In the 1930s, Jews flourished in Austria, with leading figures in the sciences, the arts, business, industry, and trades of all kinds.[2] At the time of Anschluss with Nazi Germany in 1938, the Jewish population of Austria was approximately 192,000,[3] mostly in Vienna.
Austria had a powerful legacy of
The City Without Jews, which turned out to be tragically prescient.[5]
From 1933, when Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, the annexation of Austria became one of Germany's foreign policy goals.[6] Austria was incorporated into the Third Reich on March 13, 1938,[7] the day after German troops entered Austrian territory greeted by cheering Austrians with Nazi salutes and Nazi flags.[8] A law was published, declaring Austria "one of the lands of the German Empire" under the name "Ostmark". On April 10, an Anschluss referendum was held in Austria. According to official Reich data, with 99.08% of the population voting, the Anschluss was approved by 99.75%.[9]
Anti-Semitic violence and persecution
Persecution of Jews was immediate, and of stunning violence, after Anschluss.[10][11] German racial laws were enacted in Austria, under which Jews were disenfranchised. According to these laws, 220,000 people were now considered Jews in Austria, larger than the previously accepted figure of 182,000. A forced reorganization of Jewish communities was carried out, led by Adolf Eichmann. All Jewish organizations and newspapers were closed and their leaders and management imprisoned. Jews were no longer allowed on public transport. Many regular Austrians joined the Nazis in terrorizing Jews. In acts of public humiliation, Jews were forced to wash sidewalks and public toilets, at times with toothbrushes or their bare hands.[12] In one instance, a number of Jews were rounded up on the Sabbath and forced to eat grass at the Prater, a popular Viennese amusement park.[13] Jewish faculty members of Medical University of Vienna were dismissed.[14]
During Kristallnacht in November 1938, anti-Jewish pogroms took place throughout Germany and Austria. Synagogues were desecrated and destroyed,[15] houses and shops belonging to Jews were looted.[16]
On August 8, 1938, the first Austrian concentration camp is established at Mauthausen.[17]
Plunder of Jewish property
Jewish property was seized by Austrians as part of the Holocaust. There was a massive transfer of homes, businesses, real estate,[18] financial assets and artworks[19] from Jews to non-Jews.[20][21] A well organised machinery of plunder, storage and resale, involving the Gestapo, the Vugesta, the Dorotheum auction house, various transporters and museums in Vienna moved artworks and other property seized from Jews into the hands of non-Jews.[22]
The book Unser Wien (Our Vienna) by Tina Walzer and Stephan Templ details how hundreds of Jewish businesses in Vienna were seized by the Nazis and never returned after the war.[23]
Forced emigration
In May 1938, the Nazis allowed the Jewish community in Vienna to resume activities, with one intended goal - to organize and accelerate mass emigration of Jews from Austria. The Palestinian Bureau of the World Zionist Organization was permitted to aid in Jewish emigration. In August 1938, the Central Office for Jewish Emigration was established under the leadership of Nazi Adolf Eichmann.
Among the emigrants were such celebrities as
Imre Kalman
.
After the arrest of all Jewish leaders in March 1938, Eichmann personally appointed Levengertz, Josef Löwenherz head of the Jewish community. On August 22, 1938, Eichmann wrote to Berlin that his office was providing documents for emigration to 200 Jews daily.
Fleeing persecution, 62,958 Jews emigrated in 1938, and another 54,451 in 1939. The so-called Kindertransport started with the transport of the first 600 Viennese Jewish children after a meeting of Dutch organizer Geertruida Wijsmuller-Meijer with Eichmann who gave her permission on Dec. 3rd, 1938. By the outbreak of war in September 1939 however, according to some estimates, as many as 126,445 Jews had departed Austria. Between 58,000 and 66,260 Jews remained in the country. Emigration from the Reich was ultimately banned in October 1941.
At the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, the following data were presented: 147,000 Jews emigrated from Austria from March 15, 1938, to October 31, 1941, 43,700 remained.
Isolation, deportation and extermination
Deportation of Jews from Vienna, 1942
In October 1939, the deportation of Austrian Jews to Poland began, part of a larger plan to ultimately gather and restrict all of Europe's Jewish populace in one territory. 1,584 people were deported to the Lublin region.[24]
The deportation of Jews to death camps began in February 1941. After the Wannsee Conference, this process was accelerated. The Viennese community was officially liquidated on November 1, 1942, at which time approximately 7,000 Jews remained in Austria. The deportations continued until March 1945.[25][26]
As a result of the Holocaust, according to various sources, between 60,000 and 65,000 Austrian Jews lost their lives - almost the entire number of those who did not leave before the war. Fewer than 800 Jews (mostly spouses of Austrian citizens) survived until the liberation of Vienna by Soviet troops on April 13, 1945. By 1950, the Jewish community in Austria numbered 13,396 people (of whom 12,450 lived in Vienna).[27]
Protests and resistance
As of January 1, 2016, there were 106 Austrians recognized by the Yad Vashem Institute of Holocaust and Heroism as the righteous of the world, for aiding and saving Jews during the Holocaust at the risk of their own lives.[28]
Up until the 1980s, Austrian society adhered to the "First Victim" narrative, which portrayed Austria as a victim, not an enthusiastic supporter of, Nazi Germany and therefore side-stepping responsibility for the crimes of the Third Reich.[29][30][31][32][33]
Although the Nazi genocide was well documented in the Archives of the Austrian Resistance during the 1960s, actual critical study of the Holocaust did not enter the mainstream of Austrian historiography until the 1980s. The impetus for this was the presidential elections in Austria in 1986, initiated by the scandal regarding the Nazi past of Kurt Waldheim.[34][35] In 1988, the Historical Commission was established to investigate the plundering of property during the Nazi period, as well as restitution and compensation after 1945.[36]
While many cities in Austria have constructed memorials to the victims of the Holocaust (see Monument to the Victims of the Holocaust in Vienna), a lack of specificity, for example the actual names of victims not being included, has also been criticised until recently. On November 9, 2021 (i.e., on the 83rd anniversary of Kristallnacht), the Austrian government inaugurated a “Shoah Wall of Names Memorial” at a prominent location (Ostarrichi Park) in central Vienna. This memorial monument is engraved with the names of 64,440 Austrian Jews who were murdered during the Holocaust. It is known that an additional ~1,000 people were murdered, but their names have unfortunately been lost. This memorial monument consists of 160 granite slabs arranged in an oval pattern (each slab is 1 m wide and 2 m high).[37]"
Certain victims' monuments have been repeatedly vandalized.[38][39]
A study in 2019 found that most Austrian adults were largely ignorant about the Holocaust.[40][41][42]
Holocaust denial in Austria is a criminal offense.[43][44] Holocaust deniers are prosecuted under section 3 of the 1947 Constitutional Prohibition Act (Verbotsgesetz 1947), as amended in 1992. The law applies to individuals who publicly deny, belittle, approve or justify the crimes of National Socialism. Violators are punished with imprisonment for a term of one to ten years (in especially dangerous cases up to twenty years)
This law has been repeatedly applied in practice. In particular, on January 14, 2008, Wolfgang Frolich was sentenced to 6.5 years in prison, and on April 27, 2009, the writer Gerd Honzik was sentenced to 5 years in prison.[45] Judge Stephen Apostol called Honzik “one of the ideological leaders” of European neo-Nazis. The most famous case of prosecution in Austria for Holocaust denial was the arrest and trial of British writer of historical works David Irving in 2006.[46] Irving was sentenced to 3 years in prison, though after 13 months served, the court replaced the remaining term with a suspended sentence and deported him from the country.
Austrian perpetrators of the Holocaust
Adolf Hitler committed suicide on 30 April 1945, one week before the end of war in Europe. The Austrian Nazi and, briefly, Chancellor of Austria, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, was condemned to death at the Nuremberg Trials and executed in 1946. However, many Austrian Nazis escaped prosecution altogether. Franz Josef Huber, the Gestapo chief responsible for the murder of tens of thousands of Austrian Jews, worked for German intelligence after the war and was shielded from prosecution.[47]
Obstacles to Restitution
Restitution for the Holocaust has been controversial and faced difficulties in Austria.[48] For many years, Austria's official "first victim" historical stance removed the legal obligation to make reparations for Nazi crimes.[49][50][51] Austria's record on restitution has been problematic.[52][53][54][55][56]
The arrest and imprisonment of the author Stephen Templ, who had inventoried Nazi looted property in Vienna, was strongly criticized.[57][58] In 2021, in response to criticism about Austria's restitution policies, The City of Vienna threatened to sue an American descendant of the Rothschild family for libel.[59]
^"Vienna". encyclopedia.ushmm.org. Retrieved 2021-04-09. In 1938, some 170,000 Jews lived in the city, as well as approximately 80,000 persons of mixed Jewish-Christian background. Including converts from Judaism, the Viennese Jewish population may have been as high as 200,000, more than 10 percent of the city's inhabitants. Vienna was an important center of Jewish culture and education. The city was also a center of Zionist thought and Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, had studied at the University of Vienna. Many Viennese Jews were well-integrated into urban society and culture. Jews made up significant percentages of the city's doctors and lawyers, businessmen and bankers, artists and journalists.
on 2015-05-24. Retrieved 2021-04-09. Vienna, in Hugo Bettauer's day, was also a hotbed of anti-Semitism, as it had been for about 40 years. Jewish students were periodically beaten up at the University of Vienna while the police, barred from academic soil, watched with amusement as nationalistic fraternity members jumped isolated Jews and kicked them down the two central ramps of the pseudo-Renaissance building. Day after day, pan-Germanic groups and their press indulged in tirades about Vienna's Verjudung, the penetration by Jews.
^Murphy, Francois (2018-03-12). "Austria remembers Anschluss, with far right now in power". Reuters. Archived from the original on 2018-12-03. Retrieved 2021-04-09. Hitler sent troops into Austria, the land of his birth, on March 12, 1938, in pursuit of his dream of a "Greater Germany". They were greeted by cheering crowds who waved swastika flags and made the Nazi salute.
^"Photograph of Jews Cleaning Streets in Vienna". perspectives.ushmm.org. Archived from the original on 2020-12-03. Retrieved 2021-04-09. In the days and weeks following the Anschluss, there was a rapid rise in anti-Jewish violence across Austria, particularly in Vienna, where 90 percent of Austria's Jewish population lived.2
^"Timeline of Jewish Persecution in the Holocaust". www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org. Retrieved 2021-04-09. April 23 Jews in Vienna, Austria, are rounded up on the Sabbath by Nazis and forced to eat grass at the Prater, a local amusement park. Many of the victimized Jews suffer heart attacks and a few die....May. Following the Anschluss, Austrians force Jewish men and women to scrub the streets with small brushes and with the women's fur coats.
^Conference, Claims. "History of the Austrian Jewish Community". Claims Conference. Retrieved 2021-04-09. On April 27, 1938 all Jews with total assets (in real estate, personal possessions, bank or savings accounts, securities, insurance policies, pension payments, etc.) worth more than ATS 7,500 ($2,000) were ordered to declare them by the end of June 1938 (Vermögenserklärungen). These assets of 47,768 valid declarations totaled over $800 million at that time. The Nazi authorities wanted to loot these assets, which would contribute to their war preparations. Private Nazis looted these assets as contributions to their own pockets. The night of November 8–9, 1938 there were violent riots, wild arrests, and the burning of synagogues and Jewish prayer houses (known as Kristallnacht – or "the night of broken glass"). Some Jews were sent to the Austrian concentration camp Mauthausen. Others were sent to firms, construction sites, etc. as forced laborers. By December 3, 1938, there was an "order regarding the use of Jewish assets." By February 1939, the head of a major Nazi-controlled Austrian bank consortium, Hans Rafelsberger, noted that 77.6% of the aryanization of Jewish shops and businesses (of a total of more than 36,000) that were to be kept functioning (about 4,000) had been achieved. The majority had gone to Nazi Party members.
^"Austria"(PDF). Yad Vashem. In October 1939, 1,584 Austrian Jews were deported to the Lublin district of Poland, as part of a grand plan to concentrate all of Europe's Jews in one area of the Generalgouvernement (see also Nisko and Lublin Plan). In February and March 1941 some 5,000 Austrian Jews were deported to Kielce in Poland; during 1942 they were exterminated in Belzec and Chelmno. In October 1941 the Nazis began deporting the Jews of Austria en masse. Thousands of Jews were sent to Lodz and ghettos in the Baltic region. After the Wannsee Conference of January 1942, during which steps were taken to better coordinate the murder of Europe's Jews, deportations from Austria were sped up. Thousands were transported to Riga, Minsk, and Lublin. During the second half of 1942 nearly 14,000 Jews were sent to the Theresienstadt Concentration Camp. The Jewish community of Vienna was liquidated in November 1942, leaving only 7,000 Jews in Austria - most of whom were married to non-Jews. All those strong enough to work were placed in forced labor. Small-scale deportations continued into 1943; by the end of 1944 only some 6,000 Jews remained in Vienna.
^"Huber case: Nazi police chief in Vienna spied for West Germany". BBC News. 2021-04-06. Retrieved 2021-04-09. A Nazi SS general responsible for deporting tens of thousands of Jews to death camps worked for West German intelligence after World War Two, shielded from prosecution.The protection given to Franz Josef Huber was revealed by the German spy service BND, in archives seen by German public broadcaster ARD. Huber ran the Gestapo in Vienna, the Nazis' second-biggest secret police HQ after Berlin. The US military knew about his crimes. Huber took charge of the Gestapo in Vienna immediately after Adolf Hitler annexed Austria in March 1938 and held that post until late 1944.
^Conference, Claims. "History of the Austrian Jewish Community". Claims Conference. Archived from the original on 2015-02-11. Retrieved 2021-04-09. A large obstacle preventing legal justice, from the point of view of Jewish and other persecuted victims, was that the State of Austria relied on the 1943 Moscow Declaration by the Allies, which claimed the State of Austria as the first victim of Nazi aggression – and thus without any legal obligation to make reparations for Nazi crimes. Expediently overlooked if not ignored at the time, however, was that the Declaration also stated that Austrians, as a people, were co-responsible. In other words, the Moscow Declaration also gave Austria the status of "enemy state" – and thus the need for the 10-year "Allied" occupation.
Gardiner, Muriel. Code Name «Mary»: Memoirs of an American Woman in the Austrian Underground. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983.
Paucker, Arnold. Standhalten und Widerstehen: Der Widerstand deutscher und österreichischer Juden gegen die nationalsozialistische Diktatur. Essen: Klartext, 1995.
Österreichisches Gallup-Institut. Attitudes toward Jews and the Holocaust in Austria: a public-opinion survey conducted for the American Jewish Committee. — American Jewish Committee, 2001. — 32 p.
