From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (42 page)

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Authors: Bruce F. Pauley

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serious in wanting the German people to preserve their Christian faith. Likewise the magazine declared its "solidarity" with the German regime after the book burning ceremonies of 10 May.

55
In November 1933
Schönere Zukunft
rejected contentions by what it called the "Jewish boulevard press" that antiSemitism was unpatriotic and a threat to the state. On the contrary, it was patriotic to say when the Jews held too many positions. The "Jewish press," furthermore behaved as if ''a few anti-Semitic excesses in the Third Reich were the most disgraceful and terrible crimes in world history."
56

Catholic newspapers were not alone in fearing the increased popularity of Nazi antiSemitism. The antiSemitism of the Christian Social workers' movement responded to the new competition by intensifying its long-standing anti-Semitic policy. The Jews provided a convenient scapegoat for the disastrous Austrian economy so that neither the non-Jewish capitalist supporters of the Christian Social Party nor the party's leadership would be blamed. Leopold Kunschak also hoped that by renewing his attack on Jews he could prevent the younger members of his Arbeiterverein from deserting to the Nazis.
57
Kunschak thought that the Nazi takeover in Germany was a natural reaction to "formal democracy" and party domination. However, he criticized the new regime for its "moderation" toward Jews. The regime and the German Jews had allegedly reached a modus vivendi so the anti-Semitic slogans of the Austrian Nazis did not need to be taken seriously. The true antiSemites were in the Arbeiterverein, not in the Nazi Party. When a few hundred Jews from Nazi Germany sought refuge in Austria, Kunschak's Arbeiterverein attacked them as sharply as it had the Ostjuden during the First World War. In 1936 Kunschak republished his legislative proposal of 1919 in order to prove that he had favored the segregation of Jews sixteen years before the Nazis in Germany enacted the Nuremberg Laws. At no time prior to 1938 did any of the publications of the Arbeiterverein complain about the Nazi persecution of Jews.
58
The Catholic church did not remain entirely silent regarding the excesses of Nazism and antiSemitism. Unfortunately, however, its efforts to denounce these phenomena were often so equivocal that it is uncertain whether they did the Nazis more harm than good. The most celebrated case of such an ambiguous denunciation was a pastoral letter of the bishop of Linz, Johannes Maria Gföllner, on 23 January 1933, exactly one week before Hitler became the German chancellor.
Much of the long letter, when read today, is a praiseworthy defense of Christian values. Gföllner wrote that humanity was one family that had descended

 

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from Adam and Eve. Race hatred like class hatred was not compatible with true Christianity, which is a religion of love, not revenge. Revenge was a matter left to God. As for nationalism, it was willed by God and approved by the church. But it became unnatural and un-Christian when it degenerated, as it had done in Gföllner's time, to racism and the blood myth. The racial standpoint of nationalists, including the radical antiSemitism preached by Nazism, was completely incompatible with Christianity and had to be rejected. It was inhuman to hate, despise, and persecute Jews simply because of their descent. All things considered, National Socialism suffered internally from racial madness, from un-Christian nationalism, and from a nationalistic concept of religion. It was impossible, the bishop concluded, to be both a good Catholic and a real Nazi.

59

If Bishop Gföllner had limited himself to these remarks, his letter might still be remembered today as a courageous, timely, and insightful denunciation of the Nazi ideology, which in part it was. Unfortunately, however, the letter also included a long list of anti-Semitic clichés that had been repeated for decades by antiSemites of various political persuasions. He charged that undoubtedly many godless Jews exercised a harmful influence in all areas of modern cultural life, trade and business, the legal profession, and medicine. Recent social and political revolutions had been carried out on the basis of materialist and liberal principles that originated from the Jews. The press, advertisements, theater, and cinema were often filled with frivolous and cynical tendencies that poisoned the Christian soul and were also nourished and spread by Jews. Degenerate Jews, in league with Freemasons, were also primarily responsible for capitalism and were the principal founders of socialism, communism, and Bolshevism. To fight and to break these harmful influences of Jewry were both the right and the duty of a convinced Christian. If Nazism limited itself to these tasks there could be no objection to it as long as the National Socialists remembered that the Roman Catholic church was the strongest bulwark against Jewish atheism.
60
Not surprisingly, antiSemites were far more receptive to Gföllner's pastoral letter than were Jews or philoSemites. After two thousand members of the paramilitary League of Jewish Front Fighters held a demonstration in Vienna on 30 January to protest the letter, Leopold Kunschak's Arbeiterverein held a counterdemonstration in support of the bishop's statement. Georg Glockemeier, the anti-Semitic author of a book called
Zur wiener Judenfrage
, applauded Gföllner for denouncing Jewish business morality and the Jewish international
Weltgeist
(world spirit). Even Nazis loved to quote from the let-

 

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ter, without, of course, mentioning its anti-Nazi contents. Nor did the Nazis mention that the Austrian episcopate condemned the letter in December 1933 for causing racial hatred and conflict.

61

In 1937 another Austrian bishop, Alois Hudal, the rector of the German charity in Rome called "Anima," published in Leipzig
Die Grundlagen des Nationalsozialismus
(
The Foundations of National Socialism
), which was even more pleasing to the Nazis than Bishop Gföllner's pastoral letter because it attempted to establish an understanding between Catholicism and National Socialism. Hudal (who dedicated the first copy of his book to Adolf Hitler himself whom he called "the Siegfried of German hope and greatness"),
62
praised the idea of a Volksgemeinschaft, the German ideal of racial unity, and the Nazis' attempt to find a solution to the Jewish question. In contrast to Gföllner, Hudal said that the nationalism and racism of the Nazis were compatible with Christianity as long as fundamental Christian dogmas were not violated. Although all races were equal in the eyes of God, this did not make them equal in the eyes of man as far as their intelligence, customs, and physiology were concerned. The avoidance of race mixing for the sake of producing healthy children was therefore justified. There could also not be any serious objection to special laws preventing a flood of Jewish immigrants. Bishop Hudal went on to criticize the "Jewish'' press in Austria for playing off Austrians against Germans and said that the Nazis should be supported as long as they were carrying on their fight against left-wing radicalism. Hudal's book was criticized by
Christliche Ständestaat
for using Nazi polemics and terminology. However, the prelate received support from Archbishop Theodor Innitzer of Vienna, Friedrich Funder's
Reichspost
, and Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg.
63
This brief survey of Catholic attitudes toward antiSemitism clearly reveals that there was no single unambiguous policy. Most Catholics, including even people like Leopold Kunschak, rejected racial antiSemitism in theory as being contrary to the teachings of the church. In practice, however, most Catholics made sharp distinctions between Catholics who had converted from Judaism and people whose families had belonged to the church for many generations. No member of the church's hierarchy or leader of the Christian Social Party approved of anti-Semitic pogroms, but nearly all of them appear to have supported some kind of legislation limiting the "influence" of Jews in Austria's cultural life and many also favored restricting their numbers in Austrian universities. A nostalgic longing to reverse the emancipation of Jews and return them to their medieval spiritual or even physical isolation was unmistakable. Catholics saw Marxism as the greatest threat to their religion and conservative

 

 

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way of life and held Jews responsible for this modern phenomenon. Without Jews there would presumably be no Marxism, atheism, or secularism. Therefore anti-Semitic Catholic propaganda was directed primarily against these "Jewish Marxists."

The rise of the Nazis and their expropriation of the Catholics' anti-Semitic slogans put most (but not all) Catholics in the awkward position of being able to do little more than quibble about Nazi racial theories and occasional use of violence if they did not wish to contradict centuries of their own beliefs. Moreover, the official anti-Semitic program of the Third Reich prior to the Anschluss in 1938 rarely went beyond that which had been proposed by Leopold Kunschak and others long before 1933. In short, neither the Catholic clergy nor the Catholic laity managed to denounce either Nazism in general or Nazi antiSemitism in unequivocal terms. Gunter Lewy's judgment of the Catholic church in Germany is also applicable to Austria: "A Church that justified moderate antiSemitism and merely objected to extreme and immoral acts was ill-prepared to provide an effective antidote to the Nazis' gospel of hate."

64
The compromising attitude toward Nazism, which characterized the Catholic church after the Anschluss, had its origins long before 1938.

 

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12
The Minor Political Parties and Movements

The Social Democratic Workers' Party and the Christian Social Party were by far the two largest parties in Austria during the democratic era, usually winning a combined total of over 80 percent of the seats in the lower house of the Austrian Parliament.

1
The remainder of the seats were divided between several minor bourgeois parties nearly all of which espoused antiSemitism at least some of the time as well as a measure of panGerman nationalism. In addition there were a number of usually nonparliamentary political organizations with anti-Semitic agendas. The intensity and type of antiSemitism varied from one group to another and from one time to another.

None of these minor parties and organizations displayed anything remotely resembling originality when it came to the "Jewish question." Rather, they all belonged to one of the dominant types of bourgeois antiSemitism: religious, economic, or racist, or very often a combination of these types. Although these organizations all existed from the early postwar years until at least 1934, those with stronger religious proclivities tended to predominate in the early or middle years of the republic whereas those that were more racially inclined either increased in strength after the meteoric rise of Nazism in Germany and Austria after 1930 or else were absorbed by them.
The Landbund
Possibly the least anti-Semitic of all of Austria's political parties, other than a few tiny ones of no consequence, was the Landbund or Agricultural League. In 1920 various nationalistic peasant leagues of Austria organized themselves into the German Peasant Party which in 1922 changed its name to the Landbund. Its political principles, written in 1923 during the height of the postwar anti-Semitic hysteria in Austria, closely resembled the traditional and religious

 

Page 175

antiSemitism of the Christian Social Party in declaring that it fought the Jewish race as a "disintegrating" element in society. The overwhelming influence of the Jews on the political, economic, and cultural life of Austria had to be fought at all times. The attempt of the Jews, through their leadership of the internationally organized proletariat to eliminate state power and to dominate the world was opposed by the Landbund, which considered itself a bulwark of European civilization.

2

After 1923 the Landbund was only intermittently anti-Semitic. In the more prosperous year of 1925 its new party program said nothing about antiSemitism. On the other hand, after the revival of antiSemitism in the early 1930s still another official declaration in 1932 included an anti-Semitic statement. Most Austrian peasants probably resembled other Central European farmers in being anti-Semitic only when their specific economic interests were involved.
3
Paramilitary Formations: The Heimwehr and the Frontkämpfervereinigung
A larger and certainly more strident organization than the Landbund was the Heimwehr. Whereas the Landbund was one of the more democratic parties of Austria, the Austrian Heimwehr or Home Guard, especially its panGerman wing in Styria known as the Styrian Heimatschutz, has often been described as "fascist," because of its advocacy of the "leadership principle"; its open admiration for its financial patron, Benito Mussolini; and its antiSemitism.
4
In the spectrum between the demagogic, religious, but usually nonracial antiSemitism of the Christian Socials, on the one hand, and the racial and sometimes violent antiSemitism of the Nazis on the other, the Heimwehr stood squarely in the middle, with one foot in both camps. The Heimwehr was a paramilitary formation founded shortly after the collapse of the monarchy in order to defend Austria's southern borders against Yugoslav incursions. It soon evolved, however, into a primarily anti-Socialist movement.
At the height of its popularity in the late 1920s, 70 percent of the Heimwehr's 300,000 to 400,000 active members and sympathizers were peasants, many from traditionally völkisch and anti-Semitic areas like Styria and Carinthia. Their religious suspicion of Jews now combined with their hatred of Socialists and their distrust of the great metropolis, Vienna, with its new Socialist government. On the other hand, most Heimwehr members in other provinces, while sharing the antiSocialism of their comrades in the south, were too

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