AHC: Allies return South Tyrol/Alto Adige to Austria

The Allies during World War II took the official position that Austria was a victim, rather than a perpetrator, of Axis aggression. Given that (questionable) assumption, there would seem to be a plausible case for them to favor Italy returning South Tyrol/Alto Adige (roughly the area from the Brenner Pass to just south of Bozen/Bolzano) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Tyrol Atlantic Charter, self-determination (clear majority of German-speakers), etc. How likely is it that the Allies would take this position?

(1) The UK: According to Antony Evelyn Alcock, *The History of the South Tyrol Question* (1970), "The only consistently pro-Austrian line came from the British", partly because of the persistence of "the doubts expressed on the handing over of the Brenner to Italy in 1919, but which had been quelled because of the desire not to contravene the Treaty of London," partly because of fear that confining Austria to its 1938 boundaries would make it a failed state again, which would either attempt a new Anschluss or fall into the Communist sphere of influence. "The British Government only abandoned its support for Austria when it was realised that the other Powers were against a revision of the Italo-Austrian frontier, and that a more or less deep division among the victorious states would necessarily mean hindering the rapid conclusion of an Italian peace treaty, which the British Government, for various reasons, desired."

(2) I will discuss the USSR's attitude below. Basically, it would not favor Austria unless it was pretty sure it could control Austria.

(3) France: it seemed sympathetic to the Austrians but this was probably largely to exert pressure on Italy to get Briga and Tenda. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Brigue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tende When it became clear that France would get what it wanted, it shifted to a pro-Italian position.

(4) The US: A 1944 memorandum of the Committee for Post-War Planning stated

“The Austro-Italian Frontier:—It is recommended that the frontier between Austria and Italy be rectified by cession to Austria of the Italian province of Bolzano with the provision that minor adjustments of this line may be made in accordance with the distribution of the linguistic groups.

The Committee has proposed this solution because:
a. It recognizes this area as Austrian in its history, culture and tradition, and as an area which will probably be predominantly Austrian in population at the end of the war;
b. The retrocession of this region to Austria would aid both in the political and economic reconstruction of an Austrian state;
c. The loss to Italy through this cession would be slight in comparison with the gain to Austria”.

https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1946v05/d186

What made the US change its position? In August 1945 De Gasperi wrote a letter to Secretary of State Byrnes outlining the Italian position: (1) he stressed the association of the South Tyrolese with Nazism (this was a favorite theme of the Italians, yet one would think that if they were that bad, the Italians should want to get rid of them--yet he wanted not only to keep them but offered to grant them autonomy!), (2) he also noted the importance of the hydroelectric plants in South Tyrol for Italian industry (the Austians countered by offering the Italians full use of those plants afer the transfer), (3) Austria might end up as a Soviet puppet state, which with control of the Brenner Pass could be a serious menace to Italy. "Should the Italian and Ladin minorities of the Bolzano Province and the economic interest of the whole of Italy be sacrificed to this uncertain future? And, moreover, does this precarious outlook warrant the doors of the Brenner Pass to be left wide open to a new German 'Drang nach Suden'?" Byrnes' response was non-commital, but by September 14, the fate of the area was in effect determined by the Council of Foreign Ministers of the Big Four (US, USSR, UK, and France) which turned down Austria's request (without ruling out "minor territorial rectifications" in the future).

Probably the US had simply decided that Italy was much more important than Austria. A chaotic and/or Communist Italy would be a serious menace. Moreover, the Italians were already being required to renounce their African empire; they were being forced to give up territory to Yugoslavia; and to ask them to give up territory to Austria as well could fan discontent in Italy to a dangerous extent. Furthermore, there was no desire to have a quarrel with the Soviets on this question, and they were definitely pro-Italian on it. According to Alcock (p. 97), "the Soviet Union showed itself fundamentally against the transfer of the Upper Adige to Austria, either so as not to increase the the size of the German world or so as not to create a dangerous precedent that could be invoked later to create a modification of the eastern frontiers of Germany. Only for a brief time did the Soviet representatives at Vienna give the impression of supporting the Austrian requests, and this only when Stalin beleived it was possible to exert a preponderant influence on the Austrian Government. At any rate, in the final phase of the negotations, and in particular at Paris, the Soviet Union assumed an attitude clearly favouring the maintenance of the Brenner, 'exercising a decisive influence on the deliberations of the Four Powers.'" If there was ever any chance of the USSR backing Austria's claims, the very poor showing of the Communists in the Austrian legislative elections of November 1945 killed it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_legislative_election,_1945

And of course there were other political considerations: I doubt that US policy makers did not consider the Italian American vote. (Indeed, there were widespread Italian American protests about the harshness of the peace treaty that was eventually arrived at in OTL, even though it backed the Italians on the South Tyrol question.) As for the Soviets, they must have realized that for them to take the Austrian side would hurt the prospects of the Italian Communist Party. It was one thing to sacrifice some potential PCI votes to help their Yugoslav comrades; why do it to help what it was becoming clear would be a bourgeois Austria?

So, all in all it seems unlikely the Allies would back Austria on this question. Which is why it's a *challenge.* But I don't think it's inconceivable, given that *originally* the US (as well as the UK) supported Austria's position.
 
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The Allies during World War II took the official position that Austria was a victim, rather than a perpetrator, of Axis aggression. Given that (questionable) assumption...
Very questionable, for all that the Austrians started going on about how they were the first victims of the Nazis in 1945 aside from a small minority IIRC most Austrians seem to have been fairly enthusiastic about things. If they Allies decided to not buy that defence perhaps look to the Free Territory of Trieste as a possible solution - the area is legally separated from Italy and put under technical joint administration but run by the Allied military, it stays that way for a period of time, and then in the spirit of self-determination a plebiscite is held with the locals being given the options of rejoining Italy, rejoining Italy as an autonomous region, or joining Austria. Have it be done as part of the winding up of the Allied occupation of Austria and guarantee access to hydroelectricity to keep the Italians calm so that when the South Tyroleans choose union with Austria they don't have an excuse to object. That's the best I can think of off the top of my head when by rights I should be asleep. :)
 
Oh, I agree that the whole Austria-as-victim idea is dubious. (It reminds me of the old joke that the Austrians had convinced the world that Beethoven was an Austrian and Hitler was a German...) But it was still the official line of the Allies. And even if you reject it, you have to ask why Italy was any more innocent than Austria.

In fact, the South Tyrolese had plenty of grounds to dislike both Mussolini and Hitler. The Fascisti had carried out a brutal Italianization policy in the South Tyrol, severely restricting the use of German, bringing in Italian-speakers to upset the ethnic balance, even requiring that German family names be changed. Meanwhile, Hitler, in *Mein Kampf* and later, specifically made the South Tyrolese the one exception to his demand for the union of all Germans in one state--he said they simply weren't worth the loss of Italian friendship. (Predictably, he accused "the Jews" of raising the South Tyrol question to poison German-Italian relations.) In 1939, after the Anschluss, Hitler and Mussolini arrived at the "option agreement" by which the German-speakers in South Tyrol had to opt for German citizenship (in which case they were supposed to move to Germany within a few years) or Italian (in which case they faced complete Italianization). According to Antony Evelyn Alcock, *The History of the South Tyrol Question,* p. 57, between 205,00 and 217,000 persons opted for Germany (77%-81%) and between 49,00 and 62,000 for Italy (19%-23%). (However, for a number of reasons, especially the difficulty of tranportation and finding a place of settlement under wartime conditions, the actual number who emigrated was much smaller--around 80,000.) After World War II, this vote was often cited by the Italians as "proof" of the Nazi sympathies of the South Tyrolese. No doubt some of them did have such sympathies, but one must remember that "tremendous pressure was put on the South Tyrolese by propaganda methods and the Gestapo to vote for Germany. It was put about that those who voted for Italy would be the subject of reprisals once Germany had won the war, while Italy, distrusting the South Tyrolese, would transfer those not voting for Germany away from their homeland to other parts of the Kingdom, Albania or even the Empire." (Alcock, p. 54)

One thing that occurs to me is that the Austrian case might have gotten more sympathy from the Allies if there had been an anti-Nazi partisan movement among the South Tyrolese. There was in fact an underground anti-Nazi "Andreas Hofer Bewegung." But after the War, Hans Ergarter, who had been its leader, acknowledged that he "was not able to recount any activities undertaken by the *Bewegung* directly against the Wehrmacht, giving as a reason the fear of inciting reprisals. The *Bewegung* therefore concentrated on exercising a continuous propaganda on the Wehrmacht and the local population... ('the South Tyrolese are Austrians; South Tyrol should return to Austria'), keeping up contacts and helping political fugitives and deserters escape to Switzerland where, apparently the organisation had some links. There had been some indirect contact with the Italian Resistance through one of their leaders, Manlio Longon, but following his death after capture by the S.S., Egarter declared that he was unable to take this contact further..." Alcock, p. 72.
 
I agree it's not that hard to do - on the Italian side, just have another, lesser and less interested politician in lieu of Degasperi who was a Tyrolean himself and a respected antifascist at that; maybe with a reckless (and, frankly, unlikely) gamble that giving up the Bozen area would give better chances of retaining (parts of) Istria.
However, the bigger fix would be having a stronger Austria as well - no matter how determined and capable Degasperi was, an Austria with better international credentials than 'yet another German state to de-Nazify' could have provided a better support to the strong movements which wanted to join it and convinced the Allies to do, at the very least, some kind of division.
As for the Communist side - the main thing could be some kind of early fallout with Tito coupled with a better showing of the Austrian Communist Party, thus encouraging both Stalin and the PCI to endorse a tradeoff in which South Tyrol would be given to Austria in exchange for western Istria. But that already seems kinda hard to attain...
 
The problem is not doing it; the problem is doing it without giving Italy to the Soviet block. Italy is the only Axis major who overthrew its Fascist government and fought a civil war to confirm that; you can punish it more harshly, but giving Bolzano away will be seen as rolling back all the deaths of WWI - which will enrage the pro-Allies partisans who were veterans of that war. And Italy was OTL already pretty close to going red - if it loses Alto Adige after Stalin tries to avoid it?
 
Just have the Italian Communist Party do worse on the Trieste issue, in addition to the above; OTL they danced admirably on it, managing to defend their very awkward position without incurring the wrath of the other political forces or their foreign brethren.
 
The problem is not doing it; the problem is doing it without giving Italy to the Soviet block. Italy is the only Axis major who overthrew its Fascist government and fought a civil war to confirm that; you can punish it more harshly, but giving Bolzano away will be seen as rolling back all the deaths of WWI - which will enrage the pro-Allies partisans who were veterans of that war. And Italy was OTL already pretty close to going red - if it loses Alto Adige after Stalin tries to avoid it?

Actually, Italy did not come *that* close to going red; in the 1948 election the "Popular Democratic Front" of Communists and Nenni Socialists got only 31 percent of the vote, compared to 48.5 for the Christian Democrats. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_general_election,_1948 So the Popular Democratic Front could do better and still fall well short of a majority. And it's not like all the gains Italy won from Austria in World War I will be taken away; she will still keep Trentino and most of Gorizia and ultimately Trieste.
 
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