From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (67 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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of the Anschluss on its fiftieth anniversary, the government in 1990 approved a "48th Social Insurance Amendment," which will eventually amount to $165 million in social insurance benefits to Jews who were between six and fourteen in 1938. Another $30 million will be paid to assist homes for elderly Jews living in Austria, the United States, Israel, and other countries. Rabbi Miller, the president of the Austrian claims committee described the agreement as a "major achievement."

22
Although the Austrian record on restitution is not nearly as generous as West Germany's, or as good as Jewish survivors would wish it to be, it has been infinitely better than that of the former German Democratic Republic, which until 1989 did not even respond to Israel's appeals for reparations.
23
Nor until very recently have other Eastern European governments been any more eager to admit that many of their citizens had been active collaborators in the Holocaust. Even the American government waited until 1990 to compensate the survivors of the 120,000 Japanese-Americans who lost their homes and businesses in 1942 and were "relocated" to what amounted to concentration camps; many of them remained there as late as 1945 (although almost no Japanese-Americans were killed and no citizens were forced to emigrate).
24

Another enormous source of aggravation for Jews in Austria and abroad has been the Austrian record on de-Nazification. It should be remembered, however, that the task of prosecuting former Nazis in Austria was at first shared between the Austrian government and the four occupying powers who thought that only those "illegal" Nazis who had joined the Austrian Nazi Party before the Anschluss, or who had held important positions after 1938, ought to be punished. However, since the end of the Allied occupation in 1955 the record of the federal and state governments in Austria with regard to the punishment of Nazi crimes has been at best less than rigorous. Victims of Nazism, especially those who were forced to leave their homes and jobs and emigrate, were especially incensed by the Austrian government's restoring the property of former Austrian Nazis before the victims themselves had been compensated. Still worse was the granting of amnesty to 90 percent of the former members of the party in 1948 and nearly all the others, including the Gestapo and the SS by 1957.
25
Many Austrians and even non-Austrians have argued that excluding 500,000 former Nazis from the franchise indefinitely might somehow threaten democracy. What is certain is that these newly enfranchised voters had substantial influence because they often held the balance of power between the two major parties, the People's Party and the Socialists. Although the government instituted proceedings against 130,000 accused war criminals, only 13,000, or 10

 

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percent, were found guilty and only 28 were executed. Of those all but 4 had been guilty of ordinary murders unrelated to the Holocaust. Another 100,000 civil servants were dismissed, but otherwise escaped prosecution. That more former Nazi Party members did not lose their jobs was the result of Allied fears that Austria's war-torn economy could not be restored if a large part of its population was either imprisoned or barred from the labor force. The success of the IKG in Vienna in prosecuting antiSemites has been no better than that of the government; it has lost twenty court cases of documented attacks on Austrian Jews.

26

Critics of the Austrian de-Nazification record, especially in the United States and Great Britain, should be aware that their postwar governments considered it counterproductive to dwell on Austria's Nazi and anti-Semitic past at a time when Soviet Communism was rapidly engulfing East Central Europe. From 1946 on the American policy toward Austria was based on the halftruth, originally formulated in the Allies' "Moscow Declaration" of November 1943, that Austria was the "first victim" of Nazi aggression. Even the very real differences between the American and Austrian governments over the issue of compensation for Jewish victims were therefore kept out of the public's view because of the cold war. This factor alone, of course, limited the amount of pressure the United States could put on Austria. Consequently, foreign pressure to make restitution to the Jews steadily declined after early 1947 whereas domestic pressures against such compensation correspondingly increased. The United States, joined by its Western allies, Britain and France, did not press the issue of reparations because it wanted a stable Austria; the Soviet Union likewise was not insistent because it wanted a neutral Austria.
27
The Waldheim Affair
Whatever progress there was in combating antiSemitism and compensating its victims seemed to be undone by the international uproar accompanying the presidential campaign of Kurt Waldheim. Any detailed discussion of whether Herr Waldheim was a war criminal or an antiSemite lies well beyond the scope of this study; in any event it has already been thoroughly explored by Robert Herzstein. The University of South Carolina historian argues in his book,
Waldheim: The Missing Years
, that the former secretary-general of the United Nations was no war criminal according to the Nuremberg definition of the term, but a facilitator. In many respects, he could be described as clever and ambitious; however, his doctoral dissertation on the German politi-

 

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cal theorist Konstantin Frantz, written in 1944, contained no antiSemitism even though it would have been politically advantageous for Waldheim to have resorted to it. Above all Waldheim was a careerist who had never actually lied about his wartime past but had also neglected to mention the more embarrassing aspects of it. Like many other people of his generation, he simply wanted to forget "the awkward baggage of his past."

28

There is no clear evidence that Waldheim exploited antiSemitism during the presidential campaign in the spring of 1986. On the other hand, he was criticized for not denouncing the phenomenon, at least not until after the first election in May and not vigorously until after the run-off election the next month when he promised to oppose discrimination against Jews and said that he would welcome a historical commission investigating his wartime activities. On the other hand, the
New York Times
described his apparent nonchalance about his military assignments in the Balkans as "staggering." His attempts to brush off accusations against him as having been made by "some interest groups in New York" could be interpreted as having anti-Semitic overtones.
29
The Waldheim campaign along with the placement of the Austrian president on the infamous "Watch List" in the United States clearly led to a revival of Austrian antiSemitism as was shown in the public opinion poll of January 1989. Sixty to seventy hate letters were sent to the Kultusgemeinde, some of them threatening violence if Waldheim lost. Other recipients of such mail were anti-Waldheim journalists; Waldheim's Socialist opponent, Kurt Steyrer, who was accused of being part of a Jewish conspiracy; Orthodox Jews, who were told to get out of the country; and even a gentile critic of antiSemitism, the historian Gerhard Botz, who received around sixty anti-Semitic letters. Eighty-five percent of the Austrian public was especially incensed over charges leveled against Waldheim and Austria by the World Jewish Congress and its leader Edgar Bronfman. Because most of the American criticism of Waldheim originated with Jewish organizations, it appeared to many Austrians as if the whole uproar was an American Jewish plot. On the other hand, Waldheim's evasive answers to allegations only deepened the mistrust of his accusers.
30
The Austrian reaction to the Waldheim affair, however, was far from uniform and, in fact, the controversy divided the country like no other issue during the entire Second Republic. It should be recalled that the initial accusations against Waldheim were leveled by the popular Austrian magazine
Profil
. Austria's small Jewish population was itself divided by the whole episode, with many distinguished Jewish families steadfastly supporting the eventual winner. Even the anti-Waldheim Austrian Jews did not feel threatened enough by the rise of antiSemitism to leave the country. Simon Wiesenthal accused the

 

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Anti-Waldheim rally in the Stephansplatz in Vienna. The sign reads, "Our duty:
to fight against fascist agitation. Away with Waldheim!" The horse symbolizes
the Nazi riding club that President Waldheim belonged to in 1938.
Photograph by the author, February 1988.

World Jewish Congress of stirring up antiSemitism in Austria and denied that Waldheim was a war criminal. Paul Grosz, president of the IKG in Vienna, criticized Bronfman's attempts to block Austria's admission into the European Economic Community. Austria's intelligentsia was almost unanimously opposed to Waldheim. A petition with fifteen hundred of their signatures called for his resignation in February 1988. At the same time many intellectuals made the same demand in speeches at several large anti-Waldheim demonstrations held in front of St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna.

31

Renewed Efforts to Combat AntiSemitism
If on balance the Waldheim campaign did reawaken antiSemitism, it also caused Austrians to take a hard look at their Nazi and anti-Semitic past. In June 1987 Chancellor Franz Vranitzky gave a speech warning that antiSemitism

 

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had to be stopped or Austria would face international isolation. On the fiftieth anniversary of the November Pogrom both the chancellor and President Waldheim gave speeches denouncing antiSemitism; the chancellor even pointed out that Kristallnacht had not been an isolated incident in interwar Austria. In July the conservative People's Party also passed a resolution condemning antiSemitism.

32

The negative international publicity accompanying the Waldheim affair doubtless also encouraged governmental institutions in Austria to improve their relations with Austrian Jews. Memorial plaques have been placed at the sites of some synagogues. City, state, and federal governments have combined with the IKG of Vienna to restore the synagogue in St. Pölten, and a private interdenominational organization dedicated to the restoration of Austrian Jewish cultural artifacts has been founded. Austria has served as a temporary host for more than 90 percent of the Russian Jews seeking new homes in Israel and the West although the cost of their stay has been paid for by international Jewish organizations. No incidents have resulted from this program and a few thousand Soviet Jews have made Vienna their home. Public money was spent on the opening of a new Freud museum in the psychiatrist's former apartment in Vienna and the Austrian government even partly financed a new Jewish museum in the Netherlands that opened in 1987. A Jewish museum on Vienna's Seitenstettengasse in the first district, which was founded in 1895 and completely destroyed by the Nazis in 1938, was reopened in March 1990 through the financial support of the municipal and federal governments. In 1989 Vienna hosted one hundred grandchildren of Jewish emigrants as a goodwill gesture. The efforts of Vienna's mayor, Dr. Hellmut Zilk, in "helping to bring about an atmosphere of tolerance, liberalism, and solidarity with the weaker segments of society" resulted in his being awarded a gold medal by the Federal Association of Jewish Religious Communities in December 1990.
33
The fiftieth anniversaries of the German annexation of Austria and the November Pogrom were also the occasions for an almost incredible number of international scholarly conferences in Austria. In contrast to previous anniversaries of these events, Austria was no longer portrayed almost exclusively as a mere victim of German aggression, but to a considerable extent as an active and willing participant. An exhibition of "Language and AntiSemitism" in March 1988 showed how antiSemitism had survived in Austria through subtle code words. For example, a campaign poster in 1970 urged voters to cast their ballots for the People's Party candidate, Josef Klaus, because he was "a real Austrian," thus implying that the Socialist candidate, Bruno Kreisky, was not
bodenständig
(indigenous) because of his Jewish origins.
34
Another exhibit on

 

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Commemorative plaque erected by the Jewish Communal Organization (IKG) of
Vienna at the former Mauthausen concentration camp near Linz. The plaque
reads, "Many tens of thousands of Jewish men, women, and children lost their
lives as victims of National Socialist barbarism at the concentration camp of
Mauthausen and its satellite camps between 1938 and 1945."
Photograph by the author, 1988.

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