From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (33 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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that a walk around the main building of the University of Vienna would reveal little except anti-Semitic posters and literature of the lowest kind, including the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
, which was on sale everywhere with the rector's approval. To the reporter of Austria's most venerable liberal newspaper it seemed as though the students were interested in nothing but the "Jewish question." This was especially true for members of the Deutsche Studentenschaft, whose numbers and influence were constantly growing. The hate propaganda was finally forbidden by the academic authorities in October 1925, much to the indignation of Nazi students, but only the rector of the College of International Trade was strict about enforcing the new rule.

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The anti-Semitic violence in Vienna's institutions of higher learning of the early postwar years abated only slightly in the middle and late twenties. The Anatomy Institute of Professor Julius Tandler continued to be a favorite target of völkisch students, being spared attacks only in 1928 and the first ten months of 1929.
13
In May 1925 Nazi students broke into the institute and demanded that Jewish students get out. One of the Nazi students then made a speech in the entry hall of the building in which he called for the murder of leading Socialists such as Karl Renner, Otto Bauer, and Julius Deutsch. This incident caused the Austrian government, which had the ultimate authority over Vienna's higher academic institutions, to close them all. The federal chancellor, Rudolf Ramek, very possibly responding to a complaint contained in a long letter from the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde, and mindful of the World Zionist Congress that was to meet that summer in Vienna, also issued a stern warning to the leaders of the Deutsche Studentenschaft.
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Another anti-Semitic brawl took place at the College of International Trade in March 1927 when two hundred to three hundred students from other Hochschulenled by Robert Körber, who by this time had graduated and become a businessman but had lost none of his interest in radical student politicsinvaded the building and attacked anyone who looked Jewish with rubber clubs and sticks. The director of the college, Dr. Grunzel, was called a "Jewish pig," a "dirty pig-Jew," and a "stinking Hebrew," whereas the police who arrived on the scene to restore order were called "Jew lovers." Körber delivered a short speech in which he denounced Grunzel for not allowing any anti-Semitic posters.
15
During observances in November 1927 celebrating the founding of the republic, Nazi students with the help of thirty men from the Sturmabteilung attacked the predominantly Jewish Socialist Student Association at the University of Vienna. After ten minutes eight Jewish students had to be carried away to receive first aid while the Nazi students triumphantly sang a party song.

 

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Theodor Innitzer as rector of the University of Vienna. He aided poor
Jewish students at the university and later as cardinal helped baptized
Jews (but not Jews who had not been converted) escape from
Austria. Library of the City of Vienna Picture Archive.

 

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This episode was merely the first of a series of eight pitched battles at the university in which Nazi students destroyed kiosks that displayed announcements and posters of Jewish organizations, disrupted lectures of Jewish professors, captured and held campus security officials for hours at a time, issued ultimatums, and besieged the office of the university's chancellor and later Roman Catholic cardinal, Theodor Innitzer.

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Meanwhile, over a two-year period the National Socialist League of Students distributed 100,000 propaganda leaflets, held a dozen mass meetings, and organized countless "lecture evenings." By such self-styled "heroic" tactics, the Nazi students attracted two to three thousand followers by the beginning of 1930 and claimed to be the "masters" of one of the world's most distinguished universities.
17
Nazi students did not, however, have a monopoly on anti-Semitic activities at Austria universities in the late 1920s. A protest by Socialist workers in Vienna against the results of a politicized trial culminated in the burning of the Palace of Justice in Vienna in July 1927 and sparked a sudden upsurge in the popularity of the anti-Marxist and paramilitary Austrian
Heimwehr
or Home Guard. By the fall of 1929 it was Heimwehr, not Nazi students, who attracted the attention of even the
New York Times
because of its frequent attacks on Jewish students at the University of Vienna and other Hochschulen. In October Heimwehr students at the Technical College barred the entrance to Jews and then marched to the main building of the University of Vienna where they drove Jews out of lecture halls into the streets and then assaulted them. A few days later rioting Heimwehr students invaded Professor Tandler's Anatomy Institute and attacked Jewish students with such viciousness that onlookers summoned five fire brigades to help the victims escape and ambulances were called for the injured. Seven people were seriously hurt, one having a badly fractured skull. Mounted police were present but did not set foot on academic soil. Following similar incidents a year later rectors at the Institute for International Trade scolded Jewish students for provoking nationalist students while politely reminding the latter that they ought to resist responding to "provocations."
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By 1931 Nazi students in Vienna had regained the upper hand following the great Nazi electoral victory in Germany the preceding September. Early February witnessed a renewal of Nazi violence, this time at the Chemistry Institute on Währingerstrasse, at the Technical College, and on the ramp in front of the main building of the University of Vienna on the Ringstrasse. The "provocation" for the three days of demonstrations was a poster by Socialist students (who, it will be recalled, were mostly of Jewish origins) protesting the

 

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conditions of a forthcoming student election and calling for a boycott. Nazis at the Technical College hauled away a kiosk with the offending poster, set it on fire, and then tried to prevent firefighters from putting it out. At the Chemistry Institute they invaded the building, shouted their usual anti-Semitic slogans, and sang the German national anthem; anyone who refused to stand up for the anthem was assaulted. The
New York Times
said the scene outside the university ''at times resembled a battlefield with hundreds of foot police massed in double cordons against the khaki-uniformed Hitlerite detachments." On the third day of the rioting the rector of the University of Vienna, the historian Hans Uebersberger, met some of the völkisch students and told them that the Socialist poster had indeed been a provocation and would be banned.

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The Creation of Student "Nations"
The climax of student anti-Semitic violence probably came in 1931 after the constitutional court of Austria disallowed a regulation at the University of Vienna that had divided the student body into "nations," including one for Jews. Under pressure from the increasingly Nazified Deutsche Studentenschaft, the Viennese rectors' conference, chaired by the rector of the University of Vienna and legal scholar, Count Wenzel Gleispach, decided on 1 February 1930 that Hochschule students should be divided into four nationsin the manner of medieval universitiesif they formed at least 1 percent of the total enrollment. According to the new rule, which was approved by the Academic Senate of the University of Vienna on 8 April 1930, students themselves could not decide to which nation they belonged: German, non-German (Jewish), mixed, or "other." Declaring oneself an Austrian or an American was not an option! A student would be regarded as a non-German, even if he was an Austrian citizen and his native language was German, unless he could prove that his parents and all four of his grandparents had been baptized. The latter stipulation was far more stringent than the infamous Nuremberg Laws implemented in Nazi Germany in September 1935.
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The regulation, which was similar to one that had been enforced at the Technical College since 1924, was a thinly disguised plan to disenfranchise Jewish students in campus politics and in a broader sense to segregate them from the rest of Austrian society and turn them into second-class citizens. It would have been the basic principle around which Austrian society as a whole would have been reorganized if its proponents had had their way. One Austrian antiSemite called it the first time in the history of the anti-Semitic movement

 

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that a segregation of Germans and Jews had been carried out. Only a few months after the approval of the new rule Nazi students were able to take control of the Deutsche Studentenschaft following elections in February 1931 from which Jews had been excluded. It also assured that students belonging to the "German Student Nation" would enjoy a privileged status in helping to administer the university. The Catholic periodical,
Schönere Zukunft
, thought that Jews disliked the new ruling only because they did not want others to see how predominant they were at the university.

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The enforcement of the new student ruling turned out to be short-lived even though the Ministry of Education shied away from getting involved in the controversy and the federal cabinet as a whole wanted to treat the whole question as an internal academic matter. On 23 June 1931 the constitutional court of Austria announced that the academic rule violated an Austrian law dating back to 1867 regulating the formation of associations. The creation of separate student nations per se was legal; however, because students could be assigned to a nation against their will by a student court, they were deemed involuntary and hence unconstitutional. The regulation also violated the constitutional principle of the equality of all citizens because under the plan students would not enjoy the same privileges. The court's decision amounted to a slap in the face for the academic authorities and the minister of education, the historian Heinrich Srbik, who had supported the rule; both he and the academic authorities had said it was an internal matter of the university.
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The decision by the constitutional court, which appeared to threaten the ascendancy of the Deutsche Studentenschaft, unleashed three days of the worst academic violence in the history of the First Austrian Republic. After a hundred Nazi students, most of them wearing party insignia, heard the court's ruling, they marched in closed formation from the courtroom in the Parliament building to the University of Vienna, just two blocks away. There they met hundreds of other well-armed Nazi students in the entrance of the main University building and began attacking Jewish and Socialist students with rubber truncheons and steel clubs, seriously injuring fifteen of them. Rear exits from the building were blocked by other Nazi students, who would let no one pass without identification proving that he belonged to the Deutsche Studentenschaft. Campus guards made no effort to break up the brawl; Rector Uebersberger refused to allow municipal police to enter the building and protested their charging the ramp in front of the building to drive off the assailants. (Out of gratitude for his sympathies, Nazi students serenaded the rector a few days later.) Nazi students who had previously attacked Jews had always claimed to have been "provoked." This time no such claim was advanced.
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