Austria's status of neutrality contended with crises almost immediately after its founding along with the 1955 State Treaty. First, during the Soviet invasion of Hungary in October 1956, Austrian neutrality faced the threat of conflict when Soviet-Hungarian clashes spilled over into Austria. Then, in July 1958, Austrian neutrality contended with more benign, but nonetheless disturbing, provocations from the Cold War's Western superpower, the United States. As U.S. military planes transited Austria in broad daylight on their way to Lebanon, the cozy, covert Austro-American relationship became all too overt. Although many Austrians believed neutrality would end foreign (particularly Soviet) domination and would ensure an ultimate withdrawal from global upheavals, these events showed that neutrality by itself could not remove the strategic implications inherent in Austria's position in Cold War Central Europe. Indeed, partisan strategic calculations in both East and West had played a significant role in creating Austrian neutrality. As a result, preserving both Austria's neutrality and its links to the West required delicate maneuvering by a small, poorly defended country amid Cold War crosscurrents of Eastern threats and Western sympathies. Already in its early years, Austrian neutrality proved to be less of the holiday from history that many Austrians expected during the festive mood of May 1955.

Springtime in Vienna: Sovereignty, State Treaty, and Neutrality in 1955 Austria

May 1955 was a busy month for European diplomacy. In Paris, the foreign ministers of France, the United Kingdom, and the United States finalized the entry of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). On May 5, following the successful conclusion of this conference, the ambassadors of these three Western powers to (West) Germany declared an end to that country's post-World War II occupation regime. The process by which the three occupation zones had formed the new West Germany was now complete.Footnote ¹

On 7 May, meanwhile, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union annulled the British-Soviet Mutual Assistance Pact of 26 May 1942 and the 10 December 1944 Franco-Soviet Treaty of Alliance and Mutual Assistance, two pacts originally designed to preserve the wartime alliance against Germany after the Third Reich's defeat. Not to be outdone by NATO, representatives of the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe, including the German Democratic Republic (GDR) formed in the Soviet zone of occupation in eastern Germany, met on 11 May in the Polish capital to establish a Communist bloc military pact. Three days later their conference concluded with the Warsaw Pact Treaty.Footnote ²

On that very same 14 May, Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov left Warsaw for Vienna to meet with his counterparts from the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. The four powers represented by these individuals had not only administered a defeated Germany, but also a “liberated” Austria under quadripartite control regimes. Now, however, these foreign ministers arrived in Vienna to ensure that Austria would avoid the fate of a divided Germany. The four foreign ministers intended to sign the Austrian State Treaty on 15 May, the details of which had just emerged from an eleven-day conference of the ambassadors of the occupying powers with Austrian representatives.Footnote ³ Their signatures, along with those of Austrian Foreign Minister Leopold Figl and the four Allied high commissioners for Austria, set in motion a process whereby Austria would enter the global community of sovereign states as a free and united country.Footnote ⁴

Austrians could now finally say that, in Figl's historic words at the signing of the State Treaty in the Oberes Belvedere Palace, “Austria is free!”Footnote ⁵ In reference to Austria's annexation by the Third Reich in 1938 and the subsequent Soviet occupation of eastern Austria, The Economist wrote in 1955, “Throughout the free world, people are glad that Austria should see its deliverance at hand after seventeen years of ill-usage by two totalitarian regimes.”Footnote ⁶ Recalling the State Treaty signing ceremony two days after the event in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, John Foster Dulles also recounted the “tremendous enthusiasm” he had experienced in Vienna the previous Sunday. “The day was not good but fortunately until about 1 or 2 o'clock no rain, so it was very crowded all the way in with flags and so forth, a very moving scene.”Footnote ⁷ The subsequent Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky, meanwhile, described in a 1956 brochure the banishment of the “phantom of division,” a “great danger” that “hovered during the ten-year occupation over” Austria, filling “everyone who felt responsible for our country's destiny with dread.”Footnote ⁸

On 27 July 1955 at 11:00 a.m., the State Treaty and its 90-day evacuation period for all foreign troops (Article 20) came into force following the French treaty deposition in Moscow.Footnote ⁹ The departing occupation powers left behind varied impressions. Although Soviet reparations from Austria (both unilateral and under the State Treaty) of between $1.5 and $2 billion in the years 1945–1960 left bitter Austrian memories, Austrian historian Günter Bischof noted that “many Salzburgers even hated to see the free-spending Americans leave” from their occupation zone.Footnote ¹⁰

Indeed, under the Marshall Plan, fully $1.5 billion of the $13.6 billion that the United States poured into Europe in four years went to Austria. For the period 1 July 1948 to 30 June 1949, European Recovery Program (ERP) aid constituted 14 percent of Austria's national income, a rate exceeded by no other Marshall Plan recipient.Footnote ¹¹ Along with Norway, Austria received $130 per capita, a rate second in the ERP only to Iceland's $209 per capita.Footnote ¹² Even before the Marshall Plan began in 1948, interim aid, such as packets from the Committee on American Remittances to Europe (CARE), in the immediate period following World War II left lasting impressions of U.S. generosity throughout Europe, Austria included. The contrast with Soviet retribution and rapacity led many Austrians to quip that “Russia milks the cow that America feeds.”Footnote ¹³

The oft-noted breakthrough in negotiations to end Austria's quadripartite occupation had come in the Moscow Memorandum at the conclusion of the eponymous conference on 15 April 1955. In this document, leading Austrian politicians pledged to the Soviet Union “in connection with the conclusion of an Austrian State Treaty” to “practice a perpetual neutrality of the kind practiced by Switzerland.”Footnote ¹⁴ Accordingly, on 26 October 1955, Austria's first day officially free of foreign occupation after the State Treaty's 90-day withdrawal period ended, the Austrian parliament in a sovereign act added the following two-paragraph neutrality law to the Austrian constitution:

1. 1. For the purpose of the lasting maintenance of her independence externally, and for the purpose of (maintaining) the inviolability of her territory, Austria declares of her own free will her perpetual neutrality. Austria will maintain and defend this with all means at her disposal.

2. 2. For the securing of this purpose in all future times Austria will not join any military alliances and will not permit the establishment of any foreign military bases on her territory.Footnote ¹⁵

Austrian Neutrality: Cui Bono?

For many like U.S. diplomat and historian William Bader writing in 1966, the 1955 State Treaty, the “first and thus far the only time” that the postwar Soviet “line of advance” in Europe had retreated, formed a “lingering enigma” given the “contrast to all the tortuous negotiations that had gone before.” Yet Bader and others found many good reasons for the Soviet move in a sovereign but neutral Austria. Soviet withdrawal from Austria was “part of the same diplomatic offensive” by the Soviets “to lessen Western military pressures by initiating a campaign against military alliances and for ‘disarmament’ and ‘neutralism’” precisely as the Warsaw Pact consolidated itself. In particular, the “most immediate objective” of this “Austrian example” was to act as “a temptation to those in Italy or West Germany who for ideological or practical reasons were hesitant about NATO.”Footnote ¹⁶ Withdrawal from Austria, noted Austrian international relations scholar Hanspeter Neuhold, also helped soften the “aggressive image of the USSR” in developing countries.Footnote ¹⁷

Withdrawal from Austria offered the Soviets strategic advantages as well. When considering “the alternative to the State Treaty viewed from Moscow,” German Die Zeit publisher Marion Gräfin Dönhoff determined that “all other solutions would have been less favorable for the Soviets.” A neutral Austria was “decisively to be preferred” to leaving “the Americans for an unlimited time in Vienna and the rest of Austria . . . thus on the periphery of the Soviet empire and in closest proximity to the dissatisfied East Europeans.”Footnote ¹⁸

In particular, a neutral Austria denied the United States and its allies use of the key transit route across the Brenner Pass in Tirol. The Austrian diplomat Karl Gruber remembered from his time as ambassador to the United States that “a high ranking officer” once said to him, “Today we fly from Munich to Milan in 20 minutes and tomorrow it will be perhaps two hours.”Footnote ¹⁹ The U.S. diplomat William Stearman quipped that the neutrality of Austria combined with the accession of Germany to NATO meant that “what the Paris Agreements had joined together, the State Treaty, at least partly, put asunder.”Footnote ²⁰ British historian Gordon Shepherd confirmed that Austrian neutrality “cut the whole of NATO into two. The Austrian Alps were added to the Swiss Alps to form a 300-mile granite bolt shutting off North from South. The Brenner was no longer a Western gateway but a Western frontier-post.”Footnote ²¹ Kreisky agreed that in a “strict and honest” assessment, the State Treaty “amounted to an abandonment of the military interests of the West.”Footnote ²²

The Austrian historian Karl R. Stadler, meanwhile, compared “the significant military disadvantage for the NATO alliance” resulting from Austrian neutrality with the fact that “Soviet troops would only have to withdraw to the territory of their alliance partners [i.e., Hungary and Czechoslovakia] several dozen kilometers to the East.”Footnote ²³ As anyone who has ever visited Austria can attest, moreover, Vienna and its environs in eastern Austria are practically indefensible. Hence, the U.S. scholar Audrey Kurth Cronin observed in 1986 that “Austria's topography rendered it logistically easy for the Soviet Union to reoccupy the eastern zone in time of war. Unlike the mountainous regions to the west, eastern Austria is a wide, open plain, extremely difficult to defend. Even today Austrian officials unofficially admit that the Soviet Union could reclaim the Soviet zone in half a day.”Footnote ²⁴

Such calculations, though, assumed that Austria would remain faithful to neutrality, and the Soviets did not believe Austria would do so. “The Austrian government and people have a clearly pro-Western outlook, which you know as well as I do,” stated the Soviet Deputy High Commissioner Sergei Kudriavtsev to Swedish ambassador Sven Allard at a December 1954 cocktail party. “So what would prevent the United States from making a secret agreement in which Austria pledged itself to prepare suitable bases? In case of war, American units would have supplies, quarters, and air fields waiting for them.”Footnote ²⁵ Hence, Cronin has noted that even when the Austrians proposed neutrality at the 1954 Berlin Conference, “Molotov evidently deemed such an offer of neutrality worthless.” Given that the Austrians were “economically and politically oriented toward the West,” Cronin asked, “what good were promises easily circumvented by secret basing and transit agreements operative in times of war?” With “only a small amount of pressure from the United States,” Western forces could reestablish themselves in Austria. The Soviet Union, by contrast, “could enter Austria only by force. A Western presence might be a treaty violation, but a Soviet presence would be an invasion.”Footnote ²⁶

Austrian historian Oliver Rathkolb even considered Austrian neutrality to be a strategic benefit for the West. Soviet hardliners like Molotov wanted to maintain the Soviet occupation of Austria, in part, because they considered eastern Austria a good jumping-off point for any westward offensive. For NATO, by contrast, the end of the Austrian occupation meant that a pro-Western Austria would create its own army that could easily hold western Austria in the service of the alliance in any conflict. Even a small Austrian military would be superior to the few Western occupation troops remaining in Austria in 1955.Footnote ²⁷ Austrian Chancellor Julius Raab himself stated in a private conversation “on about 24 October 1953” that was reported to the State Department by “a prominent Austrian journalist from an untested source” that with a national army Austria “would be able to make a more substantial contribution to Western security” than by remaining occupied.Footnote ²⁸

For many Austrian analysts, meanwhile, forswearing what would have seemed a logical accession to NATO has often appeared as the price for Soviet assent to Austrian sovereignty. This despite a long-standing official Austrian position first expressed in the neutrality law's explanatory comments given to the Nationalrat on 7 July 1955, that “Austria is a neutral, not, however, a neutralized state.”Footnote ²⁹ Hence, the Austrian parliament ratified Austria's neutrality law only after all foreign troops had evacuated Austria. As Chancellor Kreisky explained during an address in Düsseldorf, West Germany, on 7 May 1980, Austrians “did not want to expose ourselves to the reproach that we had agreed upon neutrality under the military pressure of one or all occupying powers.” Indeed, the fact that 26 October became Austria's national holiday in 1965 only emphasized an understanding of Austrian neutrality as voluntary.Footnote ³⁰ Nonetheless, despite a “formal separation between State Treaty and permanent neutrality,” scholars like Neuhold in 1980 have long affirmed that:

More critical observers of Austrian neutrality, like the conservative Social Democratic politician Oskar Helmer, professed a lack of “unqualified pleasure” in Austrian neutrality. In a 1961 article, Helmer wrote that the “exchange” of neutrality for the State Treaty “came about in a dilemma that left us no choice.” Helmer warned Austrians that “we are in lasting danger of believing the neutrality fairy tale [Neutralität-Märchen] rather than the hard historical facts.”Footnote ³²

Rejecting such mythology during 1955 parliamentary debates, Nationalrat members of the right-wing, pan-German Union of Independents (Verein der Unabhängigen) called for the excision of “voluntarily” from the neutrality law, even as they professed support for it in principle.Footnote ³³ Ultimately, the seventeen VdU parliamentarians in the Nationalrat were alone in abstaining or voting against the neutrality law on 26 October 1955, even as they admitted during the debate that the law enjoyed the support of about 70 percent of the Austrian people.Footnote ³⁴

Earlier indications of Austrian acceptance of neutrality emerged in an opinion poll conducted by the Information Service Branch (ISB) of the United States Forces in Austria (USFA) in conjunction with U.S. diplomats in Austria. Reported to the State Department on 18 March 1947, the poll involved “personal interviews by the reporting officer, with Austrian politicians and journalists as well as with random informants.” With respect to “Austria's Future,” the survey found that “strict neutrality, on the pattern of Switzerland, seems most desirable to 78% of those questioned by ISB. Only 5% thought an alliance with a neighboring country (but the U.S. was also mentioned) would be good for Austria.”Footnote ³⁵

For many Austrians, this acceptance of neutrality, however imposed, is easily understandable. Reviewing Austrian history across turbulent centuries, Neuhold noted that “the principle of non-involvement in international conflicts constituted the third attempt at defining Austria's identity in the course of this century, after she had failed as the center of a multinational Great Power and had been drawn into another World War after the Anschluß by the Third Reich.”Footnote ³⁶ Austrian army (Bundesheer) commandant Emil Spannocchi elaborated in 1975 that the “endangerment of his position and the knowledge that survival is bound up with war are just as embedded in the Austrian as the pessimistic frustration of a deeply psychologically wounded people that has lost in this century about 600,000 people in the vain attempt of preserving itself.” Spannocchi pithily summarized that the “path to neutrality was therefore perceived by most Austrians as an emergency exit from world history.”Footnote ³⁷ The Austrian journalist Otto Schulmeister confirmed in 1995 the meaning of Austrian neutrality as “world history without us, please.”Footnote ³⁸

Nonetheless, perceptive Austrians recognized that Austrian neutrality could only survive in the context of the security provided in the transatlantic area by Western nations. “We can be neutral,” warned in May 1955 the Social Democratic journalist Friedrich Scheu, “because others are armed.” Scheu warned of the United States reverting to isolationism if in a “neutrality panic” several West European countries tried to emulate Austria's example. Scheu explained that Austrians must:

The views of Raab and others revealed to U.S. diplomats a similar nuanced view of neutrality, as a State Department memorandum from 15 June 1955 showed with the conclusion that the only form of neutralism “prevalent in Austria” was the belief that “involvement in and responsibility for Western policies in the cold war are . . . avoidable.” The memorandum judged that “probably all the people are unanimous in supporting this approach.” The memorandum elaborated:

Arsenal of Neutrality: The Recreation of the Austrian Military

The 26 October 1955 neutrality law stipulated that Austria would “maintain and defend” neutrality “with all means at her disposal.” This is in accord with the common legal understanding, expressed by the Austrian international law scholar Karl Zemanek, that “positive international law obliges a neutral state to repel violations of its territory by belligerents and/or to end initiated but still lasting violations.”Footnote ⁴¹ With stipulations such as the inviolability of a neutral country's territory, key documents concerning neutrality such as the Convention Respecting the Rights and Duties of Neutral Powers and Persons in Case of War on Land concluded at The Hague on 18 October 1907, assume, in the words of Austrian historian Gerhard Böhner, “armed neutrality without this needing to be expressly codified.”Footnote ⁴² Moreover, Neuhold has observed that:

Scholars such as Heinz Vetschera of the Austrian National Defense Academy have even argued that neutrality has a “trilateral structure” consisting of a neutral country and opposing belligerents that obliges the neutral “to maintain its integrity.”Footnote ⁴⁴ A classic example of a neutral's failure in this regard, often cited by Vetschera and others, is Cambodia, one of the bloodiest battlefields of Cold War Southeast Asia.Footnote ⁴⁵

As noted by many Austrian analysts, the interrelated strategic and legal implications of Austrian neutrality clearly concerned the Western powers. Bischof related that “the State Department had to fight hard” in the National Security Council (NSC) for the State Treaty “in spite of the Pentagon's security concerns. Ultimately, the Pentagon agreed to neutralizing Austria only because it would be ‘armed neutrality.’”Footnote ⁴⁶ Concurrently, French Prime Minister Edgar Faure stated during the State Treaty ratification debate before the Assemblée Nationale that the French had accepted Austrian neutrality “only on condition that Austria would be placed in a position of effectively defending its independence.”Footnote ⁴⁷

During the occupation, Western concern for the stability of a post-occupation Austria had run up against an Allied Council decree from 10 December 1945, forbidding all military activity in Austria.Footnote ⁴⁸ Efforts to revise this decree consistently foundered on a Soviet veto, even though the Soviet Union had violated the 1945 decree with the establishment of Communist militias in Soviet-run Austrian enterprises (USIA Werkschutz) and the Soviet High Commissioner Colonel General Vladimir V. Kurasov on 13 April 1949 had expressed his understanding for the Austrian desire to begin the establishment of a military force before the State Treaty's ratification.Footnote ⁴⁹ Hence, the Western powers turned to covert efforts, such as a U.S. plan to train 20,000 Austrian soldiers within the Austrian federal police or gendarmerie as the basis for a 28,000-man Austrian army to form during the 90-day evacuation period foreseen under any future State Treaty.Footnote ⁵⁰

By 1954, the paramilitary units of this B-Gendarmerie had grown to 8,500 men.Footnote ⁵¹ This “restructured regiment” of the strengthened B-Gendarmerie formed nine infantry battalions and one engineer battalion or, in the words of U.S. historian James Jay Carafano, “almost a division's worth of combat power—as much as was available to the American, British, and French commanders of the reduced Western occupation forces combined.”Footnote ⁵² Perhaps predictably, though, the Soviets knew about this “covert” rearmament, according to Rauchensteiner, “in minute detail,” with the B-Gendarmerie being “merely pro forma secret . . . everything was shouted from the rooftops.”Footnote ⁵³

Communist publications in Austria such as the 163-page book Die Aufrüstung Österreichs: Dokumente und Tatsachen, meanwhile, detailed in text and pictures anything in Austria remotely connected to Western-supported rearmament and alleged “war-mongering.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Communist Nationalrat members even denounced as “fascist,” “megalomaniac Dummkopf,” and “old bandit” their fellow parliamentarians such as Interior Minister Helmer responsible for the gendarmerie. The rearmament of Austria also became, in Rauchensteiner's term, “a mainstay [Dauerbrenner] in the Allied Council” thanks to ongoing Soviet protests.Footnote ⁵⁵ Nonetheless, Bundesheer General Otto Seitz retrospectively judged Soviet reaction to this not-so-secret armament as muted and thought that the Soviets, while knowing of Austrian rearmament, “made no difficulties in recognition of its later necessity and benevolently noted it.”Footnote ⁵⁶

By the time of the State Treaty's signature, U.S. equipment for an initial Austrian military of 28,000 troops had been lying in storage in Livorno, Italy, for years. From the end of August to October 1955, 1,986 freight trains, about 40 daily, transported military equipment from Livorno to Hörsching, Austria, where a U.S. staff transferred the material into Austrian custody. This equipment came in battalion-sized packets corresponding to U.S. Tables of Ordinance and Equipment (TO&E) with a year's worth of replacement parts and training ammunition.Footnote ⁵⁷ In perhaps a merely symbolic action, meanwhile, the Allied Council lifted its 10 December 1945 ban on military activities in Austria on 8 July 1955.Footnote ⁵⁸

These deliveries from Livorno, however, formed only the first installments in the Military Assistance Program (MAP) signed between the United States and Austria on 14 June 1955. Under this plan, the only MAP at the time involving a non-NATO country, the United States agreed to provide by 1960 the equipment for an army of 60,000 troops.Footnote ⁵⁹ By April 1959, U.S. military assistance to Austria since 1955 totaled $100 million.Footnote ⁶⁰ By comparison, the U.S. scholar James Carafano calculated that Soviet military aid to Austria after 1955 totaled 10,000 carbines, 10,000 machine pistols, 24 howitzers, and 28 T-34/85 tanks. These “supplies were mostly symbolic; hardly significant enough to affect the military balance in the region.”Footnote ⁶¹ The armored backbone of the Bundesheer in its early years, for example, was 118 U.S. M-47s (by comparison, the Bundesheer received only 40 British Charioteer tanks in 1958).Footnote ⁶²

While Austria armed itself, the National Defense Law (Wehrgesetz) of 7 September 1955, demonstrated with its provision for national conscription that Austrian national security would not remain limited to a successor of the B-Gendarmerie.Footnote ⁶³ The Bundesheer's first 13,000 conscripts entered the military on 15 October 1956.Footnote ⁶⁴

Austrian Neutrality's Baptism of Fire: The 1956 Soviet Invasion of Hungary

These conscripts did not have long to wait before appreciating their relevance. Anti-Communist discontent ultimately erupted into fighting against the Hungarian Communist regime and its Soviet allies on 23 October 1956, three days shy of Austrian neutrality's one-year anniversary.Footnote ⁶⁵ Austrian journalists from the Neue Tageszeitung, according to the U.S. historian Thomas O. Schlesinger, reported “with pride” how Hungarian freedom fighters explicitly told the Austrians that the uprising fought for “things to be as they are in your country.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Hungarian admiration for modern Austria went beyond flattery when Prime Minister Imre Nagy officially proclaimed Hungary an independent and neutral country shortly before eight o'clock on 1 November 1956, thereby withdrawing Hungary from the Warsaw Pact.Footnote ⁶⁷

The uprising disrupted Hungarian border controls for a few days, even allowing two Austrian cabinet ministers to make their own investigation of events in Hungary. Raab's assistant Ludwig Steiner noted that the chancellor “saw to it that such excursions were stopped.”Footnote ⁶⁸ A 6 November 1956 State Department memorandum, meanwhile, noted transits of various Hungarians, including military personnel, back and forth across the Austrian border.Footnote ⁶⁹ To prevent such disorder with its implications for Austrian neutrality, a “barrier zone [Sperrzone]” took shape along a broad strip of Austrian territory bordering Hungary open only to inhabitants of this border region, along with individuals possessing special permits, above all from charitable organizations. Although police and army units deployed to the border had permission to open fire on hostile intruders, Austrian security forces cautiously maintained a 500-meter distance from the border marked with small Austrian red-white-red flags.Footnote ⁷⁰ Bundesheer General Emil Liebitzky, meanwhile, explained the Sperrzone to the military attachés of the four former occupying powers during an inspection tour of the border region.Footnote ⁷¹

The potential for Austrian involvement in the Hungarian events developed not just along the border, but also in Austria's interior. “The Vorfeld of the Hungarian uprising, this can certainly be said today,” Kreisky recalled in his 1988 memoirs, “was Vienna: having fled abroad from Communist Hungary, the exiles living in America and Canada, who came in large part from very reactionary circles, began to assemble themselves in Vienna in order to retake Hungary.” Kreisky explained, “If at first Vienna was only an important transfer station to Budapest, Vienna became after the outbreak of the uprising a kind of control station. For Austria's young freedom—we had, after all, just been set free—this development was extremely dangerous.”Footnote ⁷²

Accordingly, Austria imposed an entry ban on persons possessing foreign passports and traveling to Hungary. Austrian police also raided hotels frequented by foreigners and expelled from Austria individuals likely to create trouble.Footnote ⁷³ Among others, the former Hungarian minister, President Ference Nagy deposed by the Communists, received orders to leave Austria immediately after arriving in Vienna on 29 October 1956. Embassies of Communist bloc states in Vienna, meanwhile, received increased protection against demonstrations.Footnote ⁷⁴

Indeed, the Austrian politician Luijo Tončić-Sorinj noted that “Austria did more than neutrality law demanded,” given that the 1907 neutrality conventions did not regulate activities of private individuals.Footnote ⁷⁵ Hague Convention V's Article 6 clearly stated that the “responsibility of a neutral Power is not engaged by the fact of persons crossing the frontier separately to offer their services to one of the belligerents.” The Austrian government, though, might have contemplated a violation by Hungarian exiles in Austria, however improbable, of the convention's Article 4, which stated that “corps of combatants cannot be formed nor recruiting agencies opened on the territory of a neutral Power to assist the belligerents.”Footnote ⁷⁶ In all, Rauchensteiner has written of a “so to speak überneutrales behavior.”Footnote ⁷⁷

The main question facing Austrians during the fighting in Hungary, meanwhile, was whether Communist bloc forces would respect Austrian neutrality. “Austrian decoders (as was explained to me, people from above all Slavic background were considered during the monarchy as suitable for decoding, because they supposedly brought with them a special kind of patience) at the time,” Kreisky remembered, “had intercepted a radio message in which Czech and East German party leaders most urgently demanded the reoccupation of Austria.”Footnote ⁷⁸ From Washington, DC, Ambassador Gruber reflected:

“That a few people considered such a possibility,” Austrian journalist Janko Musulin commented in 1957, “was proved by the fact that during the critical period money was withdrawn from Vienna and deposited in banks in the West of the country. Official figures are not available, but it is alleged that several million Schillings were moved for this reason.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Public panic in Austria during this time led to runs on soap, rice, oil, flour, and sugar supplies in Vienna.Footnote ⁸¹ “The opinion,” Rauchensteiner reviewed in 1981, “that the great powers, at least the Americans and the Soviets, could come back at any time and occupy their former zones once again, particularly in case of a serious contingency, was not to be eradicated.” Outside Austria during the crisis, meanwhile, “NATO took precautions. A partial mobilization was conducted in Czechoslovakia. Of Yugoslavia it was known that several divisions were transferred near to the Hungarian and Romanian borders.”Footnote ⁸²

Austrian fears reached their apex on the morning of 5 November 1956 with intelligence reports indicating that Soviet forces, engaged in operations primarily to the west of Budapest, would drive on Austria and begin its reoccupation during the night of 5–6 November 1956.Footnote ⁸³ “If only for a few initiates,” Rauchensteiner judged, this night was “one of the most dramatic, if not the night of the Second Republic,” coming on the heels of “steps of escalation.” After preparing for intervention on November 3, Soviet forces invaded Hungary during the night, unleashing fighting that raged the following day and was simultaneously, in Rauchensteiner's words, the “highpoint” of the Communist media campaign against Austria. In New York, meanwhile, the United Nations General Assembly met in special session on November 4 for debating and voting on a U.S. resolution calling for a Soviet withdrawal from, and the admission of neutral observers and emergency relief into, Hungary.Footnote ⁸⁴

Shortly before the vote, Valerian Zorin, the Soviet UN ambassador, took aside Heinrich Haymerle, the Austrian Foreign Ministry's director of political affairs dispatched to New York, and warned that an Austrian affirmation of the U.S. resolution would indicate that Austria had abandoned neutrality, with Austria accordingly responsible for the consequences. Unable to establish contact with Vienna in time, the Austrian delegation decided to vote for the U.S. resolution in obedience to previous instructions. After the U.S. resolution passed with only eight votes in opposition and 15 abstentions, Ambassador Zorin playfully threatened Haymerle with finger gestures.Footnote ⁸⁵

The day Austria received warnings of a Soviet advance into Austria, 5 November 1956, was also the day that Anglo-French paratroop units landed in the Suez Canal zone to foil the nationalization plans of the Nasser regime in Egypt. The Anglo-French military operation in Egypt provoked Soviet threats of nuclear missile attacks on the United Kingdom and France. As indicated by a visit of the U.S. defense attaché in Vienna to the Austrian Defense Ministry, Soviet threats raised the concern of Soviet escalation in Europe.Footnote ⁸⁶ At the same time, the United States, according to Rauchensteiner, was “disoriented” and “politically lame” because of the presidential elections on 6 November 1956.Footnote ⁸⁷

In this setting, a crisis meeting under Defense Minister Ferdinand Graf's leadership took place on 5 November 1956 in the Austrian Defense Ministry. The result was a decision to pull back Bundesheer units deployed along the border in preparation for delaying actions in case of Soviet attack. The Bundesheer also received orders to evacuate all barracks during the night under the cover of “night exercises” so that in case of air attack the barracks would be empty. Because secrecy concerns prevented even most Bundesheer participants in the “night exercise” from knowing its true purpose, military families living in the barracks had to stay behind in ignorance.Footnote ⁸⁸

While only armored reconnaissance units remained as a screen on the border to Hungary, Bundesheer soldiers took up defensive positions on the night of 5–6 November 1956, in pouring rain, something that, according to Austrian military historian Erwin Schmidl, “fit the mood—are the ‘Russians’ coming again, is the Third World War in fact going to begin?” Simultaneously, Austrian soldiers near the airfield Tulln-Langenlebarn prepared for U.S. troop landings and demolition teams with handwritten orders in sealed envelopes took positions throughout Upper and Lower Austria near Danube bridges.Footnote ⁸⁹ The State Department's 6 November 1956 memorandum, meanwhile, ominously warned that “according to reliable information, the Soviet Embassy in Vienna burned large amounts of paper on 2 November.” Such events took place against a background of widespread Communist allegations of Austrian neutrality violations.Footnote ⁹⁰

Decades later there were still reports of intercepted radio communications from Soviet tank crews asking their superiors whether the Soviet advance should continue into Austria. According to Rauchensteiner, the answer was, in effect, “If the border is not defended, drive on!” Defense Minister Graf also later claimed to have seen a Soviet sketch marked with the advance of a Soviet armored unit into Austria. “It might be,” Rauchensteiner assessed in 2003, “that a troop commander made himself ‘independent’; that also a high command provided the troops with something that would have been used in a contingency, etc. We would all desire to be able to see for once the sketch mentioned again and again, but I—at least—have never seen it.” The Bundesheer's state of alarm ended uneventfully on 6 November 1956.Footnote ⁹¹

Calmer assessments of events, however, provided more assurance. “Austrian politicians,” Eger noted, “did not judge as serious reproaches against Austria” repeated Soviet charges of neutrality violations. Rather:

Most Austrian leaders did not suspect the Soviets of intending to extend the area of hostilities into Austria. The Austrian diplomat and Federal President Rudolf Kirchschläger reflected in 2000 that the:

In looking back on his role as undersecretary for foreign affairs during the Hungarian revolt, Kreisky also held the view that there was no specific Soviet threat to Austria during the fighting in Hungary. Not only would this have been the end of the Austrian “model” and détente, but a Soviet advance into Austria would also have prompted the three Western former occupation powers, still hopeful of integrating Austria or parts of it into NATO, to move into their former zones.Footnote ⁹⁴ “We believe,” the State Department concurred on 6 November 1956, “it improbable that the USSR presently intends any substantial military movement into Austria, although some border incidents or minor incursions into Austrian territory may occur.” The Soviets:

Statements by U.S. officials encouraged Austrian confidence. The answers of “my American friends” to Gruber's questions concerning possible U.S. responses to a Soviet invasion of Austria “consoled” the Austrian ambassador to the United States. Secretary of the Air Force Donald A. Quarles, whom Gruber “could count among my close friends,” went so far as to say that:

On 3 November 1956, moreover, the day before the Soviet assault to retake Budapest, Deputy Undersecretary of State Robert Daniel Murphy expressed concern to the Soviet ambassador in Washington, DC, over strong Soviet troop concentrations in Hungary near the Austrian border.Footnote ⁹⁷ That same day, U.S. ambassador Llewellyn Thompson in Vienna met with Foreign Minister Leopold Figl and Kreisky during the morning. Thompson cabled to Washington, DC, that the:

Three days later on 6 November 1956, State Department spokesperson Lincoln White proclaimed that the “United States has respected and will continue to respect and observe the neutral character of Austria and considers that the violations of the territorial integrity or international sovereignty of Austria would, of course, be a grave threat to the peace.”Footnote ⁹⁹ “With this declaration,” Eger commented:

The extent of U.S. commitment to Austria, however, was not clear. “From America,” Kreisky recalled, “came unsettling reports of our diplomatic representatives, through which was indicated to us not to indulge any hopes with respect to an expected military intervention as long as Soviet power did not cross the boundaries of its former occupation zone in Austria.”Footnote ¹⁰¹

Nonetheless, Austria remained firm in its response to Hungarian events. On 28 October 1956, the new Soviet ambassador to Austria, Sergey G. Lapin, presented his credentials to Federal President Theodor Körner in the president's private apartment. Afterwards in the Foreign Ministry, Lapin received the following appeal of the Austrian government for transmission to Moscow:

In additional, Foreign Minister Figl told Lapin that unarmed individuals crossing from Hungary into Austria would be treated according to the Geneva Convention. “Should, however, groups enter Austrian territory while fighting and not respond to the demand to lay down arms,” Figl warned in comments intended solely for the Soviet Union, “the Austrian armed forces shall be ordered to break any resistance.” Figl added that these rules of engagement (ROE) included Soviet forces.Footnote ¹⁰³

As described by Eger, Austria's “brave appeal” on 28 October 1956 (along with the ROE) “reflected the estimation of the Austrian government” that the fighting in Hungary “presented no direct threat of Austrian territory or even Austrian sovereignty.” Nonetheless, Eger believed that Austria's reaction was deserving of “special note” in comparison to the “cautious approach of the American government.” Austria, moreover, made its “challenging appeal directly to the government of the USSR” as the “lone Western, democratic state—directly bordering the Soviet sphere of influence, the ten-year experience with a Soviet occupation regime in fresh memory, and an independent and sovereign nation for only less than a year.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴

With the Bundesheer caught by a crisis “in the most unfavorable time imaginable,” Spannocchi, like others, found in retrospect the “hard and correct reaction” of the Austrian government to be “even more notable.” Austria's “modest military, naturally, would have been not at all adapted for an aggressor determined to violate neutrality.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ This was in agreement with the report of British Colonel J. J. Packard, one of the four military attachés representing the former occupying powers in Vienna, who inspected Austria's border security measures on 30 October 1956. Although “a most valuable demonstration of Austria's determination to defend her neutrality in this particular eventuality,” Packard reported, “precautions taken by the Austrian government were, of course, completely inadequate to deal with any attack in any strength across the frontier.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Rauchensteiner calculated that about 200,000 troops in the Hungarian army and about an equivalent number among Soviet forces were across the Austrian border in Hungary in 1956.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In contrast, Bundesheer units fielded about 2,000 troops assisting some 500 gendarmes along the border.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ As described by Austrian historian Christine Stöckl, the lack of trained soldiers precluded the “unified use of planned organizational units” and forced the Bundesheer to use a “mixed form” of cadre personnel pulled from training duties and grouped in “alarm units” filled out with recruits performing less important functions.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Some Austrian officers, meanwhile, still had not received their uniforms and wore civilian clothes instead.Footnote ¹¹⁰

Later assessments by Spannocchi credited the Austrians on the ground with no more than 50 armored vehicles.Footnote ¹¹¹ Antitank weapons, in the words of Schmidl, were “almost completely lacking and/or the crews were still not confident in their use.” Schmidl added, “As a young general staff officer tried to explain that M-8 armored cars with their 37-millimeter cannons in suitable positions could also be used against tanks, he was unable to convince experienced combat officers.” These troops also received little help from a Yak-11 training aircraft (one of eight in the Bundesheer) and a helicopter held in readiness.Footnote ¹¹² Many of the officers unimpressed with puny 37-millimeter guns, Schmidl noted, “had experienced the war and were correspondingly without illusions. Some had just returned only the year before as Soviet prisoners of war and went into this operation with a queasy feeling.”Footnote ¹¹³

In the end, Austrian resolve and Soviet reticence kept confrontations to a minimum. Three Soviet soldiers, for example, crossed the Austrian border on 23 November 1956 at Rechnitz in Burgenland in pursuit of fleeing Hungarian refugees. Austrian gendarmes killed one Soviet soldier, captured another, and forced the third to escape back into Hungary. In a move that must have pleased the Austrians, though, Ambassador Lapin's note discussing the incident four days later made clear the accidental nature of the soldiers' crossing and emphasized Soviet orders restricting the Soviet military to Hungary.Footnote ¹¹⁴

Such incidents continued even after the last Bundesheer units deployed to the border returned to their barracks on 24 December 1956. While firing their submachine guns, for example, Hungarian border soldiers of the restored Communist regime pursued fleeing Hungarians across the Austrian border near the town of Nikitsch in Burgenland and brought them back into Hungary. The Hungarian soldiers even forced Austrian civilians into Hungarian territory. A delegation of mayors then traveled to Vienna, met with Graf in January 1957, and requested Bundesheer support for Austrian customs officials. Only on 23 April 1957, therefore, did the Bundesheer's border operation officially end.Footnote ¹¹⁵

During the uprising, neutral Austria was decidedly friendly toward the Hungarians. Austrian trade union leader Franz Olah, for example, recalled in his memoirs that the Österreichischer Gewerkschaftsbund (ÖGB) delivered food, medical supplies, and money to Hungary during the fighting. Olah's assistant Heinrich Daurer and ÖGB secretary Anton Benya even accompanied deliveries to Budapest. Hungarian revolutionaries, in turn, crossed into Austria and received large sums of Hungarian currency from the ÖGB. “Weapons,” Olah emphasized, “they did not receive.” Communist propaganda to this effect at the time was, “unfortunately,” an “invention.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ The Austrian minister in Hungary, Walter Peinsipp, meanwhile, became known as the “hero of Budapest” for distributing penicillin to the city's hospitals, even if, as Peinsipp stated in a telephone call with Haymerle, “at times, it is only possible to do this in a hail of bullets.”Footnote ¹¹⁷

In Austria itself, according to Eger, the ÖVP, SPÖ, and the VdU's successor, the FPÖ, “unanimously welcomed in appeals and resolutions the developing revolution in Hungary, only the tone of the declarations varied.” All parliamentarians from these parties “demonstratively” left the Nationalrat's chambers as Johann Koplenig, the leader of the pro-Soviet KPÖ, took the speaker's podium during the Soviet invasion. Austrian workers also responded to union calls to remember Hungary with a moment of silence on 2 November and a work pause on 8 November 1956, and voluntary donations collected by the ÖGB for Hungarian relief totaled over 16 million schillings. Popular outrage in Vienna against the KPÖ, meanwhile, led to the demolition of party offices and initiated the “complete” isolation of the KPÖ, culminating in its loss of Nationalrat representation after garnering only 3.27 percent of the vote in the 1959 elections.Footnote ¹¹⁸

Before Communist control established itself once again along the Hungarian border in the spring of 1957, meanwhile, 170,000 Hungarians had fled to the sanctuary of Austria. By May 1957, 30,000 of them remained in Austria, but 135,000 had traveled to new homes in Europe and across the oceans (nearly 6,000 returned to Hungary).Footnote ¹¹⁹ “We turned the gates wide open,” Kreisky later reflected. “The famous bridge of Andau was more than a symbol.”Footnote ¹²⁰

Some Hungarian refugees fleeing into Austria, observed Rauchensteiner, “presumed to see Americans in the Austrian soldiers largely clothed with American uniforms and equipped with American weapons and vehicles.” Believing themselves among the “yearned for Americans,” Schmidl wrote, “some Hungarian officers declared to the Austrians in a commanding tone that they wanted to be brought to the responsible US-commanders; they wanted to have nothing to do with the Austrians.” The Austrians disarmed and interned the often disappointed Hungarians all the same.Footnote ¹²¹

As provincial governor of Salzburg, Josef Klaus summarized in a 1957 article that “Austria showed with its diplomatic and social measures a brave and independent posture during the uprising in Hungary.” This “confirmed in fact” that the “State Treaty and neutrality indicate no alienation of Austria from the Free World of the West, no turning away from the traditions and values of the Christian Occident, indeed, not even foreign policy passivity.”Footnote ¹²² Schlesinger later observed in 1972 an “interesting paradox. The Hungarian Revolution created for Austria the unusual opportunity to demonstrate at one and the same time her neutrality and her commitment to the West.”Footnote ¹²³

Steiner, for example, recalled Vice-President Richard Nixon's three-day visit to Vienna beginning on 19 December 1956, during which Nixon toured refugee camps and the border with Hungary. Steiner recorded the visit resulting in Nixon's expression to Raab that the “government of the United States is deeply impressed by the behavior of Austria in this difficult situation.”Footnote ¹²⁴ Ambassador Thompson concurred in a 17 January 1957 cable: “Since the conclusion of the State Treaty, Austria has steadily consolidated her alignment with the West in the political, economic and cultural fields in direct opposition to the Soviet Bloc.”Footnote ¹²⁵

Neutrality Among Friends: Austrian Territory and American Transits, 1956–1958

Communist bloc forces were not the only ones to call into question Austrian neutrality in the 1950s. Although in more benign ways, U.S. military forces also breached Austrian sovereignty. As recorded by a U.S. embassy official in Vienna on 22 March 1956, for example, the Austrian diplomat Hans Thalberg informed U.S. officials that a:

In contrast to Private Fox's statement, Austrian law generally prohibited the public wearing of foreign uniforms in Austria pursuant to Austrian neutrality. Hence, “Thalberg dismissed the alleged incident as a minor matter and was skeptical of the veracity of the soldier's excuse. He asked, however, if we would remind the Army that US soldiers may not appear in uniform in Austria.” Thalberg, though, also cited the case of the “special permission” requested by the U.S. air attaché in Vienna:

More than a year after the discovery of these Americans apparently dissatisfied with the neutralization of their favorite ski slopes, another unauthorized border transit by U.S. forces in West Germany occurred. Ambassador Gruber, complained on 5 September 1957 during a visit to the State Department that a:

Subsequent talks in Vienna between Thalberg and U.S. embassy personnel on 16 September 1957 confirmed that this incident took place on 13 August 1957 and involved the six soldiers marching back to their base in Augsburg, West Germany. As reported by the United Press on 14 August 1957, the six soldiers received their punishment for missing an exercise.Footnote ¹²⁹

The negligence of individual U.S. soldiers and their commanders with respect to Austrian sovereignty and neutrality, however, was perhaps forgivable, for the U.S. government was not very scrupulous in this regard, either. United States authorities in West Germany during the 1950s, for example, often set loose balloons containing propaganda material (and perhaps espionage instruments) destined for Eastern Europe. Wind currents blew them across Austrian territory, provoking Austrian diplomatic protests.Footnote ¹³⁰

Then again, Austrian protests against U.S. violations of Austrian sovereignty and neutrality were themselves not very convincing. Before the occupation ended on 16 July 1955, Raab and Schärf had met with U.S. officials including Lieutenant General William H. Arnold, commander of United States Forces in Austria (USFA). As the Americans recorded, they:

In response, Raab “stated that he would have to consult his Government. He added that as long as the Russians were here this was extremely difficult, but that he would in the future consider sympathetically specific requests we might have.”Footnote ¹³² Yet U.S. requests for military transit across Austria remained in question as the State Department's report on Austrian events up to 14 December 1955 revealed. Austria's relationship with the West, the report stated:

A later State Department report from 16 January 1956 noted that:

The report revealed that the Austrians ultimately took a coy position. Even though U.S. officials consoled Austrian officials that “each aircraft would be over Austrian territory for only a few minutes,” according to the U.S. embassy in Vienna:

The result of these Austro-American talks was a system of informal, behind-the-scenes cooperation. As described by Foreign Minister Figl to Ambassador Thompson on 23 February 1956, the U.S. air attaché in Vienna would request per telephone transit authority from the Austrian Foreign Ministry upon being informed by United States Air Force Europe (USAFE) headquarters of upcoming flights. According to Thompson, Foreign Minister Figl stated that permission “is almost invariably granted at once and Austrians ask only the number of the plane and the estimated time it will be over Innsbruck corridor.” Under the circumstances, Figl “repeated Austria desired to avoid any formal agreement on this subject. After long discussion Figl urged that for time being at least we continue present system which appears to be working reasonably satisfactorily.”Footnote ¹³⁶

Talks between Figl and Thompson, however, revealed a common desire to conceal these flights over Tirol. Thompson “strongly” recommended in his 23 February 1956 cable, for example, that “such flights be held to a minimum and that so far as possible they take place at such altitudes or under such conditions as to prevent their being observed.”Footnote ¹³⁷ Later on 23 March 1956, one day after Thalberg's discussion of Pfc Fox, Figl “expressed hope that number of flights would be kept as low as possible particularly until after elections. He also again urged flights be made at altitudes and under weather conditions which would prevent ground observation.”Footnote ¹³⁸

In accordance with Austro-American arrangements, Rathkolb wrote, “hundreds of overflight approvals were routinely granted in advance by a subordinate official in the Office of Civil Aviation since 1955.” In comparison to this cooperation, isolated Austrian objections to some U.S. air transits, such as four unauthorized flights in March 1956 or the helicopter landing at Thiersee, were insignificant. Although the Austrian Chancellery and Foreign Ministry quietly dealt with these incidents, East European infringements on Austrian airspace were, in the words of Rathkolb, “mostly immediately and publicly protested.” Following Thompson's suggestion, meanwhile, the U.S. military in Europe “inconspicuously” mixed military supplies without formal Austrian approval among commercial rail traffic crossing the Brenner Pass. Although leading Austrian politicians displayed a “quiet toleration” of this practice, the Soviets, having discovered it, made their displeasure already known in a 22 February 1956 Izvestiya article.Footnote ¹³⁹

Izvestiya's criticism indicated that the cozy Austro-American transit arrangement was fraught with the peril of discovery despite concealment measures. In fact, hints of the events that ultimately ended the United States shuttle service through strategic but supposedly “neutral” Tirol came two weeks after the Izvestiya article on 8 March 1956. That day Major R. G. Bankert of the Operations Division (G-3) in the Department of the Army spoke with William M. Owen from the State Department. As reported by Owen, Bankert:

The Transports of July: How U.S. Intervention in Lebanon Precipitated an Austrian Crisis

Ultimately, events in Iraq and Lebanon, not Israel, prompted a U.S. military force to transit Austrian airspace on its way to the Middle East. The 14 July 1958 overthrow of the Iraqi monarchy raised Western fears that violence and unrest could spread to Lebanon as well. President Eisenhower's administration decided that day to intervene militarily in Lebanon and to evacuate U.S. citizens there.Footnote ¹⁴¹ For three days beginning on 16 July, about 100 multiengine, propeller-driven transports (C-119s, C-124s, and C-130s) flew U.S. combat groups from West Germany across Tirol into Lebanon with jet fighter escort from the 86th Fighter-Interceptor Wing. One group, Force Alpha, alone carried 1,600 soldiers and 350 tons of military equipment.Footnote ¹⁴²

“In light of the large number of overflights in mid-July 1958,” Austrian military historian Walter Blasi wrote, “the attempt to conceal the flights through namely altitude and weather conditions failed.”Footnote ¹⁴³ Force Alpha's transport across Tirol began at 9:45 a.m. on July 16 with ten F-86 jet fighters escorting ten C-124 and 36 C-130 transports.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Austrian air control authorities in Innsbruck, though, falsely reported 150 to 200 transports crossing Tirol. The local affiliate of the Austrian Communist Party (KPÖ) in Innsbruck then relayed this estimate to Vienna where the newspapers reported it the next day, 17 July 1958.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Force Charlie's transport began that day and led to more reports of American aircraft crossing Tirol even though some U.S. planes flying during the night, at high altitude, or around inhabited areas escaped detection by sight or sound.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Given that Austria had ordered but not yet received radar equipment, only Austrian ears and eyes equipped with binoculars could detect the U.S. aircraft.Footnote ¹⁴⁷

Austrian officials, Blasi noted, now entered a political “balancing act [Eiertanz].” Nobody “wanted to ruin relations with the Americans” even while maintaining neutrality. The imminent visit of an Austrian delegation to Moscow seeking economic concessions only added to the difficulties of this conflicted situation. Hence, Austrian strategy sought to “officially protest (because of the Soviets), but to simultaneously—unofficially—put the Americans at ease.”Footnote ¹⁴⁸

During a telephone call on 16 July 1958, for example, Foreign Minister Figl informed the U.S. ambassador in Austria, H. Freeman Matthews, of a forthcoming Austrian “press release” dealing with the overflights. Figl emphasized, though, that this action was not to be understood as a protest. Haymerle also explained Austrian actions with the need to preclude future Soviet overflight requests.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ The Austrian ambassador in Washington, DC, Wilfried Platzer, also presented protests in the State Department. According to Rauchensteiner, though, Platzer had a “difficult position” in that he protested the overflights even while requesting that U.S. military forces evacuate Austrians living in threatened areas of the Middle East.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

The next day, 17 July 1958, domestic and foreign journalists asked the Austrian Defense Ministry about its efforts to stop the overflights. Defense Minister Graf then ordered the immediate transfer of Bundesheer aircraft and antiaircraft batteries to the area of Tirol and Voralberg (the antiaircraft guns ultimately did not go). Yet the Austrians at the same time assured Matthews, noted Blasi, that the “refusal of overflight approvals and the stationing of Bundesheer aviation units in the area of Innsbruck were first and foremost intended for the records.” In this regard, the Austrians cited both the impending Austro-Soviet summit in Moscow (which the Austrians had considered canceling because of feared Soviet pressures to strengthen Austrian observance of neutrality) and the need to preclude through respect for neutrality future Soviet overflight requests. “However,” Blasi observed, “the competent Austrian authorities did not also expressly demand that the still necessary flights were to be halted.”Footnote ¹⁵¹

The following day, 18 July, Austrian authorities announced the closure of Austrian airspace west of 13° longitude (i.e., west of Salzburg) and above 5,000 meters for two weeks beginning at midnight. The duration of this prohibition meant that U.S. forces in Lebanon could not return to West Germany via Tirol. Platzer also called at the State Department for a U.S. declaration forswearing future overflights. Vienna received oral statements from the Americans but demanded a press release. The Americans only agreed to a press release the next day, justifying the delay with the excuse that U.S. planes destined to transit Tirol could not be reached in time.Footnote ¹⁵²

Matthews reported to Dulles on 19 July, meanwhile, that pro-American Austrian officials had concern for U.S. (“our”) concerns even as the Austrians suspended further transit flight approvals. Bundesheer aircraft transferred on 18 July to the Tirol area, on the other hand, presented, in the words of Blasi, “rather a sign of helplessness.” The Bundesheer utilized namely two Yak-11 propeller-driven trainers and three DH-115 Vampire jet trainers to “enforce” the Austrian “no-fly” zone. “At least,” commented Blasi, “it was desired to prove goodwill.”Footnote ¹⁵³

“Could one, though,” Rauchensteiner retrospectively asked, “actually react in case the Americans did not cease their overflights? Military authorities contended with all their might against political demands for an armed intervention.” According to Fussenegger's notes, Graf hesitated, but his undersecretary Karl Stephani advocated a “stubborn upholding of our neutrality and orders to shoot upon American aircraft.” Rauchensteiner rightly judged that orders to shoot could have only had “demonstrative character” in light of the “Bundesheer's inferior armament and the flight altitude of the American machines,” but this did not dismay Stephani. On July 18 Fussenegger, nonetheless, achieved a delay in the decision to issue combat orders.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ “Viewed comprehensively,” judged Rathkolb, “the Lebanon-overflight crisis was no page of glory for Austrian decision makers.” Although Stephani, along with Raab, at times advocated orders to open fire on the U.S. planes, the Foreign Ministry on other occasions during the crisis approved routine U.S. overflights, thereby enraging Raab.Footnote ¹⁵⁵

Austrian debates over a practically nonexistent enforcement of Austrian air sovereignty only highlighted the difference between Austrian neutrality and its Swiss model. “Swiss airspace,” noted Rauchensteiner, “was also violated, but only by very few aircraft.”Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Commented former Wehrmacht General Hans Kissel in 1967, “No airplane chose the surely not longer way across better armed Switzerland.”Footnote ¹⁵⁷

After the Crossing

Following the heated controversies created by these three days in July 1958, dispute emerged concerning whether the U.S. overflights to Lebanon had received prior Austrian approval. The 12 September 1958 Progress Report on Austria from the U.S. embassy in Vienna declared that the:

The noted U.S. journalist and author John Gunther repeated this assessment in his 1962 book Inside Europe Today. “During the Lebanese crisis in July, 1958,” he wrote:

Austrians in 1958 and afterwards, however, had a far different story to tell. Before the actual overflights in July 1958, Rauchensteiner wrote in 1987, “the American embassy had only very generally sought overflight approval within the framework of a not specifically defined humanitarian action. No more.”Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Blasi reported the Austrian Foreign Ministry having given “oral” approval for 32 transport flights to the American embassy in Vienna on 14 July 1958. Three days later, as significantly more than 32 American planes were crossing Austrian airspace, the Foreign Ministry confirmed this initial approval with “written approval for evacuation measures over Austrian state territory with 32 flight movements into Lebanon and back.” Yet this limited Austrian approval for overflights, Blasi wrote, led USAFE headquarters in Wiesbaden, West Germany, to think that “the State Department had at any rate achieved all necessary overflight approvals for Austria.”Footnote ¹⁶¹

Hence, according to Rauchensteiner:

Predictably, the unexpected size and character of the U.S. overflights in July 1958 provoked Austrian protests. Figl complained during his 16 July call to the U.S. embassy that fighters in military formation accompanied far more than the agreed upon 32 transports crossing Tirol.Footnote ¹⁶³ State Department notes of a subsequent 8 December 1958, conversation in Washington, DC, between Haymerle, Platzer, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Frederick W. Jandrey, and other State Department officials recorded that Haymerle:

The Americans, observed Rauchensteiner, failed to understand Austria's position. U.S. officials only calculated the increased fuel costs, pilot fatigue, and supply difficulties entailed by long flight detours while considering Austria to be, “after all, a country that the Americans had helped very much.” Austria being “therefore obligated to a certain gratitude, to at least an understanding of the American position, what was thus all the excitement about, why all the difficulties?”Footnote ¹⁶⁵

“If after 1956,” observed Bundesheer brigadier Hannes-Christian Clausen at a 1990 conference:

Although fixated on questions of friendship and past generosity, Rauchensteiner analyzed, the Americans did not appreciate Austria's need for:

As a small consolation, the Austrians did allow return flights of U.S. transports to West Germany from Lebanon via Austria. Although Jandrey on 8 December 1958 expressed his dismay at “the public criticism of our overflights in July when we thought that the matter had previously been worked out,” the Americans “were, however, appreciative of the permission to return troops from Lebanon over Austrian territory.”Footnote ¹⁶⁸ As explained by Haymerle, though, “the return flight from Lebanon was different matter because it was in connection with a resolution of the UN. Switzerland followed the same general policy as Austria with regard to overflights.”Footnote ¹⁶⁹ With respect to the return trip from Lebanon, noted Rauchensteiner, Matthews in an “initial rage” had suggested “simply secretly proceeding with the necessary overflights; as if not enough damage had already been done anyway.”Footnote ¹⁷⁰

Yet, wrote Rathkolb, “between July and September 1958 the relations between the U.S. embassy in Vienna and the Austrian politicians and leading officials notably deteriorated.” Although “Raab's insistence on the neutrality law” during the 1958 overflights triggered “these tensions,” he “used the 1958 debate, which was conducted publicly and could no longer be checked and mediated by the Austrian Foreign Ministry, to demonstrate his detachment from the West.”Footnote ¹⁷¹ Rathkolb elaborated in another article:

To this end, noted Rathkolb, the “state visit to Moscow, coincidentally planned” for July 1958, “provided great publicity” and “was highly criticized” by the United States.Footnote ¹⁷³ Jandrey, for example, stated after the Moscow visit that the “United States Government is disappointed with the Chancellor's statement at the Moscow airport that the State Treaty was concluded ‘mainly thanks to the Soviet Union’ and that it proved that the Soviet Union wanted peace.” Raab's criticism of the recent U.S. overflights in Moscow also provoked, according to Jandrey, official U.S. “regrets” given that supposedly “at least seventy-eight out of ninety-six flights were made with the clearance of the Austrian government.”Footnote ¹⁷⁴

As reported by the U.S. embassy in Vienna on 1 August 1958, following the Moscow visit, the Soviet military attaché in Vienna gave a dinner for Graf and Stephani “at which they were [the] only two non-Russians.” Attended by Ambassador Lapin and ranking members Soviet Embassy, the dinner “was marked by continuous eulogy of Raab as great Austrian statesman whose skill and understanding alone produced Austrian State Treaty and now had made Moscow visit such a success.” The Soviets also praised Raab as a defender of Austrian neutrality and, confirming the concerns the Austrian had expressed to the Americans, “then proceeded to say that if Austria had further trouble with overflights of U.S. planes, Soviet Air Force would immediately come to Austria's assistance if requested. Both Graf and Stephani spontaneously replied that Austria would take care of its own neutrality obligations without outside assistance.”Footnote ¹⁷⁵

In his 8 December 1958 remarks recorded by U.S. diplomatic protocols, Haymerle assuaged his U.S. interlocutors that “any statements made in Moscow were not to indicate a policy change. They might have been made in the heat of Moscow's summer and as a result of the Chancellor's poor physical condition.” Yet, despite requests from Jandrey, Haymerle clearly stated that he “did not think it would be possible to go back to the system of clearances of overflights which had existed before mid-July. The system had been very informal and strictly within the Foreign Office, but now other Ministries were interested.”Footnote ¹⁷⁶ During this same period, meanwhile, Jandrey also expressed U.S. concern over Raab's announcement during the Moscow visit to adhere to the 1948 Belgrade convention. Communist states dominated this organization regulating Danube navigation.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ Austria also abstained from a vote against the People's Republic of China at the United Nations and sent Defense Minister Graf on a visit to the Soviet Union.Footnote ¹⁷⁸

In light of all these developments, Ambassador Matthews viewed Austrian policy differently from Haymerle during a meeting of U.S. officials in Washington, DC, on 26 October 1959, the third anniversary of Austrian neutrality. Matthews:

Accordingly, Matthews had already discerned a “sort of Soviet-Austrian honeymoon” entailing an Austrian view of neutrality with a “more general equating of East with West.” The result, noted Rathkolb, was the “recourse to disciplinary means” in U.S. policy toward Austria. Beginning in late August 1958, Matthews refused to give the necessary U.S. consent for the release of “counterpart funds” garnered by the Austrian state through the domestic resale of Marshall Plan aid until Austria complied with outstanding Jewish claims resulting from Article 26 of the State Treaty and Anglo-American commercial oil claims stemming from the 1955 Vienna Memorandum.Footnote ¹⁸⁰

After he became foreign minister in September 1959, Kreisky criticized this “gunboat policy in Central Europe.” Nonetheless, the United States, in Rathkolb's words, kept up an “unbroken pressure” until achieving fulfillment of the Vienna Memorandum in June/July 1960. “The Jewish claims,” Rathkolb noted in contrast, “which the U.S.A. did not pursue with the same force as the petroleum interests, were not fulfilled until 1961/1962 and then only in part.” Although Austria's new “confrontation” course beginning in 1958 “gave Austrian neutrality the necessary respect” in the United States, “in a financial sense this policy of emancipation from the West, and from the United States in particular, was costly.”Footnote ¹⁸¹

Irrespective of Austria's newly expressed opposition to U.S. overflights, some things in U.S. policy remained resolutely the same. Among the briefing papers for the 29 March 1962 visit to Washington, DC, of Austrian Defense Minister Karl Schleinzer and his undersecretary Otto Rösch is the recommendation that “when the time is politically propitious, however, consideration should be given to an effort to obtain more liberal peacetime overflight privileges, as well as dependable overflight privileges in event of crisis.”Footnote ¹⁸²

The Early Years of Austrian Neutrality: Review and Conclusions

For all of upheaval in Austria's Cold War history, many scholars have noted that Austria's neutrality never actually had to face a test according to a technical legal definition of neutrality. The initially domestic Hungarian uprising might not have qualified as a state of war (possible only between states) according to a strict interpretation of the Hague conventions regulating neutrality, thereby obviating the application of Austrian neutrality.Footnote ¹⁸³ Similarly, the subsequent 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia did not meet with armed resistance creating a state of war involving Austrian neutrality obligations.Footnote ¹⁸⁴

“Because no case of neutrality was present,” argued the Austrian scholar Christine Stöckl, Soviet reconnaissance flights over Austria during the 1968 invasion “were not a matter of neutrality violations, but rather incidents subject to Austrian judgment.”Footnote ¹⁸⁵ The Austrian legal scholar Karl Zemanek, furthermore, once analyzed not only the 1968 Soviet reconnaissance flights, but also the U.S. 1958 flights across Tirol, the transit of an Egyptian military transport plane across Austria in 1968, and the 1973 transit of a Turkish military transport across Austria that the Bundesheer even forced to land. Only in the case of the Egyptian transport did Zemanek see a violation of Austrian neutrality in light of Egypt's state of war with Israel. All other incidents considered by Zemanek occurred during a state of peace and were therefore merely violations of Austrian sovereignty.Footnote ¹⁸⁶

Traditional understandings of neutrality as expressed in the Official Swiss Conception of Neutrality promulgated on 26 November 1954, though, included the obligation of neutral countries “to conduct a policy of neutrality” as part of a neutral's efforts “to do everything so that the neutral is not drawn into war and to abstain from anything which might draw the neutral into war.”Footnote ¹⁸⁷ Austrian legal scholar Hanspeter Neuhold explained that “permanent neutrality entails the obligation to practice a policy of neutrality. The objective of this policy is to strengthen this status in the eyes of the other states beyond compliance with the legal obligations.” Echoing the Official Swiss Conception of Neutrality's own language, Neuhold recognized that the formulation of this policy is “left to the discretion of each government concerned,” but admonished that “ultimately the success of this policy depends on the response of the rest of international society to it.”Footnote ¹⁸⁸ At the very least, the October 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary and the July 1958 U.S. air transports through Austria called into question whether Austria would uphold a neutrality policy in wartime that could retain the confidence of foreign combatants.

Taken together, these events demonstrated that the neutrality of a sovereign state was not quite the settled state of affairs imagined by many Austrians. History had validated the 1955 warning of Scheu to his countrymen against believing “that one can retire from world politics with a ‘declaration of neutrality,’ that one can stick his head in the sand and hope that world events will allow themselves to be diverted solely thereby.”Footnote ¹⁸⁹ Neutral states like Austria still had to guard warily against foes while trying to keep friends at a respectful distance, actual allies who in turn could react adversely to Austrian actions deemed not sufficiently friendly. Moreover, the Soviet suppression of Hungary in 1956 indicated the loneliness of a neutral country uncertain of outside help in a crisis situation. Austria would have ample opportunity to relearn these lessons in the coming decades of the Cold War.