Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 01: The Years of Persecution

by Saul Friedlander

  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

  A second visit took place at the end of May; this time it included Theodor Eicke, the inspector of concentration camps, and Herbert Karl of the SS construction division.29 The first 300 inmates, Austrian and German criminals from Dachau, arrived on August 8, 1938. By September 1939 Mauthausen held 2,995 inmates, among them 958 criminals, 1,087 Gypsies (mainly from the Austrian province of Burgenland), and 739 German political prisoners:30 “The first Jewish inmate was a Vienneseborn man arrested as a homosexual, who was registered at Mauthausen in September 1939 and recorded as having died in March 1940. During 1940 an additional 90 Jews arrived; all but 10 of them were listed as dead by the year’s end.”31

  According to Götz Aly and Susanne Heim, it was in Austria that the Nazis inaugurated their “rational” economically motivated policy regarding the Jewish question, which from then on dictated all their initiatives in this domain, from the “model” established in Vienna to the “Final Solution.” The Viennese model (Modell Wien) was basically characterized by a drastic restructuring of the economy as a result of the liquidation of virtually all the unproductive Jewish businesses on the basis of a thorough assessment of their profitability prepared by the Reich Board for Economic Management (Reichskuratorium für Wirtschaftlichkeit);32 by a systematic effort to get rid of the newly created Jewish proletariat by way of accelerated emigration whereby, as we saw, wealthy Jews contributed to the emigration fund for the destitute part of the Jewish population; by establishing labor camps (the three camps planned by Walter Rafelsberger), where the upkeep of the Jews would be maintained at a minimum and financed by the labor of the inmates themselves.33 In essence those in charge of the Jewish question in annexed Austria were supposedly motivated by economic logic and not by any Nazi anti-Semitic ideology. The argument seems bolstered by the fact that not only was the entire Aryanization process in Austria master-minded by Göring’s Four-Year Plan administration and its technocrats, but the same technocrats (such as Rafelsberger) also planned the solution of the problem of impoverished Jewish masses by way of forced-labor concentration camps that appeared to be early models of the future ghettos and eventually of the future extermination camps.

  In fact, as has been seen, the liquidation of Jewish economic life in Nazi Germany had started at an accelerated pace in 1936, and by late 1937, with the elimination of all conservative influence, the enforced Aryanization drive had become the main thrust of the anti-Jewish policies, mainly in order to compel the Jews to emigrate. Thus what happened in Austria after the Anschluss was simply the better organized part of a general policy adopted throughout the Reich. The link between economic expropriation and expulsion of the Jews from Germany and German-controlled territories did continue to characterize that stage of Nazi policies until the outbreak of the war. Then, after an interim period of almost two years, another “logic” appeared, one hardly dependent on economic rationality.

  II

  After the Anschluss the Jewish refugee problem became a major international issue. By convening a conference of thirty-two countries in the French resort town of Evian from July 6 to 14, 1938, President Roosevelt publicly demonstrated his hope of finding a solution to it. Roosevelt’s initiative was surprising, because “he chose to intrude into a situation in which he was virtually powerless to act, bound as he was by a highly restrictive immigration law.”34 Indeed, the outcome of Evian was decided before it even convened: The invitation to the conference clearly stated that “no country would be expected to receive a greater number of emigrants than is permitted by its existing legislation.”35

  The conference and its main theme, the fate of the Jews, found a wide and diverse echo in the world press. “There can be little prospect,” the London Daily Telegraph said on July 7, “that
room will be found within any reasonable time.”36 According to the Gazette de Lausanne of July 11: “Some think that they [the Jews] have got too strong a position for such a small minority. Hence the opposition to them, which in certain places has turned into a general attack.” “Wasn’t it said before the first World War that one-tenth of the world’s gold belonged to the Jews?” queried the Libre Belgique on July 7.37

  Not all of the press was so hostile. “It is an outrage to the Christian conscience especially,” said the London Spectator on July 29, “that the modern world with all its immense wealth and resources cannot get these exiles a home and food and drink and a secure status.”38 For the future postwar French Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Georges Bidault, writing in the left-wing Catholic paper L’Aube on July 7, “One thing is clearly understood: the enlightened nations must not let the refugees be driven to despair.”39 The mainstream French Catholic newspaper La Croix urged compassion: “We cannot stand aside,” it pleaded on July 14, “in view of the suffering of human beings and fail to respond to their cry for help…. We cannot be partners to a solution of the Jewish question by means of their extinction, by means of the complete extermination of a whole people.”40 But no doors opened at Evian, and no hope was offered to the refugees. An Intergovernmental Committee for Refugees was established under the chairmanship of the American George Rublee. Rublee’s activities, which ultimately achieved no result, will be discussed further on.