REICH WRECKS RUSSIANS

When the Allies occupied Austria in the wake of World War Two, Schwechat airfield near Vienna became an important RAF station. With the help of official records, and the recollections and photography of the late Dennis Punnett — one of the personnel based there — we tell its little-known story

RAF 100 RAF SCHWECHAT

In 1945, when the Allies finally overran the remains of Hitler’s Third Reich, elements of that hoped-for 1,000-year empire were divided up between the USA, Britain, France and the Soviet Union. At a joint meeting in 1943, the Declaration of Moscow agreed the division of Germany. Berlin would be split into four zones and Austria, close to Russia’s heart as the founding country of Nazism and the birthplace of Hitler, into four sectors with the central district administered jointly by the Allied Control Council.

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