In the aftermath ofWorldWar II, Austria once again achieved notoriety as a “prison of peoples.” In 1951, the Ost-West Kurier, a newspaper in Essen, decried the degrading mistreatment of Austria's so-called “prisoners of the postwar.” Men, women, and children were wasting away in former concentration camps and were denied citizenship rights, the right to work or to travel freely, and basic social protections, the newspaper reported. These “prisoners” were not, however, former Jewish concentration camp inmates, prisoners of war (POWs), or displaced persons (DPs). They were German expellees from Eastern Europe—the very Germans on whose behalf the Nazi war for Lebensraum had allegedly been fought. “In the entire Western world, there is today no group of human beings who has been sentenced to live with so few rights as the so-called Volksdeutsche in Austria,” the newspaper's editors proclaimed:

By contrast, occupied Germany appeared to be a liberal haven for expellees. Many Volksdeutsche, despairing of their plight in Austria, illegally crossed the Austrian-German border to seek refuge in Bavaria. German expellees who sought a safe haven in Austria after World War II had actually become refugees from Austria by 1951.

In 1945, Austria was a reluctant host to approximately 1,432,000 refugees, including both DPs and Volksdeutsche expellees.Footnote ² That number quickly diminished through rapid repatriation in the first year after the war's end. By 1947, only 520,591 refugees remained on Austrian soil. Four years after the Nazi defeat, the expellee population in postwar Austria numbered 310,000, approximately 5 percent of the total Austrian population. The majority of the Volksdeutsche in Austria hailed from adjacent regions. In June 1952, the expellee population in Austria consisted of approximately 130,000 expellees from Czechoslovakia, a little more than 140,000 so-called “Donauschwaben,” German-speakers who had settled along the Danube in what was now Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Romania, and smaller groups of Transylvanian Saxons (18,000), Carpathian Germans (11,000), Bukovina Germans (10,000), Slovenian Germans (10,000), and Volksdeutsche from Poland (9,485), Bosnia (3,000), and the Soviet Union (1,457).Footnote ³

These numbers paled in comparison to the twelve million expellees forced to make a new home in postwar Germany (some 16 percent of the population in Germany's western zones of Occupation).Footnote ⁴ But the lesser told story of the reception of German expellees in postwar Austria sits at the juncture of several critical debates about the nature of Austrian and German nationalism, the relationship of Austrians and Volksdeutsche to the Nazi and Austro-Hungarian past, and emerging regimes of human rights, migration, and citizenship in postwar Europe.

In particular, this story of refugees in postwar Austria offers an occasion to analyze the postwar reception of German expellees and non-German-speaking DPs after World War II in a single frame. Surprisingly, these two stories are typically told in isolation. In spite of a growing literature on postwar refugees in Europe, historians of migration tend to focus on a single national group of migrants or refugees (Jews, Poles, or German expellees, for example).Footnote ⁵ Because German expellees were deliberately excluded from the protection and care of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and the International Refugee Organization (IRO) after World War II, they depended primarily on the German or Austrian governments, rather than on international humanitarian organizations, for assistance. And yet perceptions of and policies toward German expellees and non-German DPs in postwar Austria developed in close relationship to one another. Volksdeutsche expellees in Austria strategically positioned themselves at the top of an imagined hierarchy of victimization and entitlement after World War II. They also defined themselves in opposition to non-German DPs as culturally and economically superior workers and potential citizens of the Austrian Second Republic.

In the debate over refugees in postwar Austria, expellees and Austrian government officials hence translated preexisting nationalist and racial hierarchies into a new vocabulary of cultural assimilability and economic productivity that continues to shape migration and citizenship policies in Europe today. The racialized conception of Austrian identity that underpinned the hierarchical relationship between Volksdeutsche expellees, East European DPs, and Jews in postwar Austria was not evidence of the lingering influence of Nazi racial ideologies and practices, however. These hierarchies can also be traced back to transnational regional communities, practices of national classification, and visions of pan-German solidarity that had already crystallized in the late Habsburg Empire and in the Austrian First Republic.Footnote ⁶

It has become a platitude that nations are “contested” and “fluid” entities; but between 1945 and the ratification of the Austrian State Treaty in 1955, the Austrian nation was a particularly rudimentary work-in-progress. In the Moscow Declaration of October 1943, the Allies famously anointed Austria the “first free country to fall victim to a Hitlerite aggression.” The Declaration also stated, however, that Austria “has a responsibility she cannot evade for her participation on the side of Hitlerite Germany” and warned that “the final settlement will inevitably take account of her own contribution to her liberation.” This declaration was a strategic (and largely failed) attempt to incite Austrian resistance to Nazi rule.Footnote ⁷ But as the Nazi empire crumbled, Austrian politicians in Vienna quickly seized the protective mantle of victimhood.

This required, in turn, the creation of a new, distinctly “Austrian” national identity after World War II, unsullied by association with Hitler's Germany. In recent years, historians of Austria have ably documented the strained efforts of Austrians to distinguish themselves from their German or “Prussian” neighbors. Provincial and local conceptions of Heimat, Catholicism, Alpine landscapes, opera, baroque architecture, images of imperial glory, (singing) choirboys, and dancing horses all featured prominently in the postwar construction of Austrian-ness.Footnote ⁸ But as we will see, postwar Austrians teetered delicately between attempting to differentiate themselves from their so-called Reich German neighbors and continuing to define Austrian-ness in German ethnolinguistic terms. The reception of Volksdeutsche and East European refugees in the early Second Republic illuminates how Austrian state officials, Volksdeutsche, and citizens attempted to manage this precarious balancing act.

The victim myth, moreover, was not easily reconciled with local understandings of Austrian identity and history in the immediate postwar era. Heidemarie Uhl has recently questioned the extent to which the so-called “victim myth” resonated at all among Austrians at the local level. Although government officials in Vienna strategically promoted an image of Austrians as victims of Nazi aggression, she has found that local initiatives instead produced monuments and rituals that celebrated Austrians as German heroes in World War II, commemorating their service to the Wehrmacht and their contributions to the struggle against Communism.Footnote ⁹

Volksdeutsche refugees contributed to the elaboration of a distinctly Austrian national identity after World War II. Expellees made legal, moral, and financial claims on the postwar Austrian state by representing themselves as Altösterreicher, or as citizens of the former Habsburg Empire. They attempted to divorce their postwar fate from their complicity with Nazi crimes during World War II. One 1949 appeal on behalf of expellees in Austria even labeled Volksdeutsche “victims of racial persecution,” insisting, “they suffer this fate only because they are Germans.”Footnote ¹⁰ But expellees and postwar Austrian officials simultaneously ranked Volksdeutsche expellees above other East European refugees by virtue of their German ethnicity. By depicting the Second Republic as the natural successor to Imperial Austria, and insisting on their exclusive entitlement to Austrian citizenship, expellees effaced their own participation in the Nazi war for Lebensraum and, retrospectively, reinvented the multinational Austrian Empire as an exclusively German state.

The Habsburg Legacy: “Old-Austrians” in the Second Republic

Both food and housing were in short supply in defeated Austria; so it is not surprising that war-weary Austrians initially greeted expellees with open hostility. Several hundred thousand extra mouths to feed threatened to severely strain the depleted Austrian economy. One concerned citizen protested directly to the Ministry of Interior, “Considering the shameless nerve of the DPs' demands, one has to wonder if the government is still thinking in a normal Austrian way (normal österreichisch denkt). It is no wonder that such DPs, especially the Volksdeutsche DPs, continue to stream in—we are practically inviting them to come here and work against the interests of the Austrian labor and housing market.”Footnote ¹¹ Austrian Communist party members, meanwhile, denounced expellees as Fascists, revanchists, and collaborators who got what was coming to them in the immediate aftermath of the war. In the process, they rhetorically distanced native Austrians from their own recent history of collaboration with the Nazi regime. A Communist pamphlet circulated in 1945 declared, “The Czechs are liberating themselves from the decades-long exploitative paternalism of the Sudeten Germans; Austria too must protect itself from the foreign Sudeten German element that now wants to come to our country!”Footnote ¹²

Austria's official status as a victim of Nazi aggression absolved the Austrian government of the immense legal and financial obligations toward German expellees imposed on occupied Germany by the 1945 Potsdam agreement. The Austrian government had no obligation to shelter Volksdeutsche, to naturalize them, or to provide them with basic social rights and benefits such as the right to work or to social insurance. Initially, the Austrian Ministry of Interior specified that Volksdeutsche should be “repatriated” to Germany, unless granted a special dispensation to remain in Austria based on their family ties or economic importance (as essential skilled workers).Footnote ¹³ In short, expellees were considered no different and treated no better than any other “foreigners” on Austrian soil. Unlike other postwar refugees, however, and because they were classified as ex-enemy nationals, Volksdeutsche expellees did not enjoy the protection or assistance of international humanitarian organizations such as UNRRA and the IRO. They were subject to restrictions on their mobility, housing and employment discrimination, reduced rations, barriers to admission into Austrian universities, and denied welfare benefits and citizenship rights. As of July 1949, nearly 50,000 Volksdeutsche expellees remained in camps as a result of persistent housing shortages. The problem stemmed in part from the fact that the Potsdam agreement did not actually regulate the status of German refugees from Yugoslavia, Romania, and Bulgaria, who therefore could not simply be “repatriated” to Germany like other Volksdeutsche.Footnote ¹⁴

The treatment of Volksdeutsche in Austria as second-class citizens gradually provoked a storm of protest in both Austria and in Germany, thanks largely to the growing political organization of expellees themselves. Even as they deployed a universal language of “human rights,” expellee activists in Austria made claims on the Austrian state in nationally exclusive terms, insisting on their entitlement to equal rights based on their status as former citizens (or the children of citizens) of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. In a petition to the Austrian president in December 1949, Sigmund Gorski appealed:

Indeed, many expellees rejected the tainted label of “Volksdeutsche” altogether, instead anointing themselves “Altösterreicher,” or “Old-Austrians,” in an effort to underscore continuities between the former Habsburg Empire and the Second Republic.Footnote ¹⁶ Expellees thereby invoked pan-German loyalties, based on the presumed ties that bound expellees to Austrians through their common heritage as Habsburg subjects. According to editors of Die Presse, Austrian expellees were more properly seen as victims of the Versailles settlement of 1918 than as beneficiaries or victims of the Nazi regime. “From a moral and national perspective, the fact of the matter is that all of these Volksdeutsche from the regions of the former Austro-Hungarian Monarchy are old-Austrians, and in the final analysis, they are first and foremost victims of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and not of the unfortunate National Socialist policies,” the newspaper's editors insisted. Austrians therefore had a moral duty to welcome German refugees “with feelings of brotherhood … and to help them to find a new Heimat here.”Footnote ¹⁷

Many expellee activists thereby depicted their arrival in postwar Austria as a triumphant opportunity to right the wrongs of 1918, rather than a consequence of World War II. Writers in Wegwarte, a right-wing newspaper representing Sudeten German expellees in Austria, insisted in 1949:

All too quickly, expellees lamented, Austrian authorities had forgotten the lofty pan-German ideals of 1918. In only three decades, the administration had completely effaced the memory of “centuries of common statehood with the Germans of the Bohemian-Moravian realm and from the Southeast,” complained the Ost-West Kurier.

Also forgotten, of course, was Renner's own unequivocal support for the 1938 Anschluss to Germany.Footnote ²⁰

Wolfgang Jaenicke, a Bavarian official responsible for expellees, echoed these themes in an appeal on behalf of Volksdeutsche expellees in Austria to the Austrian consul in Munich. Jaenicke was probably motivated by a pragmatic desire to stem the tide of Austrian expellees toward Bavaria's overcrowded refugee camps, but he too stressed Austria's historic duty to shelter former citizens of the Dual Monarchy. Jaenicke maintained:

“Old-Austrians” versus “fremdsprachige Ausländer”

The resurrection of Austro-Hungarian citizenship seemed, in principle, to efface or bypass the racial hierarchies of Nazi Ostpolitik, but these hierarchies remained potent beneath the surface of expellee rhetoric. At the same time that 300,000 Volksdeutsche made their homes in postwar Austria, hundreds of thousands of other East European DPs, especially Yugoslavs, Hungarians, Czechs, Romanians, Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews from the former Habsburg lands, also descended (or remained) on Austrian soil after the war. Many were liberated forced laborers. The consolidation of Communist power in Eastern Europe meanwhile brought new waves of refugees from Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia to Austria's DP camps. As of January 1948, 164,000 so-called “fremdsprachige Ausländer” were housed on Austrian soil under the protection of the IRO, including 24,791 Jews.Footnote ²² Of this number, 37,000 (including nearly all of the Jews) remained in camps in July 1949.Footnote ²³ Like the German expellees who sought refuge in postwar Austria, many of these DPs were also former Austro-Hungarian citizens (or their children) and could typically claim regional ties to the Austrian provinces. Unlike the Volksdeutsche, however, they were never considered “Old-Austrians,” nor were they entitled to Austrian citizenship or social rights based on their shared Habsburg heritage.

In 1953, a group of “fremdsprachigen” refugees began to publish their own newspaper in Salzburg, called Fern der Heimat, in an attempt to create a voice for non-German refugees that transcended national divisions. Ironically, the language of this publication was German, suggesting that the term “fremdsprachigen” had little to do with actual linguistic skills. Although contributors to Fern der Heimat did not attempt to make claims on the Austrian state as “Altösterreichers,” they did invoke Austria's multicultural past in their appeals for acceptance. In the very first issue “Elma” reflected, “To console ourselves we pick up a Viennese phone book and look through the long pages filled with Slavic names, some of which have a very good reputation, and hope that we will also achieve the success of our predecessors and become respected citizens of this country.”Footnote ²⁴ Such appeals seemed to fall on deaf ears, as they found no resonance in the Austrian press or government circles.

Austrian officials judged refugees in Austria as potential immigrants and citizens based on their economic “usefulness” and their perceived ability to “assimilate.” In doing so, they followed the lead of other countries of immigration after World War II (including France, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada), all of which selected DPs for immigration based on economic needs and perceived assimilability.Footnote ²⁵ The need for labor to reconstruct war-damaged economies and rebuild bombed-out infrastructure in Austria was overwhelming in 1945. In this context, the relatively healthy and well-fed Volksdeutsche, many of whom had been farmers in Eastern Europe, may have seemed like more attractive candidates for Austrian citizenship than former forced laborers and concentration camp inmates from the East, whose bodies had been ravaged by years of malnutrition and hard labor.

Government officials and journalists evaluated the potential of individual refugees to contribute to the Austrian economy and to assimilate in highly ethnicized terms. As early as 1946, Ministry of Interior guidelines demanded leniency for Volksdeutsche who seemed most culturally “Austrian” and economically useful (conflating the two). These guidelines clearly perpetuated the long-standing nationalist hierarchy of Germans over Slavs.Footnote ²⁶ In a 1947 meeting between Austrian officials and British occupation authorities, Minister of the Interior Oskar Helmer announced that Austria's first priority was to see that “all of the inhabitants of the DP camps disappear,” because these refugees “do not work,” and represent “only a burden to Austria.” Austria was eager to be rid of “non-German-speaking foreigners, who are not assimilable,” he declared. Footnote ²⁷

Although they took a more generous standpoint toward expellees, Austrian officials also betrayed their assumption that some Germans were more Austrian than others and, therefore, more desirable citizens. This imagined hierarchy of Germans seemed, in theory, to contradict the Nazi ideal of the Volksgemeinschaft, but it had deep roots in the Third Reich's own citizenship and nationality laws in the occupied East, where the four-tiered German Volksliste ranked Volksdeutsche according to their degree of German-ness.Footnote ²⁸ “Among the Volksdeutsche we must distinguish between those who come from the areas surrounding Austria and are ethnographically closely related to the Austrian population, and the Volksdeutsche from other regions,” specified a 1946 Ministry of Interior memorandum. “A somewhat more liberal standpoint can be taken with respect to the first group. Especially since the relevant agencies for agriculture and industry have registered a considerable need for labor power.” Of course, Austrian authorities also urged local officials to remain vigilant against imposters. Ministry of Interior guidelines cautioned, “The selection of individuals coming from old-Austrian families is to be undertaken as rigorously as possible.”Footnote ²⁹

The purpose of these regulations was not simply to distinguish “Volksdeutsche” from “Old-Austrians,” but also to distinguish “authentic” Germans from nationally indifferent or opportunistic Slavs and Jews. Refugees were not to be taken at their word when it came to distinguishing between “Old-Austrians” and “foreigners.” A 1947 memo from the Austrian Ministry of Interior explained, “It is not always easy for the Austrian authorities to decide in individual cases if they are dealing with an ethnic German or an ethnic Slovene from Yugoslavia, because both the Volksdeutsche and the Slovenes speak both languages equally well, or equally poorly, and they can therefore claim to be Germans or Slovenes according to their own needs.”Footnote ³⁰ The ever slippery boundaries between linguistic and national groups in East Central Europe remained fungible in postwar DP camps, where refugees often attempted to slip across national lines in order to avoid forcible repatriation to the Soviet Union or to secure rations, international assistance, and coveted places in emigration schemes. A police official in Vienna hence specified in 1946, “The term Volksdeutsche is not static. Just because someone immigrated to a Volksdeutsche region and speaks German does not make them an ethnic German.”Footnote ³¹ This edict bears an uncanny resemblance to the countless regulations issued in the Austrian Empire and its successor states (especially Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Poland), where officials resorted to practices of forcible national classification in order to distinguish among Germans, Czechs, Slovenes, and Poles based on “objective characteristics.” It also resembles the decrees issued by Nazi racial authorities charged with the thorny task of determining who merited the privileges (and duties) of German citizenship in the multilingual East during World War II.Footnote ³²

Soon, Volksdeutsche settlers in Austria, fed up with being treated as cheap substitutes for Nazi slave labor, began a vigorous public campaign to advertise their historic ties and cultural and economic contributions to postwar Austria. Through this campaign, expellee activists and their supporters strategically defined themselves as hard-working, culturally and economically valuable migrants—in direct opposition to Slavic refugees from Eastern Europe. Expellees boasted specifically about their cleanliness, their “orderly” family lives, their work ethic, and their law-abiding nature. In contrast to its negative coverage of the non-German DPs, the Austrian press gradually took up the Volksdeutsche's cause and their rhetoric. In liberated Austria, “The behavior of the Volksdeutsche was in keeping with their old southeast German colonial tradition,” Der Fortschritt claimed:

In September 1947, the Wiener Tageszeitung also demanded the quick naturalization of German expellees, who “are honestly earning their bread here,” reasoning that “in light of their Austrian origins, their desire for citizenship is completely understandable.”Footnote ³⁴

A group of American emigrés called the American Aid Societies for the Needy and Displaced Persons of Central and South-Eastern Europe echoed these claims in a petition to the Austrian Embassy on behalf of the Donauschwaben. These refugees, whose “only crime is that they speak German,” had found asylum in Austria, “the land of their ancestors” after World War II. By virtue of their hard work and high moral standards, they had distinguished themselves from other refugees, who sought only to sponge off the Austrian economy. “These Volksdeutsche refugees worked industriously to rebuild Austria, while all of the other DPs lived like parasites at the state's expense,” the petitioners insisted.Footnote ³⁵

Transnational regional identities were central to the privileged position of the Volksdeutsche among refugees in postwar Austria. These regional perceptions of Austrian-ness also underpinned inequalities among German expellees. According to Helmer, for example, the Volksdeutsche refugees who were “ethnographically and culturally homogenous with the Austrian people” included German refugees from Gotschee, Cilli, Laibach, and Marburg in Slovenia, as well as Germans from Southern Moravia.Footnote ³⁶ Provincial and local notions of Heimat were fundamental to the postwar construction of Austrian-ness; and so expellees from border regions, who could claim strong economic, cultural, or kinship ties to the Austrian provinces, had a clear leg up. Sudeten German expellees who settled in Lower Austria and Vienna, for example, were by far the most successful in their efforts to become Austrian citizens. By October 1953, some 95,000 Sudeten German refugees had been naturalized, 70 percent of the total population of expellees from Czechoslovakia, compared to only 26 percent of all the other Volksdeutsche groups. Expellees from the Bohemian Lands also benefitted from the fact that they were mostly industrial workers, and the Austrian Socialist Party in Vienna and Lower Austria took up their cause. The lowest rates of naturalization, by contrast, were in provinces where refugees were employed primarily as agricultural laborers, such as Upper Austria, which also boasted the greatest concentration of expellees from Yugoslavia.Footnote ³⁷

In general, the Austrian government considered the Volksdeutsche from Yugoslavia less Austrian and less desirable immigrants than the Sudeten Germans. A 1947 memo from the Ministry of Interior bluntly declared that expellees from the Southeast “are less valuable workers than the ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia … the farmers there are not as hard-working as the Southern Bohemian and Southern Moravian farmers, because they relied on cheap Slavic workers rather than doing the work themselves.”Footnote ³⁸

The low rate of naturalization for rural, Catholic Volksdeutsche was a function of Grand Coalition politics, as well as regional differences, however. According to Clifford Maser, the co-director of the Quaker Relief Program in Austria and Germany in 1951–1952, the Austrian Socialist Party (SPÖ) did not initially speak out on behalf of rural, Catholic expellees because party leaders assumed that they would vote for the Austrian People's Party (ÖVP). The ÖVP, meanwhile, was also reluctant to take up the cause of the expellees, because the party's own constituents—farmers—stood to lose a dependent and cheap source of labor if Volksdeutsche workers became naturalized citizens with equal employment and social rights.Footnote ³⁹

But many expellee groups staked successful claims to Austrian citizenship based on their ties to transnational regional or borderland communities.Footnote ⁴⁰ In the Burgenland, for example, which had been carved out of Hungary in 1918, Mark Pittaway has shown that Volksdeutsche refugees from the Hungarian borderlands successfully capitalized on a pan-German regional identity as “Burgenlanders” that had been nurtured by pan-German nationalists between the two world wars. When the postwar Hungarian government began to confiscate the land of German-speakers and to round them up for deportation to Germany in 1946, Hungarian Volksdeutsche staged an uprising; and Austrian political parties, citizens, and provincial officials in the Burgenland supported them. Reviving interwar pan-German rhetoric, these local Austrians declared that Hungarian German-speakers were authentic “Burgenlanders,” insisting that they know “nothing of Germany.”

Austrian officials in the Burgenland meanwhile lobbied the Soviet military to stop the expulsion of German-speaking Hungarians to Germany, asserting that German-speakers from the border region “can be seen as good Austrians.” Other Burgenlanders even proposed that the westernmost provinces of Hungary be annexed to Austria.Footnote ⁴¹ But the government in Vienna thought better of antagonizing the Soviets, and the deportations continued. In 1946, many German-speakers from Hungary illegally crossed the border into Austria in order to escape expulsion to Germany and received a warm reception from Burgenlanders. “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, enabling German-speaking Hungarians to quickly integrate into Burgenland and Austrian society,” Pittaway argues.Footnote ⁴²

Regional and local ties in the Burgenland were actually elastic enough to embrace native Croatian-speaking and Hungarian-speaking minorities, as well as German-speakers from Hungary. Pittaway recounts the fate of an ethnic German refugee from Hungary employed as the manager of a large local farm in the village of Baumgarten on the Austro-Hungarian border in 1946. Shortly after his arrival, this manager fired the Croatian-speaking workers on the farm and evicted them from their homes, replacing them with German refugees from Hungary. When locals protested, the expellee imprudently replied that the Volksdeutsche from Hungary were more authentic Austrians than the Croatian-speakers, by virtue of their German ethnicity. “You are no Austrians, you are Croatians; we are better and truer Austrians than you,” he claimed. But his rhetoric backfired: the local Socialist party rallied around the Croatians and had the farm manager banned from the village.Footnote ⁴³ In Baumgarten, Volksdeutsche efforts to define Austrian-ness in terms of German ethnicity failed because local Croatians were well integrated in the region. After the war, Croatian and Hungarian-speaking Burgenlanders retained significant minority rights, anchored in Article 7 of the State Treaty.Footnote ⁴⁴

In Carinthia, the story played out differently. There were arguably strong regional ties linking Southern Carinthia to Slovene-speaking regions of Yugoslavia, and the Slovene-speaking minority in Southern Carinthia had long been loyal to Austria. A full 60 percent of Slovene-speakers had voted to join Austria, rather than Yugoslavia, in a 1920 plebiscite. Popular German nationalist associations in Carinthia nonetheless continued to promote an exclusive, ethnic-German ideal of Carinthian and Austrian identity after 1945. These groups successfully mobilized to reverse some of the expansive guarantees of bilingual education and minority rights anchored in the 1955 State Treaty.Footnote ⁴⁵ Insofar as provincial and local identities were the building blocks of postwar Austrian identity, attitudes toward refugees, expellees, and minority groups varied across the provinces.Footnote ⁴⁶

Economic conditions also shaped the Austrian response to DPs and expellees. In general, expellees were successful at presenting themselves as economic assets to the Austrian economy. In June 1947, the Zentralberatungsstelle der Volksdeutschen in Styria even collected letters from employers of Volksdeutsche and forwarded them to the Ministry of Interior. The owner of the Prinz Alois Liechtenstein'sches machine factory attested that Volksdeutsche employees boasted ample “technical expertise, willingness to work, and skill as well as discipline,” adding that “a comparison with other foreign workers is not even possible, because the others could never equal the Volksdeutsche.” The farm-management firm Waldschach, which employed 16 Volksdeutsche laborers, agreed that “on average the Volksdeutsche are equal to local laborers and far surpass all the other foreigners.”Footnote ⁴⁷

Wegwarte meanwhile attempted to cultivate the reputation of expellees as hard-working laborers by publishing letters from Austrian employers in praise of Volksdeutsche workers. The Viennese construction company Hofmann and Maculan employed 310 Volksdeutsche in 1948, 50 percent of their workforce. In a public letter, the company's owner reported:

Volksdeutsche, insisted Wegwarte's editors, “are not coolies or forced laborers.” They were entitled to the social rights they had earned through their contribution to the physical reconstruction of postwar Austria and through their long-standing historic and cultural ties to the Austrian Empire.Footnote ⁴⁹

East European DPs also attempted to advertise their contributions to the wartime and postwar Austrian economy, but they were far less successful. In 1953, Fern der Heimat reminded Austrians who scorned DPs that the so-called “burdensome foreigners” in their midst had mostly arrived in Austria during the war as forced laborers and deportees, replacing German workers who were drafted into the Wehrmacht. They too had contributed to the reconstruction of the Austrian economy after the Nazi defeat.Footnote ⁵⁰ But once again, the history of non-German contributions to the Austrian economy was typically effaced by the Austrian press and public, which tended to view the “fremdsprachigen” refugees only as a drain on the Austrian economy.

Some expellees even advertised the virtues of the Volksdeutsche in quasi-racial terms, suggesting that they represented a biological contribution to the Austrian population. In a 1950 editorial in Neuland, the newspaper of the Donauschwaben in Austria, Dr. Fritz Klinger suggested:

These appeals gradually commanded a response from the Austrian press and officials. The defeat of the Communist Party in Austria's November 1945 elections had brought to power a Grand Coalition government somewhat more favorable to Volksdeutsche interests, led by the ÖVP's Leopold Figl. Although a stalemate between the two large parties hindered decisive legal action on behalf of Volksdeutsche between 1945–48, there were signs of movement in 1949–50. In 1949, the Verband der Unabhängigen (VdU), a right-wing “Independent” party, was founded with support of many former Nazi party members and returning POWs. The party began to agitate on behalf of expellees, effectively forcing the hand of the two major parties, and particularly the Socialist party, which began to defend expellee interests in earnest.Footnote ⁵²

Meanwhile, persistent press reports about the mistreatment of the expellees in Austria were damaging Austria's international reputation and its relationship with Germany. In a meeting in Linz in 1949, Austrian Minister of the Interior (and Socialist Party member) Oskar Helmer attempted to reassure representatives of expellee organizations that former Volksdeutsche refugees would soon enjoy full citizenship rights. He also affirmed their privileged place among the ranks of refugees in Austria. “I don't see the Volksdeutsche as DPs, because they have been driven from their homeland … In addition they have a historical relationship to us,” he reassured expellees. But Helmer still qualified his embrace of Volksdeutsche in regional and racial terms. “We would have preferred it if we had been given the Sudeten Germans, because they have the closest ties to us, while the other national groups from the Southeast are certainly hard-working people, but are already constitute a different race.”Footnote ⁵³ Helmer's rhetoric underscores the extent to which the DP had become the expellee's Other in postwar Austria. Although many non-German DPs or their children were also former Habsburg subjects, they were defined out of the Austro-Hungarian past and out of the Austrian future. They were not explicitly excluded based on their racial “inferiority” or difference, however, but based on their presumed criminality, laziness, and their alleged inability to assimilate to the Austrian culture and economy.

The “Final Solution to the DP Question”

In 1948, American occupation authorities transferred complete responsibility for Volksdeutsche in the American zone to the Austrian government, and the British and French quickly followed suit. Until 1951, non-German DPs enjoyed the protection and care of UNRRA and the IRO. But as of 1951, the Austrian Ministry of Interior assumed direct financial and managerial responsibility for all of Austria's refugee camps, and the attitudes of Austrian government officials toward DPs became more consequential. Not surprisingly, relations between non-German refugees and Austrian authorities and local populations were strained. Police officials in Innsbruck reported in 1952:

Austrian officials depicted unwanted Slavic DPs as dependent, work-shy black marketeers, freeloaders, criminals, delinquents, and alcoholics who offended the cultural sensibilities of native Austrians and threatened public order. These complaints, which were also directed toward DPs in postwar Germany, betrayed a lingering anti-Semitism that was far from exceptional in postwar Europe.Footnote ⁵⁵ A 1951 Ministry of Interior report on the 700 Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe remaining in the Rothschild Hospital in Vienna concluded:

Immanuel Unger, writing in Maariv in August 1953, agreed that Jewish refugees had outstayed their welcome in Austria:

In 1953, the Jewish voluntary organization Agudas Israel lobbied the Austrian government to ease the process of acquiring citizenship for Jewish refugees from the former Habsburg lands who remained in Austria “under consideration of the circumstances that led the concerned individuals to lose their homes.” At the very least, the group requested that Jewish refugees receive the same preferential treatment for naturalization accorded to Sudeten German expellees.Footnote ⁵⁸ Between 1945 and 1952, the Austrian government naturalized only 23 Jewish DPs, whereas more than 150,000 Volksdeutsche and 35,000 other non-German speaking DPs had received Austrian citizenship.Footnote ⁵⁹ The Ministry of Interior summarily rejected the appeal. Austrian officials countered that Jewish refugees “who come from the most varied countries of Eastern Europe” were economically superfluous and “in many cases demonstrate a poor capacity to assimilate … In Austria there is no shortage of independent craftsmen or traders, so there would be no economic advantage to the naturalization of Jewish refugees. The policy of the Austrian government agencies with respect to this group of refugees, who can only be assimilated with great difficulty, is to force them to emigrate.”Footnote ⁶⁰

The exclusion of Jews and East Europeans from postwar Austrian citizenship seems like a clear holdover from the Nazi period, but this exclusion had deeper roots in the Austrian First Republic. During World War I, approximately 200,000 Jews from Galicia and Bukovina had fled the advancing Russian Army, seeking refuge in Vienna, Bohemia, and Moravia.Footnote ⁶¹ At the end of the war, Viennese police estimated that 100,000 refugees remained in the capital city. In September of 1918, Austrian welfare agencies reported that they were providing state assistance to 326,261 refugees, including 68,286 Jews.Footnote ⁶² Almost immediately after the establishment of the new Republic of Austria, however, state officials took measures to ensure that these refugees would not become Austrian citizens. On 10 September 1919, the Austrian Ministry of Interior issued a decree stipulating that “foreign” refugees were to clear out of Austria within ten days. Police plastered the city of Vienna with posters declaring that refugees who ignored the decree would be subject to criminal proceedings and deportation. Of course, these refugees had not been “foreigners” only months earlier—they had been Habsburg subjects. In practice, transport and financial difficulties meant that the threat of deportation was rarely carried out. Poland was not eager to have its Jewish citizens return home and refused to issue the visas and travel documents necessary for repatriation. Because Austria refused to naturalize them and Poland refused to take them back, these Jews were effectively rendered stateless.Footnote ⁶³

The exclusion of Jews from Austrian citizenship was further consolidated in racial terms by the Austrian interpretation of the Option Clause, Article 80 of the 1918 Treaty of St. Germain. The Option Clause allowed citizens of the former Habsburg Empire who differed “by race and language” from the majority population in the state in which they were entitled to citizenship to “opt” for citizenship in Austria, Italy, Yugoslavia, Romania, Poland, or Czechoslovakia, so long as that state was populated by “persons speaking the same language and having the same race.” Approximately 180,000 German families (totaling 540,000 people) from the former Austrian Crownlands opted for Austrian citizenship.Footnote ⁶⁴ Article 80 was intended to diminish the size of national and linguistic minorities in Austria-Hungary's successor states. But it left a critical question open: How were state officials to determine if an individual belonged to a specific “race” or even spoke a particular language?

In Austria, an Executive Order of August 1920 stipulated that those who chose to opt for citizenship would be required to demonstrate “tangible evidence” of belonging to the Austrian nation. In other words, a person's subjective claim to be Austrian would not be taken at face value. As Gerald Stourzh has shown, this decree built on legal precedents that had been established in Imperial Austria in the aftermath of the Moravian Compromise of 1905. The compromise had divided the entire Moravian population into Czech and German national cadastres for the purposes of voting, school attendance, and local governance. It was intended to diffuse national tensions by dividing the population into separate Czech and German electorates and allowing each a modicum of self-government. But it instead created explosive conflicts about who exactly counted as a Czech and who counted as a German. Through a series of court cases concerning the contested nationalities of schoolchildren, Austrian judges in the Supreme Administrative Court gradually institutionalized practices of forcible national classification, empowering state officials to assign parents and children to a single national community. Through these rulings, citizens in Moravia lost the right to freely choose their national affiliation, as nationality was now legally defined based on “objective characteristics,” including language, social networks, school attendance, and descent, rather than based on personal self-declaration.Footnote ⁶⁵

These legal precedents had weighty consequences after World War I, thanks to the use of the word “race” in the Treaty of St. Germain. The term “race,” introduced by Anglo-American delegates to the Peace Conference, was intended to distinguish between a concept of nationality that was synonymous with state citizenship and a Central European notion of Nationalität that, by 1918, was defined in Austria according to a contested jumble of traits that could include cultural belonging, linguistic competence, political affiliation, school attendance, subjective loyalties, social networks, associational activities, and descent. The Austrian Supreme Court, however, decided in 1921 to define “race” as an immutable biological quality, rather than an amalgam of cultural and psychological attributes.

The Supreme Court's critical decision concerned a Jew from Galicia, Moses Lym. Lym, who considered himself to be German, applied for Austrian citizenship on the basis of the Option Clause. He could prove his German education and linguistic abilities. But the Ministry of Interior rejected his application, and Lym appealed the decision all the way to the Supreme Administrative Court. In a critical judgment, the court rejected Lym's appeal, insisting that Lym had not adequately proven that he belonged to the German-Austrian “race.” In its decision, the court officially defined race as an “inborn, inherent, physically and psychically determined quality,” that “cannot be removed at will or changed according to preference.”Footnote ⁶⁶ On the basis of this judgment, the Austrian Ministry of Interior, then under the leadership of Grossdeutsche Volkspartei member and rabid anti-Semite Leopold Waber, proceeded to reject almost all Jews from the Austrian successor states who attempted to opt for Austrian citizenship—some 75,000 people in all.Footnote ⁶⁷ The legal and ideological precedents for excluding Jews and Slavs from Austrian citizenship after World War II were hence clearly established long before the Anschluss.

As a result of ongoing official and popular anti-Semitism, Jewish refugees who wished to remain in Austria after World War II increasingly attempted to hide their Jewish ancestry. They instead posed as German expellees in the hope of being treated more leniently in their applications for citizenship rights.Footnote ⁶⁸ The Austrian victim myth, meanwhile, rendered it more difficult for Austrian Jews to reclaim their lost property after the war. The official position of the Austrian government was that Germany alone was responsible for the expropriation of Austrian Jews.Footnote ⁶⁹ Tensions were generally high between Jewish DPs and local Austrians. In Linz in 1947, some Jewish refugees from a local camp allegedly stole some fruit from the garden of Gottfried Untersmayr. Untersmayr promptly called the police. When Austrian police officers arrived at the scene, the Jewish refugees greeted them with insults, calling them “Nazi police!” They were escorted back to their camp, at which point a group of approximately 20 Jews came out, and according to Austrian police, “behaved in a threatening manner,” calling the police officers “Nazis” and “gangsters.” One Jewish DP allegedly tried to hit a police officer in the face. The situation escalated to the point that the Austrian police drew their weapons and threatened to shoot the Jews if they did not return to the camp.Footnote ⁷⁰

Relations were not much better between Jewish and non-Jewish refugees, who were initially housed in the same camps. In Graz in 1945, for example, military personnel had to be stationed in a DP camp to prevent outbreaks of violence between Jewish and Christian Poles after the American Joint Distribution Committee provided Jews with extra rations for the High Holidays.Footnote ⁷¹ Following Earl G. Harrison's August 1945 report to President Truman, in which Harrison severely criticized the American military for its treatment of Jews in postwar Germany, Jewish DPs were typically housed in separate camps in the American zones of occupation.Footnote ⁷²

Volksdeutsche expellees strenuously distinguished themselves from both Slavic DPs and Jews in the postwar press and in their appeals for Austrian citizenship and social rights. They were particularly incensed that many local Austrians did not bother to distinguish between Volksdeutsche and DPs. In a 1947 editorial in Wegwarte, expellee activists protested, “The German-speakers from the East and the Southeast are very often thrown in one pot with the other DPs, and one often attempts to solve their problems together. But this is not possible.” Although expellees were industrious, honest farmers and workers, who enjoyed no protection or benefits from international organizations, the population of non-German DPs, Wegwarte claimed, “consists of men, of former soldiers, politicians, voluntary laborers. Along with willing workers there are many men at arms, who are constantly appearing in the police chronicles as blackmarketeers, robbers and murderers, and violent criminals.”Footnote ⁷³

Expellees continuously asserted that they ranked above DPs not only in terms of their desirability as potential citizens, but also in an imagined hierarchy of victims. Although the East European DPs could return home and simply refused to for political, economic, or even criminal reasons, Wegwarte editors claimed, Volksdeutsche had no possibility to repatriate. The Volksdeutsche did back-breaking labor to rebuild Austrian cities, but the non-German DPs sponged off the Austrian economy and international humanitarian organizations. “The Volksdeutsche are essentially and clearly distinguishable from the DPs as well as the more recent political refugees, not only based on their origins but also in their psycho-political structure,” Wegwarte concluded. “When it comes to the negative, we were and still are often thrown in one pot with the real DPs. Austrian crime statistics thus cavalierly name our naïve and respectable farmers in the same breath as the blackmarketeers of the outer ring or with other non-German-speakers.”Footnote ⁷⁴

Such comparisons between DPs and Volksdeutsche betray the extent to which older racist and nationalist hierarchies from the Habsburg monarchy, interwar Austria, and the Nazi era were recast after World War II in a language of cultural desirability and economic productivity. It was more than time for the unwelcome DPs (and especially Jews) to leave Austrian soil, Wegwarte insisted in 1949, before Austria became a veritable “El Dorado” for Jewish black marketeers:

In their own press organs, East European DPs contested these stereotypes and accusations. In response to one article in Wegwarte denouncing the criminality of Czech refugees, Fern der Heimat insisted that the time had come for Volksdeutsche and East Europeans to forget their old grudges (including the postwar expulsions) and recognize that “today we finally have to fight against our common enemy—Communism.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Representatives of Yugoslav DPs, meanwhile, attempted to put the alleged “criminality” of East European refugees in context. In a letter to the Refugee Consultative Board in Salzburg, an association founded in 1949 to represent refugee interests, the Yugoslav Committee in Salzburg complained that Yugoslav refugees arriving in the British zone were typically thrown into prison for two to three months before they were granted an asylum hearing. They were then assigned to Austrian farmers and forced to work 18 hours a day for meager pay, subsisting on a diet of “bad bread and vegetable soup.” If a refugee left his assigned job, he could be arrested and sentenced to three to four months in prison, which greatly hindered emigration. It was nothing less than a renewal of the Nazi system of forced labor, the petition claimed. Refugees were also bullied during their asylum hearings, the Yugoslav Committee reported, to the point that one student named Rozman Branko, a refugee from Slovenia, actually killed himself during the interrogation. “Without a home or support, without humane treatment, the refugees are in danger of committing illegal acts, which are then reported in the press to the detriment of the refugees without any consideration of the underlying, objective circumstances,” the Committee protested.Footnote ⁷⁷

Tropes of Volksdeutsche industry and DP parasitism nonetheless persisted long into the postwar era, even appearing in scholarly histories of refugees in Austria. Eduard Stanek's 1984 history of refugees in Austria hence praises the “cleanliness and industry of the Volksdeutsche,” which “quickly gave them a positive reputation … Most Austrians quickly valued the hard work and industry of the Volksdeutsche, who lent a hand to clean the debris from bombed-out houses or worked hard as farm laborers for little pay.”Footnote ⁷⁸ By contrast, Stanek argues, “The integration of the non-German-speaking refugees met with greater difficulties … they preferred to be taken care of than to earn their own keep through work. The word ‘professional refugee’ was first created for these refugees. Asocial behavior and alcohol abuse were the consequences.”Footnote ⁷⁹

Volksdeutsche ultimately succeeded in their quest to secure a privileged status among the stateless in postwar Austria (and in Austrian memory). In August 1950, The Federal Advisory Council to the Ministerial Committee for Refugee Affairs (Beirat zum Ministerkommittee zur Lösung der Flüchtlingsfragen in Österreich) was established. This council consisted entirely of Volksdeutsche appointed on the basis of political affiliation (four each from the ÖVP and the SPÖ). It adopted a ten-point program, negotiating with the government for equal employment rights, welfare rights, quicker naturalization, and housing assistance.Footnote ⁸⁰ Concrete action soon followed. An Austrian federal law, passed on 18 June 1952, rendered Volksdeutsche expellees equal to Austrian citizens with respect to employment rights and the rights to establish businesses and to enter trades. Further legislation in June 1952 guaranteed expellees equal access to other state welfare and unemployment benefits.Footnote ⁸¹

The rate of naturalization for expellees also steadily increased in the early 1950s. More than 150,000 Volksdeutsche had already acquired Austrian citizenship by 1 October 1953. Through the 1954 Option Law, expellees finally received the official right to acquire Austrian citizenship through a simple declaration. The Austrian Bundeskanzleramt reported that 225,000 “Old Austrians” had become new Austrians by March 1954.Footnote ⁸² The same opportunity was never afforded to non-German DPs or Jews. Indeed, in a 1950 memo to the International Red Cross, Ministry of Interior officials bluntly announced that they were eager to find a “final solution to the DP question.” That solution, officials elaborated, entailed the removal of all non-German DPs from Austrian territory. Since 1945, the Austrian government had unwillingly spent 283,546,382 schillings for the care of “fremdsprachigen” DPs on Austrian soil. “In view of these costs it will appear understandable that Austria wishes to reduce the problems stemming from the DPs to a minimum and to implement a final solution to the DP problem. From the Austrian perspective this goal can only be realized through the evacuation of the difficult-to-assimilate non-German-speaking DPs.”Footnote ⁸³

In a speech on 14 March 1950, Oskar Helmer declared unequivocally that expellees and DPs would be subject to different legal regimes. “The non-German-speaking DPs and refugees cannot remain in our country and we must double our efforts to clear them out,” he asserted. At the same time, he affirmed the privileged status of expellees, declaring, “As far as the expellees are concerned, the government will strive to ease the fortune of these individuals in every respect.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Ministry of Interior officials reinforced this message in repeated appeals to the United Nations and other international agencies, demanding assistance with the evacuation of non-German refugees. In a memorandum to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees in 1956 (shortly before the Hungarian uprising), the Ministry of Interior stressed that “Austria is determined to remove the foreign and sick refugees from our land, all the more since Austria does not wish to strengthen its minorities, especially the Slovenes and the Croats. Besides which, the Volksdeutsche are much easier to assimilate.”Footnote ⁸⁵

Refugee Psychology and Pathology

The hierarchies consolidated in the aftermath of World War II had an ongoing legacy in postwar Austria. In 1956, not long after Austria achieved full independence and neutrality through the 1955 State Treaty, the refugee issue once again dominated the headlines, as some 180,000 Hungarian refugees descended on Austria in the aftermath of the failed Hungarian uprising. In late October and November of 1956, Hungarian refugees crossed the frozen marshland between Austria and Hungary at a rate of 6,000 a day. At first, these refugees were welcomed with open arms. They presented the newly sovereign Austrian state with an opportunity to represent itself as a great power and as a democratic and peaceful land of asylum. But as time wore on, and greater numbers of Hungarian refugees remained in camps and settled into life in Austrian towns and cities, Hungarian refugees were saddled with the same stereotypes that plagued the so-called “old refugees” from Eastern Europe immediately after World War II.Footnote ⁸⁶

Although Austria continued to maintain a generous policy of asylum, Austrian diplomats and government officials made it clear from the outset that their hospitality had an expiration date. Hungarian exiles were strongly encouraged to move on to other countries for permanent resettlement. In February 1957, for example, the Austrian Bundeskanzleramt protested plans to build a UNESCO-supported Hungarian middle school in Bad Iselberg, explaining, “Austria, which has made so many sacrifices for the Hungarian refugees, also has a right to express its desire to be fully free of the burden of the refugees. Any plan that entails the perpetual settlement of these refugees is antipathetic to this desire.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Oskar Helmer also complained in a 1957 speech to UNREF delegates, “It is no longer acceptable that by virtue of its geographic position, Austria is condemned to bear the major burden of the refugee problem.”Footnote ⁸⁸

Once again, older racial and nationalist hierarchies were translated into cultural and economic terms. Only now, social workers increasingly explained the “failure” of East European refugees to assimilate using the increasingly popular idioms of psychology and psychoanalysis. As early as 1954, Austrian authorities insisted in a memo to the UNHCR that foreign refugees could not stay in Austria because they were “less apt, for reasons that are essentially psychological, to assimilate to the Austrian community.”Footnote ⁸⁹ The 1950s saw a growing number of psychological studies of refugee communities, undertaken with the support of international and non-governmental organizations. One such study, conducted by an international team consisting of a psychologist, a psychiatrist, a sociologist, and two social workers, was sponsored by the World Health Organization in Austria in 1954–55. The investigators reported “definite pathological trends” in the behavior of young East European refugees, including “chronic irritability, weariness, bad temper, tenseness, and morose depression.” In addition, the young refugees reportedly showed symptoms of dependency and a tendency toward violent outbursts, the study concluded, observing, “Lessened emotional control of feelings leads at times to explosions and … an increase in dependence.” Researchers warned that the refugees were psychologically incapable of conceiving of any future and concluded that with time, “community life will continue to deteriorate and more frequent and more severe signs of mental illness will occur.” The report was widely circulated in Austrian government circles, and was not taken as a ringing endorsement of refugees' potential to become productive Austrian citizens.Footnote ⁹⁰

Psychological approaches to refugee rehabilitation continued to shape perceptions of Hungarian emigrés after the 1956 uprising. A 1958 report of the International Social Service (ISS), an international social welfare organization, reflected on the psychological responses of Austrians to Hungarian refugees:

Older tropes about the dependence, apathy, and ingratitude of non-German refugees were anchored in new forms of expert knowledge, as psychoanalysts and psychologists diagnosed distinctive refugee pathologies.Footnote ⁹² In a study of the psychology of Hungarian refugees in Austrian refugee camps between 1956–58, Austrian psychoanalyst Hans Hoff concluded, “After a fleeting euphoria due to the removal of physical danger, the combination of helplessness and hostility due to the difficult cultural adjustment brings forth rebellion, apathetic helplessness, and finally depressive hypochondria and dependency.”Footnote ⁹³ In part, Hoff blamed the Austrian population for expecting refugees to play the role of helpless children:

And yet Hoff and his colleagues also insisted that refugees were all too likely to regress to childlike behaviors under the stress of flight and displacement. Harold Leupold-Löwenthal, a member of Hoff's team and a researcher from the University of Vienna, advised humanitarian workers “to bring the refugee to independence and not support his strong initial tendency to regressive behavior.”Footnote ⁹⁵ These psychoanalytic theories were not unique to postwar Austria. Psychological approaches to relief work were commonplace in Europe's postwar DP camps and children's homes. The belief that DPs, particularly Jewish and East European DPs, “regressed” to a childlike state of dependence was particularly widespread among the British and American humanitarian workers who staffed United Nations' agencies after World War II.Footnote ⁹⁶

In Austria, an older German nationalist view of Slavs as uncivilized children hence found new expression in a view of refugees and DPs as “hurt children” who required firm “parental” guidance from Austrian authorities and humanitarian workers. Even with psychological treatment, experts remained skeptical about the potential for Hungarians to integrate into Austrian society. In 1956, the ISS, by then the largest international social work organization in Europe, received a mandate from the UNHCR to provide casework services to unaccompanied Hungarian youth in Austria.

In the spring of 1958, Austrian ISS workers surveyed 1,119 of these young refugees, most of whom were teenagers. These social workers concluded that although some of the youngsters displayed “inner strength” because their “early home life had been sufficiently favorable to engender a wholesome capacity to respond to helpful adults,” more troubled boys and girls were not only “beset by conflicting feelings and obligations, but often filled with fear and resentment.” Still others betrayed a “weakness of character that may result in a sort of stubborn despair which immobilizes them.” The ISS was particularly concerned about outbreaks of juvenile delinquency and prostitution among young refugees—a perennial complaint about postwar DPs in Europe. They cited “problem cases” such as “a girl of 17 who is the mother of two illegitimate children, for whom she is unable even to show affection or to give them the most fundamental motherly care,” and a boy of 16 who had been in six homes and in four camps and had, “in all these places, failed to adjust.” Out of the 1,119 refugees, over half hoped to stay in Austria, but the outlook for assimilation into Austrian society did not seem promising, the ISS concluded.Footnote ⁹⁷

In the aftermath of the Hungarian crisis, securing asylum in Austria became even more challenging for East European refugees, particularly for Yugoslav citizens who fled across the border into Steiermark and Carinthia. In 1957, Fern der Heimat reported that a full one-third of Yugoslav applicants for asylum were rejected and deported.Footnote ⁹⁸ The grounds for rejection often seemed flimsy and inconsistent. Iskra, a Serbian newspaper in Munich, reported that the Legal Advisor to the Austrian delegate to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Vienna, Dr. Kadosa (himself a Hungarian refugee), was particularly arbitrary. He rejected one Yugoslav applicant for asylum on the grounds that “if all of the anti-Communists flee, who will remain behind in the country to fight the Communists?” Another refugee was reportedly turned back because he had children. Kadosa reasoned, “When a father flees one must send him back on humanitarian grounds, or there will be no one to support the family.” Many Yugoslav asylum-seekers were turned away because Austrian authorities insisted that they were “economic” and not “political” refugees, whereby the criteria for distinguishing between the two remained obscure.Footnote ⁹⁹

These tensions came to a head with a major scandal in the Wagna refugee camp in Styria in 1957–58. In the fall of 1957, two priests from the Serbian Orthodox church in Great Britain visited all the refugee camps in Austria that housed Yugoslav refugees. In a memorandum to the Austrian delegate to the UNHCR in Vienna, they reported that refugee women in the Wagna camp were frequently called to appear for “hearings” in the middle of the night with Austrian officials, noting that “the nature of these ‘hearings’ is quite obvious to everyone!” But no action was taken until over a year later, when Ifka Radic, a Yugoslav refugee, was refused asylum in the Wagna camp and sent back across the border. In an interview with a Yugoslav customs agent, she demanded to return to the barrack in Wagna where one Alfred Auer was working as a translator. It turns out that she had bribed Auer 1,800 schillings but was denied asylum anyway. When confronted, Auer confessed that he had taken money from refugees and had sexual relations with female asylum-seekers, but Auer insisted that he had not promised anything in exchange. “The women and girls made love to him out of sympathy, not in order to secure their right to Asylum,” his lawyer argued in his defense.Footnote ¹⁰⁰