Swiss Testimonies on the Heroic Deeds of the Austrian Army in Vienna

* Cologne, 5 December. While the *Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung* and other hired sheets exalt Windischgrätz and Jellachich as restorers of order to the skies, shower laurels upon the valiant Austrian troops, and never tire of recounting the atrocities of the democratic reign of terror, a new source of material for the historiography of the last events in Vienna suddenly opens up in the Swiss press. These are the accounts of Swiss who have escaped, with hardship and at risk of their lives and under maltreatment, from the henchmen of “order” and who, having returned to their homeland, are publishing their experiences during the “days of terror” and the “war of order”. And not, mind you, raging “proletarians”, but great capitalists, people who owned enormous factories in Vienna, altogether unsuspected bourgeois with conservative sentiments – and a Swiss conservative is, as is well known, a German “whiner” raised to the second power – and their reports appear not in radical scandal sheets, but in highly conservative intelligencer sheets. From one such account in the Basle Intelligencer we take the following details:

Mr Specker of St Gallen was director of a large engineering works that stood quite isolated outside the outer customs line of Vienna, on the Tabor. He, like his workers and foremen, all of them Swiss, had neither taken part in the struggle nor kept weapons in the house. Only 15 workers remained in the factory to serve the fire engine set up in the courtyard. When the military advanced, General Wyß, a patrician of Berne and chief of the Austrian general staff, gave Mr Specker his word of honour that if he had no weapons and no shots were fired from his factory, nothing would happen to the building. The house was searched by troops, and nothing was found. Despite this, another detachment of riflemen maintained that shots had been fired from the house (quite understandable, since they were permitted to plunder every house from which shots were fired). The “Swiss dogs”, who had trusted so much in the word of their countryman, General Wyß, that they had even left their wives and children in the factory, were most brutally maltreated by these riflemen and were saved only by the intervention of another officer. He led them to the guard-house. As they marched past, a neighbour pointed to one of the workers and said: “He was also at the demolition of the bridge on the Tabor.” Immediately, without being allowed a word, he was stood against the wall and shot. At the guard-house the muskets were several times levelled at the “Swiss dogs”, and only the officer’s cocked and loaded pistol, held out, restrained the soldiers. Director Specker was placed against a wall; three riflemen took aim at him; one set the barrel of his rifle to his mouth and, with the hammer cocked, played with the trigger. An officer pulled out his watch and said: “You have a quarter of an hour still, you Swiss dog, then you will be shot; so pray!” Before this time had elapsed, the officer who had already saved them once returned and led Mr Specker to General Wyß, who reproached him with his “breach of word”! He stubbornly maintained that shots had been fired from the factory, although Mr Specker proved to him its physical impossibility. At last he received a safe-conduct for himself and his people to Florisdorf. Returning to the factory, they found everything shattered, demolished, and plundered. Mr Specker’s family had been chased about the house with rifle shots; the bookkeeper, a Swiss, pierced by several bullets, was writhing in his death agony in the garden, and anyone who approached him was shot at, so that the unfortunate man lay there until late into the night and died. His name was Kunz. At length the survivors managed to get safely as far as Florisdorf.

The engineer Bollinger, likewise a Swiss, who had made a name for himself through his work on the Stephansthurm, succeeded in protecting his factory from fire by means of pumps. But here, too, the Austrians broke in on the lying pretext that shots had been fired from the factory, plundered and demolished the entire building, set it on fire, and stabbed Bollinger’s brother to death as he sought to save himself from the flames. Another Swiss woman residing in Vienna, Madame Bodener, had her child shot dead in her arms by the Croats.

The report promises further revelations about the heroic deeds of the valiant Austrian army as soon as other Swiss have returned. At the same time, however, it depicts in the most touching terms the security, the tranquillity, and the courteous, decent behaviour on the part of the armed proletarians that the Swiss enjoyed during the so-called reign of terror of the Viennese proletariat and students.

We repeat: The authors of these reports are no radicals, no proletarians and malcontents, but great capitalists and genuine full-blooded Swiss aristocrats. Does not the *A.A.Z.* wish to have enquiries made by its various τγ, MW, #, Δ and other correspondents in Vienna as to whether all this is not literally true? We have given their names, place, and all details as exactly as it could wish. But it will be careful not to.