From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (46 page)

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Authors: Bruce F. Pauley

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Page 193
Walter Riehl, chairman of the Austrian Nazi Party. Austrian National Library
Picture Archive. "Our housing shortage could be completely solved if the
approximately 200,000 Eastern Jews were expelled because there are about
150,000 Viennese without homes," he declared in a speech to a Nazi Party
rally on 31 August 1920 (
Deutsche ArbeiterPresse
, 4 September 1920).

 

Page 194
Nazi Demonstrations and Violence in the Early Republic

The minuscule size of the Austrian Nazi Party in the early 1920sits membership reached only 34,000 in August 1923condemned it to relative obscurity in the anti-Semitic developments of early postwar Austria. Between the summer of 1918 and the spring of 1923, Vienna witnessed numerous anti-Semitic outbursts. These included mass demonstrations similar to those that occurred in Berlin and Munich at the same time. In these demonstrations the Austrian Nazis played a leading role, or at least claimed to do so. In none of these events were Nazis acting alone, however. As we saw in Chapter 6, many of the participants came from the Greater German People's Party, the League of AntiSemites, the Front Fighters' Association, or the right wing of the Christian Social Party, particularly Leopold's Kunschak's Workers' Association. Not until 1923, when the Nazis first appeared at the Technical College in Vienna and began their brutal assaults on Jewish students, did they attract much attention.

9

One early instance of Nazi violence directed against Jews occurred in August 1923. Julius Streicher, the infamous Jew baiter from Nuremberg, spoke at a Nazi meeting in Vienna. In one two-hour speech he claimed that Jews alone profited from the world war whereas all non-Jews had to be considered conquered peoples. Streicher furthermore repeated the medieval legend of Jewish ritual murder and warned the women and girls in the audience about the Jewish "white slave trade." Any German woman or girl who had any sexual contact with a Jew would be lost to the German people. The effect of one of Streicher's speeches was illustrated when one of his listeners hit a Jewish-looking pedestrian in the face following the meeting.
10
The Nazis first succeeded in pushing their way to the forefront of the Jewish question in 1925. That was the year in which Walter Riehl regained some of the prestige he had lostfollowing his resignation from the chairmanship of the Austrian Nazi Party in August 1923by defending Otto Rothstock, the murderer of Hugo Bettauer.
11
In July the party gained additional notoriety when eighty Nazis, youths between fifteen and twenty years old, attacked several hundred people in a fashionable restaurant in Vienna while shouting "Juden hinaus."
12
The highlight of 1925 for the Nazis, however, was the Zionist Congress in August, another occasion when the Nazis made their presence known through their stormy protests and organized "riots." The impact of the Nazis' demonstrations, however, was undoubtedly blunted by the inclusion of countless

 

Page 195

other anti-Semitic groups. Moreover, the Nazis could not prevent the congress from taking place, a number of their members were arrested by the police, and they found themselves financially exhausted by their propaganda expenditures. Karl Schulz, the leader of the Austrian Nazis, had also alienated many of his followers; he had secretly promised the Vienna chief of police, Johannes Schober, that he would persuade his party comrades not to disturb the congress in order to prevent damage to Vienna's economy and to the good name of the city. Even though Schulz did not (or perhaps could not) live up to his promise, the whole episode cost him the respect of many of the younger Nazis.

13

An epilogue to the Zionist Congress not previously mentioned was a trial in March 1926 of the Nazi union leader, Walter Gattermayer, and a former editor of the
Deutsche ArbeiterPresse
, Josef Müller. The charges, which were raised by the
Arbeiter-Zeitung, Der Abend
, and the
Wiener Morgenzeitung
, accused Gattermayer of trying to provoke a pogrom. In the
Deutsche ArbeiterPresse
, he reprinted a speech entitled "Wien, wach auf!" ("Vienna, Wake Up!") and wrote two other articles called ''Christian Pogrom" and "The Plague in Vienna." He also authored a pamphlet entitled "A Collective Call against Jews and the Servants of Jews." In the first of these articles Gattermayer wrote that the God of the Jews was a "hardened swindler": "The beast Jehovah teaches the pleasure of making strangers work and the brutal rape of everything which is not Jewish." Gattermayer defended himself against the charge of blasphemy by quoting from the works of several scholars, including the discredited theology professor, August Rohling. Gattermayer was acquitted of blasphemy and provocation against the government, but was sentenced to three weeks of jail and three years of probation for writing and distributing his pamphlet. Müller also received three years of probation, and six weeks of jail.
14
The late 1920s and early 1930s, as we observed in Chapter 9, saw Nazi students start to dominate Austria's universities. By 1931 they had gained control over the Deutsche Studentenschaft and had created a veritable academic Third Reich a year and a half before Hitler came to power in Germany. In addition to their violent attacks on their Jewish classmates, Nazi students busied themselves compiling and publishing lists of Jewish professors, which were practically honor rolls of internationally renowned scholars, and then boycotting the classes of these professors.
15

 

Page 196
The Great Depression and the Resurgence of the Austrian Nazis

Outside of Austria's academic institutions, however, Nazi antiSemitism did not appear to be very threatening, at least not before the beginning of the 1930s. For example, as late as 1929
Die Wahrheit
was so confident about the declining significance of Nazi antiSemitism that its 4 October issue said that "we Austrian Jews have outlasted many anti-Semitic movements including the now-finished Nazis."

16

This relatively happy state of affairs proved to be all-too-short-lived. The Great Depression raised the already high number of unemployed to over 600,000 Austrians and caused the collapse of Vienna's two great Rothschild banks, the
Bodencredit-
and the
Creditanstalt
(as well as a great many non-Jewish banks in other countries). One Austrian émigré reflected years later that "these failures did more than hurt the Jewish community financially; they undermined the belief that Jews were particularly gifted, and indeed vitally needed, for the conduct of financial transactions and enterprises. Added to the substantial losses suffered by hundreds of thousands of gentile bank depositors . . . the end of the myth of Jewish competence in money matters gave a renewed impetus not only to anti-Semitic feelings, but even more so to the idea that anti-Semitic actions could be taken without harm to the economy."
17
The Nazis, in fact, made a point of this very issue in their propaganda.
18
The economic catastrophe, combined with the impact of the impressive Nazi electoral victories in Germany starting in September 1930, helped the Austrian Nazis to garner over 201,000 votes in the municipal elections in Vienna in April 1932 compared with just 27,500 votes seventeen months earlier. With the increase in the Nazi vote came a far more aggressive attitude toward Viennese Jews. By June 1932 Nazi youths sometimes attacked people in the streets of Vienna who simply looked Jewish. The next month a group of young Nazis attacked a country club in Lainz near Vienna which had an international membership including many Jews; tables were overturned and furniture and windows were damaged.
19
One particularly ugly incident occurred in October 1932 when forty Nazis, claiming they had been attacked by Jews while they were peacefully walking down a street, stormed a coffee shop that Jews used for prayers. Shouting "Juda verrecke" (roughly "Jews go to hell!") they destroyed windows and furniture. Further damage was prevented when members of the recently organized League of Jewish Front Soldiers (Bund jüdischer Frontsoldaten) came

 

Page 197

to the rescue. In February 1933 a Viennese court sentenced a Nazi to fourteen days in jail for threatening a Jewish store owner across the street from the Nazis' "Brown House" (headquarters) on the Hirschengasse in the sixth district called Mariahilf. Jewish shopkeepers and their families in that neighborhood were often beaten up and told to move to Palestine as soon as possible before they suffered the same fate as Jews in Germany, where Hitler had just come to power. Attacks by Nazis on Jewish individuals and businesses continued throughout the winter of 193233. By May, so many Jewish stores had been wrecked that non-Jewish businessmen began to display swastikas in order to gain immunity. A climax was reached in June when the Jewish jeweler, Norbert Futterweit, was killed, one of the Nazi acts of terror that led to the outlawing of the party on June 19.

20

The degree of violence, including homicide, which the Austrian Nazis were willing to employ, and not simply discuss, surpassed the physical intimidation used by their bourgeois rivals and predecessors. Likewise, their anti-Semitic propaganda
as a whole
was more extreme in its content and rambunctious in its techniques than anything Austrians had seen before or since the First World War, with the probable exception of the propaganda of the League of AntiSemites and the Greater Germans.
On the other hand, there was little if anything new in the specific charges the Nazis leveled against the Jews or even in their "solutions" to the Jewish "problem." As a matter of fact, the Nazis went out of their way to prove that their antiSemitism was
not
something new or unique. The
Deutschösterreichische Tages-Zeitung
, which had previously been an organ of the Greater Germans but was now moving into the Nazi camp, announced at least as early as 1926 that the greatest thinkers of all nationalities had been antiSemites.
21
The Nazis' Office for the Handling of the Jewish Question sent out a long list of anti-Semitic quotations by great German intellectuals and Catholic clergymen, including Bishop Gföllner's pastoral letter of January 1933, as well as statements by Jewish leaders that could be used by Nazi speakers and newspapers.
22
The pro-Nazi weekly newspaper,
Der Stürmer
, asserted that hatred of Jews dated back to ancient times and existed wherever Jews had lived. Even the famous American automobile manufacturer, Henry Ford, subscribed to the principle, as did the Ku Klux Klan, according to the paper.
23
Die Wahrheit
pointed out that many of the Nazis' favorite quotations from Goethe, Herder, Luther, Moltke, Bismarck, Voltaire, and others had been taken out of context, and did not take into account temporary moods, historical circumstances, or even later changes of mind.
24
But few Nazis had such critical insight and even

 

Page 198

fewer read
Die Wahrheit
! Austrian Nazi newspapers also liked to publish false quotations from the Talmud and other Jewish works but would have to retract them a few months later.

25

Scandalmongering: The Theater, The Cinema, and The Press
The Nazis were particularly incensed about three aspects of Vienna's cultural life where Jewish influence was especially strong: the theater, the cinema, and the press. The Nazis charged that Jews completely controlled the legitimate theater in Austria and Germany. Most of the playwrights were allegedly Jewish as were the theater directors and actors. Classical and purely German plays were rarely performed any more. Furthermore, the purpose of the Jewish plays was not to idealize life but to show it in all its fluctuations between good and evil. They made people look wretched and hopeless, and their jokes were mere obscenities without any deeper meaning.
26
The Nazis believed that films were one of the most effective ways Jews had of spreading their influence because of their appeal to the masses. Films produced by Jews were allegedly filled with "kitsch" and stupid jokes and melodies. Only one film company in Central Europe was even partly non-Jewish. Jewish control over American films, which were frequently shown in Germany, was equally great according to the Nazis.
27
As a matter of fact, the percentage of Jews involved in the film industry was high and thus gave a certain plausibility to the complaints of Nazis and other antiSemites, which was also true in Germany. For example, an estimated 63 percent of Vienna's cinemas were owned by Jews.
28
Nazi anger with American "Jewish" films and the Viennese Jewish cinemas that showed them reached its peak in the winter of 193031. Several weeks of demonstrations by perhaps as many as 10,000 Nazis and other antiSemites against the movie
All Quiet on the Western Front
, which allegedly "ridiculed the memory of two million dead German soldiers," resulted in several people being injured, considerable property being destroyed, and the picture finally being banned.
29
As for the press in Vienna, the Nazis claimed that twenty-two of the city's newspapers were in Jewish hands and that "Jewish" newspapers had a daily circulation of 1.3 million compared to only 400,000 for the nine "purely German" papers. One Nazi author complained that "at no time in history has so small a group of foreigners been able to exercise the unlimited domination the way the Jewish press has and does today in Austria.''
30
While publicly

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