From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (43 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

 

Page 176
Catholic to indulge in overt racial antiSemitism. Moreover, the two wings of the movement were badly split over the issue of Anschluss with Germany; the panGerman Styrian Heimatschutz was in favor of the union, but the Catholic wing, which was closely associated with the Christian Social Party, was opposed, especially after Hitler's takeover in 1933.

Complicating the issue of antiSemitism still further was the much needed financial support of some Jewish bankers such as Rudolf Sieghart, Jewish industrialists like Fritz Mandl, and the predominantly Jewish Phönix Insurance Company, which sympathized with the Heimwehr's staunch antiMarxism. Richard Steidle, who came from the ultra-Catholic province of Tyrol and was the Heimwehr's coleader from 1928 to 1930, said the movement was not anti-Semitic, but merely opposed to Jewish Marxists and destructive Ostjuden. Patriotic Jews, Steidle said, were welcome comrades against Marxism.

5

If the attitude toward Jews was somewhat ambiguous, the attitude of at least the more politically conservative Jews toward the Heimwehr was also equivocal.
Die Wahrheit
, the mouthpiece for upper-middle-class assimilated Jews, wrote in October 1929 that "Austrian Jews" approved of the Heimwehr's opposition to the high taxes imposed by Vienna's Socialist government. Jews also favored the Heimwehr's demand for strict proportional representation in Parliament, according to the paper. It is also true that some Jewish businessmen gave in to Heimwehr demands to dismiss their Social Democratic employees, thus doubtless increasing antiSemitism in the working class. Moreover, according to the Heimwehr's most recent historian, not a few Jews actually joined the Heimwehr, although none of them ever became leaders.
6
The tolerant attitude that some Jews held toward the Heimwehr began to change in 1930 as the Heimwehr became more outspokenly anti-Semitic. In October, Dr. Franz Hueber, a minister of justice in the federal government and brother-in-law of Hermann Göring, announced that Austria "ought to be freed from this alien [Jewish] body." As a minister he "could not recommend that the Jews be hanged, that their windows be smashed, or that their shop display windows be looted. . . . But we demand that racially impure elements be removed from the public life of Austria." Not surprisingly, Jewish members of the Heimwehr began resigning about this time and by 1934 the organization was no longer accepting Jews as members.
7
In the ideological middle of the Austrian Heimwehr, trying to balance its panGerman and racist wing with its Catholic-conservative branch, was its leader for most of the period between 1930 and 1936, Prince Ernst Rüdiger Starhemberg. Like the organization as a whole, he was caught between the need to appease the Heimwehr's Jewish financiers and his desire to maintain

 

Page 177

and attract the support of antiSemites. He was also indebted to the House of Rothschild for helping him out of some personal financial difficulties.

8

Consequently, Starhemberg could be either moderate or radical on the Jewish question, depending on the audience and the situation. In a speech delivered to a Heimwehr crowd in 1930 he proclaimed that "the object of our movement is to create a people's state in which every
Volksgenosse
[blood brother] will have the right to a job and to bread. [The Nazis' slogan was
Arbeit und Brot
.] By a
Volksgenosse
I mean only one inspired by the race instinct of the Germans in whose veins German blood flows. In 'the people' I do not include those foreign, flat-footed parasites from the East who exploit us. [This was an apparent attempt to distinguish between the Ostjuden and the Westjuden.] We want the German people's state to be on Christian foundations."
9
In February 1933 Starhemberg told a Heimwehr audience in Vienna that he was pleased that a national government had just come to power in Germany. Later in the same speech he said that Austria had lost the world war because of a foreign race sitting in coffeehouses.
10
Starhemberg became much more temperate in his public pronouncements while a member of the federal cabinet from 1932 until 1936, particularly when he was speaking to foreign journalists. To a French newspaper reporter he said in March 1934 that he merely wanted to break Jewish "predominance." At about the same time he told a Hungarian newspaper that all Jews who rejected internationalism and who were not a burden to the state were not part of the Jewish problem. A few weeks later Starhemberg told English and American reporters that it would be crazy to solve the Jewish problem by force or through a numerus clausus. The government wanted to retain "valuable" Jews who would take part in rebuilding the state. Who these valuable Jews were, Starhemberg did not say. The only solution to the Jewish problem, he added ambiguously, was through laws that took into account the sensitivities of the Christian majority.
11
The Styrian branch of the Heimwehr, which also had followers in neighboring Lower Austria and Carinthia, was much less equivocal about antiSemitism than Prince Starhemberg. Its leader, Dr. Walter Pfrimer, a lawyer from the Upper Styrian town of Judenburg, said on numerous occasions that Jews ought to be treated as a foreign race and complained that his coleader, Steidle, was too moderate on the Jewish question. Pfrimer's racism increased in the early 1930s when his Styrian Heimatschutz began to compete with the Austrian Nazi Party. The statutes of his organization, which went into effect on 1 March 1933, specifically excluded Jews from membership. A few weeks later, Pfrimer's newspaper,
Der Panther
, proudly stated that the Styrian

 

Page 178
Prince Ernst Rüdiger Starhemberg, leader of the Austrian Heimwehr. Austrian
National Library Picture Archive. "In 'the people,' I do not include those foreign,
flat-footed parasites from the East who exploit us," he told a Heimwehr audience in
1930 (Franz Winkler,
Die Diktatur in Österreich
).

 

Page 179

Heimatschutz followed the same völkisch ideology that had been preached by Georg von Schönerer.

12

The Heimwehr's attempt to bridge the gap between the relatively moderate, traditional, Catholic anti-Judaism of the Christian Social Party and the modern, racial antiSemitism of panGerman groups ultimately proved to be impossible. The Nazis' brand of violent racial antiSemitism together with their promise to bring about an Anschluss between Germany and Austria, proved too appealing for panGermans within the Heimwehr to resist. Consequently, in 1933 Walter Pfrimer and his Styrian Heimatschutz allied themselves with the Austrian Nazis and were later absorbed by them.
13
A paramilitary formation that was far more unified on the Jewish question than the Heimwehr was the Frontkämpfervereinigung or League of Front Fighters. Organized in 1920, it claimed to be a mutual aid society that merely wanted to cultivate comradeship among veterans of the world war and work for the reconstruction of the German fatherland, leading to the eventual union of the entire German people. Its secret program, however, was to unite all bourgeois elements against "Jewish Marxism." In other words, its objectives were similar to those of the Heimwehr except as a whole it was not armed and it was distinctly more anti-Semitic, probably because the majority of its 50,000 members (in late 1920) came from Vienna.
14
From the beginning the league was staunchly anti-Semitic. Its leader, Colonel Hermann von Hiltl, blamed the Jews for the breakup of the AustroHungarian Monarchy. He opposed the immigration of Jews and wanted to make their emigration easy, although he did not favor their expulsion. He was also against the persecution of individual Jews if they had not been provocative. But he did want to limit their representation in the press, medicine, and law, as well as their ownership of property to no more than their percentage of the population. Hiltl vociferously advanced these views in numerous anti-Semitic rallies in which the Front Fighters participated, especially in the early 1920s.
15
The heyday of the Frontkämpfervereinigung was definitely in the early postwar years. When the Heimwehr underwent an explosive growth in the late 1920s the Front Fighters were left in the shadows. However, when the Austrian Nazi Party was outlawed in 1933, the league experienced a rebirth with many Nazis switching their allegiance. To accommodate these new members the paramilitary formation once again stressed its antiSemitism and refused to join the government-sponsored umbrella organization called the Fatherland Front. Eventually, however, it acquired the well-earned reputation of being a Nazi front and was outlawed in June 1935.
16

 

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The Greater German People's Party

The further one went up the social scale in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Central Europe, the more secular, cultural, and racial antiSemitism tended to become; by the same token it became less and less religiously motivated. This helps to explain why the peasant-dominated Heimwehr was not particularly racist. On the other hand, the middleclass Greater German People's Party or Grossdeutsche Volkspartei (GDVP) was extremely racist.

17

AntiSemitism was apparently a necessary ingredient of the German nationalist ideology. Since the days of Georg von Schönerer its exponents had rejected liberalism, rationalism, Marxism, and democracy as "un-German." Jews were blamed for alienating Germans from their presumably unspoiled characteristics. Because there was traditional anti-Jewish resentment in broad sections of the public in Central Europe, it was easy to depict the Jews as foreign even if they were culturally integrated. Rather than blaming concrete, individual Jews, however, the German nationalists spoke about
Verjudung
(jewification) and the hidden and all-pervasive Jewish
Geist
(spirit). If Jews were not openly influential, it only showed how cunning and dangerous they really were. Racial theories were a pseudoscientific reinforcement for people who rejected emancipation, self-determination, and equality.
18
The German nationalists did not regard the Jews as inferior in every way. On the contrary, Jews had an excellent "business spirit" and were clever, shrewd, intelligent, and energetic. These qualities made German nationalists think they were defending themselves against a superior foe. After 1918 they were also convinced that they were being ruled by foreigners.
19
All of these ideas were present in the Greater German People's Party. A middleclass coalition of seventeen nationalistic splinter parties and organizations left over from the monarchy, it was founded in 1920 by groups that came together more out of necessity than conviction. To some extent it was a collecting point for all those people who could not find an ideological home in one of the two major parties. Of the nationalistic parties of Austria, only the German Workers' Party (which soon evolved into the Austrian Nazi Party) and the Landbund remained outside this loose coalition. Because it was created from "above," it had no strong organization. People who voted for the GDVP were nationalistic, but otherwise uninterested in politics and did not want to engage in routine political work. Consequently, the party was often like a general staff without an army.
20
In addition to its racial antiSemitism, the party favored free trade and an Anschluss with Germany. It also supported the concept of a Volksgemein-

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