the Landtag across the street from the Chancellery, the delegates created new government posts for the conservative Volkspartei. They set up a tripartisan elections committee; parliamentary elections were set for Nov. 25. Then they asked the Allies for recognition, credits, an end to zoning.

Recognition was in the works. But the Renner regime seemed unable to please everybody. On U. S. and British advice it shied away from a thinly veiled Russian scheme to cut in on the big Zistersdorf oil fields. Last week Red Army officers reportedly took over at Zistersdorf, booted the Austrian managers out.