Victims, Heroes, Perpetrators: Remembering the Wehrmacht soldiers in Austria 1945 till today

On March 29, 1945 the first Soviet troops crossed the Austrian border. On April 13, after fighting involving heavy losses, Vienna was liberated by the Red Army. The efforts of a resistance group within the Wehrmacht to avoid combat and surrender the city were betrayed and failed.

In building up the new, postwar Austria, the provisional Austrian government, installed by the Soviets, faced a dilemma: on the one hand the Moscow Declaration of November 1943 offered the opportunity to avoid the accusation of shared responsibility in Nazi crimes, even though Austria had been an integral part of the German Reich since the “Anschluss” in March 1938. The Moscow Declaration formula that, after the war, Austria would be dealt as the “first victim of Hitlerite aggression” offered a more than welcome way to avoid the threatened punishment. On the other hand, the obvious fact could not be denied that Austrians – as well as other Germans – had served in the Wehrmacht.

The Austrian Declaration of Independence, proclaimed on April 27, 1945, tried to explain this fact in claiming that the Austrians had been forced by Nazi suppression to fight in a war no Austrian had ever wanted, against peoples towards whom no Austrian felt any resentment.

In the immediate postwar period, this interpretation was underlined through several governmental projects, particularly the official Rot-Weiß-Rot-Buch (Red-White-Red-Book, 1946) that aimed to prove the significance of Austrian resistance to the Nazi regime – Wehrmacht soldiers were amongst those honored as patriotic resistance fighters, having been murdered for opposing the regime’s military orders.

But this narrative was to change within a short period in time. The Cold War and the re-integration of former members of the Nazi Party reframed the politics of history. This did not affect the official theory of Austria as the “first victim” but this argument was used mainly for official representations, especially to the “Ausland”. In Austrian internal discourse, clear indicators of a re-definition can be observed as early as 1948 as concerned attitudes to the Wehrmacht soldiers. In war memorials, commemoration ceremonies etc. the fallen soldiers – in 1945 defined as victims of infamous Nazi war policy - were now honored as heroes defending their homeland against the enemies from the “East”.

1945’s victim theory is of course the founding myth (more critically referred to as the foundational “historical lie”) of the Second Republic of Austria. But it is only one part of the specific Austrian postwar myth. Rather, Austrian memory is characterized by the tension between the official victim theory – Austria as the first victim of Nazi Germany in 1938 – and a widespread, populist counter-narrative: Austrians as heroic defenders of Heimat and as military and civilian victims of the Allied war against Nazi Germany. In this populist or popular second victim theory, the darkest moment of Austrian history was not in 1938, but in 1945, when Austria was occupied by the Allies, above all by the “Russian barbarians”. Obviously “Liberation” was not a term appropriate to this perspective.

These contradictory narratives caused several public conflicts, mostly triggered by the erection of new war memorials and commemoration ceremonies for the fallen, especially in the decade after the State Treaty (1955) when it was no longer necessary to take the Allied Military Occupation Forces into consideration.

In the 1980s, with the break with the European postwar myths also came the unmasking of the official victim theory, triggered by the debate on President Kurt Waldheim’s role as a Wehrmacht officer in the Balkan theater of war (1986). The official standpoint, declared by Chancellor Franz Vranitzky in 1991, now acknowledged the “co-responsibility” of the Austrians for the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes.

But surprisingly, the culture of commemoration for the fallen soldiers of the Wehrmacht remained largely untouched, despite the intensity of the "memory wars" at the end of the 20th century. Only in 2012 was Austria at last confronted with its long overlooked blind spot in coming to terms with the Nazi past. Beyond all ethical or moral arguments and the historical fact that the Wehrmacht had participated in War Crimes and played a major role in the Holocaust, honoring Wehrmacht soldiers for defending the “homeland” against the Allied Military Forces, which liberated Austria from the Nazi terror regime, is anachronistic and inappropriate, not at least taking the commitment of the Austrian Bundesheer in European military co-operation into consideration. Ironically, the starting point for the break with this outdated postwar tradition was a hidden Nazi document discovered in 2012 at the very center of official commemoration: the sculpture of the Fallen Soldier in the Austrian national Heroes Monument on Vienna’s Heroes square.

But despite overcoming of the last und today yet hardly comprehensible remains of the postwar strategies of national, social and individual reconstruction, the question still remains: How should Austrian society commemorate its Wehrmacht soldiers – the fallen and the surviving, a generation which is now passing away? As victims? As perpetrators? This affects not only national representation but also family memory. Honoring the millions of soldiers of the Allied Forces who died for the liberation of Europe – and Austria – will be in the focus of this year‘s 70th anniversary of the end of WW II. But how to commemorate the ambivalent role of the Red Army in Austria (and other countries) – commemorating and honoring the death toll of Russian soldiers who died in the Eastern and Central European theaters of war, whilst also remembering the suffering of raped women?

In 2014, the centenary of WW I resulted in an harmonious scene in which a European family of nations had learned their lessons from history. Predictably in the commemoration year 2015, the picture will be far more complex and ambivalent – especially in view of the different experiences of democratic and communist EU countries after 1945, the conflicts with Russia in Ukraine and Crimea and, not least, the role of the Great Patriotic War in today’s Russian nationalist politics of history. The commemoration year 2015 seems to become an exciting event: one can observe how new world orders – and new tensions – will be negotiated in the field of cultural memory.

Image

Heidemarie Uhl is a Fulbright-Botstiber Visiting Professor, a consulting professor at The Europe Center and visiting associate professor with the Department of History.  She is a Senior Researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and teaches at the University of Vienna. Professor Uhl has held guest professorships at Hebrew University Jerusalem (Israel), University of Strasbourg (France) and Andrassy University Budapest (Hungary). She has published books and articles on the memory of the Holocaust in Austria and Europe and is currently co-directing a project on the persecution, expulsion and annihilation of Viennese Jews 1938-1945.

Professor Uhl's recent research interest focuses on the political, social, cultural and intellectual framework in which the Holocaust became the universal watershed event for a common memory of Western civilization at the end of the 20th century. What are the pre-conditions for this change in paradigm? Which transformations in narrative and in representation - from historiography to Memorial Museums and popular movie productions - were necessary for the acknowledgment of the Holocaust as the negative point of reference for the values and norms of western societies? And what are the new challenges Holocaust memory is confronted with in today’s multi-polar post-Cold War era?

Professor Uhl taught the history course "The Holocaust in Recent Memory: Conficts - Commemorations - Challenges" during the fall quarter, 2014.

Co-sponsored by the Department of History.