From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (70 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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Jewish hopes for survival also rested to a very large extent on their ability to survive so many apparently similar dangers in the past. Six decades of anti-Semitic agitation accompanied by next to nothing in the way of concrete anti-Semitic legislation played a central role in giving Austrian Jews a false sense of security. Adolf Hitler recognized this fact in
Mein Kampf
when he cynically observed that "the Jew is so accustomed to this type of [Christian Social] antiSemitism that he would have missed its disappearance more than its presence inconvenienced him."

7

The Jews' ability to survive every historical crisis, including the one created by the Nazis, was repeatedly emphasized by all the Jewish newspapers of Vienna. Soon after the German Nazis became a mass movement in the fall of 1930,
Die Wahrheit
commented that "Judaism has already endured so much that it will also overcome Hitler and Goebbels."
8
A few days after Hitler's Machtergreifung in January 1933, the same newspaper warned that the new Nazi regime would be a serious testing time for German Jews. However, "for us Viennese Jews the developments [in Germany] are nothing new. We experienced the same thing during the rise of the Christian Social Party. Lueger's takeover of power was harmful to the livelihood of Jewish peddlers, Jewish municipal civil servants, teachers, etc., but the Jewish representatives of big capital established new business ties which were advantageous for both sides."
9
In July 1935,
Die Wahrheit
still considered the Nazi regime in Germany no more than a "passing phenomenon" that would not deflect the Union of Austrian Jews from its assimilationist philosophy.
10
The Unionist organ was not the only newspaper to express such illusions. The
Jüdische Arbeiter
thought that the Jewish "will to live [was] stronger than the hardest blow that can hit us."
11
Die Stimme
was a little more cautious, saying that it was wrong to say that Jews would endure the present threat because Jews had endured the persecutions of Haman (an ancient Persian prime minister) and Torquemada (the head of the Spanish Inquisition in the 1480s). Jews had survived then because they were united, true to their beliefs, and selfless. They would survive again in Hitler's day, but only if they united behind the blue and white flag of Zionism. Divided into parties the Jewish people were nothing. But united they were a mass that could determine their own fate. The Jewish people might be weak, but they were eternal. Jewry had experienced harder times than the present one. Soon there would be a reaction to Hitler.
12
What most Austrian (and also German and French) Jews forgot was that they had survived popular outbursts of antiSemitism so often in the past because they had enjoyed the protection of emperors, bishops, abbots, and

 

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aristocrats.

13
Under Hitler, however, legal authority changed from being the protector of Jews to their persecutor. The
Jüdische Front
, the mouthpiece of the League of Jewish Front Fighters, was virtually alone in debunking the idea that Jews would survive Hitler because they had survived so many hardships in the past. This was a dangerous error, the paper warned, that only made the Jews passive. In the past Jews had been able to escape persecution by simply emigrating to another country where there was no hostility toward Jews. This option no longer existed for the Jewish masses because all countries had (in the only slightly exaggerated words of the
Jüdische Front
) "hermetically sealed their borders."
14

The Question of Responsibility
By now it should be obvious to the reader that antiSemitism was hardly an imported item brought into Austria from Germany by Nazi Party officials in 1938. Although Austrian antiSemitism cannot be divorced from its European context, it had been thriving on Austrian soil since the Middle Ages. For centuries it was nourished by the Catholic clergy, who taught the faithful that Jews were collectively and hereditarily responsible for the murder of Jesus. The prosperity of the last seventeen years preceding the First World War only temporarily cooled anti-Semitic passions in Austria.
This hopeful trend was suddenly and catastrophically ended in 1914. The Russian invasion of the Austrian crownlands of Galicia and Bukovina inaugurated one of the greatest mass migrations of Jews in modern European history and contributed to starvation conditions in Vienna unsurpassed anywhere else in Central or Western Europe. The breakup of the AustroHungarian Monarchywhich might have occurred in any case, but which was actively encouraged by the Allied Powers in 1918was a near death blow to the Austrian economy, from which the country never fully recovered during the entire interwar period.
This combination of political and economic conditions produced the most extreme form of antiSemitism found anywhere in Central or Western Europe during the interwar years, although it is highly unlikely that Austrian antiSemitism was as extreme as that found in Poland, the Ukraine, Lithuania, Hungary, or Rumania.
15
Even though Austrian antiSemitism was undoubtedly radicalized by the growing success of the German Nazis after 1930, not to mention more directly after the Anschluss, it would be utterly false to claim that this influence always flowed from north to south. As we have seen, pri-

 

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vate organizations such as academic fraternities and sporting clubs in Austria aggressively and successfully persuaded their German comrades to adopt more radical and racial forms of antiSemitism. This influence was even more obvious after the Anschluss when Austrian Nazis were at times ahead of their German Parteigenossen in the persecution of Jews; they sometimes created organizations (and accelerated the drive for persecution) that were later adopted for the entire Third Reich.
Strong and pervasive as Austrian antiSemitism undoubtedly was between the late 1870s and 1938, blanket generalizations must be avoided. Not all Austrians, after all, were anti-Semitic, let alone fanatically committed to the ideology. Nor were they equally responsible for advocating the prejudice. Undoubtedly the worst offenders were leading politicians, especially those having no executive powers themselves. AntiSemitism was a kind of sport from which few politicians wished to be excluded. They competed with each other for the votes of the anti-Semitic electorate or at least (in the case of the Social Democrats) to avoid the dreaded "stigma" of being the "protective guard" of the Jews.
Only slightly less responsible for the spread of antiSemitism were Roman Catholic clergy like Father Georg Bichlmair, and Catholic journalists like Friedrich Funder and Josef Eberle, the editor of
Schönere Zukunft
. Most Catholic spokesmen, such as Bishop Johannes Gföllner, at least warned against racism and violence. Many Catholics, however, openly called for boycotting Jewish businesses as well as publications authored by Jews. Above all their denunciations of alleged "Jewish" capitalism, materialism, secularism, liberalism, and socialism still carried enormous weight with a large segment of the Austrian public and went a long way in stereotyping the Jews as alien and corrupting.
Much less numerous and therefore less influential than the Catholic antiSemites, but still very important, were university professors and administrators. The very people who should have been the most enlightened and tolerant of differing political, economic, and intellectual ideas instead were frequently active promoters of antiSemitism or at least stood by and did little or nothing to combat it. The anti-Semitic violence at the University of Vienna and other Austrian universities was an almost unabating scandal, which administrators were either unwilling or unable to suppress. With few exceptions (one being the rectorship of Theodor Innitzer in 192829), the most they would do would be to close the affected institution for a few daysan action that hurt the innocent as much as the guiltyand perhaps scold the perpetrators for their

 

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"excessive" but nevertheless "understandable" actions. The idea of actually expelling students who broke up lectures and physically assaulted their Jewish classmates apparently never occurred to them until suggested by the American minister to Austria, Gilchrist Baker Stockton.
Compared with these other groups, the record of the imperial government of Austria and the federal government of the First Republic, though far from untarnished, was fairly good especially between 1867 and 1914. Even in the Middle Ages and early modern times Austrian Jews were generally able to look to the imperial government for protection, although there were some obvious exceptions as in 1421 and 1670, when Habsburg rulers expelled Jews from Vienna. During the reign of Joseph II in the 1780s, Austria became the European leader in emancipating Jews from medieval economic, cultural, social, and political restrictions. During most of the incredibly long reign of Franz Joseph (18481916), Austrian Jews made impressive progress in almost all aspects of life with the partial exception of social integration.
The record of the republican government of Austria was less admirable than that of Franz Joseph's administration. Still, at worst the government tolerated anti-Semitic demonstrations and publications, and after 1934 occasionally gave in to anti-Semitic demands for the limitation of Jewish "influence." Unlike Nazi Germany, however, the Austrian government followed rather than led public opinion and did at least protect Jews from violence. Consequently, Austrian Jews confidently continued to look to the government for protection almost literally up to the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of March 1938. This tradition of the government occasionally appeasing anti-Semitic feelingsas shown in the reluctance to grant reparations for the Jewish victims of Nazismwhile protecting the physical and economic welfare of the Jewish population of Austria has at times reappeared during the Second Republic.
American and Austrian Racism and the Passing of Moral Judgments
It is tempting for Americans, and no doubt other nationalities as well, to pass moral judgments on Austria for its history of antiSemitism. After all, anti-Semitic violence has been almost unknown in American history. Moreover, the government of the United States played a surprisingly important role in restraining antiSemitism in Austria during the early postWorld War I years by threatening to withhold shipments of food; in 193233, when the Ameri-

 

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can minister to Austria denounced physical assaults against American Jewish students at the University of Vienna; and finally, after the Second World War, in pressuring the Austrian government into compensating Jewish victims.
Yet these praiseworthy actions do not tell the whole story of American involvement in Austrian antiSemitism. It is a sobering fact that Austrian antiSemites were frequently inspired by American antiSemitism and other forms of racism. It can hardly be argued that American racism
caused
Austrian antiSemitism or evenly significantly influenced it. Austrian antiSemites were, however, frequently inspired by it or at least grateful for the opportunity to justify beliefs they already held.

References to American antiSemitism and racism can be found in Austrian newspapers at least as early as the 1880s. It should be recalled that Georg von Schönerer drafted a law to prohibit Jewish immigration to Vienna that was a verbatim copy of the American Chinese exclusion law. Austrian antiSemites, including Adolf Hitler, were particularly impressed with the anti-Semitic publications of the American automobile magnate, Henry Ford, especially in his book,
The International Jew
.

16
The Antisemitenbund was convinced that its proposals for discriminatory legislation against Jews were moderate in comparison with the rights accorded to Negroes, Indians, and Chinese in the United States, who were not even allowed to sit next to whites on streetcars or restaurants.
17
The Nazis'
Deutsche ArbeiterPresse
was pleased to report on the existence of the Ku Klux Klan with its 5 million members who were opposed to Jews of every description.
18
Schönere Zukunft
pointed out that the 1.6 million Jews of New York were so thoroughly rejected socially that not even the richest among them could get into the most prestigious private clubs. Moreover, elite private universities on the East Coast strictly limited the enrollment of Jewish students during the interwar years and beyond.
19

Most disturbing of all for Americans is the fact that even horrifying stories about the November Pogrom in the American press did not appreciably reduce antiSemitism. In 1938, 70 to 85 percent of all Americans objected to the raising of quotas in order to help Jewish refugees. Furthermore, between 1938 and 1942 between 10 and 15 percent of the Americans polled said they were willing to support actively government-sponsored antiSemitism, another 20 percent were sympathetic to such a policy, and only a third said they were opposed. The peak of American antiSemitism was not even reached until 1944, eleven years after Hitler had come to power, six years after Kristallnacht, and two years after the first reports about the Holocaust reached the United States.
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