by Tim Bonyhady
She remembered being frightened not so much by Hitler but by his young Austrian followers about her own age who belonged to the Hitler Jugend and Bund Deutscher Mädchen. As these young Nazis became increasingly aggressive, some Jewish students in Vienna responded by imitating their distinctive outfits. The writer George Clare, who was in his final year of school in 1938, maintained that, when he donned “white knee-socks, a black raincoat and Tyrolean hat, very much the sort of clothing the Nazis liked to be seen in,” he did so as a sign of his readiness to fight. “Looking like a Nazi as much as possible,” Clare wrote, “instilled a feeling of toughness in oneself.” Annelore did the same for very different reasons. She recalled: “I wanted to look like everyone else, including the Nazis whose dirndl outfits and white socks I liked to copy in the hope of blending in and being inconspicuous.”
Annelore, who had persuaded Gretl to let her change schools because the Frauen-Ewerb-Verein had become so anti-Semitic, was among the few Jews in Vienna who recognized that it was time to flee. When the Gallias received an offer to buy their house in the Wohllebengasse at the start of 1938, Annelore pleaded with Gretl to accept it and to emigrate with the proceeds. But the offer was low and, like other Viennese of Jewish origin, Gretl had good reasons to stay. Her attachment to Vienna was intense. All her close family and most of her friends were there. After eighteen months in the Landstrasser-Hauptstrasse free of Hermine and Käthe, she could imagine nothing better than to remain there and dismissed Annelore’s fears as those of a “silly child.”
Anne was scathing about this response in her story. She maintained that Gretl had spent too long in the Wohllebengasse, “a closed world insulated against the outside” where “everyone was busy following the established routine and did not envisage that things would ever change.” But Gretl may not have been quite so blind; that February, she had her passport amended so it became valid for travel to all European countries, as Annelore’s passport had been since she obtained it the year before. While Gretl may simply have secured this change as part of planning their next holiday abroad, she may also have been preparing in case they had to emigrate quickly.
According to Anne, Käthe was even more intent on staying in Vienna because she wanted to remain close to Lene, who was buried along with Moriz and Hermine in the family grave in Hietzing. Because the twins had done everything together in life both as children and as adults, Käthe did not want to leave Lene in death. Yet the grave—and Käthe’s myriad attachments to Vienna—probably formed only part of Käthe’s considerations. Her position as manager of the Graetzinlicht Gesellschaft, which she half owned, was a powerful reason for her to stay.
The opportunity for Gretl, Käthe, and Annelore to leave with relative ease disappeared a few weeks after Annelore’s ball season ended, when Schuschnigg called a plebiscite on Austrian independence and Hitler responded by mobilizing the German Eighth Army, which he had stationed close to the Austrian border in order to force Schuschnigg to call off the vote. Once Schuschnigg complied on March 11, Germany demanded his immediate resignation as Austrian chancellor. That evening, like most Austrians, Gretl and Annelore listened to Schuschnigg’s farewell speech, broadcast on the radio, in which he announced that he had resigned “because he was determined at all costs not to see German blood spilt.” By the end of the night, most of the country was in the hands of Hitler’s Austrian followers. At dawn, the German army crossed the frontier to be greeted by tens of thousands of Austrians who showered the German troops with flowers. By midnight, the first German tanks were in Vienna, where they staged an impromptu parade along the Ringstrasse before an ecstatic crowd.
3
Anschluss
“Stürmisch” was how Käthe described the ringing of her doorbell. Not just loud but stormy. Insistent. Incessant. At least it was the middle of the afternoon, not the middle of the night. Käthe could have sent her maid, but the intensity of the ringing prompted her to go herself. Keeping the door on its chain, she opened it and found two men, one in civilian clothes, the other in black uniform, who demanded to be let in. Instead, Käthe shut the door and telephoned the police for an officer to come immediately. Then she told the men what she had done and, through the space between the chained door and its frame, watched the man in civilian clothes become increasingly angry.
In the month since the Anschluss, the Nazis had attacked Jews and Jewish converts to Christianity in Vienna in a way that they had not done in Germany. Many had been assaulted and killed. The stores and apartments of others had been invaded and plundered. Hundreds more had been humiliated in front of enthusiastic crowds—forced to spit in each other’s faces or made to scrub the streets using water mixed with caustic soda or hydrochloric acid, which burned their fingers. Thousands had been arrested and jailed in police prisons in Vienna or sent to the Nazis’ first concentration camp in Dachau outside Munich. Because the Nazis’ Nürnberg Laws identified everyone with three Jewish grandparents as a Jew regardless of whether they or their parents had converted, Erni, Gretl, and Käthe were in immediate danger. While the Nürnberg definition applied in Austria only from May 1938 as a matter of law, in practice it applied from the time of the Anschluss, transforming the Gallias from Austrian citizens into German Jews.
Hundreds of Viennese of Jewish origin responded by immediately escaping Austria while its borders were still open, fleeing by train, car, and even taxi. Thousands of others were soon trying to secure visas so they could leave, often queueing through the night at foreign consulates to increase their chances, only to be attacked as they waited. Käthe had particular grounds to flee because she was among the first targets of the Nazis’ Arisierung, or Aryanization of businesses owned by men and women of Jewish origin, which resulted in the sale of these businesses at a fraction of their true value. By the end of March 1938, Käthe had been stripped of her job at the Graetzinlicht Gesellschaft. Otherwise she would have been at work, not at home, when the two men rang her doorbell a fortnight later.
Yet men and women of Jewish origin, such as Erni, Gretl, and Käthe, had good reason to hope the first weeks of Nazi rule would prove an aberration; after all, the Nazis had not engaged in such assaults in Germany. When the violence diminished and a semblance of normality returned to Vienna during the first weeks of April, it looked as if those who expected a return to calm might be right. According to Anne, her mother, uncle, and aunt were among those who “thought their pleasant life in Austria would continue.” When Käthe found the men at her door, she was preparing to go to the theater.
Käthe’s account of what happened that day was one of many forwarded by victims of the Nazis to Vienna’s new gauleiter, Josef Bürckel, in the hope that he would remedy the wrongs done to them. Most of these letters were sent directly to Bürckel, which meant that he never read them. Käthe looked to get Bürckel’s attention with the help of the Nazi commissar who was Aryanizing the Graetzinlicht Gesellschaft. While most of these men were set on plundering the businesses under their control and humiliating their original owners, some were more decent. Käthe’s commissar appears to have been among the latter. In her letter to Bürckel, she maintained that “because it was only a month after the Anschluss when the men came to her door, the black uniform of the SS was still new to me.” By implication, she did not realize whom she was keeping waiting when she rang the police. She also explained that she “had read notices published by the Nazis in Viennese newspapers which advised that, as communists masquerading as officers were gaining entry into apartments and stealing their contents, the city’s residents should not open their doors to anyone in uniform but ask the police to check the men’s credentials.” In other words, she was a good citizen complying with official instructions when she telephoned the police.
This naïveté fits Anne’s later view of Käthe but is still hard to believe. Could Käthe really have been so ignorant in April 1938 that she did not know what the SS wore, or was she trying to make herself appear as innocent as possible so the Nazis would not c
onclude that she had deliberately resisted them? And could she really have believed, after five years of Christian Social dictatorship and a month of Nazi terror, that Vienna’s communists were still capable of raiding apartments? What did she hope for when she called the police? Did she still trust them, even though many policemen had immediately joined in the Nazis’ persecution of Vienna’s Jews, or did she ring the police simply because she had no one else to turn to?
According to G. E. R. Gedye, the Viennese correspondent of the London Daily Telegraph at the time of the Anschluss, the notices in the newspapers were a sham. In Fallen Bastions, the most influential contemporary book about Austria’s annexation, Gedye maintained that Jews “naïve enough” to take the notices seriously found that, when they rang the police, “in some cases the exchange refused to answer their telephone call, in others the reply from the police station, when they had explained what was going on, was that all the police were out and that only a caretaker was on the line.” The norm most likely was very different because, as was often the case with anti-Semitism, the new regime’s persecution of Jews was motivated by economics as well as racism. While no communists were looting Viennese apartments by masquerading as officers, low-level Nazis and street gangs were doing so and the government wanted to stop this freebooting so it could expropriate the property of men and women of Jewish descent for itself. As the government looked to the police to stop “illegal” searches of Jewish apartments, they did exactly as the Nazis’ public notices suggested: they answered Käthe’s call, advised her that she had followed the right procedure, and reiterated that she should not open the door until an officer arrived. Within a few minutes a policeman was there, checking the men’s papers.
The one in black was a member of the SS, as his uniform suggested. The other in civilian clothes was a member of the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police. Because they were whom they claimed, the policeman went from being potential protector to assailants’ assistant. He helped the SS and Gestapo search Käthe’s apartment, then accompanied them when they took Käthe and her maid to the Hotel Metropol on the Danube Canal, where the Gestapo conducted their interrogations, tortured many of their victims, and held Kurt von Schuschnigg in solitary confinement for eighteen months. After interrogating Käthe about her finances, the three men took her and her maid back to the Rechte Bahngasse, then resumed their search.
An unusual proportion of Käthe’s property was in her apartment in keeping with Gallia tradition, which saw Moriz and Hermine keep two strongboxes in the Wohllebengasse rather than rent a safe or deposit box in a bank. After the officers brought Käthe back to the Rechte Bahngasse, she revealed her safe to them, which contained all of her important financial papers and best jewelry. When she attempted to list them from memory a few months later, she recorded that there were sixteen different types of Austrian, Hungarian, Czech, Swiss, and French securities. There were also six accounts in Viennese banks, 2,000 new German reichmarks in cash, and small sums of foreign currency. There were three pearl necklaces and another of diamonds. There was a big diamond brooch in the form of a bow with two pearls hanging from it. There was a pair of long diamond earrings and another of pearls. There were four bracelets and seven rings studded with diamonds, pearls, rubies, and emeralds. There were two diamond pendants, a diamond pin, and a sapphire pin. There was a platinum wristwatch set with small sapphires and diamonds.
She listed much more. Käthe had at least nine gold brooches—some with semiprecious stones, others with Saint Cecilia underneath. She also had a pair of earrings made of artificial pearls with a platinum clasp and small diamonds and another pair made of rose quartz. She had seven more gold bracelets embellished with semiprecious stones. She had two more gold rings—one with small sapphires, the other with small diamonds. She had several gold pendants in the form of miniature books, knives, medallions, and guardian angels. She had a set of shell jewelry consisting of brooches, pendants, armbands, rings, earrings, and necklaces, along with a small pearl pin, a twisted string of pearls, two small pearl armbands, a platinum armband decorated with pearls and small diamonds, several wristwatches made of gold and silver, and an Easter egg case containing a key and heart made of tiny diamonds.
The Nazis had fixed on Käthe as part of targeting the wealthiest members of well-to-do families so they could seize their property and intimidate them and their relatives into abandoning most of their wealth and fleeing. The contents of Käthe’s strongbox confirmed she was worth victimizing further. That she had broken no law was irrelevant. The Nazis arrested her under suspicion of intending to transfer her assets out of the country illegally. When her uncle Paul Hamburger happened to arrive at her apartment, they arrested him, too. They also seized Käthe’s securities, bankbooks, and cash, which were worth a total of 80,000 reichsmarks, but returned her jewelry to her strongbox while retaining the key. Then they sealed up the flat apart from its back room, which they left open for her maid, and took Käthe to a police prison in the Hahngasse in Vienna’s Ninth District. Built to hold common criminals, the Nazis had turned it into a jail for “undesirables”—Jews, communists, socialists, supporters of Schuschnigg, and monarchists who wanted to restore the Hapsburgs.
Käthe’s cell was crammed, the only toilet was a bucket, and there was little opportunity to wash. On several occasions she was taken back to the Hotel Metropol for interrogation by the Gestapo, who by now had removed all her jewelry from her apartment while ignoring her paintings, which were nowhere near as valuable. Her questioning, she recorded, took place in room 383. Her interrogator was an officer called Kreipl. Yet she was lucky to be imprisoned in Vienna rather than in the concentration camp at Dachau, where conditions were much worse. She also was fortunate that while the Nazis were trying to force all Jews to leave Austria as soon as possible after stripping them of most of their property, they still displayed an occasional sliver of respect for the law and readiness to negotiate, which meant the Gestapo did not entirely dictate what all its victims had to do. Like members of other wealthy families, Erni and Gretl sought the best legal help, which meant the strongest Nazi connections. They found an experienced defense counsel, Stephan Lehner, who was a party member.
Käthe’s willingness to stand up to the Nazis was still remarkable. Far from immediately accepting their terms, she rejected them, though it meant she had to stay in prison longer. The Gestapo began by pressing Käthe to sign an agreement in which she relinquished her shares, bonds, jewelry, and cash and undertook to leave Greater Germany within two days. She refused, most likely on the advice of Stephan Lehner, because she could neither have secured the necessary visas nor organized her affairs so quickly. The Gestapo then offered her a fortnight to leave, which she still refused because she could not have complied. The Gestapo finally gave her three months and suggested that, by petitioning for her jewelry, she might recover it. She agreed and was released after seven weeks.
The Nazis generally denied their prisoners access to family and friends. While Käthe was in the Hahngasse, all the Nazis allowed was for someone to bring her clean clothes and toiletries and collect her laundry once a week. As with almost every other aspect of Jewish life under the Nazis, this weekly process involved queueing, often for extended periods, which made it particularly frightening and dangerous. Anne recalled that she did so for Käthe “because people tended to be nicer to children than to grown-ups.” Many Jewish girls and boys as young as twelve performed similar tasks for this reason. Yet Gretl may also have thought that a sixteen-year-old girl on the verge of womanhood would stand a better chance of winning over male officialdom than a stout middle-aged matron like her.
Most accounts of the Anschluss depict the Nazis as all-powerful and their victims as utterly compliant, overlooking how men and women of Jewish origin were quick to defy the new regime, if only in small ways. The bridge-playing, choral-singing Gretl, shop manager Käthe, and schoolgirl Annelore were among them. Just as Käthe discovered that she could smuggle messages out of the prison con
cealed in her laundry, so Gretl and Annelore found that they could smuggle food into the jail to supplement Käthe’s prison diet. They probably began doing so almost immediately to help Käthe celebrate her thirty-ninth birthday in the Hahngasse in late April. Their ruse was to disguise cream as toothpaste in the toiletries that Annelore brought her.
The document securing Käthe’s release at the end of May stated that she voluntarily relinquished her property and wanted to leave the new Greater Germany. The first part of this statement was false, the second true. Because of her imprisonment, Käthe was eager to emigrate, as were Gretl and Erni, who was also losing much of his property through Aryanization. Less than seventy years after their uncle Adolf Gallia became their first relative to move to Vienna, drawn by the opportunities it offered and its unprecedented tolerance of Jews, Erni, Gretl, and Käthe knew they had to leave. For all the difficulties of their relationship, Gretl and Käthe decided to flee together so that they could jointly care for Annelore, if not always for each other.
Like all schools in Vienna, Annelore’s gymnasium in the Albertgasse closed for several days after the Anschluss. When it reopened, a number of Annelore’s teachers were gone, either because they had fled the Nazis or because the Nazis had stripped them of their positions on religious or political grounds. As at other schools, the remaining teachers had sworn an oath of allegience to Hitler. If they had been illegal members of the Nazi Party before the Anschluss, they came to school flaunting their party insignia, perhaps wearing SA or SS uniforms. Annelore was particularly shocked to find that Ilse Hornung, whom she had idolized at the Frauen-Erwerb-Verein, had been a party member when it was illegal.