his detention at the punishment prison in Straubing. After the war Soviet troops reached the border from Hungary at the end of March 1945 and captured Vienna after two weeks of savage fighting by the middle of April. By the end of 1945 the Soviet occupiers had acquiesced in the creation of a provisional government under Karl Renner which immediately came into line with the tide of history by endorsing the 1943 Moscow Declarations and repudiating the 1938 annexation. War formally ended in May 1945, and with it the National Socialist chapter in Austrian (and European) history. When he was released from prison Viktor Riemann was already relatively close to home and in July 1945 he became a contributing editor on the newly launched Salzburger Nachrichten (daily newspaper). Austria had been divided into four zones of military occupation: Salzburg had ended up not in the Soviet occupation zone but in the US occupation zone, and initially the newspaper's publication was under the close control of General Eisenhower's twelfth army corps. By the end of 1945 Reimann had become deputy editor in chief, a position he retained till 1948. There are nevertheless suggestions that his (at this stage) pro-US political stance sometimes led to difficulties with senior colleagues at the paper. During his time at the Salzburger Nachrichten Viktor Reimann rediscovered an appetite for political activism more generally. With Herbert Kraus, he was a co-founder, in March 1949, of the "Verband der Unabhängigen" ("Federation of Independents" / VdU) party. When a Salzburg party branch was set up on 1 September 1949 Reimann became its chairman, as well as head of the party press department. Politician-journalist Viktor Reimann became a member of the "Nationalrat" ("National Parliament") in 1949. His was one of 16 seats allocated to the "Wahlpartei der Unabhängigen" (as the VdU was briefly known) which had won nearly 12% of the national vote. In the previous election, which had taken place in 1945, approximately 556,000 former members of the National Socialist party had been deprived of the right to vote. These people regained their voting rights ahead of the 1949 election. There were strong inferences drawn from the pattern of the election results, that the former National Socialists voted in disproportionately high numbers for the VdU rather than for the mainstream centre-right and centre-left ÖVP and SPÖ parties (with respectively 44% and 39% of the national vote). Attitudes towards Reimann,