From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (62 page)

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Authors: Bruce F. Pauley

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

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the Nazi dictatorship was incredibly swift and dramatic. One Austrian émigré recalled fifty years later that when she entered a cinema at five o'clock on the afternoon of 11 March Vienna was festooned in red-white-red Austrian flags. When she emerged from the theater two hours later the city was bedecked with red, white, and black swastika flags. Another émigré remembered feeling as though she were suddenly surrounded by enemies who wanted her dead. On the other hand, still other refugees recounted years later how their fathers had advised their anti-Nazi employees to wear swastikas on their lapels as a security measure. Still other refugees had fathers who were confident that their war record would protect their families.

8

The first few days following the German annexation witnessed a veritable orgy of plundering and brutality perpetrated against the Jews. Only rarely were these acts committed by German Nazis, and still less by German soldiers; rather it was Austrian Nazis and even non-Nazis who now released the hatred they had pent up against the Jews, especially since the outlawing of the Nazi Party in 1933. With the blessings of the new Nazi government, antiSemitism now became a patriotic virtue and crypto-anti-Semites could freely exhibit their long-suppressed prejudices. Nazis ordered Jewish women to dress in their best clothes and scrub pro-Schuschnigg slogans off sidewalks with their bare hands or with toothbrushes; Jewish children were forced to write the insulting word "Jud" on the windows of their fathers' shops. Supposedly these actions were in retaliation for earlier incidents when Austrian authorities had forced Nazis to clean off illegal swastikas from sidewalks and walls. The two actions were hardly parallel, however. The Nazis who had been punished had been the same people who had painted the swastikas, and their punishment was carried out in the middle of the night. The Jews who were degraded had committed no crimes, and their punishment was inflicted during the day in order to make it as humiliating as possible.
9
Other petty tortures inflicted immediately after the Anschluss included actresses from the Theater in der Josefstadt being forced to clean toilets of the Sturmabteilung (SA); other, more fortunate Jews, cleaned cars. Hitler Youths pulled Orthodox Jews around by their beards; Jews in the Leopoldstadt were forced to call each other insulting names; and Jews at the Praterstern were compelled to lie down and eat grass.
10
During the 1930s Nazi sympathizers had not purchased Jewish property because they thought they would some day get it for free. Now gangs of Nazis invaded Jewish department stores, humble Jewish shops in the Leopoldstadt, the homes of Jewish bankers, as well as the apartments of middleclass Jews, and stole money, art treasures, furs, jewelry, and even furniture. Some Jews were robbed of their money on the street. All automobiles owned by Jews were

 

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A Jewish store in Vienna with the insulting word "Jud" written on its
display windows, late April 1938. Photograph by William R. Steckel.

confiscated immediately. Jews who complained to the police about the thefts were lucky if they escaped arrest or physical violence. Even after this initial looting rampage subsided, about a week after the Anschluss, bargain hunters could buy Jewish possessions at nominal prices when word got around that a particular Jewish family was desperate for money.

11

Many Jews, especially prominent ones who were in great danger, attempted to flee to Czechoslovakia. However, a train carrying a large group of refugees, both Jewish and gentile, was halted at the Czechoslovak border, and all the passengers were ordered to return to Austria by the Czech minister of the interior. Other Viennese Jews were more shrewd and took trains to Berlin where they resided for several days or weeks in comfortable and secure hotels. These Jews were amazed at how much better they were treated in Berlin than in Vienna. Later, other Viennese Jews were even more surprised when they discovered that they could shop in almost any store or attend the cinema long after they had been banned from these activities in Vienna.
12
When Hermann Neubacher, the new Nazi mayor of Vienna, was asked by foreign reporters about the anti-Jewish outrages, he replied that they were only

 

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A shoe store in Vienna displaying a picture of Adolf Hitler and
a swastika flag to distinguish it from boycotted Jewish stores,
late April 1938. The sign reads, "Aryan German business."
Photograph by William R. Steckel.

temporary and the result of the previous persecution of the Nazis.

13
In a very limited sense Neubacher was right. Outright violence against Austrian Jews ended a week or so after the Anschluss and did not resume until October. The persecution of Jews, however, was actually just beginning. For example, on 1 April 1938, 60 of the 154 political prisoners sent from Austria to the Dachau concentration camp in Bavaria were Jewish; they were released early only if they promised to emigrate from Austria immediately. From 23 to 25 April, a boycott of Jewish stores in Vienna took place. SA men stood in the entrances of Jewish shops; Christians who entered the stores were arrested and forced to wear signs saying they were "Christian pigs." A new wave of arrests began in May, this time of members of the Schuschnigg government along with many Jews who had held some kind of political or cultural position; the result was another 5,000 people being sent to Dachau. Those arrested had long been on black lists of the Austrian Nazis.
14

Within a few hours or at most a few days all Jewish actors, musicians, and journalists lost their jobs. By mid-June 1938, just three months after the An-

 

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A store in Vienna with a sign saying "only Aryan guests desired,"
late April 1938. Photograph by William R. Steckel.

schluss, Jews had already been more thoroughly purged from public life of Austria than in the five years following Hitler's takeover of power in Germany. Tens of thousands of Jewish employees had lost their jobs. Only rarely were they given any warning or severance pay. Among those dismissed were all state and municipal employees (what few there were), including 183 public schools teachers, and employees of banks, insurance companies, theaters, and concert halls. Meanwhile, private Jewish businesses large and small were either confiscated outright or their owners were paid only a small fraction of the property's true value.

15

Jews were also excluded from most areas of public entertainment and to some extent even public transportation by the early summer of 1938; similar rules were not imposed on German Jews until November. Austrian Jews were also subjected to all kinds of personal insults and indignities that were not the result of official Nazi legislation. If a gentile streetcar passenger did not like

 

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the looks of a Jewish fellow passenger in the summer of 1938, he could have the trolley stopped and the Jew thrown off. The number of coffeehouses and restaurants that would not serve Jews grew from day to day. All of the public baths and swimming pools were closed to Jews. Park benches all over the city had the words ''Juden verboten" stenciled on them. Jews were not admitted to theater performances, concerts, or the opera. Numerous cinemas had notices saying that Jewish patronage was not wanted. Sometimes Jews were ejected from a motion picture theater in the middle of a performance if gentiles complained about them. SA men at times even stood at the last tramway stop in the suburb of Neuwaldegg in order to prevent Jews from strolling in the nearby Vienna Woods.

16

The initial weeks of the persecution of Austrian Jews were accompanied by a huge increase in Jewish suicides, especially among the wealthier and bettereducated Jews. For example, 220 Jews committed suicide in March 1938, three times as many as in the previous March; during the next four months there were over 140 suicides per month, about twice as many as for the same period in 193637. If Jewish converts to Christianity are included, about 55 to 60 percent of all the suicides in Vienna were by Jews, or ten times the rate among gentiles. By the end of the Nazi occupation, some 1,200 Jews had died in despair by their own hands, not counting suicides by Austrian Jews who had already been forced out of the country.
17
A Model for the Third Reich?
Much of the persecution of Austrian Jewry that occurred after April 1938 was simply part of the larger persecution of Jews that took place all over the Third Reich and therefore cannot strictly speaking be considered "Austrian" antiSemitism. Nevertheless there are numerous examples of Austrians initiating anti-Semitic policies that were later adopted in the Third Reich as a whole.
For example, the "Aryanization" of Jewish property and jobs in Austria after the Anschluss transpired so precipitouslybeing delayed only by administrative and legal technicalitiesthat on 4 April Josef Bürckel, the Reich commissioner for the reunification of the Ostmark with the Reich and former Gauleiter of the Saar, halted further arbitrary confiscations of Jewish property in order to prevent any more damage to the Austrian economy and to help restore Austria's trade, which had been hurt by an international boycott of its products. Bürckel even went so far as to institute criminal proceedings against some of the 25,000 Austrian Nazi "commissars" who had seized Jewish

 

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property without instructions from their superiors. In an attempt to modernize the Austrian economy, Bürckel allowed only the largest and most productive enterprisesabout 20 percent of the 26,000 Jewish businesses that existed in March 1938to remain operational, and even these were usually managed by Reich Germans. None, of course, was ever returned to its original Jewish owner. The Nazi state rather than individual Austrian Nazis proved to be the biggest profiteer from the Aryanization of Jewish businesses.

18

The Austrian historian Gerhard Botz has noted that as a consequence of the anti-Jewish activities of the Austrian Nazis in March, "'Aryanization Instructions' were speeded up, dictated by events in Vienna for the whole Reich at the end of April 1938. Administrative methods developed in Austria soon became models for the 'old Reich' as well as for the 'newly acquired territories of the Reich.'"
19
Another Austrian historian, Erika Weinzierl, has described Austria as a "training ground for the German policy toward Jews."
20
For example, a Jewish enterprise could only be Aryanized if such an act did not harm the general interest of the German economy. The principles Bürckel developed for taxing Aryanized property were also used later in the Reich.
21
Austrian Nazis not only raced ahead of their German Parteigenossen as far as Aryanization was concerned-by May 1939 only 6 percent of the Viennese Jews were still employed compared to 30 percent in Berlin-but also in segregating Jewish pupils and teachers and prohibiting Jewish professionals from having gentile clients. The same was true of their plans, never actually implemented, for interning Jews in concentration camps near Vienna.
22
The "achievements" of the Austrian Nazis vis-à-vis the Jewish population did not go unnoticed by leading German Nazi Party institutions and members. Only six weeks after the Anschluss the official SS journal,
Das Schwarze Korps
, noted with some envy that the Viennese had managed to do almost overnight what the Germans had failed to do after several years. The Austrians could even organize anti-Jewish boycotts without any supervision. None other than Hermann Göring complained in the fall of 1938 that the "dejewification" of the economy in Germany was not progressing as rapidly as in Austria. Austrian methods were therefore introduced into the Altreich in 1939. The
Völkischer Beobachter
also noted that whereas in northern Germany it was the duty of the party to educate the people about the Jewish danger, in Austria the duty of the party was to preserve the purity of the movement by restraining overly exuberant radicalism.
23
To some extent Austria indeed served as a model to the rest of the Third Reich for the persecution of the Jews. Certainly Nazi officials from Germany found the enthusiasm of their Parteigenossen in Austria a useful tool with

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