The politics of protection

At the turn of 1945, despite the considerable violence perpetrated by both the German and Hungarian states against tens of thousands of Jewish forced labourers building border defences for Germany, and the penury brought about by the end of the conflict, populations on both sides of border were deeply fearful of what the end of the war might bring. In north-western Hungary this fear provoked the flight of much of the local population – especially in those villages with substantial ethnic German populations – in the face of the advance of the Red Army. In the Mosonmagyaróvár district – next to the border with the collapsing German Reich – around 40 per cent of the population had gone before the new occupiers arrived.Footnote ⁹ Across the border the pattern of flight was similar. In Nickelsdorf, 70 per cent of the total population left.Footnote ¹⁰ Just as in Hungary, the regime demanded that the population flee with them. In Gols, Nazi officials threatened to shoot those who insisted on staying, asking them ‘if they wished to be communists’. The village's party leadership attempted to remove most of the cattle, taking them from their owners and letting them free. The behaviour of Nazi activists – who had internalised their leaders’ demands that they ‘fight until the end’ – generated considerable fear.Footnote ¹¹

Those who remained faced the Red Army. In western Hungary attitudes to the Soviet troops were defined by the wave of lawlessness that accompanied their arrival. In April 1945, in the Mosonmagyaróvár district,

In Csorna, Red Army troops stationed in the small town stripped the population of its property: ‘in general they took clothes and food, in many houses they removed the furniture and in others emptied the yards. A few days after the occupation they began to search for the warehouses, and from those they took all the corn and food stored.’Footnote ¹³ The extent of rape in the city of Sopron provoked panic among midwives and doctors, who at the end of April 1945 petitioned the county authorities to relax restrictions immediately on the performance of abortions.Footnote ¹⁴

The actions of Soviet troops produced widespread fear. When local schools reopened in Győr in May 1945, inaccurate rumours spread that the local Soviet command had sent ‘two trucks’ to a local school in order ‘to take away the pupils’. Within a short space of time, ‘the greater mass of pupils and parents shouted out that others “should flee to their homes, because the Russians are taking away the children”’, a situation that resulted in panic.Footnote ¹⁵ The behaviour of Soviet troops created serious problems for Hungary's new civil authorities who represented the provisional government, a popular front coalition that had been constituted under Soviet auspices, in which the MKP was the first among equals. Many in conservative regions, such as the counties of Győr-Moson and Sopron that were adjacent to the border of the newly restored Austria, expected the new authorities to intercede to protect their communities from the occupying forces, and believed, because of their political stance, that they were able to do so effectively. In late April a lorry carrying an armed Soviet officer and eight soldiers turned up in the village of Ménfőcsanak. After searching the village they rounded up eleven pigs from the residents at gunpoint, driving off with them and refusing to pay the owners. The irregular village police force, which was unarmed, was powerless to defend the villagers, leaving village authorities to demand that the county government intervene to secure the return of the ‘stolen’ pigs.Footnote ¹⁶ In Hegyeshalom, when Soviet troops confiscated the only cow owned by one agricultural labourer, village authorities demanded that the county authorities intercede to secure the return of all locally owned cattle, given that many of their owners had ‘large families and young children to feed’.Footnote ¹⁷ This perception was encouraged by the pro-Soviet rhetoric of communist leaders, for they argued that they represented a promise of ‘liberation’ from ‘from the German/Arrow CrossFootnote ¹⁸ fascists’ that had been brought by the Red Army.Footnote ¹⁹ Consequently, the experience of Soviet occupation undermined support seriously for the post-war state in western Hungary.

On the other side of the border, the population did not perceive the emergent Austrian state in the Soviet zone of occupation to have any privileged relationship with the Red Army. The wave of widespread violence, theft, rape and murder committed by Soviet troops endured by western Hungarian communities was repeated across Burgenland. It did not, however, have the same political consequences.Footnote ²⁰ The trauma of rape played a fundamental role in generating fear and insecurity.Footnote ²¹ Soviet troops were not the only ‘outsiders’ who fuelled the disorder during spring and summer 1945. The arrival of the Red Army led to the freeing of substantial numbers of prisoners of war, who worked as forced labourers on the land during the war years.Footnote ²² When freed they joined the wave of terror against the local population – in one incident in July 1945, 4,000 Greek former prisoners of war, who had been freed from a camp in Wiener Neustadt, descended on the village of Pöttsching and forced their way into the homes and gardens of the population, stealing what they could. When local police irregulars intervened, a hail of stones confronted them, and they beat a hasty retreat.Footnote ²³ Around the town of Mattersburg, local authorities believed that Soviet troops and bands of freed Ukrainian prisoners of war worked in concert to pillage the area's vineyards.Footnote ²⁴ The crime wave and food shortages, focused local residents on the needs of local communities. Residents in Drassburg demanded greater protection against ‘outsiders’ and ‘foreigners’, who threatened ‘the property and security of residents’ in August 1945.Footnote ²⁵

The perception of the state as a credible protector of the security of local communities was shaped not only by their perceived relationship with the Red Army, but by their concrete policies towards policing and crime. As in Hungary, the authorities at both provincial and federal level in Austria asked villages to organise their own, unarmed, irregular, volunteer police forces to keep the peace.Footnote ²⁶ In Hungary the popular front government, suspicious of an organisation that had enthusiastically supported the wartime and then the Arrow Cross regimes, and had played a central role in the organisation of the deportation of Jews in 1944, disbanded the gendarmerie outright.Footnote ²⁷ In Austria, while the KPÖ was suspicious of the gendarmerie, it was marginalised within the federal government in Vienna, dominated by the ÖVP and SPÖ, which strongly supported the institution.Footnote ²⁸ While the gendarmerie survived, communist suspicion of it meant that in the Soviet zone its powers and its right to carry arms were curbed severely by the occupation authorities.Footnote ²⁹ Tension between local gendarmerie commanders and communists could explode into protest, especially in the small number of communities where the KPÖ enjoyed significant support.Footnote ³⁰ Given the demands of communities for protection in the climate of crime and insecurity, majorities supported strengthening the police and the routine arming of gendarmes as part of a drive to bolster institutions capable of protecting local communities. This was especially the case since police irregulars often had few means, and little power, to protect the population.Footnote ³¹ This popular pressure was in turn used by provincial and federal authorities to secure Soviet consent for the routine arming of the gendarmerie.Footnote ³²

If the politics of law and order in eastern Austria demonstrated the ways in which legitimate state authority was reconstructed around a desire for the protection of local communities, then in western Hungary they worked in an entirely different direction. While Hungary's population demanded the protection of their communities from crime, black-marketeering and the occupation authorities, civil government proved unable to offer this to them. The ‘new’ police force established in spring 1945 barely existed outside the towns for most of the year. Furthermore, the Mosonmagyaróvár police admitted that they were unable to stem the tide of theft, rape and cross-border smuggling, given gross understaffing and a dire material situation in which the police had to work without food or pay.Footnote ³³ Furthermore, they were seen as a party police force, in the hands of the occupying authorities and the MKP. This was illustrated dramatically by an incident in the village of Alszopor. On the afternoon of 24 June 1945, a group of Red Army troops arrived in the village, stealing a horse from one resident. The villagers resolved to take the stolen horse back by force, and in the melee that ensued one of the troops was killed. The same evening the Red Army returned, backed by the Sopron police, who arrested twelve locals, including the village judge. While the police took away those arrested, the Soviet troops raided houses in search of weapons and stole a number of ‘valuable items’. Incidents like this confirmed for many that the ‘new’ police, rather than offering them protection, were instead interested in defending only those who threatened them.Footnote ³⁴

These incidents were symptomatic of the fact that the Hungarian state and the left-wing parties that played a central role in state-building during 1945 conceived the purpose of the police and other security agencies as being primarily to defend the state-building process against sections of society they believed opposed it. Their priority was not to protect local communities from either the occupying forces or the post-war crime wave fed by hyperinflation and generalised penury. In September 1945 a border police station was established at Hegyeshalom as large numbers of refugees from Germany returned home, for the state realised that among them there could be ‘a large number of leading fascists, who are attempting to return to Hungary in secret’.Footnote ³⁵ Rather than focus on smuggling and organised violent crime, which generated real misery in borderland communities, the border police concentrated on screening those returnees they suspected of ‘political unreliability’, who were sent to a camp where their cases were investigated.Footnote ³⁶ Furthermore, the police and their political commanders were most interested in the implementation of anti-fascist retributive legislation,Footnote ³⁷ which served to strengthen the impression of many that they were more interested in protecting the regime in Budapest than in safeguarding the security of the population. The police in Mosonmagyaróvár were prepared to write off as ‘hopeless’ fighting crime committed by Soviet troops or organised criminal gangs, while it measured its ‘success’ by the number of ‘fascists’ it interned – among whose number it included not merely members of the Arrow Cross, nor those who had collaborated with the German occupiers after March 1944, but many who had served the neo-conservative inter-war and wartime regime prior to that date.Footnote ³⁸

This happened against a backdrop of deep-seated political antagonism between the state and the population. Győr-Moson and Sopron counties were characterised by a hegemonic Catholic and conservative political culture that had allowed the dominant political actors of the conservative, inter-war regime to win considerable support. Prior to the outbreak of war, anti-communism provided an especially potent part of the construction of the regime's local appeal, given the memory of the Soviet Republic in 1919, and the way in which it was successfully blamed for Hungary's territorial losses after the First World War. Even during the 1930s this had turned to anti-Soviet sentiment; the local pro-government press in Sopron, for example, had argued that the state that had arisen in Russia after the Revolution of 1917 was a ‘regime of command that had created a new form of capitalism – state capitalism – in which all the country's energy was drained into maintaining its rule’, and which was marked by ‘the most terrible oppression and misery of the Russian people’.Footnote ³⁹ Its railing against communism in Hungary, especially against the tyranny of the ‘kolhoz’ over the peasantry, and the immorality of godless communism, however, did not have merely an abstract meaning for many, given the region's experience of the Soviet Republic and the subsequent trauma of border disputes with Austria in the Sopron region. Throughout the 1930s local elites linked anti-communist propaganda to local memories of 1919.Footnote ⁴⁰

Anti-communism had been a potent theme of wartime propagandaFootnote ⁴¹ and shaped attitudes that were reinforced by the behaviour of the Red Army and the ‘new’ Hungarian state in local communities. While the outcome of the war discredited the authoritarian conservatism of the inter-war years, many of the cultural values it rested on allowed a democratic conservatism – represented largely by the Independent Smallholders’ Party (Független Kisgazdapárt, FKgP) – to become dominant in western border regions. This was despite the fact that while opposing the left and the MKP's vision of a socially radical post-war state, it was simultaneously resolutely anti-fascist and a partner in the popular front coalition government in Budapest.Footnote ⁴² In Csorna, the party's activists proclaimed their goal as creating an ‘independent country, a clean, Christian democracy’.Footnote ⁴³ Such rhetoric allowed them to claim support as the party that could oppose the Soviet occupation successfully. In Győr-Moson, in advance of the 1945 elections, many believed that if the country ‘votes for the Smallholders’ Party then the Soviets will be forced to leave the country, if they vote for the communists, they'll stay forever’.Footnote ⁴⁴ As elections approached, the FKgP, backed by public opinion in the borderland, attacked the police focus on anti-fascist retribution. They concentrated their fire on the Sopron internment camp, where many former gendarmes, because of their role in the deportations of local Jews in 1944, and other supporters of the inter-war regime locally, for reasons that were less clear, had been interned as ‘fascists’. Sopron residents did not believe that the detention of many of the camps’ inmates was legitimate. The local police were compared both to officials of the 1919 Soviet Republic and the Gestapo. While persistent antisemitism fed these protests, so too did a sense that the police stood against the majority of the people and spent too much time interfering in politics and little on fighting crime.Footnote ⁴⁵

In November 1945 the FKgP won a landslide victory over the MKP and its allies.Footnote ⁴⁶ Although the occupying authorities demanded that a popular front coalition of all anti-fascist parties continue, the elections intensified political polarisation, as many working-class voters demanded greater assertiveness from the left. The MKP leadership responded, attacking the FKgP as enemies of democracy. Within days of the election the MKP warned that ‘it seems that the reaction has drawn the conclusion from the election results that the coming months will see the elimination of democracy’. It accused the FKgP of protecting ‘provocateurs’ who ‘victimised’ communists.Footnote ⁴⁷ While the MKP and the police it controlled enforced a tough line against those Smallholders it accused of supporting ‘reaction’, it intensified class-based rhetoric to mobilise industrial workers, and other supportive groups, who had become disillusioned as a consequence of the hyper-inflation that had gripped the country since summer 1945. At Brennbergbánya it accused the mine management of using transportation to fetch for themselves ‘fatted geese and ducks’, but not to bring ‘oil and margarine’ for miners.Footnote ⁴⁸ The focus of the MKP's anti-fascism had shifted – as internment camps were run down the MKP welcomed working-class former members of the Arrow Cross, who had held no leadership roles into its ranks, for they were ‘workers’ who had been ‘cheated into joining fascist organisations’.Footnote ⁴⁹ This represented no let-up in retribution, however, against those who had served Hungary's pre-1945 regime, but rather its re-focusing on apparent ‘reactionaries’ who staffed public administration and private business, and whom it accused the FKgP of protecting.Footnote ⁵⁰

While the MKP sought to put political retribution in Hungary to work in its attempts to mobilise its base of support and to smash the FKgP following its electoral victory in late 1945, on the Austrian side of the border it was used to bolster the authority of the emergent, protective state. While Hungary's practice of anti-fascist retribution gave licence to its police forces to attack all those they perceived to be enemies of the ‘new’ state, and allowed open wounds from the war years to fester, the implementation of Austria's de-Nazification laws was not to the letter and, being more limited, offered the potential of closure to conflict. While the 1945 De-Nazification Law mandated the registration of all former Nazis, it extended an implicit bargain in that it allowed them to petition for ‘clemency’ if they had never ‘misused’ their membership of the party or one of its front organisations.Footnote ⁵¹ Some of the petitions the authorities received revealed popular understandings of this bargain – that the state would protect from the consequences of prior political affiliations those who professed loyalty to it. A former party member in the border town of Mörbisch am See framed his claim for clemency in 1945 on the grounds that he had been deceived by National Socialist promises to ‘turn around the situation in agriculture’. He had ‘always regarded himself as an Austrian’ and promised that ‘in future he would act positively towards the state’.Footnote ⁵²

Processes of separation

While the local practice of de-Nazification in Burgenland bolstered the inclusive features of post-war Austrianness, it was deeply exclusive in other respects, as a result of the state's desire to define the new Austria against the Germany of which it had been part for the seven years prior to 1945. When in 1946 officials in the borderland were asked to document ‘National Socialist’ oppression locally, in order to provide material for the ‘Red-White-Red’ book that was to record Austrian ‘victimhood’ at the hands of the Nazis, many returns concentrated on the dismissal of local officials and their replacement by those brought in from Germany proper.Footnote ⁵³ The state's definition of itself against Germany was more than simply a matter of rhetoric. In spring 1945 the provisional government in Vienna instructed districts to separate their residents into ‘Austrians’ and those it termed ‘Germans who came from the Reich’ (Reichsdeutsche), as a prelude to their removal from Austrian soil.Footnote ⁵⁴ In 1946 local authorities faced a steady stream of appeals from Austrian women married to German citizens, who discovered that they were denied Austrian citizenship as a result of their marital status, and faced deportation to Germany.Footnote ⁵⁵

Post-war constructions of ‘Austrianness’ did not merely seek to demarcate Austria and Germany, but celebrated provincial identities.Footnote ⁵⁶ In the case of the borderland, this meant that the reconstruction of Austrianness was tied to the rebuilding of Burgenland identity. Burgenland had been carved out of Hungary at the end of the First World War, as a consequence of the demands of its German minority that it be ruled by Vienna rather than Budapest. Owing its origin in part to a political project of ethnic Germans within the pre-war Kingdom of Hungary, dominant constructions of its provincial identity during the inter-war years had argued for its fundamental kinship to those western Hungarian counties populated by German speakers.Footnote ⁵⁷ Pan-German nationalists dreamed of the territorial extension of the province. While the province was divided after Austria's incorporation into Germany between the Gaue Footnote ⁵⁸ of Niederdonau and Styria, Burgenland's own Nazis had argued against Berlin that their province should become a Gau in its own right within the expanded Reich, in view of its distinctive ‘mission’ as a ‘borderland’ (Grenzland) that could serve as bridge between Germany, and German speakers in Hungary.Footnote ⁵⁹ Berlin's only concession to pro-Burgenland sentiment was to establish a National Groups Office (Volkstumstelle) in the former Burgenland capital, Eisenstadt, that supervised the region's ethnic minorities and maintained close contact with pro-Berlin, ethnic German activists in the neighbouring Hungarian city of Sopron.Footnote ⁶⁰

These notions of Burgenland identity were revived in an unfavourable post-war context at the precise moment that the Hungarian state engaged in its campaigns of expulsion against the German minority. The waves of expulsion between 1945 and 1946 generally, but especially deportation in 1946, played a fundamental role in the construction of Burgenlander and, by extension, Austrian identities in the region and shaped perceptions of the Hungarian neighbour that strengthened the authority and legitimacy of the Austrian state as a protector. In border villages, where ties of kin often spread into villages on the Hungarian side, expulsion provoked particular outrage. When ethnic Germans returned home in late 1945 to north-western Hungarian villages such as Magyarkimle to find that their homes and land had been redistributed to settlers, they launched an armed uprising with the goal of reclaiming their property, using flight over the border and networks of solidarity with kin on the Austrian side to sustain their fight. While they were beaten back as the Hungarian state flooded the border region with armed police, both the central government and its local representatives remained worried at their lack of control over the border.Footnote ⁶¹

Public opinion, the political parties, opinion formers and even officials in the Burgenland government responded to Hungarian violence against borderland Germans by claiming them as ‘Austrians’, and arguing – in an adaptation of pan-German arguments from the inter-war years to post-war circumstances – that the lands they inhabited were, in fact, eastern Burgenland. These arguments sought to differentiate Hungary's German-speakers from Germans proper, and underline their kinship to ‘Austrians’ living on the Burgenland side of the border. ‘Hungary's German speakers refer to themselves as Donauschwaben and Heidebauern, and are so known by the Hungarians; they know nothing of Germany’, according to one opponent of expulsion used by officials in the Burgenland government to make their case against Hungary. These officials in the Burgenland government lobbied Vienna to intervene with the occupying powers, especially the Soviet Army, against expulsion, on the grounds that ethnic Germans ‘settled right on the border, can be seen as good Austrians’.Footnote ⁶² Others argued for a solution that allowed for the Moson and Sopron districts closest to the border to be removed from Hungary and incorporated into Burgenland.Footnote ⁶³

When the Hungarian government drew up regulations to intern German citizens on its territory in spring 1945 it had been aware that some would claim exemption on the grounds of their ‘Austrianness’. While it argued that Austrian citizens could not be regarded automatically as ‘German citizens’, the authorities had to ‘pay attention to’ Austria's ‘true relationship to the German Reich, which had existed over several years’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Neither the Hungarian state, nor the left-wing parties who most enthusiastically supported expulsion were prepared to make any concession to claims that borderland German speakers should be exempted on grounds of their ‘Austrianness’. Aware of calls in the Burgenland press for a redrawing of the border, the Hungarian police rounded up five ethnic Germans for spreading pro-Austrian propaganda in Sopron during early 1946. Prosecutors accused them, in a political trial designed to serve as a warning to authorities across the border, of conspiring with leading Burgenland politicians to launch an armed uprising in Hungary to secure territorial changes.Footnote ⁶⁵ Vienna, mindful of the likely Soviet reaction, were it to show any willingness to lobby openly for territorial change or a halt to deportation, remained silent, and urged restraint on Burgenland's government.Footnote ⁶⁶ By early 1946 the Hungarian state prepared for the organised deportation of most of those it identified as Hungary's ethnic Germans to Germany. The MKP press in western Hungary celebrated what it believed would bring to an end tension generated by the more generalised expulsion efforts it had organised from spring 1945: ‘The time is coming fast, when we will be able to start deporting the Hungarian Swabians.’Footnote ⁶⁷

The expulsion drives, which culminated in the deportations during spring 1946, confronted several problems. The first was the fluid and problematic nature of ethnic identities in the borderlands. The published results of the 1941 census recorded 719,762 people, or 4.9 per cent of Hungary's population, identifying themselves as German-speakers, although it bears mention that these figures were themselves contested strongly by political representatives of the German minority itself.Footnote ⁶⁸ In many western border districts the proportions were higher. In the Mosonmagyaróvár district, 37.2 per cent of the population declared themselves German-speakers and in the Sopron district 39.3 per cent, while 12.7 and 29.9 per cent respectively identified themselves as such in the cities of Mosonmagyaróvár and Sopron.Footnote ⁶⁹ Many ethnic Germans had a ‘dual identity’ that was both Magyar and German, for German often functioned as a local language rarely used beyond the boundaries of home villages, while ties of kin and friendship often transcended the ambiguous ethnic divide.Footnote ⁷⁰ Furthermore, ethnic German identity did not imply political sympathy for Germany's political goals during the war; Volksbund organisations only ever operated in twenty-five villages in Győr-Moson and Sopron counties, and never mobilised anything like all ethnic German residents in these villages.Footnote ⁷¹

This contributed to bureaucratic confusion and arbitrariness as to who was to be marked out for either expulsion or, later, deportation. The process of selection was mired in confusion over goals, for the Hungarian state was never consistent in applying the principle of collective guilt to all ethnic Germans, and argued that those who could demonstrate ‘loyalty’ to Hungary should be exempt.Footnote ⁷² When asked to draw up lists for eventual expulsion in 1945 they faced an absolute lack of documentary evidence; in Ágfalva the notary commented that his list rested on no independent evidence and contained the names of some he believed to be patriotic Hungarians.Footnote ⁷³ These local lists were scrapped when organised deportation began in spring 1946, as the compilation of deportation lists was placed in the hands of national civil servants and the authorities went to considerable lengths to exclude local actors from the process. This was combined with heavy-handed implementation. Three hundred policemen were imported into Sopron from outside the region in order to ensure that order was kept during the process.Footnote ⁷⁴ As the lists were prepared over the Easter weekend the city was sealed from the outside world, the serving of alcohol was banned in local restaurants, and a night-time curfew enforced.Footnote ⁷⁵ The police hunted down those on the list who hid; during one night-time raid in early May 1946 almost 80 eighty per cent of the city's houses were searched.Footnote ⁷⁶

The 1946 deportations allowed the impression of a despotic state to crystallise in western Hungarian communities, as the demonstration of arbitrary state power against a group that it argued was its enemy created real fear that transcended the ethnic divide. The sight of deportees being rounded up and placed on cattle trucks awakened fears that reached back to popular memories of the deportation of local Jews in 1944. In Mosonmagyaróvár, the local organ of the left-wing Social Democratic Party, normally supportive of the MKP, reflected commonly held opinion when it equated the removal of Germans with the events of two years earlier: ‘ExpulsionFootnote ⁷⁷ . . . two years ago it was called deportation.’Footnote ⁷⁸ Reactions to deportation were therefore a product of the way in which it demonstrated the power and will of the state to act against the civilian population. This apparent despotism weakened the state's legitimacy, and its institutions found that the willingness of the population to co-operate with them was weakened as a consequence. The MKP mayor of Mosonmagyaróvár complained in April 1946 of the deportations’ corrosive effect in his city on the political authority of the organs of the new state.Footnote ⁷⁹

Faced with the threat of removal through deportation from Moson or Sopron to Freilassing in southern Bavaria in 1946, many fled over the border, with the intention of returning at a later date.Footnote ⁸⁰ Some took their property with them to prevent its confiscation.Footnote ⁸¹ Ethnic German refugees from Hungary met with sympathy from the population on the Austrian side of the border. Furthermore, the ‘settlers’ who had taken their homes and property were unpopular, and were blamed for cross-border crime in border villages such as Nickelsdorf and Zurndorf.Footnote ⁸² Minor officials showed similar sympathy for the plight of refugees, granting border passes, in contravention of the regulations, so that they could return to Hungary to visit relatives, to explosions of fury from the Hungarian authorities.Footnote ⁸³ This sympathy and the belief that expelled populations from the western border regions were of ‘Austrian character’ provoked a loosening of both work permit and citizenship regulations that made it easier for them to claim Austrian citizenship.Footnote ⁸⁴

The 1946 deportations created a dynamic of mutual suspicion on both sides of the border which drove a process of separation. While they led many in Austria to see the state over the border as threatening, and generated considerable local sympathy for Hungarian refugees, in Hungary these reactions helped drive a climate of suspicion. Both the local and national state saw the relatively open border as an active threat to the country's security. This was reinforced by apparent attempts by deportees to return home. In Fertőrákos, in one of several such incidents along the border, police were called in March 1947 after five former residents returned from Austria in order to resettle and take back the property that had been confiscated from them and redistributed to new settlers.Footnote ⁸⁵ The border played a central role in the Hungarian left's politics of economic security. During 1947 the MKP smashed the FKgP through the use of the police in order to cement its control over the popular front coalition and prepare the ground for the construction of dictatorship. A vital accompaniment of this campaign was the mobilisation of industrial workers and the poor, by blaming their poor material situation, persistent high prices and the food shortages on ‘speculators’ and the ‘reaction’.Footnote ⁸⁶ Ethnic Germans who had escaped deportation were often blamed for ‘smuggling’ and ‘speculation’, accusations that were used to justify the further confiscation of property and expulsion in 1948.Footnote ⁸⁷

The deterioration of cross-border relations and the politicisation of smuggling continued with the construction of overt dictatorship in Hungary during 1948 and 1949. With opponents of the emergent dictatorship fleeing in large numbers and Hungary gripped by cold war paranoia, ethnic Germans returning to Hungary and Austrian smugglers were labelled as ‘spies’ and ‘enemies’ against which Hungary's western border needed to be secured. According to one piece of propaganda in March 1949, ‘the cells in the Mosonmagyaróvár police station were full yesterday of illegal border crossers. Horse and livestock traders, ethnic Germans [svábok] seeking to return, German and Austrian citizens after food, and escaping fascists waited out the afternoon.’Footnote ⁸⁸ Budapest implemented a scheme that involved the physical closure of the border, the creation of barbed-wire fences separating the two countries, the construction of a network of watchtowers and the clearing of all land of vegetation within 500 metres of the border.Footnote ⁸⁹ When it demanded that Austria create a similar zone on its side of the border and Vienna refused, Hungary retaliated by closing the border to all Austrian farmers with properties on their side, to fury in Burgenland border villages.Footnote ⁹⁰

Two states in a divided borderland

On the morning of 9 April 1950 in Schattendorf twelve residents left Sunday mass and walked through the cemetery that lay adjacent to the barbed-wire fence that marked the border with Hungary. As they did so they were fired on by the Hungarian border guard. One shot went right over their heads, hitting a bush that lay just behind them. Panic ensued as the men left the cemetery as quickly as they could, as more shots were fired by the Hungarians.Footnote ⁹¹ Between the closure of the border in 1949 and the temporary thaw along it in summer 1956, the Austrian authorities recorded a string of incidents, which included attempts by Hungarian border guards to kidnap Austrian citizens, one shooting of an Austrian gendarme, and numerous instances of people being fired on; a string of injuries due to the accidental explosion of mines by people walking close to the border, fires, and even an instance of Hungarian border guards protecting agricultural workers trespassing on Austrian territory to steal the crops of local farmers.Footnote ⁹² The Austrian authorities lodged diplomatic protests when confronted with each incident; the Hungarians rejected their protests, arguing that the fault lay with the Austrian side, and that they had a duty to defend their borders.Footnote ⁹³

Despite the unpleasant and abnormal everyday reality of living next to a contested border, it provided one aspect of the background that enabled the emergent Austrian state to construct its legitimate authority as a protector of local residents. This had begun in 1945, when it protected borderland residents from disorder generated by the Soviet occupation authorities. In 1950, although the end of the occupation lay five years in the future, the state had restored law and order, while the Red Army, although still present, was by no means as oppressive a presence as it had been during the late 1940s.Footnote ⁹⁴ With the expulsion of ethnic Germans from Hungary and the subsequent rise in tension along the border, an anti-communist consensus, shaped by events in Hungary, bolstered the legitimacy of the Austrian state in northern Burgenland. Fraudulent elections and the repression directed against the Catholic Church in Hungary offended public opinion,Footnote ⁹⁵ as did the material hardship inflicted on Austrian property owners by their inability to cross the border to work their land after 1949.Footnote ⁹⁶ The way in which this consensus strengthened the state was demonstrated during a crisis in the wake of the Fourth Wage and Price Agreement during September and October 1950, the latest of a round of agreements that cemented Austria's post-war ‘social partnership’ between capital and labour, through which the national trade union leadership had agreed to a process of managed real-wage reductions as part of a generalised economic stabilisation package. The resulting rebellion in factories was backed by the KPÖ, enabling the federal government, union establishment and the SPÖ to break the strike movement by denouncing it as a Communist plot.Footnote ⁹⁷ Despite the unpopularity of government economic policies caused by the real material hardship for those living on fixed incomes in Burgenland as a consequence of almost constant pressure on real wages, the anti-communist consensus ensured that there was little industrial protest, even in many industrial communities in the region.Footnote ⁹⁸

On the other side of the border, despite its deployment of considerable violence the Hungarian state was weakened by its failure to generate real legitimacy for itself. While it used repression to secure its rule against the majority of the population that opposed it, which included religious believers and much of the rural population – which it attempted to force into agricultural co-operatives – it had built some conditional legitimacy through mobilising the industrial working class and rural poor by promising material improvement. By 1950, as forced industrialisation, the regime's attempts to feed the urban centres and collectivisation led to severe cuts in living standards, even this conditional legitimacy was gone.Footnote ⁹⁹ In the western borderlands its position was far weaker. When it nationalised church schools in 1948, one of the few places in the country where it provoked open protest was in Sopron, where local priests, teachers and pupils marched against the measure. To assert its authority the local regime was forced to bus in 15,000 activists from the rest of the country to stage a counter-protest against the machinations of the ‘clerical reaction’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The fury generated in villages by collectivisation, high taxation and the government's attacks on organised religion meant that in many borderland villages, while a semblance of order was maintained through a heavy police presence, the local regime lacked any positive authority at all.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Even in Sopron's factories local party activists were forced to concede that the regime had no real support among the working class, for even most of the Stakhanovites – its exceptional workers – were ethnic Germans, alienated from the regime by its policies of ethnic exclusion during the period of its construction.Footnote ¹⁰²

Nationally the Hungarian state compensated for its lack of legitimacy by a reliance on repression, which made the regime dangerously unstable and prepared the ground for its rapid collapse during the 1956 Revolution.Footnote ¹⁰³ It discriminated against the borderlands, whose urban centres, especially Sopron, were starved of new investment and lost industrial establishments and cultural institutions. It also restricted the freedom of border region residents severely, creating a border zone in order to cut residents off from the rest of the country, and deported those it regarded as ‘class enemies’ to other parts of Hungary.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ This combination of retribution and control did not strengthen the regime, but generated complaints. When the regime crumbled during 1956 as a result of splits within the party and chronic lack of legitimacy and support among the population, these complaints shaped local political demands. In summer 1956 residents demanded the lifting of restrictions of travel between the border zone and the rest of Hungary and the legalisation of small-scale cross-border traffic with Austria.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ While such hopes were dashed after the suppression of the 1956 Revolution, border region residents accommodated themselves reluctantly to the regime under which they were forced to live. With the post-1956 regime more aware that its survival depended on tacit compromise with those it ruled than its immediate predecessor had been, the authorities in the border region constantly pressured Budapest to make the lives of its residents more tolerable.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

The terms of the peace established after 1945 in the borderlands were unequal, in that those who lived in Austria found the peace they were offered easier to accept than those on the Hungarian side of the border. The state established in Hungary was weaker, even though, seemingly paradoxically, it was more repressive. This was because of its relative failure in establishing legitimate state authority, which rendered the regime in Budapest vulnerable to outright collapse in 1956, and left its leaders profoundly insecure between 1957 and 1989.

If the events of the mid-1950s in Hungary confirmed that for as long as the post-war settlement held its socialist regime could not be replaced, they also underlined the fragility of that regime. In Austria the mid-1950s underlined the strength of legitimate authority possessed by the state that had been built since 1945. A year before the outbreak of the 1956 Revolution, Austria's leaders had signed a State Treaty with the allies that restored their sovereignty on condition of neutrality. The treaty allowed for the withdrawal of the Red Army from Burgenland. During the Hungarian Revolution and its suppression neutrality was tested as a consequence of the upheaval on its eastern border and the temporary housing in the country of tens of thousands of refugees.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The way in which this revealed the strength of the formula of the protective state, through which the new Austrian state constructed its legitimacy after 1945, was indicated by the changing attitude to the army, established by the State Treaty a year previously. At the time of its establishment many had argued against its creation, on the grounds that in the war years ‘enough fathers and sons of this land died for nothing’,Footnote ¹⁰⁸ and that money to be spent on the new military ‘should be better put to more productive uses’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ By early 1957 the army could make its case credibly to the Burgenland population by arguing that ‘the events in Hungary threatened military action on our eastern border. Does anyone now doubt that we need an army to defend our homeland?’Footnote ¹¹⁰