From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (25 page)

Read From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism Online

Authors: Bruce F. Pauley

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

 

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lies with their 100,000 members who were without living quarters could be housed if only the Eastern Jews were deported.

26

The actual number of Jews living in the whole of Austria was revealed by the census of 1923 to be only about 220,000, of whom 201,513 lived in Vienna. This represented an increase in absolute numbers of just over 26,000 since the census of 1910, and a rise in the percentage from 8.6 to 10.8. However, the increase was actually smaller than the 28,500 Jews who were added to Vienna's population between 1900 and 1910; the increase in the
percentage
of Jews simply resulted from the decline in Vienna's overall population following the departure of thousands of Czechs and other national minorities.
27
As to the number of people of Jewish origins in the country, the figure of 300,000 has frequently been cited; however, when the Nuremberg Laws were enforced after the Anschluss, only 34,500 people were reclassified as Jews who had not been so identified in the census of 1934 when there were officially 200,000 Jews in the whole of Austria.
28
Anti-Semitic Demonstrations and Counterdemonstrations, 19181923
The political and economic crises of the early postwar years induced many politicians to hold the Jews responsible and fostered a series of noisy and sometimes violent demonstrations, which did not end until the Austrian economy slowly began to recover in the spring of 1923. An anti-Semitic rally in the plaza in front of Vienna's huge neo-Gothic city hall on 25 September 1919 drew 5,000 participants who heard eight speakers complain that Aryan women and children were going without food and shelter because of Galician Jews. A second rally on 5 October, which was aimed primarily at the "plague of Eastern Jews," attracted 15,000 onlookers and prompted the
Ostdeutsche Rundschau
to remark that the Viennese population was far more anti-Semitic than it had been in the 1880s and 1890s. Now the whole "German" intelligentsia was involved in the movement along with large numbers of workers.
29
In 1920 such demonstrations sometimes turned violent. After a joint meeting in June called by the Antisemitenbund (League of AntiSemites) and a monarchist paramilitary formation known as the Frontkämpfervereinigung (Front Fighters' Association), a number of passersby with long noses were assaulted because they looked Jewish.
30
In September the Austrian Nazi Party held a rally in the Prater amuse-

 

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ment park near Leopoldstadt attended (according to its own estimate) by 3,000 people. The party's leader, Walter Riehl, demanded that Vienna's "200,000 Ostjuden" be deported to Poland to make room for the city's 150,000 homeless people. (Prophetically, twenty years later all of Vienna's Jewsand not just the Ostjudenwere forced to emigrate or were deported to death camps, in part to solve Vienna's housing shortage.) A street march after the rally by 1,000 of the participants led to clashes with outnumbered Socialists and Jews. The latter were chased down side streets until police finally intervened. Jewish shopkeepers in the neighborhood were hastily forced to close up and flee to their homes while the Nazis hurled stones and insults at the police.

31

One of the biggest rallies in early postwar Vienna was an international congress held between 11 and 13 March 1921. The product of over eighteen months of preparation by the Antisemitenbund and especially its leader, Dr. Anton Jerzabek, it was attended by about 40,000 people. Participants came not only from Austria, but also from Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. Austria alone was represented by sixty-two anti-Semitic corporations and clubs having a total of 400,000 members. Many of the organizations brought all of their members, including their marching bands, which performed on the final day.
32
The speakers at the congress covered all the usual anti-Semitic allegations and demands. Colonel Hermann von Hiltl, the leader of the Front Veterans, demanded that Austrian Jews be stripped of their citizenship rights, including the right to serve in the army and to own land; land already owned by Jews should be expropriated. The Catholic writer, Anton Orel, called Jews the "incarnation of the anti-Christ" whose strength was used to destroy Christian-German culture. Either German Romanticism would triumph or there would be world domination by the Jews. The congress concluded by approving a resolution calling on the Austrian government to limit the number of Jewish middle-school and university-aged students to their percentage of the country's population. Another resolution, advanced by Jerzabek demanded the expulsion by 1 April 1921 of all Jews who had immigrated to Vienna after the start of the world war. Some young people celebrated the end of the rally by breaking the windows of Jewish stores and attacking Jewish streetcar passengers.
33
Anti-Semitic rallies diminished in 1922 only to reach new heights in the first three months of 1923. In January a newly founded Racial Anti-Semitic Fighting Committee (Völkische-antisemitische Kampfausschuss) organized a huge rally between the City Hall and the Burgtheater attended by anywhere from 20,000 (the estimate of the
Wiener Morgenzeitung
) to 100,000 people (the
Reichspost
calculation). Several paramilitary formations, including the Aus-

 

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trian Nazis and the Front Veterans' Association marched to the rally, "looking not unlike real storm troopers," and listened to speeches demanding that the Austrian government recognize the Jews as a separate nation and count them as such in the next census. The director of the Burgtheater, Hofrat Milenkovich, demanded that a
numerus clausus
(cap on representation) for Jews be applied not just to Vienna's Hochschulen, but to all public positions.

34

Anti-Semitic outbursts in the early 1920s were not limited to street rallies and demonstrations. For example, in early February 1923 a group of young Nazis broke up a public lecture on "The Aberrations of Erotic Passion," which was given at the Konzerthaus (a large concert hall) by a Jewish sexual therapist from Berlin named Magnus Hirschfeld. At a prearranged signal the storm troops fired pistols blindly, threw stink bombs and rotten eggs, and threatened members of the audience with rubber knuckles and knives while shouting "Saujud [pig Jew] shut up" and "out with the Schweinhund [swine]," all of which created a panic and caused some people to be trampled. The tactics prompted the
Wiener Morgenzeitung
to comment that the medieval spirit of Jew burning had been reawakened.
35
The
Morgenzeitung
did not content itself with editorializing. A month after the Nazi outrage in the Konzerthaus the Zionist paper helped sponsor a mass rally protesting anti-Semitic rallies that had taken place in front of the city hall. The rally, attended by Jews of all political orientations, took place in the people's hall of the Rathaus, the site of many earlier anti-Semitic demonstrations, and was intended to give Jews a chance to express their feelings about the recent anti-Semitic agitation. Six thousand people crowded into the hall and perhaps another ten thousand listened to the speeches outside on loudspeakers. The vice president of the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde, Dr. Desider Friedmann, criticized the Austrian government for doing nothing to stop the anti-Semitic excesses. Members of the audience had to leave the building by rear exits under police protection. But not everyone was able to escape the armed Nazi youths who attacked Jews with rubber clubs and heavy sticks along with various other weapons, in actions that the
Reichspost
said were provoked by Zionist guards. Ninety-nine armed antiSemites were arrested.
36
Demands for Expulsion or Internment of Galician Refugees
The hate campaign against the Ostjuden also included the universities (to be described in the next chapter), parliamentary bodies, and above all the newspapers. The common denominators in all of this anti-Semitic agitation

 

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were calls for the expulsion or even the internment of Jewish refugees. These became almost routine in Vienna and in other parts of Austria after the summer of 1915 when the municipal government first made such a proposal. In December 1917 the Christian Social mayor of Vienna urged the city council to compel the repatriation of the city's remaining refugees now that there was an armistice on the eastern front. In July 1919 the Christian Social deputies in the city council, no doubt angry over their party's defeat in a recent municipal election, demanded that the Ostjuden (whom they blamed for their defeat) either be forced to emigrate or be placed in internment camps. The Social Democratic governor of Lower Austria (which still included Vienna at the time), Albert Sever, ordered all foreigners, except those with special temporary permission, to leave the federal state. Similar demands were made during the next several years by members of both the Christian Social Party and the Greater German People's Party.

37

Brutal as these demands were, it should at least be pointed out that once again Austria's antiSemitism at this time was not unique in Central Europe or elsewhere. The governments of Czechoslovakia and Hungary also tried to send Galician refugees back to their Polish homes after the First World War (even though the Czech government later became a bulwark of tolerance toward Jews). In August 1923 the police of Amsterdam gave Ostjuden who had arrived in the city after the start of the war just eight days in which to leave. Even in the United States, the Bolshevik scare was associated with radical Jews and helped produce immigration restrictions in the early 1920S that were aimed in large measure against Eastern European Jews.
38
The response in Germany to the continued presence of Eastern European Jewish refugees was equally sharp. In December 1919 Prussian Minister of the Interior Wolfgang Heine announced his intention to establish internment camps for the refugees; in April 1920 the Bavarian government tried to expel 5,000 Ostjuden who had entered the state after August 1914. In August 1923 internment was limited only to criminals, people under serious suspicion of having committed crimes, and enemies of the state. These camps were hardly comparable with the Nazi concentration camps established a decade later and even German Jews did not object to their stated intention. But they did set something of a precedent.
39
To force, or at least encourage, the departure of the Ostjuden, politicians made all sorts of proposals, none of which was ever implemented by the Austrian government, but all of which were eventually enacted by the Nazi government in Germany after 1933 and in Austria after the Anschluss. In February 1919 Anton Jerzabek along with nineteen of his Christian Social colleagues

 

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in the Austrian Parliament proposed a bill that would have expelled Jewish refugees if they had infectious diseases, had committed economic crimes, or had carried out political subversion. The sponsors of the bill warned that if it were not enacted the outraged masses would resort to "self-help." The Jews were not singled out in the language of the bill, but the motivation was clear and the alleged habits and customs of the Jewish refugees were openly discussed by the parliamentary deputies. In March 1919 a so-called German People's Council (Deutsche Volksrat) for Vienna and Lower Austria, an anti-Semitic group of German nationalist clubs, demanded that all refugees have their ration cards and freedom to conduct business withdrawn. The following month the two largest parties in the Parliament, the Social Democrats and the Christian Socials, agreed to control more strictly the dispersement of ration cards to refugees.

40

Actually, the attitude of the Social Democratic Party toward Jews on this as well as many other issues was ambivalent. During these early postwar years the party sometimes favored the expulsion of the Ostjuden in principle but opposed it in practice. For example, as mentioned previously, on 10 September the Social Democratic governor of Lower Austria, Albert Sever, ordered the expulsion by 20 September of all foreigners who had not been residents at the start of the world war on the grounds that there was not enough housing and work available for them. Already on 23 September, however, he had to acknowledge that the shortage of trains and the coal to fuel them made this order impractical. He also called the idea of concentration camps for refugees a "cultural disgrace." The reversal of the governor's decision sparked a major protest demonstration by the Nazis and the League of AntiSemites a few days later.
41
It is possible that Governor Sever was never serious about expelling the foreigners and had only made a gesture to appease the antiSemites. It is also likely, however, that he was reacting to a warning by the American consul general in Vienna, Albert Halstead. The consul told Chancellor Karl Renner on 25 September that American opinion would be prejudiced against Austria if the expulsions should actually occur. The warning came at a time when Austria was desperately dependent on the United States for famine relief. A few weeks later (in November) Halstead repeated his warning, this time to the Austrian Foreign Ministry, saying that reports coming out of Vienna about anti-Jewish agitation had created a very unfavorable impression in the United States, which could make it difficult in the future for Austria to obtain American credit.
42
Verbally at least, the Catholic Christian Social Party was much less equivo-

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