On the existence of rigid aleph₁-free abelian groups of cardinality aleph₁

An abelian group is said to be aleph_1-free if all its countable subgroups are free. Our main result is: If R is a ring with R^+ free and |R|<lambda <= 2^{aleph_0}, then there exists an aleph_1-free abelian group G of cardinality lambda with End(G)=R . A corollary to this theorem is: Indecomposable aleph_1-free abelian groups of cardinality aleph_1 do exist.