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Authors: Bruce F. Pauley

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From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (54 page)

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Page 237

the paper compared the fate of the German Jews with the fate of Jews in Spain during the Inquisition. The one big difference noted by the paper, however, was that in the sixteenth century a Jew could, as a last resort, escape persecution by converting to Christianity (actually this was not entirely true), an option not available in the Third Reich. Even families whose Jewish ancestors had converted to Christianity two generations earlier were being affected by the Nazis' anti-Semitic legislation.

23

Die Wahrheit'
s pessimism was nothing, however, compared with that of Zionist newspapers in Austria. Just three days after Hitler's appointment as chancellor on 30 January 1933,
Die Stimme
again used events in Germany as a dire warning about the need to join the Zionist cause before it was too late. "The situation of Jews in Germany is deplorable hopelessness, fear, lack of organization, and helplessness. These are the people who did not recognize, or who did not want to recognize, that liberalism had been passed by. They ridiculed the Zionist idea. They did not realize that their desire for assimilation and their cringing made them look silly."
24
Die Stimme
used the burning of 45,000 "Jewish" books on 10 May as the occasion to renew its criticism of assimilated German Jews. Their superpatriotism was now coming back to haunt them. They ought to get rid of their past illusions. But if the future of Jews in Germany looked dismal, the future of Zionism was bright. "We are just as certain of final victory as we are sure that culture will always win over barbarism, morality over naked power, justice over the power-politics of despots." The Zionists would never desert the Jews of Germany, but they demanded the same loyalty from the German Jews.
25
Der jüdische Arbeiter
was a little less moralistic in its assessment of Hitler's takeover, and was more direct and descriptive. The paper remarked that for the first time a government was in power in Germany whose political path was marked by murder and bloodshed and whose party program was characterized by hatred of other races. But
Der jüdische Arbeiter
also could not resist the temptation to seek political gain. Hitler, it said, could only appear in a capitalist society. The extreme champions of the capitalist order had helped put him in power. After the Reichstag elections in March, the paper noted (for the most part correctly) that it was the middle classes that had voted for Hitler, not the proletariat.
26
Die Neue Welt
considered Hitler's assumption of power proof that Herzl was right in saying that only the gathering of all Jewish strength on a national basis could resist antiSemitism. The disaster that was befalling the Jews of Germany was the result of their being politically leaderless, which left them defenseless. AntiSemitism could be avoided only if German (and by impli-

 

Page 238

cation, Austrian) Jews did not interfere in the cultural affairs of Christians. Great harm had come when Jewish writers had criticized German artistic taste and morality. The German Jews had been suffering from the illusions of the emancipationist and socialist ideologies that viewed Zionism as unpatriotic and suspect. A few months after dispensing these opinions,
Die Neue Welt
, alone among Austrian Jewish newspapers, made the remarkable statement that ''Hitler-Germany was preparing to murder hundreds of thousands of Jews,"

27
although the comment was probably intended more as a scare tactic than as a sober prediction.

Jüdische Presse
, the organ of Austrian Orthodox Jews, also found it impossible to pass up the opportunity to moralize about the sins of liberal, assimilated German Jews. Their problems were all caused by their not having been given a religious education, the paper editorialized just after Hitler's takeover. "Orthodox Jews in Germany will certainly be negatively affected by Hitler's takeover of power. But it is undeniable that those assimilated Jews who have turned their backs on Judaism will be hurt the most." Other religions were no less endangered than the Jews. The greater part of the first page of this issue, however, was devoted not to events in Germany, but to denouncing the enfranchisement of women for Viennese Jewish communal elections!
28
Austrian Jews and Nazi Germany in the Middle 1930s
Both the deep pessimism of
Die Wahrheit
and the attention paid to Jewish affairs in Nazi Germany by Zionist papers proved to be short-lived. From 1934 until the Anschluss, reports in the liberal paper about the Jewish persecution in Germany became less frequent, and those that were published were considerably more hopeful. The main reason for this relative lack of interest was that after the initial outburst of persecution in early 1933, life for German Jews settled down into somewhat more tolerable, if uncertain, circumstances. Many Jews who had emigrated in 1933 actually returned after failing to find employment abroad or after encountering more antiSemitism in their host country than they had left behind in Germany. Aside from the 5,433 highlevel Jewish civil servants who had lost their jobs in the first six months of the Nazi era, many Jewish businessmen actually prospered. At the beginning of 1937 there were still 40,000 Jewish-owned businesses in Germany, and some even received government contracts. German Jews also experienced little intervention by the Nazi government in the operation of their school system. Jews were not hindered in the practice of their religion or in the functions of

 

Page 239

their institutions. Therefore it appeared to many Jews in Germany and Austria that German Jews might be granted a special autonomous position within the Nazi state.

29

Already by July 1934
Die Wahrheit
was beginning to regain some of its lost confidence. In that month it expressed pleasant surprise that the recent campaign of the Nazi government to stamp out criticism had ended not with a pogrom, as feared, but with a purge of the Sturmabteilung. It expected this "Röhm Purge" to undermine the Nazi regime.
30
Die Wahrheit
was not alone in this assessment. The American Jewish scholar Jacob R. Marcus expressed the opinion that "any day may witness the collapse of Hitler and his cohorts. The implacable logic of internal, economic decline and foreign encirclement would seem at the date of this writing (August, 1934) to presage the speedy and almost inevitable fall of Hitler."
31
The biggest news to come out of Nazi Germany in the middle 1930s regarding Jews was the publication of the infamous Nuremberg Laws. Approved by the Nazified German Reichstag on 15 September 1935, they classified Jews as subjects rather than citizens of the Third Reich. Since the Holocaust the Nuremberg Laws have been seen as a major step in the Nazis' anti-Jewish program. Far from reacting in horror, however, as one might presume, the reaction of
Die Wahrheit
and many other Jewish newspapers was relatively restrained. Both Jews and non-Jews actually welcomed the new laws as a return of order. The German Jews now at least appeared to have a permanent albeit lowly status. A decree implementing the citizenship law in November narrowed the definition of a Jew to include only those people who had at least two Jewish grandparents and who practiced Judaism or who had three or more Jewish grandparents if they were nonpracticing Jews. This definition was the least comprehensive of the four presented to Hitler and was designed to make the Führer look moderate at a time when a worldwide boycott of the 1936 Olympic Games still seemed likely. Jews were partially excluded from public life and were increasingly isolated from German society; but this merely codified what had long since been implemented.
32
The Nuremberg Laws were designed first of all to fulfill the Nazi Party's original Twenty-five Point Program of 1920 concerning Jews, and secondly to comply, at least superficially, with the demands of German Zionists for cultural autonomy. The German government, in fact, went out of its way to claim that the laws conformed to demands made by a recent Zionist congress in Switzerland. It did not object to Jews as long as they wanted to be members of a separate Jewish Volk.
Die Wahrheit
said that the laws only proved that the opposition of the Union of Austrian Jews to declaring Jews a national minority

 

Page 240

had been justified. The desire of Zionists for such minority status had led to the loss of basic rights for German Jews.

33

After two months of reflection,
Die Wahrheit
admitted in November that the Nuremberg Laws did not actually involve a worsening of the long-declining status of German Jews. They were mild in comparison to what German Jews had had to endure in practice up to then. The few Jews remaining in lowerlevel civil service positions had to give up their jobs by the end of 1935 unless they were veterans of the First World War. Jews also lost their right to vote, but that right had been a farce even for gentiles since March 1933. Surprisingly, the laws had already been revised since September so that the minimum age for Aryan women working in Jewish households had been lowered from forty-five to thirty-five in order to preserve some jobs. In sharp contrast to
Die Wahrheit
, however, was the reaction of the bimonthly Zionist newspaper,
Der Jude
, which denounced the Nuremberg Laws for condemning the German Jews to a death by hunger. The slaves of Abyssinia enjoyed an enviable status compared with the Jews of Germany.
34
As the Winter and Summer Olympic Games of 1936 approached, the status of German Jews once again faded from Jewish newspapers in Austria.
Die Wahrheit
was not entirely fooled by this diminution of anti-Semitic activity, however. In April 1936 the paper observed that there had been fewer anti-Semitic measures and demonstrations taking place in the Third Reich than at any time since 1933. This happy turn of events, however, could be attributed to the Olympics. The future still looked ominous for Germany's Jews. By November
Die Wahrheit
already noticed a worsening of the status of the Jews since the end of the Olympics and noted that the Nazi government's policy toward the German Jews was determined by both domestic and international politics.
35
In 1937 almost nothing was reported in Austrian Jewish newspapers about the status of Germany's Jews.
Die Neue Welt
did comment in May, however, that the anti-Semitic measures in Germany had the purpose of destroying the Jews not just economically but spiritually as well. AntiSemitism had nothing more to do with so-called cultural Bolshevism and had become a kind of sport.
36
The changing moods of Austrian Jewish newspapers, particularly
Die Wahrheit
, toward events in Nazi Germany closely reflected the moods of Jews inside Germany. A few months of stability could produce a spirit of optimism, which then quickly dissipated with the next wave of persecution.
37
However, in general it would appear that there was far less apprehension about Nazi Germany

 

 

Page 241
in the Austro-Jewish press at the beginning of 1938 than there had been in the first half of 1933. It is entirely possible, of course, that after five years Nazi persecution had lost some of its shock value or newsworthiness. It is even more likely, however, that Austrian Jews, like so many Jews and non-Jews outside Nazi Germany, were overly impressed by the comparatively secure and still reasonably prosperous status of the Jews of Berlin and did not realize the extent to which provincial German Jews were subjected to forced "Aryanization" and emigration.
What is more certain is that a large percentage of those articles that had been published during the first five years of Hitler's rule had been designed more to achieve some partisan advantage by proving that the ideology of one's own political faction offered better protection against the Nazi threat than that of one's rivals. The persecution of the German Jews had done nothing to bring the Austrian Jews together in a common front. If anything, they were more divided than ever as they were about to face their ultimate challenge.
BOOK: From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism
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