1938 (17 page)

Austrians formed over half of the 18,695 men admitted to Dachau in 1938. They were kept apart from the others and dismissed by the guards as “Lazy, Jew-infested, priest-ridden coffeehouse scum.” At one point in the spring of 1938, they were put to work building a perimeter road around the camp: “Amongst them were two ambassadors, three ministers, a state secretary, a senior judge, a state prosecutor, the mayor of Vienna, a general, a colonel and three majors, two university professors, some senior police officers, two prominent Viennese lawyers and a number of well-known journalists and authors.” The extent of the Nazi purge was noticed by one Berliner in the camp, who acknowledged the impressive rank of Dachau’s new intake, saying, “Looking at you one would almost be ashamed to be free.”

There were several leaders of the Fatherland Front, such as the Corporate State’s counterpart to Goebbels, Colonel Walter Adam, as well as Richard Alexander and Hans von Becker; other political grandees included propaganda man and later vice chancellor of the Second Republic, Fritz Bock; Eduard Ludwig, the minister for the press, responsible for dealing with foreign journalists; Dr. Viktor Matejka, who had run the cultural wing of the Christian trades union movement before converting to Communism in Dachau; Ludwig Draxler, the former minister of finance; the later chancellors Leopold Figl and Alfons Gorbach; the mayor of Vienna, Richard Schmitz; and the future governor of Lower Austria, Josef Reither. There was Johann Staud, who ran the Corporate State’s trades unions (who died in Flossenbürg in 1939), and General Baron Karl Werkmann, the last secretary to the Emperor Charles. Baron Theodor Hornbostl was the permanent undersecretary at the Austrian foreign office who had tried to drum up support from abroad at the moment the Nazis were gathering at the frontier.

Several people were there because of their earlier role in the persecution and suppression of National Socialism: the later minister of justice, Josef Gerö, who as public prosecutor had imprisoned Nazis at Wöllersdorf; Dr. Robert Hecht was the secretary of state in the Ministry of Justice who had found the legal apparatus needed to end democracy and ban the Nazis. He was also a Jew and committed suicide in Dachau. Dr. Eduard Streitmann, who had been an anti-Nazi police commissioner, was sent to Dachau with his son. There was the head of security in Styria, Colonel Franz Zelburg; the police general Rudolf Manda; Dr. Alois Osio, who had been head of the high court and naturally handed down impressive sentences to Nazis; and Major Baron Emmanuel Stillfried, who had been the camp commandant at the Austrian concentration camp at Wöllersdorf.

There were also the Socialists Robert Danneberg and Major Alexander von Eifler, chief of staff of the Republican Schutzbund. The highest-ranking Socialist caught by the Nazis, Danneberg had tried to flee on the night train to Prague on March 11, but was one of the unlucky ones who were packed off back to Vienna. A Jew, he was killed in Auschwitz in 1942. The Socialist leaders Otto Bauer and Karl Seitz got away, but Bauer died in Paris in July. There was also the political informer Theodor Krisshaber and a Communist called Josef Händler who had been in and out of Wöllersdorf for four years and had little fear of Dachau. They joined General Archduke Josef Ferdinand of Habsburg-Lothringen and the two Hohenberg brothers, Max and Ernst, the children of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, who had made no secret of their revulsion toward Hitler and who reached Dachau the day before.

There was a total of sixty full Jews among the 151 prisoners, including Friedmann, Ehrlich, and Stricker from the IKG; four members of the Schiffmann family, whose premises had been so rigorously plundered on March 11; and Willy Kurtz, who had been prominent in street combats between the Fatherland Front and the Nazis. The Nazis took particular pleasure in beating him now that he could not hit back. His size made him dangerously noticeable, as did his clothes: his trousers reached to his calves, while his tunic could only be buttoned at the top. He was finished off in Auschwitz in 1942.

Six of the eight Burstyn brothers were there, who owned a well-known bathhouse as well as the Viennese taxis; Dr. Wilhelm Blitz, a millionaire who was big in the Pan-German movement; Ludwig Klausner, who ran the Delka chain of shoe shops; the hatter Robert Korff; and the spice-merchant Johann Kotanyi (he hanged himself in the camp). Pictures of their “healthy” life in Dachau were shown in
Völkische Beobachter
to coincide with the opening of the Eternal Jew exhibition in August. What the “elite” thought of the inclusion of the Jews has not come down to us, but within the camp, we are assured, there was no antisemitism. Others dispute this and say the criminal “Greens” and the antisocial “Blacks” were as antisemitic as the SS.

The Socialist bookseller Josef Kende joined newspaper magnates such as Alexander Geller, Ernst Buchbinder, and Paul Kolisch; and journalists like Bruno Heilig, Markus Siegelberg, Bela Felsenburg, Ernst Colbert, Rudolf Kalmar, and Maximilian Reich. Raoul Auernheimer was the vice president of Austrian PEN, and a
Mischling
. Among the other Jews who had the honor of being among the first to go to Dachau was Franz Lehár’s librettist Fritz Löhner-Beda, the author of the lyrics for much of Hitler’s favorite music. In Buchenwald he wrote the camp song that the miserable prisoners had to sing during their travails. It was set to music by another unfortunate victim who arrived on a later transport: the violin virtuoso Hermann Leopoldi. Lehár could not intercede for him with Hitler, as he was protecting his own Jewish wife. Löhner-Beda was beaten to death in Auschwitz in 1942.

There was also one Nazi on that first transport: the Burgenland peasant Paul Hutfless. He had betrayed secrets to the Fatherland Front. Gestapo chief Huber’s concern for elderly or infirm Jews was a sham. Bruno Heilig’s book,
Men Crucified
, first published in 1941, makes it abundantly clear what they faced. Heilig was arrested on March 15 and had been locked up in four prisons before the day came to ship him to Dachau. His book is a chilling record of brutality. The newspaper magnate Kolisch weighed three hundred pounds when he came to Dachau and was the butt of much cruelty. By the time he reached Buchenwald his weight had halved. They also singled out the Hohenberg brothers, whose work involved emptying the latrines. Prince Ernst remained in the camp until 1943.

A FEW weeks after the first Austrian transport, the camp received a visit from Heinrich Himmler. He paid particular attention to the Austrians, whom he endeavored to humiliate. “You know that from now on you are in protective custody, that means I shall accord you my most special protection.” He paused so that his retinue might voice their appreciation for his joke. He told the prisoners that they fell into four categories: professional criminals—they were the nicest; political prisoners—who were much more dangerous and would be given less protection; Jews—who belonged to the scum of humankind; the worst, however, were the Communists. To Stillfried of Wöllersdorf he said, “So you see what it is like!” Stillfried answered back, “Herr Reichsführer, I would truly love to say that we are treated here like your people were in Wöllersdorf!” The others expected a reprisal, but none was forthcoming. Stillfried survived.

At Wöllersdorf political prisoners had been detained without trial, but the Austrian camp was not to be compared with Dachau, unless you accepted Eric Gedye’s quip: “There was one thing in common between Wöllersdorf and Dachau. The Nazis seemed thoroughly to enjoy both.”

The work was literally backbreaking. Any answering back was rewarded with horsewhipping, kicks, and beatings. The Jews were separated from the Aryans and placed in their own block. Yet despite the grim existence led by the prisoners, there was a semblance of cultural life in Dachau. Sunday afternoons were free. Viktor Matejka put on a play written by Rudolf Kalmar strewn with oblique references to Hitler, which remained undetected by the guards. Grünbaum continued to perform with Paul Morgan and Hermann Leopoldi, and the Berliner dancer Kurt Fuss joined in. Jura Soyfer wrote a poem, the “Dachauerlied” (song of Dachau).

The rest of the time the prisoners were subjected not only to the whim of the guards but also to the commandant’s vicious dog and chimpanzee. In the middle of the brutality, there were flashes of mercy on the part of the guards, although these were few and far between.

The transports to Dachau aroused international condemnation, particularly in Britain. This motivated State Secretary Weizsäcker at the Wilhelmstrasse to seek an interview with Heydrich on July 5, 1938. Heydrich admitted to having 3,900 Austrians in “protective custody.” Weizsäcker sought to have all those released against whom no charges had been preferred. It transpired that most of the middle-class prisoners were indeed released before war broke out. Jews were let out if they could show that they had an entry visa for another country. The Communists were often left to rot in the camps until the end of the war.

Until the Jews arrived that April, Germany’s concentration camps had been filled with Gentiles, chiefly political prisoners and habitual criminals. Certain inmates had caught the attention of Catchpool, particularly Fritz Küster of the Friedensgesellschaft (Peace Society); Hans Litten, a half-Jewish solicitor; the well-known social democrats Ernst Heilmann, Carlo Mierendorff and Kurt Schumacher; as well as the Communist Theodor Neubauer. Like Gildemeester, Catchpool had been cleverly working his way into the Nazi regime’s good books by visiting German political prisoners in captivity in Lithuania and Czechoslovakia. There had been eighty in Lithuania, and there were still sixteen serving long sentences at the beginning of 1938. In February that year he estimated the German prison population to be between 110,000 and 120,000, “of these about a quarter are political cases, mostly undergoing long sentences.” Of course this did not include those in concentration camps, who had been neither tried nor sentenced.

There was an expansion in the number of categories of prisoners eligible for “protective custody” in 1938. That was going to mean more concentration camps, like Mauthausen, and the enlargement of existing ones such as Buchenwald on the Ettersberg above Weimar, which had opened its gates in 1937. In the course of 1938, the population of Dachau tripled. Between April 21 and 30, the Gestapo rounded up around 2,000 “work-shy” (men deemed to be resistant to employment) and took them to camps. In the summer Heydrich turned his attention to the “antisocial.” Each criminal department was to locate around two hundred gypsies, tramps, beggars, pimps, violent criminals, and Jews with criminal tendencies. The arrests started on June 13, with the police working their way through railway stations and dosshouses—twenty-five years earlier, they might have arrested their own Führer. The bag totaled over 10,000. They were taken to a new generation of camps: Flossenbürg, Mauthausen, and Neuengamme, located close to quarries. The SS needed labor for their own stone business.

The arrival of “work-shy” and antisocial elements altered the social structure, swamping the Communists and Socialists who had previously been the mainstay of Sachsenhausen. They wore black triangles, as opposed to green for criminals and red for political prisoners. Although some ascended to the level of the green aristocracy among the prisoners, others fell victim to the terrible physical strain imposed by the camps, perishing in the mud or crushed to death in the quarries.

The Jews—the assimilated Jews in particular—had nowhere to go. With the Anschluss, would-be Austrian immigrants to the United States were added into the tally from Germany, fixed at a little over 27,000 a year; Canada and Australia did not want their wide-open spaces polluted by Jews.

SINCE THE Olympics in 1936, Berlin Jews had enjoyed a holiday from persecution, but after the Anschluss the authorities began to get rough. As the son of an Austrian Jew, Gerhard Beck and his family were obliged to quit their spacious flat in Weissensee and move into the Scheunenviertel, the nearest thing Berlin had to a ghetto. The only hope of escape now was to join the endless lines that radiated from the offices of the Jüdischer Hilfsverein and enquire into the possibilities of emigration. Beck’s family soon came to the conclusion that escape was only possible if you were rich or a “Zionist zealot.” Peter Fröhlich, who would later change his name and achieve fame as the cultural historian Peter Gay, was thrown out of his
Gymnasium
or grammar school in Berlin-Wilmersdorf. With a little flourish of Prussian decency, the boys were issued with proper leaving certificates, which recorded—fallaciously—that they had left to take up a profession. In July Fröhlich’s father had been fired from his job. The family then set to work applying for visas. That meant paying calls on consulates to pick up forms, typing out applications, and applying for residence.

The harassed Jews were prey to rumors. At the beginning of the month a ripple of optimism went through the community. It appeared that Australia was going to open its gates to the Jews and issue 6,000 additional visas. The rumor created siege conditions outside the British consulate in Vienna. Eventually the Australian Prime Minister Lyon released a clarification that Jews would only be admitted under the normal constraints of emigration. Two weeks later Miss Stamper at the Passport Office was forced to issue a leaflet to explain the separate policies on emigration of the various British colonies and dominions—Cyprus, Palestine, and Australia in particular. It warned against bogus organizations that claimed to be able to help and had “sprung up like mushrooms, enriching themselves from Jewish misery.” At the consulate Gainer, Consul J. W. Taylor, and Kendrick (responsible for Palestine) all handled the Jews with understanding and sympathy in spite of the outrages going on outside their doors. On one occasion the SA forced the Jews in the lines to wash cars. The consul general issued a formal protest, after which they were allowed to line up in the “neutral” courtyard.