British Subversive Politics towards Austria and Partisan Resistance in the Austrian-Slovene Borderland,1938–45

Surveying current literature on anti-Nazi resistance within the Third Reich highlights a remarkable omission. The only organized armed resistance within the borders of Nazi Germany – that conducted by Slovene partisans in what was then the Gau of Carinthia (Gau Kärnten) – is mentioned only incidentally or ignored altogether. Yet for three years in this southernmost part of the Reich from 1942 to 1945, the Slovene Liberation Front (Osvobodilna fronta, OF) put up political, civil and military resistance to Nazi rule. At its height in the summer of 1944, approximately 900 armed resistance fighters were organized in two battalions based in the Karawanken mountain range extending to the outskirts of the Gauhauptstadt Klagenfurt. In August 1944, in addition to violent skirmishes with local police and military forces, the partisan forces inflicted in the so-called Battle of Črna na Koroškem (Schwarzenbach) what was presumably the only military defeat inflicted on Wehrmacht and SS units by partisans within the borders of the Third Reich. It is therefore surprising to see that Handbuch zum Widerstand gegen Nationalsozialismus und Faschismus in Europa 1933/39 bis 1945, the 2011 collection of essays published by Gerd R. Ueberschär, contains scant reference to Carinthian partisan units. And there is absolutely no mention of them in his introductory survey Deutsches Reich: Gegner des Nationalsozialismus im ‘Dritten Reich’ 1933–1945. ¹ This could be excused if more detailed information were presented in the subsequent article about Austria, but there is only a single sentence: ‘Slovene partisan units formed above all in Southern Carinthia, where they worked closely together with Titoist partisans and were the only organization active on Austrian territory that made a substantial military contribution to that country's liberation.’ ² The article on Slovenia is also a disappointment. ³ It seems that the partisan struggle in Gau Kärnten does not fit into the postwar nation-state paradigm of historical research on resistance about National Socialism.

The difficulties of integrating the Slovene resistance in Carinthia into a postwar national framework can be seen as an echo of the complicated social and political situation in the Austrian-Slovene borderland. Many of the guerilla fighters were Carinthian Slovene farmers who had been Austrian citizens prior to the Anschluss in March 1938. After the Anschluss they were regarded as German citizens and were drafted into the Wehrmacht. However, many young Slovene soldiers escaped to the mountains and to Slovenia before their conscription or deserted from the Wehrmacht and helped to form the first partisan groups in the Karawanken mountains. ⁴ For local German radicals, the Nazi state had offered new opportunities in Carinthia, and the invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941 extended their activities south to Slovenia (Upper Carniola). Thus the partisans were not only battling National Socialism; they were also fighting for the incorporation of ‘Slovene Carinthia’ into a reconstructed Slovene nation state, which would also bring a revolutionary realignment of pre-war society with its structure of unequal land ownership. This at least was the agenda of the political leadership. But for many rank-and-file partisans, many of whom came from a traditional Catholic milieu, this was simply a struggle for survival – theirs and their families’ – that could be waged most effectively by joining forces with the OF. ⁵ However, any neglect in historical accounts of resistance within Nazi Germany is in stark contrast to the significance attributed by the Allies in 1944 to the resistance these Carinthian partisans were putting up. In that year, Great Britain, the USA and the Soviet Union provided support for the resistance struggle in the Karawanken mountain range and attempted to use it to advance their own individual – and partially conflicting – geopolitical aims in Central Europe, especially in Austria. In late 1943 on the southeast border of the Third Reich, the British military intelligence agency, Special Operations Executive (SOE), launched its Mission Clowder, one of the largest wartime efforts by a Western intelligence agency to infiltrate Nazi Germany via Austria. ⁶ There ensued similar operations by the USA's Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and by the Soviet Union. ⁷ Simultaneous, separate clandestine infiltration operations proceeded over the course of 1944, and, in the winter of 1944–5 before the backdrop of general intra-Allied tensions, culminated in a complete breakdown in cooperation. The utter nadir was the covert assassination of Clowder's chief officer in the field, Alfgar Hesketh-Prichard, by a partisan commander in December 1944. In 2004, Slovenian historian Marijan Linasi presented for the first time documents from the archive of the Yugoslavian secret service (UDBA) that provide an account of the murder of Hesketh-Prichard. ⁸ In light of additional documents from British and Austrian archives, Linasi's hypothesis that this was a political murder commissioned by the Communist Party of Slovenia and carried out by a partisan commander seems highly plausible. ⁹ From a British perspective, William Mackenzie's assessment of the Clowder Mission, in his official history of the SOE, was clear – he called it one of the SOE's most ambitious projects in Europe, a ‘brilliant display of gallantry, entirely without practical result’. ¹⁰

This essay will analyse and reconsider the Clowder Mission and the partisan struggle in Carinthia in the context of the SOE's policy towards Austria and the interallied proclamation on the reestablishment of Austria in November 1943, commonly known as ‘Moscow declaration on Austria’. In scholarship on Western Allied policymaking towards Austria during the Second World War, the dominant hypothesis is that of Canadian historian Robert Keyserlingk, whereby the above-mentioned Moscow Declaration on Austria by no means expressed a political program; rather, it is said to have been merely a propaganda declaration as part of waging psychological warfare. ¹¹ On the basis of a rigorous study of the files both of the SOE and the Foreign Office, I want to present a revision of this hypothesis ¹² and follow up how the declaration affected subversive allied warfare against Germany in the Austrian–Slovene borderland. My article will pursue a transnational perspective focusing on the following questions: What policy did the SOE pursue towards Austria in contrast to Germany and upon which assumptions was it based? What significance did the Moscow Declaration assume in Allied political planning? What consequences did it have for the actual subversive warfare the Allies waged on the Third Reich's southeastern border? What was the SOE's agenda in seeking to cooperate with Carinthian partisan units? What did this cooperation yield for the partisan struggle? What were the grounds for the flare-up of the conflict with the Carinthian partisans, and what consequences did this have for the postwar political configuration in this ethnically conflict-ridden region? Taking this approach will make it possible over the course of this article to also deal with unanswered questions about the SOE's engagement with Austria that Gerald Steinacher formulated in an initial analysis of SOE documents having to do with Austria – for instance, why the SOE miscalculated the importance of territorial and ethnic conflicts in Central Europe. ¹³ Aside from Steinacher's article, the detailed and comprehensive analyses produced heretofore were either written by historical protagonists themselves, ¹⁴ or were hardly based on those SOE documents that have only been made available in the last 15 years.

Shortly after its formation in summer 1940, the SOE founded, among other country sections, one which focused its activities on Germany and Austria. Despite the fact that the British government had recognized the Anschluss in 1938, the SOE continued to consider Germany and Austria as separate entities. In the organization's internal strategy discussions about subversive warfare against Germany, the first head of the SOE, Labour Minister Hugh Dalton, concurred with the assessment of Sir Robert Vansittart, who was convinced that no resistance against the Nazi regime would materialize in Germany. ¹⁵ Thus, the SOE's activities in Germany did not concentrate on attempts to establish contact with opponents of National Socialism and potential resistance fighters, but rather on sabotaging German morale, infrastructure and administration such as the distribution in Germany of counterfeit rationing cards for food and clothing. Plans to kill Hitler were worked out in detail in autumn 1944 but ultimately scrapped. ¹⁶

SOE took a different approach to Austria and the Austrians. Three of the Austrian experts within the SOE, Evelyn Stamper, Clara Holmes and Elizabeth Hodgson, had worked for many years as officers at the British Legation in Vienna (partly for the SIS) and developed a very positive attitude towards Austria that can be called ‘Austrophilia’. Even though the intelligence-gathering activities at the British Embassy in Vienna focused on obtaining military information about Germany and Italy, ¹⁷ SIS staffers nevertheless also monitored domestic political developments in Austria following the establishment of an Austro-fascist dictatorship in 1933–4 and the outlawing of the country's Social Democratic party (SDAP). Like other British observers such as G.E.R. Gedye, the Vienna correspondent of the New York Times, the SOE's Austria experts considered the SDAP – despite years of political repression and the wave of arrests following the Anschluss – as a party that was still capable of resistance and ready to unite with bourgeois and Catholic opponents of the Nazis to form a national front against what they termed Prussian dominion in Austria. ¹⁸ The British observers derived their assumption of a readiness to fight from the fact that at least some members of the Social Democrats in Vienna, Styria and Upper Austria had put up armed resistance in February 1934 against repression by the Dollfuß Regime. Gedye, who in 1941 likewise joined SOE, painted a thoroughly optimistic picture of Austrians’ power to resist. ¹⁹ Adding credibility to Stamper, Holmes, Hodgson and Gedye's positions was the fact that they had been eyewitnesses to the Anschluss. Stamper and Holmes explained the absence of resistance in March 1938 as having been attributable to the extraordinary efficiency of Germany's military course of action, which was said to have completely surprised the Austrians. ²⁰

On this basis, SOE officers formulated plans for Austria which fundamentally differed from those for Germany. At the top of the agenda as far as Austria was concerned was to instigate separatist resistance there via propagandistic, political and military action that would hasten the Third Reich's disintegration. ²¹ This approach can be understood as a means of exploiting opposition to National Socialist suppression of national identities in order to combat Nazi supremacy in Central Europe. The SOE's goal was to ‘bring about the restoration of Austria as a national unit’, ²² and to do so by supporting anti-Nazi resistance and anti-German resistance among exiles and in Austria. For the SOE, the primary function of the re-establishment of an independent Austria was to thwart future German hegemony in Central and Southeastern Europe. Stamper expressed this position to bourgeois-democratic Austrian exile politician Emil Müller-Sturmheim in late May 1942 in no uncertain terms:

When German domination in Europe has been broken, Austria – geographically, economically and politically – holds a key position in Central Europe. Austria must not belong to Germany. … It matters little whether Austria forms part of a Nat.Soc. Germany, a Communist Germany, or a Germany run on Democratic lines: the possession of Austria – the gateway to the East – will ensure German hegemony in Europe. ²³

A central element of the SOE's early policymaking towards Austria was to promulgate a nationalist, anti-German line among Austrian political exiles in order to propagate Austrian nationhood. The SOE cooperated with and financed only those groups that pursued an anti-German line. ²⁴ The Socialists, whom the SOE expected to furnish the closest links to resistance groups in Austria, held out the longest against this position. It was only in the wake of a protracted conflict between 1940 and 1942 that the London Bureau of the Austrian Socialists in Great Britain finally abandoned its pan-German and pan-European approach to overcoming National Socialism and cooperated with the SOE. ²⁵ Furthermore, Stamper and Holmes edited Free Austria, the highest circulation exile newspaper, the mission of which was to present an image to the Anglo–American public that set Austria apart politically, culturally and historically from Germany. ²⁶ They conducted a vehement campaign against exiles and others within the British propaganda machinery who were proponents of a Pan-German orientation – for example, leftist Labour politician Richard Crossman. ²⁷ Even though rapid eastward and southeastward expansion of Nazi dominion made open resistance in Austria unrealistic over the near term, the SOE remained true to the fundamental orientation of its separatist policy in favour of the formation of Austrian nationhood. From early November 1941 onwards, SOE pressed the Foreign Office to change its policy on Austria and publish a declaration in favour of an independent Austrian state. ²⁸ What is absolutely striking is the similarity of the X Section's position on Austria to that of Stalin. Only a few weeks later, Stalin declared for the first time his position that Austria was to be separated from Germany and exist as an independent state, ²⁹ and he reiterated this position in negotiations with Foreign Minister Eden on 16 December 1941 on future spheres of influence in Europe. ³⁰ In these talks, Eden did indeed agree with Stalin on Austria's independence, ³¹ but, in fact, the British Foreign Office had not yet established a firm position on the matter. Rather, it was made clear to the SOE ‘that an independent Austria is not at present an official war aim of H.M.G’. ³² The question of Austria's future was not initially a high priority item on either the British or the Soviet foreign policy agenda. British–Soviet talks focused on the precise location of the Soviet Union's western border. ³³ Unlike the Soviet leadership, the British Foreign Office earlier in 1941 had commissioned studies on the subject of Austria's future, which recommended a wide variety of solutions. One study prepared by the Foreign Research and Press Service (FRPS) in September 1941 came to the conclusion that only the inclusion of Austria in a Danube confederation would serve Austrians’ interests, ³⁴ whereas the Royal Institute for International Affairs considered a break-up of Austria as probably the best solution from economic, political and practical standpoints. ³⁵ Neither of the two expert appraisals favoured re-establishing Austria as an independent state. Moreover, Churchill was a fervent proponent of a Danube federation. In light of the failure of the nation state system in the aftermath of the First World War, the Foreign Office generally favoured federative solutions conducive to a balance of power and larger economic entities in central, eastern and south eastern Europe, and thus, for the time being, rejected an early political commitment to the reestablishment of Austria. ³⁶ Nevertheless, one outcome of a conference of Allied foreign ministers in November 1943 in Moscow was a joint declaration that proclaimed the reestablishment of Austria as an Allied war aim. As Great Britain was the driving force behind this policy, an analysis of British policymaking is essential to understand the genesis of the Moscow Declaration. ³⁷ In it, first of all, the Allies called Austria the first victim of ‘Hitlerite aggression’ which was to be liberated from ‘German domination’, secondly, they promised to re-establish a ‘free and independent Austria’ and finally, they reminded Austria ‘that she has a responsibility which she cannot evade for the participation in the war on the side of Hitlerite Germany, and that in the final settlement account will inevitably be taken of her own contribution to her liberation’. ³⁸ According to Keyserlingk, the British draft of the Moscow Declaration was quickly drawn up on the basis of a work of propaganda proposed by the Political Warfare Executive (PWE) in January 1943. ³⁹ But Keyserlingk's assertion that the British political warfare organizations ‘concurred that political warfare activity ought to focus on Austria’ cannot stand up to scrutiny on the basis of material in the SOE and PWE files. ⁴⁰ The Moscow Declaration was not only a short-term instrument of psychological warfare designed to encourage resistance in Austria; it also expressed on the level of propaganda a well-thought-out paradigm shift in British policymaking towards that country, which by no means had begun in 1943 but rather the previous year. It was prompted by a speech Churchill delivered in February 1942 to a gathering at the Austria Office, an SOE-sponsored Austrian exile organization, in which Churchill referred to Austria as the ‘first victim of Nazi aggression’ and promised that ‘the people of Britain will never desert the cause of freedom of Austria from the Prussian yoke’. ⁴¹ Churchill's surprising formulations triggered in the Foreign Office a controversy as to their meaning and implications. The conclusion was that Churchill's speech had meant neither derecognition of the Anschluss nor commitment to an independent Austria. ⁴² At the same time, it was decided that the future of Austria as a state would be investigated in depth by the FRPS on the basis of three new studies. ⁴³

Until 1943, leading officials in the Foreign Office regarded the Austrian Question as a dependent variable of the future political configuration of Central Europe. In early March 1943, the Central Department of the Foreign Office decided to come out in favour of the reestablishment of an independent Austrian nation-state, which the SOE had been calling for since 1941. Geoffrey Harrison, the Austria expert in the Central Department of the Foreign Office, provided a sober, pragmatic summary of the results of a year long process of discussions and considerations among British diplomats in Whitehall since February 1942: ‘… we shall have to start anyhow with a free and independent Austria’. ⁴⁴

Taking a different tack than that of Keyserlingk, who arbitrarily separated consideration of political planning and psychological warfare, we can analyse the paradigm shift from an integrated perspective on three levels: (1) the FRPS studies and their assessment by Foreign office diplomats, (2) psychological and political warfare, and (3) inter-Allied policymaking. The most important shift following the FRPS studies, ⁴⁵ which Keyserlingk omitted from consideration in his study, was that Austria's economic viability was no longer regarded as the central problem; rather, it was the political-ideological task of engendering an Austrian national consciousness among a population the overwhelming majority of which considered itself German. ‘… we should have to make it a conscious aim to prove to Austrians that Austrian self-interest and Austrian patriotism (or separatism) were coincident,’ ⁴⁶ Harrison argued. It is obvious that he aimed to kindle an anti-German, Austrian national spirit, not only for ‘helping to win the war’ but as a ‘contribution towards winning the peace’. ⁴⁷ Harrison was very well aware of the fact that neither political exiles nor resisters in Austria had shown noteworthy capacities of nation building abroad or in the underground. ⁴⁸ Since, until 1943, the SOE could hardly introduce evidence proving the existence of patriotic anti-German resistance in Austria, but, in light of the worsening war situation, could establish an increase in anti-German resentment, a declaration by the Allies in favour of a free and independent Austria was then meant to give the Nazis’ opponents in Austria as well as the mutually hostile Austrian exile groups long-term political prospects independent of Germany's. The perspective of substitute nation building was also manifested by the frequent use of biological metaphors in the Foreign Office's elaborations on Austria. For example, one of the key position papers called for carefully nurturing the still-delicate seedling of Austrian patriotism. ⁴⁹

The issue in question then became what means would be most effective to nurture an Austrian desire for independence and sustainably maintain it. Whether abruptly commencing to foment resistance would be an appropriate instrument to sow the seeds of an enduring national identity in contradistinction to that of the Germans was a matter of dispute in the discussions among British strategists. On the one hand, SOE and PWE agreed in August 1942 that the propaganda directed at Austrians ought to accentuate the direct linkage between the resistance they put up and their country's political and economic future. ⁵⁰ The corresponding directive contains – for the first time and prominently featured – a responsibility clause like that which would later appear in Harrison's draft for the Allied declaration. ⁵¹ The experts in the Foreign Office took a more sober view of the Austrians, considering them coolly, from a more distanced perspective and on the basis of current reports instead of past personal impressions and wishful thinking. Subjects of discussion in the Foreign Office included the lack of evidence of anti-German resistance as well as the high morale of Austrian soldiers serving in the German Wehrmacht. The War Office was unable to detect any particular inclination to desert at this point. To the diplomats in the Foreign Office, it seemed highly dubious that there would ever be organized resistance in Austria. ⁵² In light of these facts and circumstances on the ground, it was deemed doubtful that a straightforward call for revolt and making the country's postwar treatment strongly conditional on the resistance Austrians put up would be an expedient measure. Accordingly, Harrison not only toned down this conditional formulation; he also relegated it to last place in the text structure. In contrast to previous propaganda directives and proposals by the SOE and PWE, Harrison completely rearranged the draft for the Allied declaration. In the very first sentence, he termed Austria ‘a victim to Nazi aggression’. ⁵³ The key lever to get Austrians to distance themselves from Germany was for the planned declaration to prompt Austrians to consider themselves first of all as victims of Nazi Germany. Harrison's rationale for his draft is contained in the discussion of his proposal to the War Cabinet to submit to the USA and the Soviet Union a joint declaration on the reestablishment of Austria. In his opinion, nationalism transcending party lines flared up at least to some extent in Austria immediately prior to the Anschluss in opposition to Nazi Germany's aggression. ⁵⁴ Harrison saw this as the sole historical point of reference that addressed Austrians as a nation and, indeed, as the victim of German aggression. He omitted any effort to differentiate between Austria and Germany on the basis of ethnic or cultural factors. Thus, he had recourse to Churchill's succinct formulation that had kicked off the debate. For Harrison, the chief aim of the Allied declaration was to accustom Austrians to an independent political future. ⁵⁵ In other words, the declaration Harrison suggested was conceived primarily as an offer for Austria to escape shared blame and responsibility with Germany. Harrison's intention here was to send signals to potential political leaders in Austria and to focus their attention on forming a government: ‘Once the Austrians realize that they have a future as an independent State, it is to be hoped that leaders from amongst the Austrian people will be forthcoming’. ⁵⁶ The subversive nature of Harrison's formulation is obvious. This was not a matter of conventional political recognition of an already extant separatist nationalism; quite the contrary. Separatist nationalism was to be externally stimulated and offered long-term assurances – a classic example of subversive policymaking in opposition to an empire. Giving impetus to real resistance on the ground, as expressed in the shared responsibility hypothesis, was clearly accorded subsidiary importance.

At the foreign ministers conference in Moscow, one of the changes the Soviet Union wanted to be made to the British draft of a joint Allied declaration was the deletion of a passage that held out to an independent Austria the prospect of association with its neighbouring states. ⁵⁷ It is interesting to note that the Austria experts in the Foreign Office, in the calculations that went into their policy towards Austria, had already anticipated the Soviet veto of such federation plans. As early as August 1942, Harrison already viewed the chances of implementing such a federation with scepticism; ⁵⁸ sociologist Thomas Humphrey Marshall, the author of the study ‘The Future of Austria’, was even more sceptical. Thus, in early March 1943, once the question of Austria's so-called viability was cleared up, a second conception of British postwar planning was abandoned – namely, the primacy of confederation as opposed to restoration of a nation-state. Now, to even the strongest proponents of federal structures, the reestablishment of Austria seemed the more pragmatically sensible way to proceed. ⁵⁹ This fundamental change of perspective on the part of British planners, who thereby basically adopted the early conception held by the SOE, has been overlooked heretofore. Taking this into account makes it understandable why Harrison put so much emphasis on fostering an Austrian national consciousness. There was no sentimentality for Austria connected with this; rather, it stemmed from political rationality prevailing in the Foreign Office. A second major change made to the British draft was the revision of the responsibility clause. It was put in stronger terms at the behest of the Soviet negotiators in Moscow and explicitly related to Austria's participation in the war ‘on the side of Hitlerite Germany’, though not to enhance the propagandistic value of the declaration as a means of inciting resistance but rather to stake the Soviet Union's claim to reparations payments. ⁶⁰ The basic British conception – that the reestablishment of an independent Austria was not made conditional on the resistance Austrians put up – was not changed. Nevertheless, the policy of Great Britain as well as the USA was still to exempt Austria from reparation payments, a policy that aimed to foster Austrians’ identification with a future independent nation-state. ⁶¹ This approach was accepted by the Soviet Union at the Potsdam Conference in 1945. ⁶²

The Moscow Declaration was not a document that delineated an exact state-building project. It was conceived as a political declaration with which the Allies asserted the reestablishment of an independent state as the guiding principle of their agenda and offered the Austrians the role of victim as the foundation of their process of nation-building in contradistinction to Germany. All other formulations remained vague and matters of interpretation. The Allies had indeed thereby come to an agreement on nation-state formation as an element of political warfare waged against Germany; however, what position Austria would assume in the geopolitical fabric and the configuration of that country's domestic political sphere remained open. These questions became virulent in 1944 in the context of the unilateral and covertly subversive policymaking of the great powers. That applies particularly to the Clowder Mission and its communist competitor initiatives being carried out on the southern border of the Third Reich, that is, in Slovenian–Austrian borderlands. Before I analyse, in light of these background factors, the anatomy of this inter-Allied rivalry amidst the resistance struggle against Nazi Germany, it is necessary to go briefly into another key aspect of the SOE's political agenda with regard to Austria.

In addition to separatism from Germany, policymaking by the SOE's Austrian Section was characterized by another form of ideological and geopolitical disassociation: to prevent Austria from falling into a Communist and/or Soviet sphere of influence in Central Europe. This item was well hidden on its agenda, particularly from 1942 onwards, but the anti-communist character of SOE policymaking towards Austria is evident from a consideration of the organization's relations with Austrian exiles in Great Britain. ⁶³ The SOE maintained no direct contacts with the Communists who, it must be noted, were the most fervent advocates of Austrian nationalism. ⁶⁴ After having converted the Socialists from their traditional pan-German to an Austrian national line, the SOE recruited a number of Austrian Socialists as staff members and agents in order to then use them to infiltrate Austria and thereby assist the Socialist Party in re-establishing itself as a strong democratic leftist alternative to the Communist Party of Austria (KPÖ) that, it was feared, would play a major role in Austrian postwar politics. ⁶⁵ Preparations for the reorganization of socialist and democratic parties in Austria were most certainly among the tasks assigned to SOE's Austrian Section. ⁶⁶ With respect to the makeup of Austria's post-Nazi government, it envisioned a coalition of Catholics and Social Democrats. ⁶⁷ Thus, the SOE adopted a position that was already being advocated in the early 1930s by the British community in Vienna, which had yielded several of the SOE's current staff members. G.E.R. Gedye, for example, had written several articles in 1934 in which he appealed to the Western powers to apply intense pressure on Chancellor Dollfuß, the head of Austria's authoritarian government, to reinstate democracy and allow for a governing coalition with the Socialists that would be in a position to withstand pressure from Nazi Germany. ⁶⁸ This concept of a strong national alliance of Catholics and Socialists to counter a threat both foreign and domestic was transposed by the SOE onto the potential postwar conflict with the Soviet Union and the KPÖ over Austria's political future. The rivalry between Socialists and Communists characterized not only the political activities of Austrian exiles in Great Britain but also the SOE's missions to Austria. Whereas routes via Switzerland, Italy and Turkey were planned for Socialists or their agents were brought in directly via parachute jump, the SOE's efforts to establish initial contacts in Austria via partisans in Slovenia entailed deployment of mostly British officers and some politically unaffiliated Jewish exiles from Austria. The exile Socialists' leading functionaries such as Oscar Pollak as well as planners on the SOE's staff proceeded under the assumption that the Communist leadership of the Slovenian partisans would not permit the infiltration into Austria of Socialists who were independent of them. ⁶⁹ The anticommunist agenda of SOE's policy towards Austria corresponded to the original outline of the Clowder Mission too. In order to gain an adequate understanding of the Clowder Mission, we must briefly elaborate on its basic strategic perspective and tactical aims. The basic idea arose from considerations on future SOE operations in Central and Eastern Europe by SOE officer Peter Wilkinson. He had dealt primarily with Poland and Czechoslovakia thus far during his intelligence career and was no expert on Austria or Germany. ⁷⁰ His closest staff associate was SOE officer Alfgar Hesketh-Prichard, who had been in charge of the SOE Czech Operations until September 1943. ⁷¹ In July 1943, the SOE's Yugoslavia department in Cairo informed Wilkinson that the OF had also begun to recruit members and organize anti-German resistance within the borders of the Third Reich in Carinthia, Upper Carniola and Lower Styria. Wilkinson saw this cross-border subversion by the OF as a potential bridge for British operations in Central Europe. ⁷²

The Clowder Mission was not initially part of SOE plans for Austria. When, in September 1943, Wilkinson drew up the first plan for the Clowder Mission, the list of objectives he formulated included the following: ‘to establish direct contact with resistance elements in Central and Eastern Europe’ and ‘to establish a War Station in Central Europe for coordinating resistance elements and for exploiting any general rising in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia in accordance with future strategic requirements’. ⁷³ ‘Future strategic requirements’ was Wilkinson's allusion to the looming conflict with the Soviet Union over its border with Poland, and between the Soviet Union and the Polish Underground Army. ⁷⁴ Right from the outset, Wilkinson positioned the Clowder Mission as an effort both to organize anti-Nazi resistance as well as to prepare for a coming confrontation with the Soviet Union over future influence in Central Europe. It was not until 29 November 1943 that SOE Director Colin Gubbins issued a directive that launched intensified efforts to establish contacts with regime opponents in Germany and Austria. ⁷⁵ What motivated this new directive were no doubt, on one hand, the Allied agreement on the Polish–Soviet border that had been reached at the Teheran Conference at that time, and, on the other hand, conversations among Gubbins, the British military staff and Churchill on future strategy governing warfare in Central Europe. In Teheran, Churchill had sought Stalin's support for a landing in Istria by Western Allied forces that were then bogged down south of Rome, the aim of which would have been to move northward through the ‘so-called Ljubljana gap’ and reach Vienna by the summer of 1944. ⁷⁶ By reflecting this strategy, the new Clowder guidelines likewise called for setting up a war station, this time in Slovenia. Wilkinson named this project Clowder Mayor. ⁷⁷ The reorientation of the Clowder Mission on Germany and Austria was most probably due to the fact that Churchill had failed yet again to convince Stalin of the necessity of forming a Central European confederation that would include Austria. Stalin re-emphasized his interest in an independent Austria. ⁷⁸ He thus underscored once again the Moscow Declaration as guideline for inter-Allied policymaking. But the matter of which geostrategic role Austria would play in Europe was kept open in Teheran as well.

In December 1943, Tito authorized Wilkinson and Hesketh-Prichard to set up subversion routes into the Third Reich with the help of Slovene partisans. Tito's approval has to be seen within the context of an agreement with respect to Yugoslav resistance the Allies had just concluded at the Teheran Conference: to provide support from then on only to Tito's partisan army, and to withdraw support from the Serbian Chetniks under the command of Draža Mihailović. ⁷⁹ In January and February 1944 following an arduous journey from Bosnia to Slovenia, Wilkinson and Hesketh-Pritchard met several political and military leaders of the Slovene partisans and the Communist Party of Slovenia (ZKS) in their Headquarters in Črmošnjice and the regional partisan Headquarters of the IX. Corps in Cerkno closer to the German border, and negotiated the concrete terms of cooperation with them. ⁸⁰ In going about this, the two SOE officers obtained information about the rebels’ territorial and political aims, and insights into the organization of their uprising. Furthermore, they learned that the Slovene partisans were in contact with a resistance organization in Austria, the Austrian Freedom Front (ÖFF), which was in urgent need of radio equipment, arms and propaganda, and was prepared to accept British officers into their ranks to act as technical advisors and as a sign of political recognition. Information about the existence of the ÖFF was one of the key factors that motivated Wilkinson to press ahead with the Clowder Mission. Conversely, British interest spurred Yugoslavian and Slovenian partisan leaders to intensify collaboration with non-Slovene anti-Nazis in Austria, first and foremost KPÖ cadres. The conflicts that arose thereby are a subject I will return to later. Both sides’ reports testify to the will to cooperate but also bring out the distrust that had already emerged about the information provided by and intentions of the other side. ⁸¹ In retrospect, the partisan leaders’ information about the ÖFF was essentially true. Incited by the Moscow Declaration, KPÖ cadres from various Austrian provinces actually had gathered in November 1943 in the heavily industrialized region around the city of Leoben in Northern Styria where there had long been a well-organized labour movement, and founded the Landeskomitee der österreichischen Freiheitsfront für Steiermark und Kärnten to launch the struggle ‘for the establishment of a free, independent and democratic Austria’. ⁸² The ÖFF was established by KPÖ activists who had received training in spring 1943 in a partisan battalion of the IX. Corps in the Triglav region. Thus, its mission was already to transfer to Austria the experience resistance fighters had gained in Slovenia. The program called for the ÖFF to pursue the Communists’ popular front concept. It defined itself as a joint organization of Communists, Social Democrats and Christian-Social Democrats. ⁸³ Wilkinson presumed that the account of it was more wishful thinking than reality. However, the mutual distrust initially had no impact on carrying out the Clowder Mission; the focus remained on the potential benefits both sides offered one another. Decisive for the Clowder Mission was the fact that partisan companies were already operating in the Karawankens and could serve as a conduit for the agents’ infiltration. Conversely, prompt delivery of the first shipments of arms and equipment to the IX. Corps in Cerkno demonstrated to the partisan commanders that Wilkinson and Hesketh-Pritchard had outstanding contacts to British headquarters and were able to fulfil their promises. Wilkinson agreed to regularly deliver weapons, equipment and foodstuffs to the Slovene partisans in return for their support for the Clowder Mission in the form of information, infrastructure, courier services and mediating contacts to anti-Nazi elements in Austria. Even after Wilkinson's departure, relations with the local partisan group in Cerkno went well. Hesketh-Prichard described them as ‘100%’. ⁸⁴

Following his reconnaissance, Wilkinson authored an impressive study of the Slovene insurgency in order to develop a deeper understanding of its meaning for future British policy in Central Europe. In addition to military considerations, Wilkinson paid particular attention to three political aspects: the fact that this guerrilla warfare enjoyed strong political support within the Slovene population (as well as the insurgents’ high degree of political organization); the national objectives of the partisan leadership (that is, aspirations to establish a united Slovenian nation-state that would include territory that had belonged to pre-war Italy and pre-war Austria); and their perception of the so-called Big Three Allied powers. Wilkinson took note of an almost blind, practically ‘pathological’ admiration for the USSR and the Red Army that was considered the spearhead of and role model for the national liberation struggle.

Wilkinson was interested above all in what Soviet power meant for the postwar era in case Soviet imperialism became virulent in Central and Western Europe. He envisioned a scenario in which Greater Slovenia – including, in the west, the Italian city of Triest and the adjacent Venezia Giulia region, as well as, in the north, the Austrian cities of Villach and Klagenfurt – would be, in addition to Czechoslovakia, Russia's most important gateway to the West. Nevertheless, Wilkinson recommended that the SOE and the Foreign Office refrain from communicating to the partisan leadership open opposition to the Slovenes’ territorial plans, despite the fact that the Foreign Office had by then already decided in favour of re-establishing the Republic of Austria within its 1938 borders. ⁸⁵ Wilkinson's intention with respect to exporting the ‘Slovene experiment’ to Italy and ex-Austria was to exploit it to further the SOE's interests. In Wilkinson's own words: ‘The Slovenians are only too willing to cooperate in this penetration, since it asks nothing of them which is in any way incompatible with their own interests, and helps to widen their sphere of influence’. ⁸⁶

Wilkinson's reckoning was guided by the insight that the Soviets had hardly established a presence in Slovenia and had not been in a position up to that point to deliver material support to the partisans, and Wilkinson aimed to take advantage of this material vacuum in the summer and autumn of 1944. As far as the timing was concerned, this gambit meshed well with the British expectation that the war would end no later than 1944. Wilkinson's papers also contain his reminiscences about T.E. Lawrence, Britain's masterful agent who had promoted British interests during the First World War by whipping up an Arab uprising against the Ottoman Empire.

In light of these facts and circumstances, Wilkinson drew up the final plan of Mission Clowder. First of all, he advocated dropping Clowder Mayor since the Slovenes and the Soviets would oppose such a massive British presence. Instead, he recommended setting up small base camps in the Carnic Alps and the Karawanken Range, and concentrating operations on infiltrating agents (Clowder Minor). ⁸⁷ Its objective was to take advantage of help provided by Slovene partisans to establish contact with local Austrian resistance groups in Carinthia, Styria and Vienna, and to enlist them on behalf of the British cause in Central Europe. But Wilkinson was still looking far beyond Austria. On 7 June 1944, he wrote to his liaison officer at Clowder base in Monopoli: ‘Policy is now clear at last …. The position is, briefly, that we remain an independent mission advancing along the Axis Ljubljana-Berlin, always pushing on as hard as we can and exploiting whatever opportunities arise en route. This is the primary task.’ ⁸⁸ Wilkinson's phraseology thus indicates that he saw Clowder as a competitor in a race with the advance of the Soviets to establish a presence in Central Europe.

In contrast to Wilkinson's utter fascination with the Slovene partisans and their organization was his almost complete indifference to the situation in Austria. His reports had little to say about the mood there. More or less authoritative information about that country was scant, and there was not even a trace of the then-available British intelligence such as ‘Opinion and Morale in Austria’, a memorandum produced by the PWE in early 1943, which pointed out that German nationalism was far stronger in Styria and Carinthia than in all other Austrian provinces. ⁸⁹ According to the estimates of the PWE, in German–Slavic border regions with their history of nationality-based conflicts, German propaganda that stirred up fear of the Red Army and pan-Slavism still fell on fertile soil. It was not until their protracted stay among the Carinthian partisans in the Karawankens during the summer of 1944 that the Clowder Mission officers gained a better understanding of the situation in Austria. Why no national will to put up resistance emerged in Austria was attributed by Charles Villiers to the fact that almost all Austrian men between the ages of 16 and 40 had been called up to serve in the Wehrmacht. Combined with the influx of evacuees from the German cities this had diluted the national character of the country, Villiers argued. Accordingly, there were poor prospects for anti-German resistance among non-Slovenes not only in Carinthia and Styria but also in Austria as a whole. ⁹⁰ Thus, Villiers quite correctly recognized the key function of the Wehrmacht in integrating Austrians into the German Volksgemeinschaft. ⁹¹

From the outset, the Clowder Mission officers in the field had been arranged in a delicate political position. While they aimed at exploiting the Soviets’ absence and the Slovenian Liberation Front's territorial ambitions to infiltrate groups of agents via Carinthia and Styria into Central Europe they were obliged to comply with the Foreign Office's proviso to make no promises to the Slovene partisan leaders with respect to the future Austrian–Slovenian border. The Clowder officers were to limit themselves to a non-binding statement ‘that they knew H.M.G. policy was to create a strong Jugoslavia’. ⁹² In June, Hesketh-Prichard received the following orders: ‘Stick to Moscow Declaration that liberation Austria allied war aim but final settlement depends on extent of her own resistance STOP Since strong Jugoslavia is aim unlikely for strategic reasons Karawanken frontier will be moved north include Austrian Slovenes …’. ⁹³ In early summer 1944, the territorial question and the Moscow Declaration seems not to have been discussed among the Clowder Mission officers and their Slovene partners. The ZKS had likewise issued a directive to the Carinthian units to not bring up the matter of the postwar border. ⁹⁴ Actually more practical issues were at the forefront. When Hesketh-Prichard arrived in the Karawanken, he was surprised at the numerical weakness of the Carinthian partisan groups – the Western Carinthian unit consisted of only 40 poorly equipped men who survived in the woods under the most precarious conditions and constant enemy harassment. ⁹⁵ The Eastern Carinthian unit was somewhat stronger, but also desperately needed weapons in order to put more fighters in the field. Right from the outset, the attitude of the local partisan leadership towards the British officers was ambivalent: on the one hand, they urgently needed equipment; on the other hand, the presence of the British mission meant a considerably heightened security risk. ⁹⁶ The relations between the Clowder Mission and the Slovene partisans can be analysed on two levels – on the operational level with the Staff of the Carinthian Group of Detachments (ŠKGO) in the Karawanken mountains and, on the political level, with the Regional Committee of Liberation for Slovene Carinthia (POOF) and with the Communist Party of Slovenia (ZKS), which was in charge of the conduct of partisan warfare.

On the military level, the ŠKGO operating in the Karawanken between June and September 1944 established a form of cooperation with the Clowder officers that can generally be described as containment and stalling tactics. British officers were not permitted to move about on their own, though they were promised that their agents would be transported across the Drau River and deeper into Austrian territory as soon as possible. Since the partisans employed a system of laissez-passer documents (‘propusnica’) to control movements, the British officers were able to establish contact only under supervision with civilians in Carinthia and the liberated zones in Slovenia with whom the partisans put them in touch. This is also why they failed to gain access to ethnic German elements of the population while they were stationed in the Karawankens. However, during this period, Hesketh-Pritchard organized the two Carinthian partisan groups’ massive military build-up via 27 airdrops of weapons, ammunition and equipment, and offered military training. ⁹⁷ The shipments contained rifles and Sten guns, explosives, clothing and shoes, foodstuffs, inflatable boats, cigarettes and medicine. According to SOE sources, this enabled the Carinthian partisan detachments to reach 900 – the largest number of fighting men they ever put in the field – and to conduct the most intense resistance warfare within the borders of the Third Reich. British support enabled the partisans to withstand the intensified anti-partisan warfare being waged by German security forces. On 1 April 1944, Himmler had set up an operations staff in Klagenfurt to ‘combat gangs’ and transferred SS-Polizeiregiment 13 from the Soviet Union to Carinthia. At least 747 battles and other actions targeting armed German units were recorded between August 1942 and May 1945. The account by Linasi confirms that partisan warfare was at peak intensity by far between June and September 1944, and thus during the presence of the Clowder Mission and after Nazi officials stepped up their anti-partisan efforts. ⁹⁸ And without the armament by Mission Clowder, the Carinthian partisans would never have been able to successfully withstand large-scale frontal combat with German troops as they did 18–24 August at the Battle of Crna. Hesketh-Prichard reported this remarkable feat via radio to the SOE base in Monopoli and, in turn, relayed Field Marshal Alexander's praise for and appreciation of the partisans. In addition to tying up German SS, police and other units amounting to almost one infantry division, ⁹⁹ the Carinthian partisan groups were able to offer Wehrmacht deserters, anti-fascists, and escaped concentration camp prisoners, forced labourers and POWs a comparatively safe haven and the opportunity to participate in the fight against the Nazis. The military cooperation and the logistics of the materiel shipments proceeded to the complete satisfaction of the Clowder officers. Charles Villiers even described it as ‘close and happy cooperation’. ¹⁰⁰

On the political level, while a military cooperation with the staff of the Carinthian Group of Detachments went quite smoothly, the Clowder Mission received no support from the POOF to enable it to penetrate into Austria. In their negotiations with POOF's local ZKS cadres, the British officers sought to establish contact with anti-Nazi Austrians in Carinthia and Styria as well as Austrians who were present at the partisans’ regional and national headquarters, but the POOF officials prevented Clowder Mission personnel from engaging in any actual interpersonal relations. This policy of isolation applied not only to the British officers at the partisans’ bases in the Karawankens but also to those at other regional and national headquarters. ¹⁰¹ Opponents of the Nazis who came from Styria and Vienna to Slovenia to establish contact with British officers were kept away from them. Contrary to Radomir Luza's account, no records have yet been found in War Office and SOE sources documenting contacts to the Britons having been arranged by Slovenian partisan leaders. ¹⁰² The reason for isolating the Clowder officers was political. Compared to the situation in winter and spring 1944, the options to the ZKS had substantially widened in the meantime. Parallel to the development of Mission Clowder, since April 1944 the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (SKJ) in close cooperation with the ZKS was working together with the Comintern ¹⁰³ and the KPÖ's leadership in Moscow to develop common projects in order to transfer ‘Slovene experience’ into Austria and foment armed resistance there along the lines of the Moscow Declaration.

To better understand the Communist infiltration projects, its strategic orientation and political implications, it is necessary to go into more detail about the relations among the KPÖ's underground organizations in Carinthia and Styria, the KPÖ leaders in exile in Moscow, the Comintern and the ZKS. As previously noted, a reorganization of the KPÖ's resistance cells in Carinthia and Styria began in 1943 under the banner of the ÖFF. In Carinthia, the reorganization was already shaped by the ZKS' presence in bilingual regions, where it had set up local OF cells. In contrast to the situation in Styria and eastern Austria, the question of the precise respective territories in which the KPÖ and the ZKS would be in charge of the resistance effort arose in Carinthia. The first meeting of the KPÖ chief in Carinthia, Konrad Bucher, with the ZKS' leading functionaries for Carinthia, Dušan Pirjevec-Ahac and Janez Kmet-Mirko, took place in late November 1943. Political responsibility for cooperation with the KPÖ in Carinthia had been entrusted to Tito's confidant Edvard Kardelj, a member of the Central Committee of the SKJ and the ZKS. According to Yugoslavian sources, it was agreed that in the Slovenian-speaking area of Carinthia, the KPÖ would transfer its organization to the ZKS. The area under ZKS control would also include the provincial capital, Klagenfurt, but no agreement was reached on the second-largest city, Villach, a predominantly German-speaking industrial centre and transportation hub. Bucher refused to cede control over the organization in Villach to the ZKS. Since this question could not be resolved on the local level, Kardelj referred the matter to the Comintern to be addressed with the KPÖ leadership in Moscow. ¹⁰⁴ For the time being, Kardelj ordered the Carinthian ZKS functionaries to stop raising issues having to do with nationality and focus on developing a joint resistance effort that was considered as the best precondition for the fulfilment of Slovenian national interests in the postwar negotiations. ¹⁰⁵

A second source of conflict was initiating the conduct of armed struggle. In the bilingual region, this initially would have meant that German-speaking Communists would be attached to Slovenian partisan units. Beyond the territory to which it laid claim, the ZKS pressed the KPÖ functionaries to also form Austrian partisan units. Both ideas were rejected by the KPÖ's leading activists, and the Central Committee of the KPÖ in Moscow concurred that waging partisan warfare in Austria would be premature. ¹⁰⁶

The problems in Austria were discussed during negotiations with a Yugoslavian military mission on 12 April 1944 in Moscow. One important organizational decision was to transfer Franz Honner, a member of the KPÖ's Central Committee and later Austrian minister of the interior, and some other leading KPÖ cadres to the Slovenian partisans’ general staff in Črnomelj. Kardelj briefed Franc Leskošek-Luka, secretary of the Central Committee of the ZKS and Slovene Minister of War, in early May 1944 on these moves that centralized the resolution of political issues between the KPÖ on the one hand and the ZKS and the SKJ on the other. ¹⁰⁷ Now, let us turn our attention to the two differences of opinion that emerged in the winter and spring of 1944. Regarding the armed struggle in Austria, it was initially decided in Moscow to use trained KPÖ activists, primarily Spanish Civil War veterans, and a few Soviet fighters, and to deploy them to Slovenia at an appropriate time. It can be assumed that the basic decision to form such a unit named ‘Avantgarde’ had already been made immediately after the promulgation of the Moscow Declaration. ¹⁰⁸ The KPÖ's reluctance to initiate partisan warfare changed explicitly in early June 1944 following the Western Allies’ landing in Normandy and liberation of Rome, both of which raised expectations that they would rapidly advance to Germany's borders. At a conference in Moscow 10–14 June 1944, the KPÖ, in close consultation with the VKP(b), drew up a manifesto entitled Die Wiedergeburt Österreichs (The Rebirth of Austria) and issued it as a declaration formulated by the ÖFF in Austria. The document maintained that in Austria ‘the time was now ripe for a general popular uprising, for a people's war against the German oppressors’. ¹⁰⁹

The KPÖ's position on the question of the sovereignty of resistance fighters operating in Carinthia was also resolved in July. The VKP(b) informed Kardelj on 30 June 1944, that Honner should receive all support. At the same time it was stressed that the border question should not be a subject of controversy and assured that ‘the Austrian Communist Party is, in principle, for a union of the Slovenian regions with a future Yugoslav state, i.e., with Slovenia’. ¹¹⁰ Following talks with Honner in Črnomelj, Kardelj stated in a letter to Tito dated 5 September 1944 ‘that Honner had agreed that the anti-Nazi activities of the Slovenes in Carinthia amounted to a practical plebiscite expressing their wish to be incorporated in Yugoslavia’. ¹¹¹ This makes it clear that the Slovenian leaders regarded the resistance struggle by the Carinthian Slovenes as a contribution to liberation from the Nazis that would be honoured as such in the final settlement in accordance with the Moscow Declaration – to wit, by ceding the predominantly Slovene region of Carinthia to Slovenia. Honner and Kardelj also agreed that the partisan units in Austria would operate under the joint command of the OF and the ÖFF. ¹¹² In addition to discussing the future national territory, a matter of central importance for the ZKS, the Soviet Union's geo-strategic interests in Austria were also treated during these talks. Honner informed Kardelj ‘that the USSR would not give up Austria, because it will have [to] be a link between Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia’. ¹¹³ Furthermore, Yugoslavia was to participate in the occupation of Austria. However, Kardelj also openly acknowledged the weak point of the Communist plans: ‘In Austria itself there is still no serious movement’.

By ‘Austria itself’, Kardelj meant areas beyond those in which Carinthian Slovenes lived – in other words, where the KPÖ was responsible for setting up the ÖFF. Kardelj's assessment accurately summed up the situation. In Carinthia, Nazi security forces had not only intensified their anti-partisan efforts but were also harassing non-Slovene opponents. Gestapo raids in May and June smashed the organizations that the KPÖ and ÖFF set up in Carinthia. In addition to arresting 49 activists, Gestapo officers shot the leading KPÖ functionary, Hubert Knes. The KPÖ's organization had been penetrated by Gestapo informants. ¹¹⁴ A better situation still prevailed in the industrial area of Upper Styria, where KPÖ activists set up a secret civilian organization consisting of sympathizers from across the anti-Nazi political spectrum, supporters and informants working for National Socialist agencies, the railroad, industrial enterprises and at local Wehrmacht facilities, farmers, and women who provided food, clothing and shelter, and established a series of bases in the mountains. This civilian organization of the ÖFF (‘organization on the ground’) was no doubt the strongest such group in Austria, but it was by no means as deeply rooted among the populace as that of the OF in Slovenian Carinthia. In June, a group of about 20 activists equipped with arms and explosives stolen from the Wehrmacht wrecked railway infrastructure and attacked local Nazis. These partisan raids carried out until mid-month were the first operations outside of Carinthia, but the Leoben-Donawitz partisan group, whose strategy was to avoid direct military confrontations due to its scant personnel, soon found itself on the defensive, and was gradually decimated through persecution by Gestapo, SS, police and other Nazi units. Meanwhile, the Gestapo exposed the civilian network of supporters. Between July and October, approximately 500 people were arrested, sent to concentration camps or executed. ¹¹⁵ This sequence of events clearly shows that, in Upper Styria as well, there was far too little opposition to the Nazi regime among the general populace to be able to sustain locally organized, open resistance. Nevertheless, it must also be pointed out that the ÖFF in Upper Styria received no outside support either.

The Clowder Mission as well changed its strategy in August, when it had the impression that it was bogged down in the Karawankens. The ŠKGO and POOF had indeed briefed Hesketh-Prichard and Villiers about the elimination of the ÖFF groups in Carinthia and a breakdown of communications with Upper Styria, but neither about the ÖFF groups still operating, such as the one in Ferlach that existed until March 1945 nor the OF cells still operating in the Klagenfurt basin. ¹¹⁶ The raids in Carinthia and Styria were the Slovenian partisan leaders’ rationale for refusing to permit Clowder Mission agents already in Slovenia to penetrate Austria. ¹¹⁷ At the same time, the Clowder officers concluded from the fact that the Soviets’ Free Austria broadcasts included no hard news about open resistance in Austria that the ÖFF had either been crushed or, in the best-case analysis, been put on ice due to the severe repressive measures. Nevertheless, they believed there was a chance to ‘artificially and externally’ reactivate the ÖFF and form a core of resistance that could be nurtured with outside support. To this end, Hesketh-Prichard pressed the ŠKGO to permit him and a partisan unit to cross the Drau and advance to the Saualpe, a mountain range on the Carinthia–Styria border. There, according to Hesketh-Prichard's plan, he would be reinforced by a group of SOE paratroopers consisting of British and Austrian officers. This unit would then detach from the Slovenian partisans and independently recruit Austrians for the resistance struggle. ¹¹⁸ Hesketh-Prichard's proposal had been anticipated by the Slovene partisan leaders as well as, no doubt, members of a Soviet mission that had in the meantime joined the regional operations staff. ¹¹⁹ While the SOE continued to supply the partisans in the Karawankens with armaments – also meant to equip the upcoming Saualpe incursion – the ZKS and KPÖ were carrying out two projects. One was to prepare the Avantgarde group of partisans that had arrived from the Soviet Union for their advance into Austria. The second project was the formation of Austrian battalions that were to fight on the side of the Yugoslavian Army and, under the banner of the ÖFF and as called for in the Moscow Declaration, take part in Austria's liberation. To this end, camps for men who escaped from Austria or deserted from the Wehrmacht were set up in Crnomelj and Ljubno. ¹²⁰ The area of deployment of both KPÖ operations was not Carinthia but rather the adjacent region of southern Styria. In Carinthia, the lion's share of the contribution called for by the Moscow Declaration was evidently to be left up to the Slovene partisan units. While the Clowder Mission was kept pent up in the Karawankens, the Slovene partisans fully assisted the Avantgarde partisan group's advance into Carinthia by mid-September and further on to the Koralpe in Southern Styria. The Clowder Mission people learned nothing of either undertaking. ¹²¹

Nevertheless, the Clowder Mission still had an important function for the Slovene partisan leaders. Despite the deterioration of the relationship between Tito and the Western Allies beginning in September 1944, ¹²² the Clowder Mission was still delivering weapons to the Slovene partisans. In negotiations with Leškosek-Luka in mid-September 1944, Alfgar Hesketh-Prichard pledged to continue delivering arms in return for authorization to advance into Austria with a partisan battalion. But while Hesketh-Prichard and Wilkinson were reporting the results of the negotiations as a successful breakthrough (‘a politico-military triumph’ ¹²³ ), Leškosek-Luka was issuing orders to his partisan unit's commander to execute Hesketh-Prichard once they got into Austria. ¹²⁴

The historical accounts of the Clowder Mission and the British and American missions in Slovenia have contained much speculation about the reasons Mission Clowder went awry and the disappearance of Hesketh-Prichard. ¹²⁵ In any case, his radio transmissions from Saualpe to the SOE base give no indications that he intended to set up a resistance group ‘in order to have available a force which might counter Tito's push into Carinthia’, as British historian Heather Williams has maintained as a reason for his murder. ¹²⁶ Hesketh-Prichard's general aim was to push deeper into Austria. He intended to set up a base as a collection point for other SOE agents who would then fan out towards Vienna, Graz and Tyrol ‘to ferment support and exploit all Austrian resistance’, ¹²⁷ but, due to continually inclement flying weather in October and November, the RAF was unable to parachute in reinforcements for Hesketh-Prichard. One of ideas he later considered was linking up with the ÖFF, fortifying its ranks and forming an anti-communist core within them, but this had, in the meantime, been strictly rejected by both the Foreign Office and the SOE's Austrian Section, who had no intention of either strengthening a communist lead organization such as the ÖFF or risking a conflict between rival factions within the resistance movement. ¹²⁸ The PWE too wanted no part of a call to support the ÖFF. ¹²⁹

The turning point was finally brought about by the Allied Forces Headquarters’ (AFHQ) decision to discontinue the effort to foment resistance in Austria. ‘Operational value Austrian resistance before the end of war likely to be insignificant’, was the wording of Wilkinson's radio transmission to Hesketh-Prichard. Dispatching additional SOE agents to Hesketh-Prichard was ordered to be removed from the SOE's operational to-do list. ¹³⁰ In light of the dramatically deteriorating relations between the Western Allies and Tito, Wilkinson concurred with Hesketh-Prichard's decision to terminate his mission. ¹³¹ It is unclear whether Hesketh-Prichard advised his partisan battalions of this decision to withdraw. A few days later during a joint reconnaissance tour with the commander of his battalion, he was shot. It is important to note that his murder was not due to conflicts with his battalion. Contrary to what is maintained in popular accounts, ¹³² his radio transmissions provide no evidence of conflicts about the treatment of the local populace, liquidations, forcible requisitioning or forced recruitment raids. Hesketh-Prichard had been identified by the leadership of the ZKS already before as an ‘objective opponent’ (Hannah Arendt) who had to be liquidated. The other losers were the foot soldiers in Hesketh-Prichard's partisan force on Saualpe. Cut off from any possibility of retreat, in largely hostile territory, undernourished and low on ammunition, during a bitterly cold winter and constantly harried by the SS and the police, very few of the unit's approximately 80 original members survived the war.

Once Hesketh-Prichard had disappeared without a trace and in light of the Slovene partisan leaders' continued delaying tactics, the remaining officers attached to the Clowder Mission were withdrawn from Slovenia in January 1945. In the final report written by Frank Pickering, the Clowder Mission officer who served the longest tour of duty in Slovenia, the author came to a finding that makes Wilkinson's assumptions from April–May 1944 seem like imperial hubris:

It is not the policy of the ZKS to allow the British or Americans to use their lines for the purpose of infiltrating Austrians over whom they, the Slovene Communists, have no control. Neither is it the policy of the Slovenes (whether Communist or not) to permit British or American officers to build their own organisation from Slovene soil into a country in which Slovenia is vitally interested. ¹³³

Pickering emphasized the Slovene partisan leaders' demand to maintain total supremacy in the partisan struggle, a characteristic that Wilkinson, from his imperial perspective, had completely underestimated.

What political insights did Mission Clowder's experience in Slovenia yield for the planning of the postwar occupation of Austria? According to the Clowder Mission staff's report delivered to the Foreign Office in late autumn 1944, the extent of the support for the Slovene partisans among the civilian population in Carinthia by no means justified revising Austria's prewar borders. ¹³⁴ SOE was thus very clearly thwarting the opposing line of argumentation put forth by the Slovene partisan leaders. A second insight was that there was no clearly evident will among Austrians to put up anti-Nazi resistance. The SOE's original assumption of being able to drum up a national will to resist in Austria had proved erroneous. ¹³⁵ As to occupation policy in Carinthia, the SOE proposed a zero-tolerance approach to any form of separatist political activities on the part of the Slovene liberation movement in this ethnically mixed region in order to foster Austrian national identity. At the same time, the SOE officers essentially pursued a policy of leniency towards German-speaking Austrians that the Foreign Office had been developing since 1943. Whenever ethnic conflicts occurred, solutions were to be found that were ‘designed to satisfy Austrians without giving Tito an excuse for treating Southern Austria as a Sudetenland’. ¹³⁶ Robert Knight used the term ‘Munich prism’ to characterize the British approach that had been formulated by Peter Wilkinson, who was serving as political adviser to the British occupation authority in Austria. ¹³⁷ From this perspective, even a policy of neutrality towards the OF's Slovene nationalist program could only be counterproductive for Britain's intended strategy to propagate a new Austrian identity as a sort of refuge following Germany's defeat in battle. The upshot was the British occupation authorities’ containment of separatist agitation by the OF, a concerted response that in retrospect seems quite excessive in numerous respects. At this point, British policymakers were taking the OF's national objectives very seriously – the lessons had been learned from the Clowder Mission. And as early as 1946, the British were already displaying a notable lack of zeal and consistency in carrying out denazification among the German-speaking populace and in sustainably implementing minority rights for the ethnic Slovenes living in Austria. ¹³⁸ Both were deprioritized in favour of integrating former Nazis into postwar Austrian society. ¹³⁹ British occupation officers as well began to play down the impact of partisan operations, and in return mention of British support promptly vanished into thin air in the historical accounts of former partisans. ¹⁴⁰

But what was actually accomplished by the Clowder Mission's Communist competitors, the projects that enjoyed the full support of the ZKS? In autumn 1944, the Avantgarde partisan group under the aegis of a Slovenian partisan battalion established a base in Koralm in Styria and was involved in acts of sabotage and diversionary manoeuvres designed to support the Red Army's advance into that region. But it was not until April 1945 that it was capable of operating as an independent unit under the banner of the ÖFF. In any case, in April 1945, it consisted of about 500 men, mostly Wehrmacht deserters and local anti-Nazis. However, the ÖFF was disbanded as soon as the Red Army liberated Styria. ¹⁴¹ The accomplishments of the Austrian battalions were similarly ambivalent. Although some of the units saw action against German forces in Slovenia, none of the five set foot on Austrian territory prior to the war's end. Instead of fighting their way back home, on 21 April, the top echelon was flown into Vienna, which had been liberated by the Red Army, where, on 27 April, they participated in the formation of a provisional government under Social Democrat Karl Renner. Honner was named minister of the interior, and members of his battalions were assigned to his police forces. ¹⁴²

The Soviets' unilateral course in installing a provisional government under Renner, who had welcomed the Anschluss and took no part in the resistance movement, was an ironic reverberation of the clash among the various subversive policies formulated in 1944, and not only with respect to Renner personally. Quickly setting up a government seemed necessary to Stalin since he was under the impression that the Western powers planned a government under their domination and with the help of the bourgeois resistance movement O5 which had emerged in spring 1945. ¹⁴³ But Stalin's projection was erroneous; the Western powers were totally prepared to comply with what they had previously agreed to: the formation of an Allied military government. Soviet realpolitik in April and May 1945 was an affront not only to the Western powers; it also turned the KPÖ leaders' political program into a stack of wastepaper. ¹⁴⁴ Promptly disbanding the partisan units and resistance groups was not unique to Austria; it was consistent with the Soviet Union's general policy in its sphere of influence. ¹⁴⁵ The Western Allies did likewise. As in other Western European countries, they carried out only a few tightly circumscribed infiltration projects in Austria in 1945, ¹⁴⁶ and they instituted no measures to get resistance groups substantially involved in the liberation or to take them into account in their political planning. ¹⁴⁷ Like the Soviet Union, the Western Allies and their intelligence agencies were more interested in reinstituting the parties that had dominated the pre-war political landscape and subordinating them to Allied military administrations than they were in empowering protagonists who had recently emerged in conjunction with the resistance struggle. ¹⁴⁸

In conclusion, it can thus be asserted that, in the wake of the disappointments of 1944, the contribution clause was indeed the passage of the Moscow Declaration to which the Allies no longer ascribed much significance – already in winter 1944–5 and even less so in the postwar years. For the essential task at hand – social and political integration of a formerly failed and now reinstituted state – the victim clause was the key to success. No document manifests this more clearly than the Austrian Declaration of Independence that, with Renner as its primary architect, was formulated totally in the spirit of the victim hypothesis and with the broadest possible application to society at large, whereas the shared responsibility clause was mentioned only as a sort of compulsory exercise, and the contribution clause was greatly relativized and played down. Nevertheless, I consider it a misleading oversimplification to refer to this as a fundamentally improper ‘instrumentalization’ or ‘unintended consequence’ of the Allies’ wartime policy. ¹⁴⁹ Great Britain in particular made in its occupation policy every effort to support Austrian politicians’ and the Austrian society's efforts to adapt the victim hypothesis as conducive to the formation of an Austrian identity. ¹⁵⁰ Relativizing both the resistance that Austrians had put up and their shared responsibility for the Third Reich's deeds while simultaneously expanding the ascription of victimhood became visible with unmistakable clarity especially in the aftermath of the Clowder Mission and its consequences for British postwar policymaking in Carinthia.

In the light of covert inter-Allied rivalry following the Moscow declaration on Austria, the drama played out in the final stage of the Clowder Mission at the Saualpe can be regarded neither as a heroic struggle, as is the case in post-1945 partisan historiography, nor as an ‘inter-Allied tragedy’ as Anglo–American historians such as Thomas M. Barker and William Deakin have done. Instead, it should be interpreted in the light of the geopolitics of resistance. The murder of Alfgar Hesketh-Prichard was committed at a pivotal and highly sensitive location, the site of the first opportunity to directly penetrate the Third Reich, an intersection at which Western and Soviet aims to influence postwar developments collided. It was a political murder in the context of covert Allied parallel operations and clandestine inter-Allied hostilities that were a prelude to the Cold War. Both communist projects were carried out within the before mentioned larger geopolitical framework. Even though these plans were never put into practice, ¹⁵¹ the future political configuration of Austria and particularly how much influence each of the respective Allies would have was still very much an open question in spring and summer of 1944. What ensued on the Third Reich's southeastern border was by no means a concerted inter-Allied effort to strengthen resistance in Austria the Allies had called for in the Moscow Declaration but rather a competition characterized by covert geopolitical rivalry to achieve hegemony in an anticipated Austrian resistance movement as well as to establish a presence in Central Europe before Nazi Germany collapsed.

The favouritism shown to Communist projects was indicative of a power shift in the relationship between the Clowder Mission team and the Slovene partisan leaders – that is to say, between imperial tactical manoeuvring and local claims to sovereignty. In contrast to Great Britain, the Soviet Union and its junior partner, the KPÖ, offered the Slovene partisan leaders and the ZKS the prospect of support for their territorial ambitions in Austria when, according to the wording of the Moscow Declaration, in the final settlement account is taken of Austria's own contribution to its liberation from National Socialism. The contribution clause is often scrutinized solely from an Austrian national perspective. From the point of view of the Slovene partisan leaders and the ZKS, though, the contribution clause offered at least a chance that the military resistance put up by the Carinthian Slovenes – who had, after all, been Austrian citizens until the Anschluss – might contribute to the realization of their territorial aims. The problem of Wilkinson's plans was not attributable to having miscalculated the importance of territorial and ethnic conflicts in Central Europe. In fact, his assessment of the political and territorial plans of the Slovene partisan leaders in spring 1944 was spot-on, but it seemed to him that they could be exploited over the short term to advance British interests. What he miscalculated was the tripartite power relationship among imperial Great Britain, the local Slovene rebels, and the Soviet Union, which successively deteriorated from the Clowder Mission's perspective as the Red Army's advance into Central Europe accelerated over the course of 1944. Although the Carinthian Slovene partisans did indeed emerge victorious from the Second World War, they were, in stark contrast to the overwhelming majority of German-speaking Austrians, among the losers of the peace. Neither did the OF achieve their aim of integrating Carinthian territory into the new Slovenian nation-state nor did their resistance struggle pay off as legitimation that could yield political capital for the Slovene minority in the new Austrian nation-state. Even the Soviet Union did not act as an effective advocate of their interests after 1945, ¹⁵² to say nothing of the KPÖ, who received a mere 5.4 per cent of the vote in the first election held in November 1945.

William Mackenzie's assessment cited at the outset that the Clowder Mission remained ‘without practical result’ falls short of the mark too. The results of the Clowder Mission were paradoxical. Assessed in terms of whether it achieved its original objective of organizing resistance by Austrian patriots, the Clowder Mission was indeed a failure. The main reason for this was surely the fact that, among the German-speaking population, there was no strong popular opposition – to say nothing of open resistance – to the Nazi regime, and the Mission was therefore totally reliant upon support from the Slovene partisans. But because the team spent such a long time in the Karawankens as a result of the Slovene partisan leaders’ stalling tactics, it was ultimately the only Allied paramilitary mission that, thanks to systematic weapons shipments to the Carinthian partisans, succeeded in fomenting armed resistance within the Third Reich. They undoubtedly made the largest contribution to the struggle against the National Socialist regime within the so-called Ostmark and the Third Reich as a whole. This is their historic achievement, one that to this day is still often overlooked by scholars studying resistance, especially when the historiography itself has been arrested in national paradigms.

In the rest of Austria, the SOE had only isolated successes to its credit during the war. Its hope for Austrian patriotic resistance went largely unfulfilled. Other elements of the SOE's policy towards Austria proved to be more in touch with reality: the conception of Austria as the first victim of Nazi Germany; the policy of separatism from Germany and the reestablishment of Austria as an independent state; advocating a postwar coalition of Social Democrats and Catholic Conservatives; and the anti-communist ideology and pro-Western orientation of postwar political policymaking. The British occupation power's conflict with the Slovene partisans in postwar Carinthia has to be seen in the context of this conception of Austria. A border revision was ruled out from the start as weakening Austrian national identity. This could be called an inter-Allied tragedy – those who were ready and willing to put up anti-Nazi resistance according to the Moscow Declaration were precisely the ones who were suppressed by the British postwar occupation authorities on account of their divergent political aims, and not the least important reason for this was in order to implement policies that would foster integration into a new Austria of elements that had considered themselves as Germans up to then.