"…Moscow deployed NKVD (Soviet secret police) teams of professional looters to extract reparations through requisitions: the NKVD teams seized industrial plants and production installations while confiscating goods in the quantity of 31,200 freight cars. In June 1946, 30 percent of the national budget went into covering the occupation costs. Historian Walter Iber estimated that in total Austria paid the Soviet Union 36.8 billion Schillings, or two percent of the accumulated GDP, from 1946 to 1955.
The fact that Moscow did not plan or try to impose a communist dictatorship in Austria meant that the scale of political violence experienced by Austrians was more limited than in other countries occupied by the Red Army. According to the research of Harold Knoll and Barbara Stelzl-Marx, in 1945, or the initial eight months of occupation, Soviet military tribunals arrested around 800 Austrian civilians. For 400 of them, the charges are known: 191 were charged with belonging to the Nazi Werewolf resistance group, 61 with espionage, 55 of maltreatment of Soviet POWs and slave laborers, 31 of weapons possession, 22 of war crimes, 24 with violent acts, 11 for selling bad alcohol to Soviet troops, four with criminal activities, and one for being a former Soviet citizen. By 1955, when the Red Army pulled out of the country, the Soviets had arrested 2,400 Austrians, 1,250 of whom were prosecuted for everything from war crimes to everyday criminal activity. Some 150 were executed, while others received lengthy prison terms.
By the standards of the Soviet justice system, and given the significant Austrian contribution to Nazi war crimes, the Soviet repressive apparatus in the first months of occupation acted with considerable restraint. This restraint can be partly explained by the fact that Moscow did not fully control Austria and partly because Austria was far from the Soviet Union's frontiers. Consequently, it did not rank high on Moscow's list of geopolitical priorities. It was far more important for the Kremlin to have a friendly and preferably communist regime in a neighboring country, such as Romania or Poland, whose adjoining territory made it a potential military threat to the Soviet Union. In these countries, the Soviet terror was worse…"
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Armand
takes a look at a D-Day: German anti-aircraft vehicle platoon.
