From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (63 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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which to shame their German comrades into a more energetic implementation of Nazi goals. However, Austria's role in the persecution of Central European Jewry cannot be understood apart from developments that occurred within the Nazi Party shortly before the Anschluss.

Aryanization and persecution of Jews in general had been slowed by several factors prior to 1938, the most important of which was Hitler's reluctance to do anything that might disrupt the German economy at a time when unemployment was still high. It is no accident therefore that Aryanization began to speed up rapidly in Germany in 1937 at the very moment when unemployment disappeared. Hermann Göring's appointment at the end of 1936 as head of the Four-Year Plan also represented a shift in the balance of power within the Nazi Party toward the more radical elements. More important, however, was the dismissal of Economics Minister Hjalmar Schacht in November 1937, which removed another obstacle to Göring's economic ascendancy and to more drastic forms of Aryanization, even though Schacht had not been opposed to "legal" confiscations. Consequently, by January 1938, 60 to 70 percent of the enterprises that had been in German-Jewish hands in 1933 had been Aryanized and half of all Jewish workers and employees were unemployed. After 1 March 1938 no more government contracts were given to Jewish firms except for a few vital to the rearmament program; nearly all the Jewish banks in Germany were also Aryanized by early 1938, well before the Anschluss.

24
Therefore it is safe to say that Aryanization (and also emigration) measures carried out by Austrian Nazis at most only slightly accelerated trends already well underway in the Altreich.

The November Pogrom
Essentially the same thing can be said about Kristallnacht. The November Pogrom in Vienna, far from being a turning point, merely completed the economic destruction of the Jewish community in Vienna as well as in other cities of the Third Reich. Nazi outrages against Austrian Jews, which had abated during the summer of 1938, began increasing again in early October when numerous Jews were hauled out of their beds by Nazi functionaries. In the middle of the month some Jewish religious places and stores were damaged.
25
As it turned out, however, all of this was merely a prelude to the November Pogrom, more popularly known by the euphemistic name "Kristallnacht" or "Crystal Night" given it by its chief promoter, Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels.

 

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Although the Nazi instigators of the pogrom wanted it to appear like a spontaneous popular outburst of indignation aroused by the assassination of a German diplomat in Paris by a Polish-German Jewish refugee, the pogrom was actually carefully planned. Two days before the "action" the Vienna edition of the
Völkischer Beobachter
carried an article describing the location and appearance of the temples. The members of the SS and Hitler Youth (including the League of German Girls), who were the principal perpetrators of the pogrom in Vienna, especially those between the ages of fourteen and thirty, were ordered to leave their uniforms at home and told not to plunder. The police were instructed to protect the property of non-Jews and foreign Jews.

26

Probably no one in Vienna was fooled into thinking the pogrom was really spontaneous in its origins. Nevertheless, there were elements of spontaneity that the instigators themselves had probably not envisioned. Not only were all but one (or by some reports two) of the twenty-four temples and synagogues and seventy prayer houses in Vienna destroyed by fires started by hand grenades, in addition to the few Jewish religious houses that existed in the provinces, but they were also plundered and sacrilege committed against their sacred contents. Over four thousand Jewish shops were looted and their inventory was partially or sometimes even completely destroyed; afterward they were closed and sealed by the police. On some streets so many shops were shut down that it looked like Sunday on weekdays. Nearly two thousand Jewish apartments in the first district alone were Aryanized by the SA, in the process of which a great deal of furniture and mattresses was destroyed while the looters searched for silver, jewelry, and other valuables. Men who tried to defend their homes against the looters were sometimes beaten to death. Six hundred eighty Viennese Jews committed suicide during the night of burning and looting and in the following few days; another twenty-seven were murdered and eighty-eight seriously injured. Over sixty-five hundred Jews were arrested in Vienna and about twelve hundred in the rest of Austria, of whom thirty-seven hundred were sent to Dachau.
27
Many of the actions carried out by the SA against Jews were nothing more than pure sadism. Jewish men who were arrested were placed in schools, prisons, and even the Spanish Riding School next to the Habsburg Hofburg Palace and forced to do calisthenics, go without food, and sleep while standing up. Some Jewish women were forced to strip and perform lesbian acts with prostitutes for the entertainment of the storm troopers. Other Jewish women were forced to dance naked. One Gestapo agent in Vienna later reported that he and his colleagues had difficulty in preventing crowds from manhandling still more Jews.
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Outside of Vienna the situation was similar though perhaps not quite as bad; in Graz and Linz this may have been because all Jewish shops had already been Aryanized and therefore could not be plundered. There was looting, however, in Salzburg and Klagenfurt. The main difference between Vienna and the provinces is that the SA was in charge of burning synagogues in the federal states, not the SS. There also appears to have been less violence perpetrated against Jews except in Innsbruck, perhaps indicating a closer sense of smalltown solidarity between Jews and gentiles than existed in a more impersonal metropolis like Vienna. In Graz, most of the young SS men were actually on friendly terms with their former Jewish classmates.

29

Many historians believe that the November Pogrom was even more severe in Austria than in the Altreich. The only evidence to support this contention, however, is anecdotal. There are no statistics to compare property damage in Austria with that in the Altreich. The number of Jews arrested in Vienna6,547 out of somewhere between 20,000 and 40,000 for the entire Reichwas no more than proportionate to Vienna's share of the Third Reich's Jewish population in November 1938. Equally proportionate was the twenty-seven murders in Vienna compared with ninety-one for the whole Reich. Individual acts of cruelty toward Jews may have been more common in Vienna than elsewhere, but this has not been proved statistically. There were many private individuals who condemned the senseless destruction of property in Germany, but such expressions were not unknown in Austria either, even among party members. Two things are reasonably certain, however. Kristallnacht was at least as brutal in Austria as elsewhere in the Third Reich; and 10 and 11 November proved that the robbery and murder of defenseless Jews would not cause a collective protest. The Nazi government therefore had little to fear from the Austrians when it decided to accelerate the process of destroying what remained of the Jewish community.
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The Solution to Vienna's Housing Problem
The confiscation of Jewish homes and other kinds of wealth by Austrian Nazis both before and after Kristallnacht probably had less to do with Nazi ideology than it did with economic self-aggrandizement-that is, pure old-fashioned greed. In addition, Hitler, Bürckel, and the Austrian Nazis intended to solve the housing shortage in Vienna by driving out the Jews, as well as Czechs and other foreigners. It was a solution to a problem that had been chronic in

 

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Vienna since the beginning of heavy industrialization and urbanization in the late nineteenth century and that had become far more acute during the First World War with the rapid influx of refugees, many of whom had been Jewish. Of course it was also a way of rewarding
alte Kämpfer
(old Nazi fighters) for their services during the illegal period and tying them more closely to the regime. Likewise, the confiscation of Jewish jobs was also an answer to Viennese unemployment, which had been endemic during the entire interwar period, and especially in the 1930s. The confiscation of Jewish homes was also a critical step on the road to their emigration and deportation. Without homes, Jews could hardly hope to remain in Austria for long.

31

Confiscation of Jewish homes began immediately after the Anschluss. Then a few days after Kristallnacht the Vienna edition of the
Völkischer Beobachter
openly called for robbing Jews of their apartments. Already by December 1938, 44,000 Jewish apartments had been Aryanized out of a total of about 70,000. In early May 1939 various officials in the city housing office complained that a new law against Jews was not stringent enough.
32
The housing situation for Jews after the November Pogrom can only be described as appalling, although far worse conditions awaited those Jews who were eventually deported to concentration camps in Poland. Jews were sometimes notified by a piece of paper on their front door that they had only a few days or even hours to move out of their apartments. And leaving their own apartments was the first of as many as six moves they had to make between 1940 and 1942. By 1940, up to five or six families were living in a single apartment; the married and unmarried, young and old, and people of both sexes were all living in one room without plumbing or cooking facilities. Telephone calls could be made only from a central office.
33
One of the cruelest ironies of this horrible housing situation was that Nazi officials blamed the sanitary conditions that resulted from the overcrowding on Jewish "character traits." In reality, of course, it was Nazi discriminatory policies in employment, housing, and even shopping that created in some cases the stereotype of the filthy Jew that the Nazis and other antiSemites had long depicted in their propaganda and political cartoons. Making the Jews disgusting alienated them all the more from their gentile neighbors (if they still had any) and made it easier for the Nazis to depict them as subhuman and worthy only of deportation.
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Legal Discrimination

With the loss of their homes came special laws intended to segregate Jews completely from the rest of society and to make them want to leave Austria as soon as possible. Although the laws became really severe only after the beginning of the Second World War in September 1939, some were first introduced immediately after the Anschluss. By the end of Nazi rule in 1945, some 250 anti-Jewish laws had been enacted in the former Austrian territories.

35

One of the first such discriminatory laws to be enacted was a numerus clausus for Jewish university students, which was introduced on 24 April 1938, thus fulfilling one of the oldest and most cherished demands of Austrian antiSemites. Only 2 percent of the students at Austrian universities could be Jews, a figure which was actually considerably below the 2.8 percent of religious Jews in the country in 1934 and far less than the percentage of "racial Jews" that panGermans had always cited when speaking of Jewish "domination." After 8 December even the few remaining Jewish students were excluded from the universities. In some cases unqualified gentile professors replaced worldfamous Jewish scholars who had been dismissed. In the meantime, in April 1938 the 16,000 Jewish primary and secondary pupils of Vienna were placed in segregated classes and were later forced to transfer to eight purely Jewish schools, often far from their homes; at the end of the school year in 1939, they were no longer allowed to attend even these public schools.
36
On 20 May 1938 the Nuremberg Laws were introduced into Austria. One of the surprises resulting from this action was the discovery that there were only 34,500 people who qualified as full-blooded "racial Jews" according to the Nuremberg definition who were not already registered as Jews. This figure was only a fraction of that which had been claimed by Austrian racists, particularly in the Greater German People's Party. After 2 July Jews were not allowed to enter certain public gardens and parks, and none at all after September 1939. At the end of September 1938 both Jewish physicians and Jewish lawyers lost their right to serve gentile clients. Only about fifty Jewish lawyers were able to make a living even briefly under these circumstances. After 5 October Jews were not permitted to enter sports stadiums as spectators. Shortly after the November Pogrom the Jews were not even allowed to appear in public during certain times of day. After January 1939 they could not use sleeping or dining cars on railroad trains.
37
By far the harshest anti-Semitic laws were introduced just before and during the Second World War when they developed a kind of dynamic of their own that went far beyond the previous "moderate" steps. On the eve of the war,

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