Im Kalten Krieg der Spionage

For decades, the case of Margarethe Ottillinger lay in the darkness of history. The arrest and abduction of the young economic expert and head of the section on 5 November 1948 at the Enns Bridge near Linz caused a great stir in post-war Austria, but the true background remained unknown to this day. Margarethe Ottillinger herself did not learn until her death in 1992 why she disappeared for seven years in Soviet gulag camps and prisons and to whom she owed it. This book finally clarify these unanswered questions on the basis of new materials from Russian archives: In the process, a picture is drawn of the very person who denounced Ottillinger. The Austrian Alfred Fockler, who fell into the hands of the Soviets as an American agent, wanted to get his head out of the noose by heavily incriminating Ottillinger. Two other men sealed Ottillinger`s fate: Russian engineer Andrei Didenko, who had fallen in love with the young top official and whom she helped escape to the Western sector, and Minister Peter Krauland, her chief, who stood idly by as his first female employee was abducted. Stefan Karner as the author of the book has reprocessed Ottillinger`s KGB interrogation records, which had been kept under lock and key for decades, and uncovered names and aspects of Ottillinger`s environment that were previously unknown. Using new documents from the KGB and Western intelligence agencies, Ottillinger`s disappearance can be reconstructed as a concatenation of political and human components. Ottillinger`s work for the reconstruction of Austria with the help of the American Marshall Plan and the planned reduction of steel allocations for Soviet factories in eastern Austria made her extremely suspicious to the Soviets at the juncture of the Cold War and an American spy. As a powerful young woman with a lot of money to distribute within the Austrian bureaucracy, she also attracted envy and ill will in a male-dominated society: reports to the Soviet occupation forces were the result. And Ottillinger, who never showed fear, actually played with fire: by venturing deep into the networks of the secret services in post-war Vienna. The publication of this book in Russian translation by the most important Russian publishing house Rospen for historical scientific literature is a special event and shows the progress in the joint reappraisal of even dark parts of the bilateral Austrian-Russian history.

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