Julius Raab
Julius Raab went to Moscow in 1955 and came back with the only occupied country in Europe that the Soviet Union agreed to leave. He was a building contractor from Lower Austria and a conservative deputy in the first republic, and he had been a member of the paramilitary Heimwehr and briefly a minister in the corporate state, which is a biography that would have ended most postwar careers. It did not end his: he had refused office under the Germans, spent the war running his firm, and came out of it as a man the party could use. He built the chamber of commerce into a pillar of the postwar settlement and became chancellor in 1953. Austria had been occupied by four powers since 1945, divided into zones with Vienna split between them, and eight years of negotiation about a treaty had produced nothing because the Soviet Union would not sign while the German question was open. Raab's judgement was that Moscow could be moved by an offer of permanent neutrality, and that the offer had to be made directly rather than through the Western powers who were sponsoring his government. He went to Moscow in April 1955 with a small delegation and negotiated the memorandum that traded neutrality for withdrawal. The State Treaty was signed in Vienna the following month, in front of a crowd on the palace balcony. The last occupying soldier left in October, and parliament wrote neutrality into constitutional law the same day. It is the only case in the Cold War of the Soviet Union withdrawing from a country it occupied without a change of regime, and the reasons are still argued about - a new leadership in Moscow wanting a demonstration of good faith, a hope of tempting West Germany towards neutrality, or a judgement that a small neutral state was cheaper than a garrison. At home Raab presided over the system of formal bargaining between employers and unions that held Austrian wages and prices for the next thirty years, and he left office in 1961 after a stroke.
- Lived: 1891 CE – 1964 CE
- Nationality: Austrian
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
