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- Hugo Portisch - Die Zweite Republik: Eine unglaubliche Geschichte (Teil 1/4)
Hugo Portisch - Die Zweite Republik: Eine unglaubliche Geschichte (Teil 1/4)
Explore the tumultuous events of March 1945 in Europe as Allied armies march forward, civilians suffer under bombings, and the Red Army soldiers attack Hungary. Follow the gripping tale of Austria during this turbulent time in part 1 of an incredible story by Hugo Portisch.
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Video Transcript
Europe in March 1945.
The Allied armies are on the move everywhere.
The Americans are advancing in Nuremberg.
The French reach Stuttgart.
The British advance in Italy.
And in Hungary, the Red Army soldiers attack.
The last supply is collected in front of the Vienna town hall.
The old and the very young.
As a so-called people's strike, they are consecrated and are to be sent to the front, to the war.
Women and children are recommended to leave the city.
March 1945.
Austria is in the bombing of the Allies almost daily.
mainly the Americans.
The civilian population is the main cause of suffering.
It is exposed to double the fear,
by bombs and by the terror of the Nazi regime,
which demands the fight to the last.
Wiener Neustadt after an air strike.
The Vienna State Opera, hit by bombs, is on fire.
Every victim is demanded by the population.
Victory at all costs, it is said, and never surrender.
On the Vienna Central Cemetery, the bomb dead are placed in mass graves without a scab.
Thousands are still in the mass grave.
A huge stream of people is rolling over the streets of Austria.
Abducted foreign forced laborers, disarmed Hungarian soldiers,
People's Germans from Romania and Hungary pass the tank barriers in endless trains, which are still being built.
What happened in those days is the content of this first episode of our documentation about the rebirth of Austria, the Second Republic, the state in which we live today.
At that time, many people feared that the worst was yet to come, namely the end of the Hitler regime, the war that would now take place on our home soil.
And yet, with this fight, liberation was already announced.
How quickly that happened, that is at the beginning of the history of the becoming of a new Austria.
And that is an amazing, an incredible story.
Let's look back in 1945.
The war has been going on for almost six years, but now the allied armies are approaching the borders of Austria.
From Hungary, the Red Army is the Soviets on the way to the bourgeoisie.
Along the border, tens of thousands of people are forced to the ditch, to build trenches and tank barriers.
It is women and young people, forced laborers, among them thousands of Hungarian Jews.
Many of them die of malnutrition and typhoid.
And as the front approaches, the rest is set in motion towards Mauthausen.
It is a death march. Who can not go on, is shot.
The Soviets attack the Austrian border.
The German troops resist bitterly, but their positions are soon overtaken.
The first Soviet soldiers reach the Austrian border at the castle of Marienberg.
The armor barriers of the South-East Wall are quickly overcome.
Rocket launchers, called the German Stalin organs, are the most effective weapons of the Soviets.
The Soviets' goal is to encircle Vienna from the south-east.
So they continue their offensive in the direction of Vienna's Neustadt and Baden.
In small towns, too, there are always fierce battles.
The Red Army men reach the outskirts of Vienna.
For the Soviet leadership, Vienna is not just any city, but the second largest city in Germany and the capital of the to be rebuilt Austria.
Almost everywhere in Austria resistance groups are active at this time.
