From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (64 page)

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Authors: Bruce F. Pauley

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BOOK: From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism
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in August 1939, the Nazis requisitioned all rare metals and jewelry except for wedding rings, watches, and table service for two people. On 25 September, shortly after the outbreak of the war, Jews were forbidden to go out after eight o'clock in the evening and were not allowed to listen to the radio or to visit any public places (although there were few they could still visit anyway). The curfew was to facilitate mass arrests, which always occurred at night. By May 1941, Jews could not leave Greater Vienna without special permission. After 1 September of the same year, all Jews over the age of six had to wear the Star of David, thus removing their last measure of anonymity. The penalty for noncompliance was six to eight weeks imprisonment followed by deportation to Poland. In 1942, the few Jews who still remained in Vienna could not use public means of transportation without police permission; they could not go to "Aryan" barbershops or buy newspapers or magazines. In April non-Jews who were married to Jews had to move to Jewish housing. In November Jews had to surrender all their electrical appliances.

38

In 1939, just as the persecution of Austrian Jews was entering its harshest phase, a book was published in Vienna with the obvious intent of soothing any troubled consciences. The book,
Rassesieg in Wien: Der Grenzfeste des Reiches
(
Racial Victory in Vienna: The Border Fortress of the Reich
), was written by Robert Körber, one of Vienna's most rabid antiSemites since his days as a student at the University of Vienna just after the First World War. Körber's book, which was lavishly illustrated with unflattering photographs of Jews and reprints of political cartoons, was one of the longest and viciously anti-Semitic works of interwar Austria.
Rassesieg in Wien
purported to be a historical survey of all the crimes and cultural degradations committed by Austrian Jews since the Middle Ages, and especially since the First World War. The Galician Jews who had immigrated to Vienna during the war were no more than "human mire" and "pirates of war." It was not a legend but a historical fact that the Jews had stabbed Germany in the back in November 1918. The revolution in that month was a Jewish, not a German one. The Christian Social Party had abandoned Lueger's anti-Semitic program and had become a party of converted Jewish bank presidents and stock-market capitalists. The antiSemitism of the Landbund and the Greater German People's Party was only for show. The Dollfuss regime was unconstitutional and had fought Austro-Marxism in February 1934 not because of its Weltanschauung and culture, but only because the SDAP had risen up against the government. The Nazi Putsch in 1934 was a desperate uprising against Jewish executive organs. And Jews dominated Vienna's cultural life during the Schuschnigg regime.
39

 

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Photographs from
Racial Victory in Vienna
by Robert Körber showing deformed
Jews. The caption reads, "The ugliest people of the world were the most certain
allies of the 'Christian-German' government [of Dollfuss and Schuschnigg]."
Körber's view of Jews followed the uncompromising Nazi line. It was "dangerous" to draw any distinctions between Westjuden and Ostjuden or between Jews who practiced their religion and those who did not. The enemies of Germany and the friends of the Jews wanted the Viennese to feel sorry for them. But the Aryans of Vienna were not dealing with normal people but with a criminal group that had been waging clandestine war against the Germans for centuries. One could not have any sympathy for criminals; they had to be punished through restitution and expulsion. What was happening to the Jews might seem hard, but it was mild in comparison with what would have happened to Vienna if the Jewish Bolsheviks had taken over. The Austrian Jews had lost their thousand-year war with Germandom and now had to vacate

 

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their occupied territory. But they could emigrate wherever in the world they wished.

40

Emigration and Deportation
Whereas German Jews had, until the November Pogrom, often hoped that they might remain in Nazi Germany indefinitely, albeit with an inferior legal and social status, most Austrian Jews were disabused of any such illusion soon after the Anschluss. Hermann Göring announced already in March 1938 that Vienna had to be a German city once again, by eliminating Jews from the city's economy. A month later, the
Völkischer Beobachter
said that this task had to be completed within four years, a goal that was reached. Most Viennese Jews wasted no time in helping Göring to realize his dream, standing outside the consulate of every possible host country in lines that sometimes stretched for miles, and which were subject to constant attack by antiSemites. Some Jews, however, waited too long to apply for visas, and othersestimated by Jewish leaders as comprising one-third of all Austrian Jewswere simply too old, sick, or settled in their ways to contemplate emigration.
41
The Kultusgemeinde of Vienna lost its autonomy on 18 March 1938. Thereafter its only functions were to provide welfare and to facilitate emigration (and later deportation). Over 42,000 Jews enrolled in its courses, which trained people in the skills they would need in their new homelands. Young Jewish women had comparatively little trouble finding work as domestic servants, particularly in Britain, in 1938 and 1939. They hoped to bring the rest of their families to them later, but often their loved ones perished in extermination camps instead.
42
Obtaining an immigration visa was probably the most difficult obstacle for an Austrian Jew trying to escape from the Third Reich. Neighboring countries like Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Switzerland required Jews to have a visa merely to cross their borders. Switzerland also insisted that German-Jewish passports be clearly identified with the letter J. The worldwide depression only made potential host countries all the more reluctant to accept penniless Jewish refugees. The German ambassador to the United States, Dieckhoff, when reporting to Berlin on the American reaction to the Anschluss, noted with apparent glee that "the realization that large numbers of Austrian refugees, especially of the Jewish race, would constitute no blessing for America, might also have contributed to this sobering up [of hostile public opinion]; and it was

 

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interesting to note the letters to the papers, especially from the middle strata of the population, criticizing the American Government's readiness to admit such refugees and thus further depress the labor market.''

43

Once an immigrant's visa had been obtained, there were still other roadblocks to overcome before a Jew could leave Austria. The Nazis hoped to export antiSemitism and enrich the Third Reich by allowing only penniless Jews to go. Therefore Jews were allowed to take only thirty marks (later reduced to only ten) in German and foreign currency when they left Austria. This problem could be surmounted only with the aid of Jewish organizations abroad. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the Jewish Agency for Palestine, and the Central British Fund for Refugees all set up soup kitchens for Jews while they remained in Vienna and paid all the costs of Jewish emigration. Unfortunately, such aid ended with the outbreak of the war. In the meantime, however, the Third Reich was able to make a profit of $1.6 million by the end of November 1939 from the emigration of Austrian Jews alone. Still more difficulties were caused by fake travel agencies, which swindled desperate Jews.
44
With so many obstacles to overcome, emigration from Austria after the Anschluss was at first slow; only 18,000 Jews left in the first three months following the German annexation compared with 32,000 for the next three months. By the end of November 1939 over 126,000 had escaped, including 80 to 90 percent of the Jewish intelligentsia. Having been the first to lose their jobs, they had the most time to emigrate and the least difficulty in obtaining immigrant visas.
45
Only 66,000 Jews remained in Vienna along with another 30,000 "racial" Jews. During the next two years only 2,000 more managed to get out of the country before legal emigration was completely ended in November 1941. A plurality of the departing Austrian Jews, 30,850, moved to Great Britain. The 28,615 who went to the United States were probably the largest single influx of talent in American history even before the arrival of another 12,000 Austrian Jewish refugees between 1945 and 1958. However, the United States virtually closed its doors to further immigration in July 1940. China was the recipient of 18,124 refugees most of whom settled in Shanghai. Palestine received 9,195. Smaller numbers emigrated to eighty-five other countries all over the world.
46
The deportation of Austrian Jews to work camps began in October 1939, shortly before legal emigration came to a virtual standstill. The exiled Austrian Socialist newspaper,
Der Sozialistische Kampf
, published in Paris, preserved a survivor's vivid description of the very first transport to leave Vienna for Poland.
47
Early on the morning of 20 October, one thousand Viennese Jewish

 

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men between the ages of eighteen and fifty were notified by a registered letter from the Kultusgemeinde that they were to appear that same afternoon at five o'clock at the Aspang railroad station and would leave an hour later for a work camp in Nisko, Poland. Failure to appear at the appointed time and place would have the most serious consequences. Each member of the transport was allowed to take along 110 pounds of baggage and three hundred German marks. However, at the station they were immediately forced to exchange their marks for Polish zlotys at only one-fourth of the official rate. They were robbed not just of money, however; during the trip all of their personal documents were taken from them, including passports and birth certificates. The train trip lasted four days; anyone asking for water during the many hours the train stood at depots along the way was beaten by a Viennese policeman who was assigned to each passenger car.

The real brutality, however, began only after the train reached Poland. Perhaps because the work camp at Nisko did not have the necessary facilities to accommodate these men, all but 150 of them were driven by SS guards to the vicinity of San River. There the commandant announced that he was giving the "pig Jews" two hours to get away. Anyone found within three miles after that time would be shot. To emphasize the point he fired three bullets into the crowd. In a panic the Jews dropped their baggage and began running in every direction. After five days of hiking through forests and making many detours to avoid field gendarmes, small groups of Jews reached the Bug River, which divided the German and Russian occupation zones. There German border guards robbed them of their last possessions and forced them to swim across the icy waters to the Russian side of the river where they were cordially received by the Russians; they were then sent to labor camps in Siberia. Remarkably, all but about a hundred men survived the death march. In comparison with the fate of the later transports, these men were fortunate indeed. After this experience, Heinrich Himmler ordered that further transports be suspended for "technical reasons."

48

Many of the deportation policies originated in Berlin and, like many other aspects of the post-Anschluss persecution of Austrian Jews, cannot properly be considered "Austrian" antiSemitism. Certainly the idea of the Jews' wearing some identification on their clothing, driving them into ghettos and work camps, and ultimately deporting them was not conceived exclusively in Vienna. The Franconian Gauleiter Julius Streicher was apparently the first to propose, already in November 1938, the idea of interning Jews as a means of solving a housing problem. Nevertheless the Austrians frequently did take the initiative and did not simply wait for instructions from the Altreich. In

 

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the Third Reich, personal advancement was more likely for innovators than followers; some Austrians therefore may have felt compelled to catch up with their colleagues through aggressive new policies.

49

The most important of the Austrian initiators, aside from the inspiration of Adolf Hitler himself, was Adolf Eichmann, a man whose name would one day become almost synonymous with crimes against humanity. A member of the Austrian Nazi Party and the SS since 1932, he soon became the departmental head for Zionist affairs at the Reich Security Head Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt). After the Anschluss he told Jewish dignitaries that he had been ordered to solve the Jewish problem in Austria in the quickest and most effective way and demanded their complete obedience. His aggressive leadership resulted in the establishment of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna with himself as head. No project having to do with the emigration of Austrian Jews could take place without his approval.
50
Eichmann's appointment came at a critical time in the emigration of Jews from the Third Reich. By the end of 1937 only 129,000 Jews had been coerced into leaving Nazi Germany, not counting thousands of Jews who returned to the Reich thinking that the worst of the persecutions was over. The sudden addition of 220,000 Jews to Germany's population made the solution to the "problem" more "urgent" than ever. The efficiency of Eichmann's office soon caught the attention of his German superiors. In January 1939 a group of officials in charge of Jewish emigration from Berlin visited Vienna to study Eichmann's organization. They were astounded to see that in one day a Jew could accomplish what had been taking weeks in the Altreich. A Jew would enter Eichmann's ''fully automated emigration factory" still possessing some wealth and within a matter of hours would emerge from the building with nothing more than a passport stating that he was required to leave the country within a fortnight.
51
Göring was so impressed with Eichmann's example that he established a Committee of the Central Reich Office for Jewish Emigration on 24 January. Later even Eichmann's well-trained "Jewish Police" was ordered to Berlin to show officials there how to conduct a nighttime deportation raid. On 11 February, Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Nazis' security police, cited the Austrian experience as a model for how to obtain foreign exchange from international relief organizations so that the deportations could be made without any expense being incurred by the Reich. Eichmann's conveyor-belt system of emigration in Vienna proved to be so successful that he was finally rewarded by being put in charge of Jewish deportation for the entire Reich beginning in October 1939.
52
Austrians were involved not only in planning and administering the deporta-

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