How did World War II end in Austria?
Soviet troops crossed into Austria in late March 1945 and took Vienna after a week of street fighting that ended on 13 April. On 27 April a provisional government declared Austria independent again. In the west, American and French forces entered Tyrol and Vorarlberg at the end of April; Austrian resisters freed Innsbruck before the Americans arrived on 3 May, and the German armies in the west surrendered in the first days of May.1
The Red Army reaches Vienna
On 23 March 1945 Soviet troops crossed today's Austrian border at Klostermarienberg in Burgenland and soon reached Wiener Neustadt and Baden. On 2 April Vienna was declared a defended area, and within days the city was almost surrounded. The Wien Geschichte Wiki notes that Marshal Fyodor Tolbukhin's 3rd Ukrainian Front attacked it from three sides.2
The fighting in the city began on 6 April in the southern districts of Simmering and Favoriten and soon reached the Gürtel ring road. The defenders, Wehrmacht, SS, Volkssturm and teenagers of the Hitler Youth, fell back across the Danube Canal and blew its bridges behind them. Fires burned in every district, and ORF notes that flying sparks set St. Stephen's Cathedral alight. Soviet troops crossed the canal on 11 and 12 April, and on 13 April Tolbukhin declared the battle for Vienna over.3
The cost is uncertain. The ERINNERN:AT account puts the dead of that week, civilians and soldiers, at almost 40,000; the Wien Geschichte Wiki cites Soviet claims of 19,000 German soldiers killed and the postwar mayor Theodor Körner's report of some 5,000 bodies counted in the city.4
Resistance and terror in the last days
A group of officers around Major Carl Szokoll had tried to hand the city over without a fight, in what they called Operation Radetzky. They were betrayed, and on 9 April three of them, Karl Biedermann, Alfred Huth and Rudolf Raschke, were condemned by an SS court-martial and executed at Floridsdorf. The violence of the last weeks also fell on Jews still in the city: on 11 April an SS unit shot nine Jewish residents taken from a cellar in the Förstergasse, hours before the Red Army arrived.5
A republic among the ruins
Political life restarted almost at once. ORF recalls that the Social Democrats were refounded in the city hall on 14 April and the People's Party on 17 April. On 27 April a provisional government declared Austria's independence, the day now counted as the beginning of the Second Republic.6
The redoubt that was not there
In the west the Allies feared a National Redoubt, a last fortress in the Alps. Charles MacDonald, the US Army's official historian, writes that the Germans had no formal plans for one, and Horst Schreiber notes that Hitler gave the order to build an Alpine fortress only two days before his suicide. Eisenhower nonetheless directed one of his main drives into Austria to deny it.7
American troops entered Tyrol on 28 April and crossed the border at Scharnitz on 1 May, while French forces took Vorarlberg. Patton's Third Army reached the Inn at Braunau, Hitler's birthplace, and pushed on toward Linz and the Enns, where it waited for the Russians. The German surrender in Italy, effective on 2 May, also covered Tyrol and Vorarlberg.8
Innsbruck and Itter
Innsbruck was freed from within. Resistance groups led by Karl Gruber, the later foreign minister, working with three agents of the American Operation Greenup, seized barracks and the regional headquarters on 2 and 3 May. When the first American battalion drove into the city at 7.45 in the evening of 3 May, Gruber handed it over as a liberated city. The 103rd Infantry Division went on to the Brenner Pass and met American troops coming from Italy on 4 May.9
One of the strangest fights of the war came the next day in the lower Inn valley. At Castle Itter, a prison for prominent French captives run from Dachau, the guards had fled. Local resisters asked the Americans for help, and a small detachment with a tank joined German soldiers in defending the castle against an SS battle group. The German major Josef (Sepp) Gangl was killed in the fight before relief arrived.10
Mauthausen and the surrender
Farther east, columns of the Third Army reached the concentration camps around Mauthausen and Gusen, where US troops secured the main camp on 5 May. The German armies facing the Americans in the west surrendered in the first days of May, on 5 May according to the Tyrolean State Archive and with effect from noon on 6 May in Schreiber's account; the general surrender of Germany took effect on 8 May. Austria was free of Nazi rule, but from July 1945 it was divided into four Allied occupation zones, and the joint administration lasted until 1955.11
Notes
A number in the text points to a note; each note names the works that paragraph draws on, listed in full under Sources.
- Daniela Lackner and Antonia Winsauer, “Kriegsende und Befreiung in Wien”; Haus der Geschichte Österreich, “Zwischen den Zeiten”; Horst Schreiber, “Das Kriegsende in Tirol”. ↩
- Daniela Lackner and Antonia Winsauer, “Kriegsende und Befreiung in Wien”; Wien Geschichte Wiki, “Kriegsjahre 1944-1945”. ↩
- Daniela Lackner and Antonia Winsauer, “Kriegsende und Befreiung in Wien”; ORF Wien, “80 Jahre Befreiung und Kriegsende in Wien”; Wien Geschichte Wiki, “Kriegsjahre 1944-1945”. ↩
- Daniela Lackner and Antonia Winsauer, “Kriegsende und Befreiung in Wien”; Wien Geschichte Wiki, “Kriegsjahre 1944-1945”. ↩
- Daniela Lackner and Antonia Winsauer, “Kriegsende und Befreiung in Wien”; Wien Geschichte Wiki, “Kriegsjahre 1944-1945”. ↩
- ORF Wien, “80 Jahre Befreiung und Kriegsende in Wien”; Haus der Geschichte Österreich, “Zwischen den Zeiten”. ↩
- Charles B. MacDonald, The Last Offensive; Horst Schreiber, “Das Kriegsende in Tirol”. ↩
- Charles B. MacDonald, The Last Offensive; Horst Schreiber, “Das Kriegsende in Tirol”; Wilfried Beimrohr, “Das Kriegsende 1945 in Tirol”. ↩
- Horst Schreiber, “Das Kriegsende in Tirol”; Charles B. MacDonald, The Last Offensive. ↩
- Wilfried Beimrohr, “Das Kriegsende 1945 in Tirol”; Charles B. MacDonald, The Last Offensive. ↩
- Charles B. MacDonald, The Last Offensive; United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Mauthausen”; Wilfried Beimrohr, “Das Kriegsende 1945 in Tirol”; Horst Schreiber, “Das Kriegsende in Tirol”; Haus der Geschichte Österreich, “Zwischen den Zeiten”. ↩
Sources
- Daniela Lackner and Antonia Winsauer, ERINNERN:AT, “Kriegsende und Befreiung in Wien” (in German)
- Haus der Geschichte Österreich, “Zwischen den Zeiten: 1945” (in German)
- Horst Schreiber, ERINNERN:AT Tirol, “Das Kriegsende in Tirol: die Befreiung Innsbrucks” (in German)
- Wien Geschichte Wiki, City of Vienna, “Kriegsjahre 1944-1945” (in German)
- ORF Wien (2025), “80 Jahre Befreiung und Kriegsende in Wien” (in German)
- Charles B. MacDonald, The Last Offensive, United States Army in World War II, US Army Center of Military History (1973), “Chapter XIX: Goetterdaemmerung”, via HyperWar
- Wilfried Beimrohr, Tiroler Landesarchiv (2005), “Das Kriegsende 1945 in Tirol” (in German)
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Mauthausen”
