From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (65 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 297

tions, but also in operating the death camps themselves where they constituted 40 percent of the staff. Odilo Globocnik, who had joined the Austrian Nazi Party in 1920 and who became the Gauleiter of Vienna for a time shortly after the Anschluss, exercised overall supervision over Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec, three concentration camps whose only purpose was to kill Jews as expeditiously as possible. The commandant at Treblinka, the largest of these three camps, was likewise an Austrian. The Austrian concentration camp of Mauthausen, near Linz, was by far the harshest of all the camps within the territory of the Third Reich. The prisoners were worked to death in quarries within a few months. However, relatively few Austrian Jews were sent there. Simon Wiesenthal, the internationally renowned hunter of Nazi war criminals, has estimated that Austrians were directly or indirectly responsible for the death of 3 million Jews during the Holocaust. Austrians also comprised 13 to 14 percent of the SS even though they comprised only about 8 percent of the population of the Greater German Reich.

53

When the deportations were resumed in 1941, it was again an Austrian, Eichmann's deputy, SS Captain Alois Brunner, who issued the order in late September, three weeks before a similar decision was made for Jews in the Altreich. Would-be deportees were seized in the middle of the night and given only three or four hours to pack their bags. Only people with permission to emigrate, war invalids, people working in essential industries or for the IKG, "part Jews" (
Mischlinge
), and baptized Jews were temporarily exempted. In the end, only the last two categories escaped deportation, although in all special cases much depended on the mood of local SS men.
54
The actual transporting of the 48,000 religious Jews who remained in Austria began on 15 February 1941 and continued until 12-13 September 1942 when the last two transports-there had been seventy-one altogether-took prominent Viennese Jews to the "model" concentration camp of Theresienstadt in northern Bohemia. From there 70 percent of the Viennese prisoners were sent to the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Many of those who remained at Theresienstadt died of starvation or disease. Another 15,000 Austrian Jews were killed after falling into Nazi hands in occupied countries. By October 1942 only 8, 100 Jews remained in Vienna. Other Austrian cities were "cleansed" of Jews even earlier than Vienna; the last Jews left Graz in May 1940 and Linz in the summer of 1942.
55
By the time the Second World War ended in May 1945, a total of 65,459 Austrian Jews had been killed in one way or another, or slightly more than half of the 128,500 who successfully escaped by emigration. Some 2,142 had been in concentration camps and around 6,200 survived because they were married

 

Page 298

to Christians or had been baptized before 1938 (or both). Only 1,747 deportees ever returned to Vienna. Of those who survived as "U-boats," 700 were hidden by friends in Vienna. This should be compared to the 5,000 Jewish "submarines" in Berlin, which had had a considerably smaller prewar Jewish population, no doubt a testimony to the greater integration of Berlin Jews into gentile society.

56

Cardinal Innitzer and Catholic Assistance to Baptized Jews
That so many baptized Jews survived the war in Austria was largely due to the efforts of the Sudeten-born panGerman, Theodor Cardinal Innitzer of Vienna. Innitzer had had good relations with Jews, particularly impoverished Jewish students, since his days as a professor at the University of Vienna. When he was rector, he threatened to close the university for a year after Jewish students were assaulted. He was also the honored guest of the Zionist fraternity, Kadimah. In 1934 the cardinal made critical comments about the Nazi treatment of Catholics in Germany.
57
However, the day after the Anschluss Cardinal Innitzer committed a major blunder by pledging the loyalty of the Catholic church to the new regime in exchange for a promise from Hitler that he would respect the independence of the church formally promised it by Nazi Germany in the Concordat of July 1933 (and subsequently violated). He even ordered church bells rung in Vienna when Hitler entered the city on 14 March and in a pastoral letter instructed Catholics to vote for the Anschluss. Whatever illusions he may have had about the efficacy of these gestures must have soon disappeared. In 1940 he started a new welfare agency that fully supported three hundred Jewish Catholics and partially assisted another one hundred. In 1941 he personally opposed Jews having to wear special identification and to their being required to attend separate church services for Jewish converts; this he felt would have been an unwarranted concession to Nazi racial theories. He obtained money from the Vatican to help about 150 Jewish Christians escape to North and South America by way of Portugal and Spain. Perhaps most important of all, he informed Pope Pius XII in April 1943 that the Nazis were planning to dissolve "legally" all mixed marriages between Christians and Jews; the Jewish partners would then be deported to the East, Innitzer said, where they would face an uncertain future. But Innitzer, like the rest of the Catholic hierarchy of Austria and Germany, did not extend his assistance to religious Jews or those

 

Page 299

who were not married to Christians.

58
Of course, he may have simply believed that Jewish converts were the only ones he had any hope of saving.

The German annexation of Austria in March 1938 clearly represented a sharper turning point for Austrian Jews than it did for the country's antiSemites. For Jews it marked an immediate end to all of the country's Jewish newspapers. In Vienna, only 3 of 450 Jewish organizations survived the takeover: the Kultusgemeinde; the "Pal-Amt," a Zionist umbrella organization; and the Bund jüdischer Frontsoldaten.
59
Within a matter of months if not weeks nearly all Jews lost their livelihoods and soon thereafter their homes. Within an equally short time, all but the most naive realized that they must emigrate from Austria as soon as possible.
For antiSemites, the change was much less drastic, at least prior to the Kristallnacht. Restraints on violence against Jews imposed by Dollfuss and Schuschnigg were removed. But this simply meant a return to the type of activity that had been commonplace in Viennese Hochschulen before 1933 and even to some extent on the streets of Vienna until 1925, with the important distinction that now Austrian Jews could no longer turn to the authorities for protection. The imposition of a numerus clausus in Austrian universities, the segregation of Jewish school children, and the elimination of Jewish cultural influence fulfilled old demands that had been made by nearly all bourgeois Austrian antiSemites, even some of the more "moderate ones."
The economic spoliation of the Jews was especially popular with broad sections of the Viennese public.
Der Sozialistische Kampf
, while reporting with considerable horror the violence and humiliations perpetrated against Jews in the spring of 1938, acknowledged that although the workers had not taken part in these actions they did approve of measures taken against "unloved Jewish department stores and individual capitalists." The petite bourgeoisie had approved of the economic campaign against all the Jewish classes but had rejected the violence.
60
Even the expulsion of Austrian Jews was hardly a new idea, although the less rabid antiSemites would have confined such a move to Ostjuden.
Whether Austrians knew about or approved of the Holocaust is an entirely different question, although it is certain that more Austrians knew about the slaughter than admitted to knowing. Recent research into what Americans and even Jews themselves knew at the time about the Holocaust, however, has shown that "knowing" and "believing" are two quite different things.
61
(One refugee recalled years later that Americans refused to believe what she told

 

 

Page 300
them about antiSemitism in Austria; finally she simply gave up talking about it.)
62
It would probably be reasonable to say that there was nothing in the ideology of even the more radical forms of Austrian antiSemitism that made the Holocaust "inevitable." Certainly no Austrians openly called for such a thing, and even the more radical antiSemites often said that they opposed pogroms, that is to say, random violence, preferring instead an orderly elimination of Jewish economic competition. Yet the idea that Jews were a "criminal group" so emphatically expressed by Robert Körber in his book,
Rassesieg in Wien
, was by no means new. There are many ways of punishing criminals: fines, incarcerations, and exile, all of which were exacted against Austrian Jewry. Still another alternative is capital punishment.

 

Page 301
20
Restitution and Recovery
AntiSemitism after the Holocaust

Whereas 185,000 Jews lived in Austria on the eve of the Anschluss, the country's Jewish population was little more than 11,000 shortly after the war. Today just 6,500 are registered with the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde in Vienna and perhaps another 6,000 Jews (mostly recent immigrants from the Soviet Union) live in Vienna but do not belong to the IKG. Of this remnant, only about 1, 200 lived in Austria before the war. Only 4, 500 Jewish émigrés ever returned to their former homeland; the remainder had no desire to return to the scene of so many painful memories. The exceptions were mostly baptized, were married to gentiles, or had (naive) hopes of recovering their businesses. The Austrian government, for its part, issued no blanket invitation for the refugees to return until after Kurt Waldheim became president in 1986. The Jewish newcomers were mainly Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, or more recently Russian immigrants. As before the war, over 90 percent of the Austrian Jews today live in Vienna. Graz has the second largest community with just 80 Jews.

1

One might suppose that the virtual disappearance of Austria's Jewish population along with its cultural influence and economic power would have been accompanied by the disappearance of antiSemitism. However, neither the minuscule number of Jews nor knowledge about the Holocaustwhich was at first viewed by Austrians as crude Allied propagandaeliminated anti-Jewish attitudes, especially in the early years following the Second World War. A public opinion survey conducted in 1946 by Americans in their zone of occupation revealed that 44 percent of the Viennese, 50 percent of the Salzburgers, and 51 percent of the Linzers believed that although "the Nazis had gone too far in the way they dealt with the Jews, something had to be done to place limits on them."
2
Another survey conducted in the same year showed that 46 percent of the respondents opposed a return of those Jews who had survived the slaughter, compared with just 28 percent who favored their return. In 1973,

 

Page 302

21 percent still opposed their repatriation, the same percentage that favored it. Even Social Democratic politicians, who had been among the least anti-Semitic people in the First Republic, were not anxious to see too many Jews come back to the country, including their own former leaders. It is not certain, however, whether this feeling resulted from resentment against émigré Jewish leaders for sitting out the war in safe havens (even though that was hardly the result of their own free will), or whether it was a product of the exiled leaders' Jewish backgrounds.

3

For a time there was an eerie resemblance between the antiSemitism of postWorld War II Austria and that which occurred after the Great War of 191418. A major cause of antiSemitism at the beginning of the First Republic had been the refugees who had flooded the country after 1914. Between 1945 and about 1953, 170,000 Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe spent some time in Austria and again became a cause of anti-Semitic agitation. The parallels between the two postwar periods were far from exact, however. After 1945 the refugees were not Austrian citizens; nor did they have any intention of remaining in the country any longer than was absolutely necessary. Rather they were Jewish displaced persons (DPs) who were in transit from their old homes in Poland, Russia, or Hungary to Palestine or the United States. Contrary to a widely held belief among Austrian gentiles, the refugees were not being fed or housed from scarce Austrian sources. Instead, they were being cared for exclusively by the American army and by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Nor were there huge numbers of them in Austria at any one time. In March 1947, for example, when the tide of refugees was probably at its height, there were only about 32,000 in Austria, not counting the 10,000 who had made Austria their home.
4
As so often happens in history, however, the reality was less important than the perception. Many Austrians, desperately poor, cold, and underfed in the early postwar years, were convinced that the Jewish refugees were taking food out of their mouths. Others disliked them for exactly the opposite reason, envying them for receiving four hundred to five hundred more calories per day than Austrians did because of the Jews' outside assistance. A few Austrians smeared swastikas on the newly opened synagogue in Graz and sent threatening letters to the IKG in Vienna. The British occupiers did not help matters by openly sympathizing with the Austrians. At the same time, however, the DPs, who had barely survived the Holocaust and who were hypersensitive to anti-Semitic affronts, did not always behave in an irreproachable manner, accusing everyone who did not agree to their demands of being anti-Semitic.
5
Another, almost bizarre similarity between the two postwar periods is that

Other books

A Matter of Honesty by Stephanie Morris
Seduced by Mr. Right by Pamela Yaye
How to train your dragon by by Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III; translated from the Old Norse by Cressida Cowell
Dancing in the Dark by Linda Cajio
Leave a Mark by Stephanie Fournet
Quality Assurance by Dragon, Cheryl
Fervor by Silver, Jordan
Kill Me Again by Rachel Abbott
0764213512 (R) by Roseanna M. White