Austrian hiking, sports and social club

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Österreichischer Wander-, Sport- und Geselligkeitsverein ( OeWSGV , also: ÖWSGV ) was a stay-behind organization in Austria in the 1950s and 1960s. It was originally founded by the Austrian Federation of Trade Unions (ÖGB) to combat attempts at communist coup, later it was equipped and financed by the CIA .

prehistory

After the end of the Second World War, Austria was divided into four allied occupation zones. Shortly after the end of the war there was rivalry between the Western Allies (USA, Great Britain and France) and the Soviet Union over the future of the newly founded Republic of Austria. After the KPÖ had only received 5.5% of the vote in the National Council election in November 1945 , fears that Austria could become a communist-dominated country through democratic means seemed to be allayed. Due to the tense economic situation, however, there was still a risk of strikes and demonstrations that could lead to a communist coup.

Under these circumstances, a secret agreement was reached in 1947 between the ÖGB President Johann Böhm and the Viennese politician Franz Olah to form a force of reliably anti-communist-minded trade unionists for this case. According to Olah's later statements, this measure was tacitly accepted by the leadership of the SPÖ and the US High Commissioner and head of the United States Forces in Austria Lieutenant General Geoffrey Keyes .

October strikes 1950

In 1949 Franz Olah had become the first secretary of the construction and woodworkers union, whose members were known as the most powerful part of the ÖGB. When the following year in October 1950 a wave of strikes against the fourth wage-price agreement, instrumentalized by the Austrian communists, broke out, which posed a serious threat to the government led by ÖVP Chancellor Leopold Figl , so were the members of the Bau- und Timber trade union under Olah and not the police, who in Vienna sometimes violently fought this strike down. It was only years later that it became known that the Soviet occupying power under High Commissioner Vladimir Petrovich Sviridov had largely refused to support the strikers out of geopolitical interests.

In the eyes of the USA, however, the socialist Olah has since been considered the most reliable anti-communist in Austria, who was able to beat down a demonstration with his trade unionists, while the police under SPÖ Interior Minister Oskar Helmer had remained largely inactive out of fear and political consideration for the Soviet occupying power.

expansion

From 1951 onwards, the organization was actually built up in order to have a troop always ready to deal with possible attempts at communist overthrow. As camouflage was Austrian hiking, sports and socializing club founded, whose members are mainly of young cadres of workers recruited. The members received military training from older soldiers in training camps and thus trained to become experts in shooting, blasting and hand-to-hand combat. Weapons from former Wehrmacht stocks were bought through middlemen and the organization was equipped with cars that were rare at the time in Vienna and the federal states. In Golling near Salzburg, at that time in the area of ​​the American occupation zone, a piece of land was purchased on which a 200-man special force was trained for mountain and winter operations. Overall, the OeWSGV was able to fall back on around 2,700 people in its largest expansion phase.

To what extent this paramilitary stay-behind organization was set up on the initiative or with the tolerance of the US occupation authorities is still unclear. However, the OeWSGV received financial support and material from the CIA, including 8 to 10 million schillings and modern radios. In 1952, two front companies were founded for the "Olah Special Project", the Atlanta trading company and the Omnia Warenhandels AG. From now on these served to provide financial support to the OeWSGV. In addition, the organization was able to fall back on the radio infrastructure of the American occupation authorities in an emergency, such as the Rot-Weiß-Rot transmitters in Vienna, Linz and Salzburg.

In 1953, the Austrian State Police (StaPo) under Section Head Peterlunger first became aware of these activities when  the police seized secret transmission systems in the small Styrian town of Trofaiach - in the British occupation zone. A letter found found that these are owned by the Bau- und Holz trade union. Peterlunger then contacted Franz Olah, whom he had valued since the October strike in 1950 and with whom he was on friendly terms. After a discussion, the detainees were released and the transmitters returned without any information being made public.

In 1955, the Austrian State Treaty was concluded , as a result of which the four occupying powers withdrew and the Republic of Austria achieved its complete sovereignty under the condition of perpetual neutrality . With the withdrawal of the troops of the Soviet Army , the immediate danger of a Communist takeover in Austria was largely averted. Nevertheless, the CIA did not want to do without the secret structures that had been created. In previous years, similar associations had been formed in other Western European countries to function as stay-behind organizations in the event of a Soviet attack. Although Austria was neutral, the OeWSGV was loosely integrated into the structure of the other Western European stay-behind organizations.

In the event of a Soviet attack disregarding Austrian neutrality, the organization's task would have been to set up partisan units to carry out sabotage actions behind the front. This was intended to slow down an advance by the Warsaw Pact states as much as possible until NATO troops could take effective countermeasures.

In the eyes of NATO, this decision was confirmed by the Hungarian uprising that broke out the following year and was crushed in November 1956 by an invasion of Soviet troops. More than 200,000 refugees then streamed into Austria, although the secret services suspected that some of them might include smuggled communist agents.

resolution

In 1959, Franz Olah replaced Johann Böhm as President of the Austrian Federation of Trade Unions and thus rose further in Austria's official power structure. In 1963 he finally became Minister of the Interior in the government of ÖVP Federal Chancellor Alfons Gorbach . He was now subject to 25,000 police and gendarmerie executives, as well as the domestic secret service of the Ministry of the Interior, the StaPo. At the same time, after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, there was an international détente between the two power blocs in the Cold War. In addition, at that time the Austrian democratic system was so well established that a communist takeover of power was no longer seen as a realistic scenario. The OeWSGV's stay-behind organization had thus become more or less obsolete. Olah therefore gradually dissolved the organization and had all documents and the entire bookkeeping destroyed.

Exposure

When it became known in 1964 that Franz Olah had financially supported the FPÖ with funds from the union , he fell out of favor in his own party and had to resign as Minister of the Interior on September 21, 1964. His successor in the Klaus I cabinet was his party colleague Hans Coppel . Olah was then expelled from the SPÖ and entered the National Council election in 1966 with his own splinter party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DFP). Due to its popularity among parts of the workforce, it achieved a little more than 3% of the votes, which were mainly at the expense of the SPÖ, so that the ÖVP won a narrow absolute majority for the first time and was thus able to form a single government under Josef Klaus .

In view of the hostility of his former party friends, another scandal from Olah's time as ÖGB president came to the public. In 1959 he had illegally used union funds as financial start-up aid for the newly founded Kronen Zeitung . In 1969 he was tried in court for unauthorized use of union funds. In the course of this process, details of the stay-behind organization of the OeWSGV came to the public for the first time. Olah defended his "special project" as a patriotic measure in the fight against communism, which should be assessed in the context of the circumstances at the time. In order to reject the accusation that he had built up his own private army, he named prominent confidants, but only those who had already died in 1969, including former Federal President Adolf Schärf , former Interior Minister Oskar Helmer and former ÖGB President Johann Böhm. However, investigations brought other names in connection with the project, including the trade unionist Karl Flöttl , the Viennese SPÖ councilor Hans Bock and the then head of the Chamber of Labor Franz Horr . These in turn named other names. Heinrich Daurer is said to have been responsible for weapons training and Walter Jeschko for radio training. The intermediary for the financing was the American union official Wesley Cook.

At the end of the trial, Franz Olah was sentenced to one year in prison. He then withdrew completely from Austrian politics. In this affair, however, the allegations about the organization were in the background, while both within Austria and internationally the accusations of unauthorized use of union funds preoccupied the public much more. It was not until many years later, after the end of the Cold War, in 1990 that the international scope of these circumstances appeared in a new light.

Stay-behind organizations in Western Europe

It was only after the fall of the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall that the international context of the OeWSGV became known. According to investigations by the Italian judge Felice Casson , the then Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti publicly admitted the existence of a stay-behind organization in Italy called Gladio in 1990 . As a result, it turned out that similar organizations existed in many Western European countries. It became public that a secret paramilitary organization called P-26 also existed in Switzerland, to whose political model the Republic of Austria had orientated itself since 1955 .

In 1991 the Green MP Peter Pilz made a parliamentary question about "activities of the Gladio secret service, or another intelligence service close to NATO, on Austrian territory". Both the then Defense Minister Werner Fasslabend and Interior Minister Franz Löschnak denied the existence of a stay-behind organization in Austria, or said they had no knowledge of whether one had ever existed. In 1995 the aged Franz Olah published his memoirs under the title “The Memories”, in which he disclosed further details for the first time since the 1960s.

In 1996, under the Freedom of Information Act, old intelligence documents were published in the USA, which were handed over to the Austrian authorities and later also to the media by the US Ambassador to Austria, Swanee Hunt. It became known that the USA had set up over 100 secret weapons depots in Austria during the occupation, which had remained undiscovered for decades. These were partly in impassable or mountainous terrain. These weapons were subsequently tracked down by the Austrian authorities according to US documents and taken into custody. However, it could not be determined from the published documents whether these weapons were intended for American agents or for arming a stay-behind organization . The Austrian federal government then commissioned the historian Oliver Rathkolb from the University of Vienna to request the publication of further documents in the USA. However, the competent authorities there and the CIA replied that there were no other documents in addition to the files on the weapons depots in the archives.

As a result, Austria also remembered another historical event. In 1965, Austrian gendarmes discovered an arms depot in a mine near Windisch Bleiberg in Carinthia, which at the time forced the British authorities to produce a list of 33 additional arms depots. This confirmed that at that time not only the CIA or its predecessor organization, the OSS , but also the British MI6 and its predecessor organization, the Special Operations Executive , had set up weapons storage facilities in Austria.

By putting together further pieces of information, the channels of the cash flows at that time could be reconstructed. In addition to the then station chief John (Jack) H. Richardson, these contacts ran mainly through American trade unionists. Wesley Cook had direct contact with Olah, who from 1949 worked as a representative of the American Federation of Labor for the Economic Cooperation Administration in Vienna for three years as part of the Marshall Plan . During this time, a friendship began between Olah and Cook, which lasted even after his return to the USA. These funds were transferred from the USA to Austria by Jay Lovestone and Irving Brown, also high-ranking US trade union officials who worked through the secret Office of Policy Coordination , which came under the CIA in 1952.

The son of John H. Richardson also published a book about his father's agent activities in 2005, in which there are more details. However, this has not yet been evaluated by Austrian historians.

particularities

The stay-behind organization, which was set up in Austria with the help of the US secret services, was one of the first organizations of its kind in Europe. The initiative came from anti-communist trade unionists in Austria and the project was only supported by the USA after the 1950 October strike in order to build up a power base against Soviet influence. However, while socialists and trade unionists were almost exclusively represented in the OeWSGV, the Western European stay-behind organizations in other European countries mainly relied on conservative, nationalist and right-wing extremist circles.

literature

  • Oliver Rathkolb : Washington calls Vienna - US great power politics and Austria 1953–1963, with digressions on CIA weapons stores, NATO connection, neutrality debate. Böhlau Verlag, Vienna 1997, ISBN 3-205-98197-9 .
  • John H. Richardson (Jr.): My Father the Spy: An Investigative Memoir. HarperCollins, 2005, ISBN 0-06-051035-8 .
  • Franz Olah : The memories. Amalthea Verlag, 1995, ISBN 3-85002-365-6 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Barbara Coudenhove-Kalergi : Olah Trial: The Last Witnesses . In: Arbeiter-Zeitung . Vienna March 4, 1969, p. 4 ( berufer-zeitung.at - the open online archive - digitized).
  2. ^ A b Erwin A. Schmidl: Austria in the early Cold War 1945–1958: Spies, partisans, war plans. Böhlau Verlag, Vienna 2000, ISBN 9783205992165 , p. 111.
  3. ↑ Günter Traxler: When he spoke of power, tears came to him . In: Arbeiter-Zeitung . Vienna February 1, 1969, p. 3 ( berufer-zeitung.at - the open online archive - digitized).
  4. ↑ Barbara Coudenhove-Kalergi: Falk's statement is shaken . In: Arbeiter-Zeitung . Vienna February 26, 1969, p. 4 ( berufer-zeitung.at - the open online archive - digitized).
  5. ^ Der Spiegel: ÖWSGV. (Issue 8/1969)
  6. ^ Günter Traxler: Loans for Olah companies - others guaranteed . In: Arbeiter-Zeitung . Vienna February 7, 1969, p. 3 ( berufer-zeitung.at - the open online archive - digitized).
  7. ↑ Der Spiegel: Huge ammunition box. (Issue 1/1996)
  8. ↑ Gerald Stourzh: About Unity and Freedom: State Treaty, Neutrality and the End of the East-West Occupation of Austria 1945–1955. Böhlau Verlag, Vienna 1998, ISBN 3-205-98383-1 .
  9. ^ Günter Bischof, Anton Pelinka, Dieter Stiefel: The Marshall Plan in Austria. Transaction Publishers, 2000, ISBN 9780765806796 , p. 197.