Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (38 page)

On March 16, as the Gestapo was coming to arrest him, the Jewish playwright and historian of culture, Egon Friedell, jumped to his death from the window of his Vienna apartment. Five Jews had committed suicide in Vienna in January 1938, four in February. In the second half of March, seventy-nine Viennese Jews killed themselves.
⁹⁷

In Austrian author Thomas Bernhard’s last play,
Heldenplatz
, the Jewish professor Robert Schuster, originally from Vienna, returns from Oxford to the Austrian capital sometime in the 1980s. For himself and his wife, he discovers, the past remains hauntingly present:

My brother Josef may speak of luck

that he managed such a spontaneous departure

I always admired those who committed suicide

I never believed that my brother would be capable of

doing it….

Later he alludes to his wife:

For months, she again hears the really frightening way

in which the masses were shouting on the Heldenplatz

You know: on March fifteenth Hitler arrives

at the Heldenplatz…
⁹⁸

^*
Dacia was an ancient kingdom and a Roman province whose borders roughly corresponded to those of the Romanian state of the 1930s.

^*
This tirade was in keeping with the party’s vituperative anti-Catholic campaign of the late thirties: Its main ideologue was Alfred Rosenberg, but soon Martin Bormann was to become its principal driving force.

CHAPTER
8

An Austrian Model?

I

On June 4, 1938, Sigmund Freud, aged eighty-two, was allowed to depart from Vienna, the city that had been his home since he was four years old. His apartment had twice been searched by the Gestapo, and his daughter Anna summoned for interrogation. Finally, after the Nazis had impounded part of his possessions and imposed the emigration tax, they demanded his signature on a declaration that he had not been ill treated. Freud dutifully signed, and added: “I can most highly recommend the Gestapo to everyone.” The Gestapo men were too dull witted to perceive even such heavy-handed sarcasm, but the risk of such a comment was considerable—and one may wonder “whether there was something at work in Freud making him want to stay, and die, in Vienna.”
¹

As a result of the Anschluss, an additional 190,000 Jews had fallen into Nazi hands.
²
The persecution in Austria, particularly in Vienna, outpaced that in the Reich. Public humiliation was more blatant and sadistic; expropriation better organized; forced emigration more rapid. The Austrians—their country renamed Ostmark and placed under the authority of Gauleiter Josef Bürckel, who received the title Reich Commissary for the Reunification of Austria with the Reich—seemed more avid for anti-Jewish action than the citizens of what now became the Old Reich (Altreich). Violence had already started before the Wehrmacht crossed the border; despite official efforts to curb its most chaotic and moblike aspects, it lasted for several weeks. The populace relished the public shows of degradation; countless crooks from all walks of life, either wearing party uniforms or merely displaying improvised swastika armbands, applied threats and extortion on the grandest scale: Money, jewelry, furniture, cars, apartments, and businesses were grabbed from their terrified Jewish owners.

In Austria in the early 1930s, the Jewish issue had become an even more potent tool for right-wing rabble-rousing than had been the case in Germany during the last years of the republic.
³
When the Nazi campaign against Engelbert Dollfuss reached its climax in early 1934, it harped unceasingly on the domination of the chancellor by the Jews.
⁴
The incitement intensified after Dollfuss’s assassination, on July 25, and during the entire chancellorship of his successor, Kurt von Schuschnigg, which ended with the German invasion of March 1938. According to police sources, anti-Semitism was of “decisive importance ‘for the success of Nazi propaganda’ during the Schuschnigg years. ‘The most dangerous breach in the Austrian line of defense [against Nazism] was caused by anti-Semitism,’ wrote the ultraconservative Prince Ernst Rüdiger Starhemberg, the commander of the Heimwehr and head of the Patriotic Front, in his postwar memoirs. ‘Everywhere people sniffed Jewish influence and although there was not a single Jew in any leadership position in the whole Patriotic Front, the Viennese were telling each other…of the Judaization of this organization, that after all the Nazis were right and that one should clean out the Jews.”
⁵

The wild aggression following the Anschluss quickly reached such proportions that by March 17 Heydrich was informing Burckel that he would order the Gestapo to arrest “those National Socialists who in the last few days allowed themselves to launch large-scale assaults in a totally undisciplined way [against Jews].”
⁶
In the overall chaos, such threats had no immediate effect, nor did the fact that the violence was officially attributed to the Communists change the situation. It was only on April 29, when Bürckel announced that the leaders of SA units whose men took part in the excesses would lose their rank and could be dismissed from the SA and the party, that the violence started to ebb.
⁷

In the meantime the official share of the takeover of Jewish property was rapidly growing. On March 28 Göring had issued orders “to take quiet measures for the appropriate redirecting of the Jewish economy in Austria.”
⁸
By mid-May a Property Transfer Office (Vermögensverkehrsstelle) with nearly five hundred employees was actively promoting the Aryanization of Jewish economic assets.
⁹
Within a few months, 83 percent of the handicrafts, 26 percent of the industry, 82 percent of the economic services, and 50 percent of the individual businesses owned by Jews were taken over in Vienna alone; of the eighty-six Jewish-owned banks in Austria’s capital, only eight remained after this first sweep.
¹⁰
The funds made available by the confiscations and expropriations were used in part to compensate the losses suffered by “Nazi fighters” (
NS-Kämffer
) in “Jewish-Socialist Vienna” and to give some support to the pauperized Jewish population that was unable to emigrate.
¹¹
The compensation idea actually offered a wide array of possibilities. On July 18 the Office of the Führer’s Deputy sent to Bürckel a draft of the Law for the Compensation of Damages Caused to the German Reich by Jews. The law had not yet been announced, the letter indicated, “as it is not yet clear how the compensation fund should be set up after implementation of the measures planned against the Jews by Göring.”
¹²

Some measures were not in need of any law. A few days after the Anschluss, SA men took the board chairman of the Kreditanstalt, Austria’s leading bank, Franz Rothenberg, for a car ride and threw him out of the moving vehicle, killing him. Isidor Pollack, the director general of the chemical works Pulverfabrik, received a visit from the SA in April 1938 and was so badly beaten up during the “search” of his home that he died shortly afterward. The Deutsche Bank confiscated the Rothschild-controlled Kreditanstalt, while Pulverfabrik, its subsidiary, was taken over by l. G. Farben.
¹³

The overall Aryanization process continued to unfold with extraordinary speed. By mid-August 1939 Walter Rafelsberger, the head of the Property Transfer Office, could announce to Himmler that within less than a year and a half his agency “had practically completed the task of de-Judaizing the Ostmark economy.” All Jewish-owned businesses had disappeared from Vienna. Of the 33,000 Jewish enterprises that had existed in the Austrian capital at the time of the Anschluss, some 7,000 had already been liquidated before the setting up of the Transfer Office in May 1938. “Of the other 26,000, approximately 5,000 were Aryanized and the remaining 21,000 liquidated in an orderly way.”
¹⁴

Simultaneously Jewish dwellings began to be confiscated throughout the country, particularly in Vienna. By the end of 1938, out of a total of approximately 70,000 apartments owned by Jews, about 44,000 had been Aryanized. After the beginning of the war, the rate of occupancy in the remaining Jewish apartments was approximately five to six families per apartment. Often there were neither plumbing nor cooking facilities, and only one telephone was available in every building.
¹⁵

Herbert Hagen arrived in Vienna on March 12 with the first units of the Wehrmacht; a few days later Adolf Eichmann, who had just been promoted to second lieutenant in the SS (SS Untersturmführer), joined him. On the basis of lists that had been prepared by the SD, employees of Jewish organizations were arrested and documents impounded.
¹⁶
After this first sweep, some measure of “normalization,” allowing for the implementation of more far-reaching plans, took place. Eichmann was appointed adviser on Jewish affairs to the inspector of the Security Police and SD, Franz Stahlecker. In a letter dated May 8, he informed Hagen about his new activities: “I hope that I will shortly be in possession of the Jewish yearbooks of the neighboring states [probably Czechoslovakia and Hungary], which I will then send to you. I consider them an important aid. All Jewish organizations in Austria have been ordered to make out weekly reports. These will go to the appropriate experts in II 112 in each case, and to the various desks. The reports are to be divided into a report on the situation and a report on activities. They are due each week on Monday in Vienna and on Thursday in the provinces. I hope to be able to send you the first reports by tomorrow. The first issue of the Zionist
Rundschau
is to appear next Friday. I have had the [printer’s copy] sent to me and am now on the boring job of censorship. You will get the paper, too, of course. In time this will become ‘my paper’ up to a point. In any case, I have got these gentlemen on the go, you may believe me. They are already working very busily. I demanded an emigration figure of 20,000 Jews without means for the period from April 1, 1938, to May 1, 1939, from the Jewish community and the Zionist organization for Austria, and they promised to me that they would keep to this.”
¹⁷

The idea of establishing a Central Office for Jewish Emigration (Zentralstelle für Jüdische Auswanderung) apparently came from the new head of the Jewish community, Josef Löwenherz. The community services assisting the would-be emigrants had been overwhelmed by the tens of thousands of requests for departure authorizations; a lack of coordination among the various German agencies involved in the emigration process turned obtaining these documents into a lengthy, cumbersome, and grueling ordeal. Löwenherz approached Eichmann, who transmitted the suggestion to Bürckel.
¹⁸
Berlin gave its agreement, and on August 20, 1938, the central office was established under the formal responsibility of Stahlecker and the de facto responsibility of Eichmann himself.” The procedure inaugurated in the former Rothschild palace, at 20–22 Prinz Eugen Strasse, used, according to Eichmann, the “conveyor belt” method: “You put the first documents followed by the other papers in at one end and out comes the passport at the other.”
²⁰
One more principle was implemented: Through levies imposed on the richer members of the Jewish community, the necessary sums were confiscated to finance the emigration of the poorer Jews. Heydrich later explained the method: “We worked it this way: Through the Jewish community, we extracted a certain amount of money from the rich Jews who wanted to emigrate…. The problem was not to make the rich Jews leave but to get rid of the Jewish mob.”
²¹

Aside from hastening legal emigration by all available means, the new masters of Austria started to push Jews over the borders, mainly those with Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Switzerland. What had been a sporadic Nazi initiative in some individual cases until March 1938 became a systematic policy after the Anschluss. According to Göring and Heydrich, some five thousand Austrian Jews were expelled in that way betwen March and November 1938.
²²
And even tighter control was imposed on those Jews who had not left. Sometime in October 1938, Himmler gave the order to concentrate all Jews from the Austrian provinces in Vienna. According to an internal memo of the SD’s Jewish section, Eichmann discussed the transfer of an estimated 10,000 Jews still living outside the capital with Odilo Globocnik, the Gauleiter of Lower Danube, and himself set out on October 26 to tour the Austrian provinces in order to inform the SD chiefs in each region “that with the help of the Gestapo stations, they advise the Jews either to leave the country by 15/12/1938 or to move to Vienna by 31/10/38 [probably an error for 31/12/38].”
²³
Within six months of the Anschluss, 45,000 Austrian Jews had emigrated, and by May 1939, approximately 100,000, or more than 50 percent, had left.
²⁴
The Jewish exodus from Austria had an unexpected side benefit for the Nazis. Each emigrant had to attach three passport photos to the forms. The Vienna SD drew the attention of the party’s Racial Policy Office to such an outstanding collection; Walter Gross’s office responded immediately: It was “exceptionally interested” in this immense inventory of Jewish faces.
²⁵

The Germans had some other plans as well. In October 1938 Rafelsberger suggested the setting up of three concentration camps for 10,000 Jews each in areas empty of population, mainly in sandy regions and in marshes. The Jews would build their own camps; costs would be kept to about ten million marks, and the camps would provide work for approximately 10,000 unemployed Jews. It seems that one of the technical problems was to find enough barbed wire.
²⁶
Nothing came of this idea—for a short while at least. Another idea—not directly related to anti-Jewish policies, and deadlier in the immediate future—was, however, quickly implemented.

“Mauthausen,” writes its most recent historian, “sits amid lovely rolling hills whose fields cover the Austrian landscape like the bedspread of a giant. The town nuzzles peacefully along the north bank of the Danube, whose swift current is quickened by the nearby confluence of the Enns, a major Alpine waterway…. Mauthausen lies just 14 miles downriver from Linz, the provincial capital of the province of Upper Austria; 90 miles to the east the spire of St. Stephen’s Cathedral, the landmark of Vienna, rises to meet the sky…. Of all the area’s treasures, however, the most significant to our story are the great yawning pits of granite.”
²⁷

A few days after the Anschluss, in March 1938, Himmler, accompanied by Oswald Pohl, chief of the administrative office of the SS-Hauptamt, made a first inspection of the quarries. The intention was clear: excavation of the granite would bring considerable financial benefits to an SS-operated enterprise, the German Earth and Stone Works Corporation (BEST), which was about to be established in April; a concentration camp on location would provide the necessary work force. The final decision must have been taken quickly as, according to a report in the London
Times
of March 30, “Gauleiter Eigruber, of Upper Austria, speaking at Gmunden, announced that for its achievements in the National Socialist cause his province was to have the special distinction of having within its bounds a concentration camp for the traitors of all Austria. This, according to the
Völkischer Beobachter
, aroused such enthusiasm in the audience that the Gauleiter could not continue his speech for some time.”
²⁸