Weltkrieg, Zweiter#

World War II, 1939-1945. General development: From the early 1930s Germany, Italy and Japan increasingly pursued more aggressive policies with the aim of gaining markets, sources of raw materials and settlement areas. Japan occupied Manchuria in 1931, the Japanese-Chinese war officially broke out in 1937, Italy conquered Ethiopia in 1935/36 and occupied Albania in April 1939, Germany under A. Hitler freed itself from the restrictions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles (Saarland plebiscite in 1935, re-militarisation of the Rhineland 1936, introduction of general compulsory military service in 1935/36) and encroached on neighbouring countries in 1938 (Austrian Anschluss and annexation of Sudetenland in 1938, occupation of what is today the Czech Republic and Memelland/Klaipeda in 1939). Despite the British government´s guarantee of Polish national independence of March 31, 1939 and a French-Polish military alliance, Germany began the war against Poland on September 1, 1939, after having concluded a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union (August 23, 1939), which envisaged the partition of Poland and the Baltic states according to spheres of interest. Thereupon Great Britain and France declared war against Germany on September 3, 1939.

The Polish troops were defeated quite quickly (the battle over Warsaw ended on September 27, the last Polish units capitulated on October 6), the Soviet Union entered the war on September 17, occupied parts of Poland, deployed troops in the Baltic states and waged war on Finland over the Karelian Isthmus in the winter of 1939/40. Poland fell victim to a German-Soviet policy of exploitation and deportation.

The Western Powers (French troops and British Expeditionary Forces) remained passive behind the Maginot line in 1939/40, although preparing the occupation of bases in Norway. Germany occupied Denmark on April 9, 1940, launched an attack on Norway and had occupied it by June 10. On May 10, 1940 Germany started the offensive in the west, with the invasion of the Netherlands (capitulation on May 14), Luxembourg and Belgium (capitulation on May 28), broke through the Maginot line in the Ardennes and severed the British troops from the French; 340,000 British, Belgian and French soldiers escaped to Great Britain. By way of the armistice of Compiègne of June 22, 1940 three-fifths of France became the German-occupied zone, while a dependent French government was established at Vichy and C. de Gaulle acted as spokesman of the Free French in exile. Italy had entered into war on the side of Germany in June 1940 and the Soviet Union annexed the Baltic states and parts of Romania (Moldavian S.S.R.).

Hitler was at the peak of his power in the second half of the year 1940. Great Britain, where W. Churchill became prime minister on May 10, 1940, rejected peace offers; the Germans did not dare to land in Britain, but instead intensified submarine warfare and started air raids.

Germany, Italy and Japan concluded a pact of mutual support in the event of an attack by the USA on September 27, 1940 and recognised their spheres of interests (Hungary, Slovakia and Romania joined in November 1940, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia in March 1941). The USA increased their support for Great Britain from the autumn of 1940, while Germany started to prepare an attack on the Soviet Union. At the beginning, however, these preparations were slowed down by the defeats of the Italians in the Mediterranean. Italy had attacked Egypt from Libya in September and Greece on October 28, 1940, but it lost part of its fleet and suffered severe defeats. The Italians capitulated in Ethiopia in May 1941, from February 1941 German troops had to support them in Libya. After a coup d´etat in Belgrade, Germany declared war against Yugoslavia and Greece on April 6, 1941. Yugoslavia fell to Germany on April 17, Greece with its islands on May 11 (Crete May 20-31). Most of Greece was put under Italian military administration, Serbia fell subject to German administration, Croatia became a satellite state (nationalist Usta<!SZ<!-hatschek>se under A. Pavelić), the remaining parts divided among Germany, Italy and Bulgaria.

The German Wehrmacht (together with Romanian, Hungarian, Italian and Finnish allies) invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, to put the bulk of the Soviet troops (4.7 million soldiers) out of action in what was called a blitz attack. Despite the rapid advance towards Leningrad (besieged until 1944) and Moscow and 1.5 million Soviets taken prisoner, no decisive victory was achieved. The policy of violence in the occupied areas (Commissar Decree: on the instruction of Hitler the German High Command issued an order to shoot all Soviet commissars who had been taken prisoner; this was mostly carried out by task forces) led to resistance and partisan activity; favoured by the mild winter, the Red Army launched a highly successful counteroffensive on December 5, 1941.

The war became a world war in late autumn 1941, when the Japanese attacked the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 and Germany and Italy declared war against the USA on December 11, 1941. Great Britain was able to stock up its munitions under the USA Lend-Lease act of March 11, 1941; on August 14, 1941 F. D. Roosevelt and W. Churchill proclaimed the Atlantic Charter, aiming at the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny. Great Britain and the Soviet Union occupied Iran on August 25, 1941 and signed an Anglo-Soviet agreement which pledged the signatories to assist one another. After the USA entered the war, common strategies were worked out with Great Britain, Germany remaining the main enemy.

In 1942, the Soviet Union was most affected by the burden of war. Although, by that time, the power of the German army was limited, Germany launched a large-scale offensive, conquering Sebastopol on July 2, and Rostov on July 23, and started the battle of Stalingrad in late August. In the course of the Russian counteroffensive started on November 19/20, the Sixth German Army was encircled and had to surrender between January 31 and February 3, 1943. Retreat from the Caucasus and stabilising the front proved very difficult. In July 1943 the Red Army eventually started to take the initiative on the eastern front.

German troops advanced in northern Africa as far as Al-Alamein near Cairo in the summer of 1942, British troops drove the Germans back to Tunis from October 1942 to February 1943, fighting in northern Africa ended on May 13, 1943. Meanwhile the Allies had occupied Morocco and Algeria, the Germans southern France. The Allied conquered Sicily from July 10 to August 17, 1943, Mussolini was overthrown on July 25, the Allies landed in Italy on September 3, the Italian government capitulated on September 8 and subsequently declared war against Germany on October 13. This provided the Allies with airports and enabled them to attack targets in Austria from the air.

German submarine warfare was successful until well into the summer of 1942, when the defensive measures taken by the Allies (control of the high seas from the air, radar equipment) cost the Germans heavy losses, at the same time facilitating supplies to Great Britain and the merging of large troops. From 1942 the Allies increased the number and volume of bomb attacks launched from England on targets in northern Germany, day raids by the Americans began in 1943, Wiener Neustadt was the first Austrian town to be attacked by bombs on August 13, 1943, and other towns followed; the most important German industrial centres were systematically destroyed.

The Red Army accelerated its advance in 1944, forcing Romania (September 12, 1944), Finland (September 19, 1944) and Bulgaria (October 28, 1944) to conclude cease-fire agreements, German troops had to evacuate Greece, from 1943 increasingly larger parts of Yugoslavia came under the control of Tito's partisans, who took Belgrade on October 20, 1944. By the end of 1944 Soviet troops had enclosed Budapest and conquered East Prussia.

The Allies landed in Normandy on June 6, 1944, established a bridgehead and set about their advance in August 1944. They occupied Paris on August 25, Brussels on September 3, Aix-la-Chapelle on October 21. A second invasion army advanced from southern France to the Rhine. The German Ardennes offensive of December 16-24, 1944 failed.

In Germany an attempt by a military resistance group to assassinate Hitler failed on July 20, 1944; Hitler subjected the armed forces completely to Nazi control and called up the Volkssturm (People's Army) in September 1944; defensive structures were built at the south-eastern border. Armament factories and railway junctions in Germany and Austria were systematically bombed. The war conferences of the Allies in Moscow (October 19-30, 1943), Tehran (November 28-December 1, 1943), Quebec (September 11-16, 1944) and Yalta (February 4-11, 1945) already dealt with the post-war order, while Germany was invaded by the Red Army from the east and the Allies from the west from mid-January. At Torgau an der Elbe American and Soviet troops first met on April 25, 1945, Berlin, where Hitler had committed suicide on April 30, capitulated on May 2. The German Wehrmacht surrendered to the Western Powers in Reims on May 7 and to the Soviet Union in Berlin-Karlshorst on May 9.

In the Pacific, World War II was ended after the dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, which resulted in Japan's capitulation on September 2, 1945.

In World War II, 27 million soldiers died and 25 million civilians were killed (among them 6 million Jews), 3 million people remained missing. The Soviet Union lost 20 million people, Germany 4.8 million (another 2.5 million fled, were expelled or deported immediately after the war).

The situation of Austria: After the Anschluss to the German Reich on March 13, 1938, Austria no longer existed as a state in its own right. Almost 66,000 members of the Austrian Armed Forces (Bundesheer) were sworn in and taken over by the German Wehrmacht. Compulsory military service of a duration of two years had been introduced in Germany in 1936 and, after the Anschluss, also applied to Austrians in the two new Defence Districts, Wehrkreis XVII (Vienna) and Wehrkreis XVIII (Salzburg); The leaders of the Wehrmacht tried to avoid maintaining units that consisted exclusively of Austrians and sought to form army divisions and air force units with Germans from the Reich, a task which was almost fully realised in the following years. However, there were still a number of units with a high percentage of Austrians. The new divisions, recruited in 1938, were already used in the campaigns against Poland, Norway and France: 44th and 45th  Infantry Divisions, 2nd and 3rd Mountain Infantry Divisions (Gebirgsjaegerdivision), 4th  Tank Division (Panzer Division), 4th  Light Tank Division (Leichte Panzer Division, name changed into 9th  Panzer Division from late 1939). Altogether around 30 large army units were recruited on Austrian territory during the war, some of which consisted largely of Austrians. The 2nd Panzer Division, which was transferred to Austria at the time of the Anschluss, counted many Austrians among its members. The same holds true for air force units and the navy as well as for the Waffen-SS (Armed SS), which recruited tens of thousands of Austrians. A total of around 1.25 million Austrians (including women as "Wehrmacht helpers") were engaged in military service during World War II (along with the Wehrmacht, the Volkssturm/People's Army, the Reichsarbeitsdienst/State Labour Service, the "Todt Organisation" and others). Around 15,000 Austrians who had fled and wanted to contribute to the liberation of their country, fought on the side of the Allies.

Soon after the Anschluss, the Austrian economy was largely integrated in the development of the arms industry of the German Reich. By the summer of 1939, more than 300,000 unemployed had been taken on by the German industry, which was beset by a shortage of labour. Armament factories received large orders (Steyr-Daimler-Puch, Boehler), new factories had been established until 1942, such as the "Hermann-Goering-Werke" in Linz (steel), the Nibelungenwerke in Sankt Valentin (tanks), the Ostmark engine works (aircraft engines) in Wiener Neudorf and the Messerschmittwerke (bombers) in Wiener Neustadt, the Heinkelwerk (bombers) in Schwechat. From then on, demand for workers became too great to be satisfied by people from inside Austria, so an increasing number of foreign workers from western Europe were brought in as well as forced labour convicts from eastern Europe and eventually also tens of thousands of concentration camp detainees from Mauthausen, who, forced to work under inhuman conditions, had to build bunkers and underground armament factories and produce arms and armaments. Tens of thousands died of exhaustion or were deemed "unable to work" and killed in Mauthausen. Around 500,000 people were working for the arms industry on Austrian territory at the beginning of 1945.

Many factories had already been located by the Allies due to the activities of agents and air reconnaissance at the beginning of 1943. In order to destroy them the Allies extended their air raids to Austria, which was quite wrongly referred to as the "air-raid shelter of the Reich", with an attack on Wiener Neustadt by the 9th US air fleet (from northern Africa) on August 13, 1943. The 15th US air fleet and the British 205th bomber group launched increasingly heavy attacks from southern Italy (Foggia) on Austrian targets from November 1943. Until May 1944 the main targets of those attacks were the aircraft factories, the ball-bearing factories (Steyr) from February 1944 and Greater Vienna, with its six refineries and fuel tanks, from April. The Allies started heavy attacks on transport systems from January 1945 to stop supplies and the transfer of troops to the front, which was steadily moving towards the borders of the Reich. Low-level attacks caused serious damage to bridges and railway systems and subjected the civilian population to increasing danger. The German air defence (around 150 bombers were deployed in Austria until the summer of 1944) and the anti-air units (the 24th  anti-air division in Vienna had more than 432 heavy anti-air guns in the autumn of 1944) did not succeed in preventing the attacks by the US forces with their up to 800 four-engine bombers. The air raids cost more than 20,000 lives (at least 8,769 dead were counted in Vienna alone after the 52 air raids). Public supply and transport systems and industrial sites were severely damaged, 75,959 homes destroyed and another 101,096 damaged.

From the autumn of 1944 it was foreseeable that the Red Army would soon reach the border of the Reich from Hungary. The "South Eastern Wall", leading along the present-day border between Austria and Hungary, was reinforced in October 1944; units of the Wehrmacht together with the Volkssturm, which was recruited at the same time from all men fit to fight between 16 and 60 years of age, were mobilised to defend the wall. However, since it had not been completed and not enough soldiers were available, this barrier was taken over by units of the 3rd Ukrainian Army Front (Marshall F. I. Tolbuchin) within a very short period of time after the last failure of the German offensive in Hungary (March 6-16, 1945). The first units of the Red Army crossed the border at Guens/Koeszeg on March 29, 1945. The remains of the 6th German (SS) Panzer Army were driven back to the area south of Vienna within a few days, while the 6th German Army was trying to set up a new front in eastern Styria. Vienna was enclosed on the west by the 6th Soviet Tank Army, who, together with units of the 2nd Ukrainian Army Front (Marshall R. I. Malinovskij), advancing towards Vienna from the Marchfeld Plain, tried to encircle Vienna, but failed. A resistance group tried to prevent or shorten the battle over Vienna by means of a military resistance action, which remained unsuccessful. The fighting lasted from April 6-13, 1945 and caused heavy losses on both sides as well as among civilians, many buildings were destroyed (St. Stephen´s Cathedral severely damaged by fire). While the advance of the Red Army from the Vienna Woods south of Vienna was quite slow, units of the 4th  Guard Army had advanced into the region of Sankt Poelten and taken defensive positions by April 15. In the Weinviertel Region fights involving the 8th German Army and units of the 2nd Ukrainian Army Front continued until the German capitulation.

After a rapid advance through southern Germany the 7th US Army reached the Tirolean border in the Ausserfern region on April 28, 1945. Encountering only slight resistance by the Germans (remains of the Army Group/Heeresgruppe G) the US troops took Innsbruck on May 3, which had been liberated by a resistance group, and occupied all of Tirol within four days. Vorarlberg was occupied by troops of the French 1st Army from April 30, 1945, again with the Germans (Army High Command 24) offering little resistance. Apart from a few small encounters, the city of Salzburg surrendered to the US troops without fighting on May 3, 1945. Units of the 3rd US Army had occupied almost all of Upper Austria by May 6, 1945, after some heavy fighting with relatively few losses on the American side. Carinthia was occupied by British troops advancing from Venetia and by Yugoslav units invading from Slovenia only on May 8, 1945.

The establishment of the Renner Provisional Government in Vienna on April 27, 1945, which could not extend its competence to all of Austria until October 20, represented the first step on the road to the reestablishment of Austrian sovereignty.

Literature#