From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (45 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 187

until early 1937 the Antisemitenbund led a precarious existence because Austrian security forces were convinced, with good reason, that it was a mere cover for the illegal Austrian Nazi Party. From mid-1935 until early 1937 it was not even allowed to hold public meetings after the police discovered that as many as 60 percent of the people in its audiences were Nazis. Thereafter, however, it resumed its public activities with the permission of the government, which evidently thought that such limited tolerance would allow it to monitor the illegal Nazis and distract them from more dangerous activities. In arguing its own case, the leadership of the league maintained that their antiSemitism was strictly defensive. Their model, it said, was not Julius Streicher, the rabble-rousing Gauleiter of Nuremberg, but Karl Lueger.

35

By March 1937 the Antisemitenbund had chapters once again in nearly all the federal states of Austria and by November of the same year it was holding two meetings a week in Vienna alone in addition to others in the provinces, especially in Graz. The frequency of these meetings increased in the last few months before the Anschluss in March 1938. In Vienna the meetings were attended by an average of two hundred to six hundred enthusiastic people, mostly young Nazis. Speakers who praised the anti-Semitic policies of the German governmentfor example, a proposal to put 6.5 million unemployed Germans back to work by supposedly removing the Jews from the German economyand denounced the high percentage of Jews in the professions in Austria were loudly applauded. Meanwhile, the league was also busy distributing anti-Semitic propaganda in an attempt to penetrate every segment of society, but especially young people, students, the military, gentile businessmen, and women. The Antisemitenbund had to exercise extreme caution, however, in order to avoid difficulties with the authorities. It had to notify the government ten days in advance of all planned activities, and the government had the right to change the topics of the speakers.
36
During the last three years or so of its existence the Antisemitenbund was anxious to prove that it was a patriotic organization with no ties to the Nazi Party. A new statement of twenty principles drawn up by the league in the spring of 1936 began with the declaration that the organization "recognized without reservation the Christian-German, independent fatherland of Austria." The principles also carefully avoided calling the Jews a "race," preferring instead the more politically neutral word "Volk." The declaration furthermore claimed that the organization, since its founding, had been strictly nonpolitical and consisted of native Austrians.
37
The Antisemitenbund's managing director and deputy chairman, Karl Peter, a former
Truppführer
(section leader) in the Nazis' Sturmabteilung, also wrote

 

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a twenty-four-page pamphlet in 1936 called
Der Antisemitismus
which reaffirmed the league's loyalty to the state. League members, Peter claimed disingenuously, were not Nazis because antiSemitism was only one part of the Nazi program. AntiSemitism was no imported idea but had long played an important role in Austrian history. The notion that the Jews were a people (Volk) was also not an exclusively Nazi idea, but one admitted by most Jews themselves. The Antisemitenbund did not preach hatred of the Jews but merely love of its own people. Zionism was the only solution to the Jewish problem, and the league did not care whether the Jews moved to Palestine, Madagascar, or somewhere else.

38

Despite these denials, relations between the Antisemitenbund and the illegal Nazi Party were very close, especially in the last two years before the Anschluss.
Der eiserne Besen
had continued to urge its readers to vote for the Nazi Party as the only genuinely radical anti-Semitic party even after Nazis had withdrawn from the organization in 1924. After a major Nazi victory in local and state elections in April 1932,
Der eiserne Besen
described Hitler as the "only politician . . . of the German people who is willing to oppose Jews openly and ruthlessly."
39
For its part, the leadership of the outlawed Austrian Nazi Party, especially Leopold Tavs, the Gauleiter of Vienna, had good relations with the leaders of the Antisemitenbund and allowed their members to join the latter organization and to attend its meetings. But the relationship remained a loose one, probably in order to prevent the league from being outlawed.
40
The fate of the Antisemitenbund was similar to that of other racist and panGerman organizations of Austria. It was founded and flourished at a time of extreme antiSemitism when few people had heard of National Socialism. The popularity of the Antisemitenbund, the Front Fighters' Association, the Greater German People's Party, and the Heimwehr all declined in the middle 1920s as antiSemitism began to recede with the return of at least a modicum of prosperity. Only the Heimwehr enjoyed an early revival between July 1927 and 1930 because of the anti-Socialist hysteria surrounding the burning of the Palace of Justice by a crowd of workers. In the meantime, the Landbund temporarily dropped its anti-Semitic philosophy, and the Greater German People's Party chose the pragmatic Johannes Schober as its leader for the elections of November 1930.
The deepening of the Great Depression and the rising popularity of Nazism in Germany ultimately revived Austrian antiSemitism, and no group benefited more than the Austrian Nazi Party. For a time, the Heimwehr, the

 

 

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GDVP, the Landbund, and also the Christian Social Party all tried to compete with Nazi antiSemitism. In this they all failed, however. The Nazis, with their more uncompromising stand on antiSemitism and monopoly (after 1933) of the Anschluss issue, absorbed 90 percent of the Greater Germans, at least a third of the Heimwehr, and perhaps a quarter of the CSP. Of the non-Nazi organizations of Austria, only the Antisemitenbund continued to flourish after the mid-1930s, and that was only because it had become largely a coverits protestations to the contrary notwithstandingfor the now-outlawed Austrian Nazi Party.

 

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13
The Austrian Nazi Party

The most infamous of the anti-Semitic organizations of Austria was without doubt the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP). But once we look beyond the Nazi Party's popular reputation, we discover that its ideas and methods of propaganda were in no respect completely novel. It is even doubtful whether its Jewish policy prior to the Anschluss was much more extreme than that of the Antisemitenbund, the Christian Social Workers' Association, or some elements of the Greater German People's Party. Only in their greater willingness to use violence against Jews did the Nazis differentiate themselves to some extent from other Austrian antiSemites.

1

If Nazi antiSemitism was unusual in any way it was in how it combined different aspects of antiSemitism from all other political parties in order to bind together the very heterogeneous party membership as well as to attract new followers. One could find an anticapitalism resembling that of the SDAP, the same attacks on the Jewish leadership of the SDAP made by the CSP and the Heimwehr, the same charge of "Jewish materialism" made by the GVDP and the Antisemitenbund, the same violent criticism of Jews for their supposed domination of the Viennese press and cultural life found in all the non-Jewish political groups of Austria, and the same racism as in Schönerer's Pan-Germans, the GVDP, the Antisemitenbund, and part of the Heimwehr.
2
However adept the Nazis may have been at combining various forms of antiSemitism, their eclecticism itself cannot be considered unique. As we have already seen, there were no pure forms of antiSemitism in Austria. Many political groups, especially the Christian Social Party, attempted to combine religious, economic, cultural, and, to a certain degree, even racial varieties of antiSemitism.
The Nazis were more consistent in their antiSemitism than their rivals. Their "scientific" racism and aggressive opposition to Jews avoided the semi-religious, semiracist, and basically "defensive" antiSemitism of most Christian Socials. (On the other hand, it is ironic and instructive that the Nazis were

 

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able to define who belonged to the Jewish "race" only by using the religious affiliation of grandparents.) Unlike the Socialists they denounced all Jews, not just those who were capitalists; and unlike the Heimwehr and the CSP, the Nazis did not accept money from Jewish financiers. In contrast to all their anti-Semitic rivals, except Greater Germans and the Antisemitenbund, Nazis were not supposed to associate with even baptized Jews. Thus, the Nazis, unlike most other antiSemites, could claim to be fully
kompromisslos
(uncompromising) on the Jewish question, although this did not mean that their rivals did not accuse some of their leaders of having Jewish blood or business associates.

It may also be that antiSemitism played a more important (but not allimportant) role in Nazi ideology than it did in the ideology of the other political parties of Austria. The centrality of the Nazis' antiSemitism can best be seen in six of the party's official twenty-five points, announced (but not drafted) by Hitler in February 1920, being devoted to the Jewish question.

3
The Christian Socials, on the other hand, were primarily concerned about the defense of Christianity; the Socialists were interested above all in defending the interests of the working class against those of the capitalists and in establishing economic equality. But the Nazi ideology was so antirational and pseudoreligious that perhaps only something equally antirational and pseudoreligious like antiSemitism could hold it together. Neither Nazi dogma nor antiSemitism could be exposed to critical thinking.

It is obvious by now that the Austrian Nazi Party was far from having a monopoly on antiSemitism in the First Republic, especially prior to about 1934. It was, however, ultimately the most successful party in exploiting traditional Austrian antiSemitism as well as current events and problems in which Jews were associated or at least alleged to be associated. In doing so the Austrian Nazis employed mostly the traditional techniques of antiSemites, ranging from attacks on the alleged cultural influence of Jews to boycotts. Their solutions for the Jewish "problem" were equally shopworn and included such things as reducing Jewish representation in the professions and academic life to their proportion of Austria's (or Vienna's) population to expelling the Jews or at least the Jewish newcomers from Eastern Europe.
The German Workers' Party
The prewar Austrian Nazi Party, or German Workers' Party (
Deutsche Arbeiterpartei
), as it was known until 1918, was not particularly vociferous in its opposition to Jews. Although founded in Bohemia in 1903, it was not until

 

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1913, when its Iglau Program was drafted, that antiSemitism was even mentioned. Even then the program merely made the rather unexceptional assertion (for antiSemites) that the party would ''combat . . . the ever-increasing Jewish spirit in public life."

4

During and immediately after the war the Austrian Nazis, who started calling themselves the German National Socialist Workers' Party in May 1918, began to intensify their anti-Semitic message, as indeed did all of Austria's parties. Rudolf Jung, a Bohemian and the party's principal theorist, wrote an article during the war calling for the nationalization of monopolies, department stores, and large landed estates that were not the product of "honest work," a disguised form of antiSemitism. Jung was also most responsible for drawing up a new program for the party in August 1918 which opposed "all alien influences, but above all . . . the parasitic power of the Jewish trading spirit in all spheres of public life." In particular the predominance of Jewish banks in Austria's economy had to be eliminated. Shortly after the war the party's leading newspaper, the
Deutsche ArbeiterPresse
, put
Judenherrschaft
(Jewish domination) at the top of a list of evils the party opposed.
5
A major driving force behind the party's antiSemitism, almost from its founding, was one of its early leaders, Dr. Walter Riehl, who, like Jung, came from the party's original heartland in northern Bohemia. To be sure, antiSemitism was not quite the all-consuming obsession it was for such bourgeois radical nationalists as Georg von Schönerer, although Riehl did resemble the knight of Rosenau in being a racial rather than a religious antiSemite. Nor did Riehl emulate the adult Hitler in refusing even to associate with Jews socially. Still, as his early biographer, Alexander Schilling, noted, Riehl related almost all of Austria's problems, foreign and domestic, to Jews.
6
Riehl's primary demand with regard to the Jews was one that could be found in all of Austria's interwar parties: the political, cultural, and economic "predominance" of the Jews had to be reduced to their proportion of the country's total population, roughly 3 percent.
7
Even though Riehl's antiSemitism was less extreme than that of either Hitler or Schönerer, he was far from being regarded as innocuous by Viennese Jews who were the brunt of his fiery oratory. For
Die Wahrheit
, Riehl was the "embodiment of wild street terror and violent racial antisemitism . . . . He was the personification of unredeemed hatred and bitter enmity toward Jews."
8

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