The Austrian Section of Britain´s Wartime Secret Service SOE

The proposed research project investigates the activities of the British secret service "Special Operations Executive" between 1940 and 1945 with respect to what today is Austria. This historical political study uses a qualitative approach and aims to systematically analyse the attempts by a secret service of one of the Western Allies to attack NS-Germany in one of its core areas, former Austria, by means of clandestine gathering of intelligence, subversion, sabotage and by supporting resistance movements. The focus of research is on the "Austrian Section" of SOE. Research will concentrate on the dimensions of the origins and development as an institution, the production of "intelligence", political goals, military strategies, its missions and its personnel. This is to explore the co-operation of an institution of British warfare with various factions of persons exiled for political reasons, Jewish refugees, deserters and prisoners of war from the German Army as well as opponents of the Nazi regime in Austria. In addition to presenting the course of events and the reconstruction of biographies of involved persons the project aims to answer the question of the "Austrian Section`s" role in the political "birth" of Austria as a democratic state and a nation. Furthermore, the proposed project will examine and analyse the integration of Austrian and German SOE members into the respective post-war societies against the backdrop of political questions relating to politics of the past and politics of memory. The project will explore the cultural, communicative and social memory of a deviant group. Apart from a secondary analysis of the existing literature, the proposed project will examine the questions outlined above at three levels of primary sources: Still existing written material from the corpus of the institutional actors involved (SOE, other British institutions, exile and resistance organisations, NS institutions and the Republic of Austria), analysis of person-related and personal written sources (personnel files, agents` reports, reports in the media, correspondence, bequests) and interview analysis (agents, British SOE members, relatives).

In January 1941, British secret service officer Evelyn Stamper was the first to formulate the british war strategy to separate Austria from the German Empire and re-establish Austria as a national unit. Stamper was the officer responsible for Austria in the German and Austrian Section of Special Operations Executive (SOE), the secret british organisation for subversive warfare. At that time, this goal was anything but self-evident. SOE began a series of political conflicts with the British Foreign Office on the basis of this sensitive issue. Until now studies of the Moscow Declaration (Austria`s `magna carta`) have left this field largely unnoticed. The self-declared task of SOE`s Austrian Section was to discover and support anti-German and patriotic resistance in the Danube and Alpine regions of the German Reich. Apart from the basic strategic leanings toward destroying Germany`s territorial hegemony in Europe, Stamper`s beliefs were based on distorted information from Austria and, furthermore, were characterized by her own ideological bias and a specific interpretation of the `Anschluss` in March 1938 as a german takeover solely by military force. Stamper who left Vienna some months after the `Anschluss` uncritically extrapolited this perception for the years to come although - contrary to expectations - SOE`s research into potential resistance in Austria yielded decidedly meagre results until 1943. In spring 1943, the Foreign Office acted in accordance with SOE`s policies regarding Austria not because of any increase of resistance in Austria but instead because it was, for strategic purposes, determined to see Austria re-established despite previous failures. The political decision to re-establish Austria was finally made on the basis of scientific studies on the economic viability of an independent Austrain state. What was lacking in establishing a permanent anti- German state in Central Europe with a population whose overwhelming majority considered itself German, was an Austrian ideology which would support the state. The purpose of the Moscow Declaration was not only to initiate short-term resistance on the scale of psychological warfare, but also, at the same time, to offer a pivotal point for a long term Austrian nationalism. Neither the political exiles nor NS opposition groups in Austria were in the position to formulate a joint national political plan of action. SOE continually failed to unite the exiled groups up until 1943. Owing to the serious misgivings that national resistance in Austria might never come about, the Moscow Declaration contained the additional proposal allowing Austria to declare itself a victim of the Germans. As is well known, this option to be victims became integrated into the foundation of the state`s identity. With some support from the exile groups, SOE sent a total of 77 agents on missions to Austria and South Tyrol. At least 13 of them were either killed by Nazi personnel while carrying out their duties or taken into custody and then murdered by the Gestapo. The fate of seven persons has remained unexplained. Serious conflicts with the Slovenian partisan leadership arose in 1944 around SOE`s Mission `Clowder` to penetrate Austria from partisan controlled territory. The SOE had heavily equipped the Slovenian partisan groups in the borderlands of Carinthia and Slovenia, but were still prevented from making advances deeper into Austria. There was a covert race to penetrate Austria that took place between SOE on the one side and the KPÖ and the Comintern on the other side. Contrary to the Clowder Mission the communist project was seriously backed by the Partisan leadership. In the end, SOE officer Alfgar Hesketh-Ptrichard was murdered in the Carinthian Sau Alps by command of the Communist Party of Slovenia`s leadership. This occurred against the backdrop of an ongoing covert battle between Western Allies and the Soviets over influence in Central Europe, and not localised conflicts such as the border question. A second infiltration project was mapped out in Istanbul by the famous British journalist G.E.R. Gedye and Stefan Wirlandner, who later became the deputy director of the Austrian National Bank. This project failed because it was undermined by the Gestapo from the beginning. The research explored also some more successful SOE operations into Austria, f.e. operation `Ebensburg` into the Salzkammergut or operation `Electra` in Vienna. In both cases SOE agents achieved to organise some local resistance. In studies concerning the reintegration of Austrian SOE agents and the formation of memory of exile resistance, the research continued up to the present. Various familial recollections were gathered, in which the responses of family members ranged from complete ignorance to heroic portraits. In many cases, however, the public reception of SOE members was, and partly still is, characterized by the use of negative labels such as agent, deserter or traitor. Finally, the work of the SOE and the members themselves, are either excluded from or veiled in the annals of cultural memory.