Spies: A Batch from the Journal of Cold War Studies (MIT Press Batches) by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780262757768
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 2014-05-18T16:00:00+00:00

Conclusions

During the ten years of postwar occupation, Austria and especially Vienna became an arena for every major intelligence service. Soviet forces knew full well that Western intelligence services were trying to hire Austrian informers to spy on Soviet troop deployments in Austria and Eastern Europe and to track Soviet economic exploitation of “German assets” in eastern Austria. Some Austrians spied for the West to gain compensation at a time of often desperate poverty and hardship, whereas others acted out of political or personal motivations. Women who had become romantically involved with Soviet soldiers were often especially useful as sources of intelligence for the West. Although the information these alleged spies provided was trivial in most cases, the penalties they faced under Soviet occupation were drastic: kidnapping, incarceration, and in some cases execution. Most of the Austrians had never anticipated the risk of death.

After almost eight years of occupation, the executions of Austrian civilians in Moscow came to an end. Following Stalin’s death in March 1953, Military Tribunal No. 28990 imposed no more death sentences. Austrian civilians who had been sentenced to death and were then pardoned were able to return to Austria in 1956. That year, relatives of the executed received the first notification from the Soviet Union—with falsified causes of death. The declassification of materials from the former Soviet state security archive and the assistance provided by the Memorial center have been crucial in tracing what happened to these Austrians as well as other victims of Stalinism in Austria. The plaque commemorating the Austrian victims of Stalinist repression, unveiled at Donskoe Cemetery in September 2009, is a reminder of the cruelty of the Stalinist regime and the Soviet occupation.126

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