Read From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism Online

Authors: Bruce F. Pauley

Tags: #History, #Jewish, #Europe, #Austria & Hungary, #Social Science, #Anthropology, #Cultural, #Discrimination & Race Relations, #test

From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (44 page)

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Page 181

schaft, or people's community. This idea had the dual advantage of ending the Marxist class struggle while excluding the "parasitic" Jews, who were allegedly responsible for Marxism, liberalism, individualism, and capitalism. Because Jews were not ethnically Germans, they could never be part of the Volksgemeinschaft.

21

The concept of a Volksgemeinschaft was very much present in the party's first declaration of principles drawn up in Salzburg in 1920. The Jews' ability to dominate depended on their destroying the people's community by dividing the Volk into mutually quarreling groups. In other respects the document was filled with most of the usual anti-Semitic clichés. Jews were stylized into everything negative. They were guilty of moral depravity and for all economic misery. The idea of an absolute moral code was alien to them. The Christian attitude toward morality was just the opposite, so it was inevitable that Jews would fight it. The Jews were parasitic because they could not maintain a state of their own. Their racial characteristics made them try to dominate productive people. They could only sell things, not make them. Their highest goal was to become rich in order to avoid work. Even art for them was not a matter of creativity but a means of making money. They had recently enjoyed a great increase in political power, in part because of democracy, which made it easy for them to dominate the state.
22
The only means of combating these evil Jewish racial characteristics and their threat to the Volksgemeinschaft was to treat them as a separate nation, a demand that some of the Jews (the Zionists) favored. In this the GDVP openly subscribed to racial antiSemitism with all that that implied. "Verbal antiSemitism" was simply not enough to restore the people's community. Propaganda about the essence of the Jewish intellectual characteristics and their danger to the German people would lead to their influence over the culture, economy, and public life of the country being reduced and to the disappearance of the Jewish way of thinking within the German people.
23
When read today the party program of the GDVP as well as that of other anti-Semitic parties of interwar Austria seems so extreme and so utterly irrational that one is inclined to doubt seriously whether the framers of such documents took them seriously themselves. Surely the authors were doing nothing more than appealing to the worst prejudices of their audiences in order to gain votes. However, there is hard evidence available that proves that at least some prominent members of the Greater German People's Party did indeed believe their own propaganda.
The Administrative Archives in Vienna contain minutes of numerous private meetings of a special committee of the GDVP that was formed in order

 

Page 182

to study the Jewish question and to make recommendations to the party as a whole. The committee's meetings were private, and it is unlikely that any member thought that the minutes would ever be made public. The committee, whose meetings began in April 1921 and lasted until at least February 1924, estimated that there were an incredible 730,000 Jews living in Austria, of whom 220,000 were foreign and 260,000 were baptized. The committee, which consisted of ''experts" on the Jewish question from both inside and outside the Parliament, was charged with exploring the following points: Ostjuden, the option question (in which, it will be recalled, subjects of the former AustroHungarian Monarchy had the option to choose which successor state they wished to live in), rent control, the race question, banking matters, Hochschulen, the press, and changes in the party's principles with regard to membership and marriage to Jews. The committee also wanted to establish an anti-Semitic archive and library. Already in its second meeting the committee approved a motion to exclude all racial Jews from membership in the Greater German People's Party.

24

The chairman of the committee, parliamentary deputy Dr. Josef Ursin, who accepted the authenticity of the
Protocols of Zion
, was convinced that the Jews, not the Entente, were the real winners of the world war. Another member of the committee believed that the Jews also represented a greater danger to the preservation of the German people and their economy than the Entente. The latter at least was obvious in its desire for destruction, whereas the Jews were secretive. Another member cautioned that the Treaty of St. Germain protected the rights of minorities, including Jews. During a meeting in May 1921, the committee discussed the possibility of a complete separation of Jews and "Aryans" in all their social organizations, including sporting, academic, and professional associations. It was agreed that Aryans should not even allow Jews in their homes. In this regard, cooperation with other anti-Semitic organizations such as the Schutz-und Trutzbund (Offensive and Defensive League) was thought to be helpful as long as it was not done publicly.
25
Despite their efforts to combat Jewish influence through the publication and distribution of leaflets and pamphlets, members of the committee themselves admitted that they had not been very successful up to 1924, except in promoting social segregation. The power of the Jews, far from being curbed, was actually still growing. The committee was not even sure whether the Jews were a divided people, united only by instinct, or whether they were, as one member suggested, a united and international great power led from New York.
26
Chairman Ursin did not confine his anti-Semitic activities to the committee on Jews. Early in 1923 he and Anton Jerzabek, a Christian Social parliamen-

 

Page 183

tary deputy and chairman of the League of AntiSemites (Antisemitenbund), sponsored a bill in Parliament that would have required Jews to state their
Volkszugehörigkeit
(roughly "nationality") and race when the Austrian census was taken that March.
Die Wahrheit
was adamantly opposed to such a question being included in the census, arguing that there was no such thing as a "Jewish race" because of intermarriage between Christians and Jews, which had been taking place in Austria since 1914 (actually much earlier than that). The Union of German-Austrian Jews denounced the proposed bill as anti-Semitic. On the other hand, Zionists such as Leopold Plaschkes favored the bill, as did Robert Stricker when a similar bill was first proposed in 1919. The bill enjoyed the support of both the Greater German People's Party and the Christian Social Party, but was ultimately defeated in Parliament by the Social Democrats.

27

Although the official program of the Greater Germans was the most anti-Semitic and racist of Austria's political parties apart from the Nazis, in practice the party was more moderate than its program suggested.
28
Its best-known leader, Johannes Schober, had taken every precaution as Vienna's police president to protect the Zionist Congress in 1925. His chancellorships in 192122 and 192930 were marked by equal restraint. The unwillingness or inability of the party to back up its extreme rhetoric vis-à-vis the Jews with concrete actions no doubt accounts at least in part for its losing 90 percent of its followers to the National Socialists in 193233.
The Antisemitenbund
The close agreement and cooperation between the Christian Social Party and the Greater German People's Party can be seen not only in their joint sponsorship of the parliamentary bill on racial identity, but also in the involvement of both parties in the German-Austrian Defensive League of AntiSemites, the full title of the organization which was better known as the Antisemitenbund. In fact, members of all the bourgeois parties and paramilitary formations of Austria including the Landbund, the Heimwehr, the Frontkämpfervereinigung, and the Austrian Nazi Party (until 1924 and after 1933) participated in the activities of the Antisemitenbund. For example, the CSP member and parliamentary deputy, Anton Jerzabek, and Robert Körber, a member of the GDVP and later the Nazi Party, were the organization's first cochairmen in 1919; Anton Orel, leader of the Christian Social Party's League of Working Youth of Austria and editor of its newspaper called
Volkssturm
, was on the Executive Committee of the Antisemitenbund until it was officially dissolved

 

Page 184
Dr. Anton Jerzabek, Christian Social member of Parliament and leader of the
Antisemitenbund. Austrian National Library Picture Archive. Addressing an
international congress of antiSemites in Vienna in March 1921, he proclaimed,
"Only the debilitating disintegration of the German people by the Jewish poison is
responsible for the Entente victory over us" (
Der eiserne Besen
, 20 March 1921).

 

Page 185

shortly after the Anschluss. Richard Steidle, the one-time coleader of the Heimwehr, was a prominent member of the Antisemitenbund in the Tyrol in 1919 at a time when it was the leading exponent of anti-Semitic propaganda in the province. Even Engelbert Dollfuss, chancellor of Austria from 1932 to 1934, repeatedly spoke at league meetings in 1920 while he was a leader of the Catholic Students. Leopold Kunschak of the CSP, Josef Ursin of the GDVP, and the Nazi leaders Walter Riehl and Walter Gattermayer were also frequent speakers at meetings and rallies of the Antisemitenbund.

29

The Antisemitenbund was founded during the height of the anti-Semitic hysteria in 1919, and thereafter its success mirrored the rise and fall of anti-Semitic feeling in Austria. It began in Salzburg, but by the middle 1920s it had established chapters all over the country. The first mass meeting of the league took place in September of 1919 with five thousand people attending. By March 1921 it was able to attract forty thousand people to an international congress of antiSemites in Vienna. The organization continued to prosper until about 1924 or 1925, but thereafter its popularity declined, as did the popularity of antiSemitism in general in Austria; then a revival of both occurred with the coming of the Great Depression.
30
The first task of the Antisemitenbund, and the element that made it unique among anti-Semitic organizations in Austria, was its desire to assemble all antiSemites into a single umbrella organization in order to protect them from the economic, social, and political influence of the Jews. The Antisemitenbund stood squarely in favor of the racial principle; it defined as a Jew anyone having one Jewish great-grandparent, a definition far more rigorous than that found in the legal commentaries on the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. The latter considered a person Jewish who had two Jewish grandparents and practiced Judaism or, for nonobservant Jews, three Jewish grandparents. On the other hand, the league's definition was no more exacting than legal definitions used to identify racial minorities at that time in the United States. Therefore, one of its most important responsibilities was informing the Austrian people that the Jews were a separate nation. However, like nearly all other anti-Semitic organizations in Austria, the Antisemitenbund also fought the "Jewish spirit" among Aryans. Unlike many antiSemites, league members did not waste much time on scholarly analysis of the Jewish question. Instead, they preferred taking such action as encouraging boycotts of Jewish businesses.
31
In general the League of AntiSemites wanted a legal separation of Jews and non-Jews in education, administration of justice, and social welfare. More specifically it wanted to expel all Jews who had immigrated since 1914; forbid all future Jewish immigration; identify as "Jewish" all newspapers and businesses

 

Page 186

where Jews worked; establish a numerus clausus for Jews in the arts; exclude Jews from the professions of law, medicine, and teaching; take away their right to vote; and deny them the right to hold public office and to own land.

32

Members of local chapters of the Antisemitenbund, consisting of at least twenty members, were supposed to report the names of all Jews living in their building together with their professions, the size of their apartments, when they were born, their arrest record, their service in the army, and where they spent their summer vacations so that a complete registry of all Jews could be compiled by the national organization. These records would make it possible someday for Jews to be required to carry special identification. The
Reichspost
asked its readers to assist in this survey, much to the alarm of the Viennese Jews who feared a pogrom. Local chapters were also supposed to help establish judenrein schools and to monitor the influence of Jews on the press, education, scholarship, and art in their locality. They also encouraged summer resort communities to exclude Jewish guests, an effort at which they were only partially successful, however.
33
Although the
Deutschösterreichische Tages-Zeitung
in Vienna maintained close ties with the Antisemitenbund, as did the
Reichspost
(which advertised its meetings), the
Deutsches Volksblatt
, and the
Neuigkeits-Weltblatt
, the official newspaper of the organization until 1932 was
Der eiserne Besen
. Founded in Vienna in 1921, it was forced to move its editorial offices to Salzburg in 1923. Its circulation remained quite small, never exceeding six thousand. Even by the low standards of predominantly anti-Semitic newspapers, the contents of
Der eiserne Besen
were primitive; its specialties were detailed descriptions of private sex scandals involving Jews and stories about alleged Jewish ritual murders. It also liked to list the names of Jewish shops together with the names of their "Aryan" customers. The scandal mongering evidently proved to be too much for three newspapers in Salzburg, which won a libel suit against
Der eiserne Besen
in March 1932, a victory its editors ascribed to "Jewish-Roman concepts of right and wrong."
34
The Antisemitenbund virtually disappeared from public view during the relatively prosperous late 1920s, in part because the leadership of the Austrian Nazi Party required its
Parteigenossen
(party comrades) to give up their membership in the Antisemitenbund in 1924, a decision that came about the same time that overall interest in antiSemitism in Austria substantially declined. For the next nine years or so the activities of the Antisemitenbund remained infrequent and were far overshadowed by those of the Nazis. However, it experienced a major renaissance after the prohibition of all the political parties of Austria, beginning with the Communists and Nazis in 1933. From then
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