by Tim Bonyhady
Osborn’s letter arrived in between. As Anne remembered it, he had secured them visas for the Philippines, which remained an American territory in 1938 but controlled its own immigration policies and was very generous to Jewish refugees. Their passports reveal, however, that the visas were in fact for the United States, where Congress was against measures to help Jewish refugees but President Roosevelt assisted them by combining the annual Austrian quota of less than fifteen hundred, which was manifestly inadequate, with the German quota of almost twenty-six thousand, which was not being filled. In early September, the American consul in Vienna issued Gretl, Käthe, and Annelore visas “good for all United States ports” for twelve months.
Like other refugees who had been in the workforce, Käthe needed more documentation. The first step, as one contemporary account described, was for refugees to go to their old universities and employers “to beg for a copy of a diploma or testimonial and to be called a filthy Jew and left standing, once, twice, three times, before the document—on which was pinned the hope of any future—was finally, with fresh insults, produced.” Then they had to seek consular endorsement of these papers, which was hazardous since those waiting in line were sometimes subject to Nazi attack. Because Gretl and Käthe were still not sure which visas they would use, Käthe had her qualifications endorsed by the British and the Americans.
The Nazis required refugees to obtain even more papers before letting them go. Many were financial because the Nazis were intent on ensuring that Jews left with as little money as possible. They had to show that they had paid all government charges, including income, inheritance, building, rental, welfare, and departure taxes, both real and fictitious. The most preposterous document was a statement from Vienna’s police president that their departure was voluntary. To begin with, Viennese Jews had to queue to get the necessary forms at ministries, boards, and offices scattered across the city. They had to queue to submit them while Aryans who wanted anything from these offices always took precedence. Because most of these permits were valid for only one month, refugees often found that by the time they had secured what should have been their last approval, the first had expired, so they had to start the process again.
Adolf Eichmann, an officer with the SS, simplified this process in August 1938 by creating a Central Office for Jewish Emigration where members of Vienna’s Israelitische Kultusgemeinde could obtain all the necessary permits, all valid for the same period. While Eichmann’s use of the Palais Rothschild symbolized how the Nazis were victimizing even Vienna’s richest Jews, the office not only enabled the Nazis to secure Jewish property with even greater speed but also allowed Vienna’s Jews to escape more easily. Gretl and Käthe did not have this option because of their conversions. Either they could try to secure the documents themselves or become part of Operation Gildemeester, which the Dutch Quaker Frank van Gheel Gildemeester created with the Nazis to expedite the departure of former members of the Kultusgemeinde. This operation, which made Gildemeester a fortune while facilitating the flight of thousands of relatively poor refugees, was funded by property from about a hundred wealthy families whose escapes were also expedited. Because the Nazis imposed strict exchange controls on refugees, Käthe went through Operation Gildemeester to obtain the landing money she needed to gain entry into Australia. She recalled paying an “extravagant sum” to secure this £200.
Switzerland was to blame for a new law that complicated the departure of Gretl and Annelore. When Germany annexed Austria, the only benefit for Austrian Jews was an agreement between Germany and Switzerland that allowed their citizens to travel without obtaining visas. As Austrian Jews became German citizens following the Anschluss, they could enter Switzerland on this basis. When forty-seven reached Basel in one day, Switzerland protested at this “inundation” and renounced the agreement with Germany, only to offer to restrict its visa requirement to German and Austrian Jews so long as their passports made plain that they were Jews. The Nazis duly ordered all Jews to hand in their passports so they could be issued with German passports stamped with a big red J on their front pages.
Because Käthe had already obtained a German passport at the start of September in which was affixed her American visa, she simply had to have this passport stamped with a J in order to satisfy the new law. Because Gretl and Annelore had obtained their American visas in their Austrian passports, they had to secure new German ones. Then they returned to the American consulate, where, to their relief, they found that the visas they had obtained with Osborn’s help were transferable.
In the end, Gretl, Käthe, and Annelore chose Australia because Erni, Mizzi, and Mizzi’s sister, Fini, appeared set on going there. As Anne remembered it, Australia’s remoteness also attracted them. She thought they were eager to go as far from Hitler as they could, though this aspect of Australia probably began to appeal to them only when World War II started and Hitler’s military power appeared almost unlimited. When Käthe and Annelore went to see the Vienna Boys’ Choir’s founding director, Rektor Schnitt, who was the only person they knew who had been to Australia, he recommended Sydney and wrote them a letter of introduction to its most exclusive Catholic girls’ school, run by the Order of the Sacred Heart at Rose Bay.
I can see Annelore dreading the daily insults and indignities at her school in the Albertgasse following the Anschluss. I imagine her wanting to stay away to avoid the harassment and victimization. She would have pressed Gretl to let her sometimes remain home if not take her out of school altogether. When the new school year started that September, there was no choice. Annelore could not return to the Albertgasse because the Nazis’ exclusion of children they identified as Jewish had finally taken effect. As a new and devout Catholic, Annelore would have refused to attend the one high school in Vienna that the Nazis created for Jews, even if it had been safe to go there. Like most other children of Jewish origin, Annelore stayed home with what she described as “endless days to fill and nothing to do.”
Many other refugees spent their last months in Vienna attending language classes, but Gretl had no need to do so because she had been taught English by a succession of governesses, schoolteachers, and private tutors and was a superb linguist. Käthe’s English was also good due to similar instruction. One of her birthday presents in 1908—inscribed by Hermine in English “To my darling twins”—was A Little Mother, a 294-page children’s story that Hermine clearly anticipated her nine-year-old daughters would have read to them, if not read themselves. Annelore’s English was also impressive, as revealed by one of her school exercise books from 1936. She wrote of London’s policeman: “The so-called ‘Bobby’ is everyone’s friend. He is very kind, but that does not mean that he can not look sharp after transgressors. Little children and prams or bewildered persons, all are directed by his up-lifted hand.”
Many other adults and teenagers looking to flee also attended courses in trades and crafts such as pastry making, pearl stringing, sausage making, typing, and shorthand. The men who attended these classes were typically professionals with qualifications not recognized outside Austria who needed retraining to persuade another country to take them. The women who took these courses needed training since they generally had never worked. The teenagers were often just looking for something to keep them busy as a substitute for going to school. Annelore was among them when she began learning how to clean lace—a specialist occupation for which there was still demand in Vienna but none in Australia.
Her teacher was Anni Wiesbauer, who had worked first for Hermine and then for Gretl and Käthe. While the Nazis allowed the Israelitische Kultusgememeinde in Vienna to organize retraining courses for its members, just as the Quakers did for converts to Christianity, it was very different for an individual such as Anni to do so. By aiding a Jew, as Annelore remained in Nazi terms, Anni could be branded a Volksfeinde, or enemy of the people. Anni was particularly vulnerable because her assistant, Reserl, was a Nazi who might have informed on her, yet Anni was happy to help. Her offer to
teach Annelore was one of a devoted employee to long-standing employers. It was one of a devout Catholic to a new convert. It was one of a middle-aged woman with no child of her own who had known Annelore all her life. In Annelore’s last months in Vienna she saw Anni almost every day.
Both Anni and Annelore looked on this time together with similar intensity. Anni thought of Annelore as a younger sister, a little comrade, a soul mate. Anne described her time with Anni as one of her “great” experiences as a girl and looked on Anni as having “rescued” her. She particularly enjoyed the opportunity to do mundane, practical tasks that had always been the job of the Gallias’ servants before the Anschluss and remained so after it because the Nazis initially allowed men and women of Jewish origin such as Gretl to keep their Christian maids. They last saw each other on November 11, the day after Kristallnacht, which was also the day before Annelore left Vienna. Annelore gave Anni a silver basket once owned by Hermine and a bottle of liqueur probably made by Johann Timmels-Witwe. Anni reciprocated with a photograph showing her cleaning lace “in memory of our work together.” Annelore also left with a photograph of Anni’s maid, Reserl, that she later inscribed “Anni’s Reserl, a good Nazi.”
Father Elzear gave Annelore more to do as he continued baptizing Jews at the Franciscan church. Because many of the new converts knew no one willing to be their godparents, Annelore served as the godmother not only of younger girls but also of several adults. Either way, she always filled this role for people she had only just met and did not expect to see again. By the time Annelore left, Elzear was very important to her. The last two photographs that she took in Vienna were of him. He gave her a photograph of himself and a postcard of the Franciscan church that he inscribed “in everlasting memory and forever.” Annelore found saying good-bye to him very difficult.
Annelore also occupied herself by playing the cello—the one aspect of her conventional middle-class education to continue through these months. Although Annelore did not show particular ability, Gretl followed family tradition by having her taught by an accomplished cellist, Lucie Weiss, who performed with one of Vienna’s best quartets. When the Anschluss resulted in Weiss’s being stripped of this position because she was a Jew, she continued to teach Annelore while organizing her own escape to New York.
The start of the new opera season in September saw Annelore going out more than ever, usually alone, though accompanied at least once by Anni Wiesbauer. While she would have worn her new crucifix prominently displayed, these outings were fraught with danger. If identified as a Jew, she would be at risk, whether discovered in the opera or on Vienna’s streets. Yet Annelore was eager to make the most of a world that was ending for her. Whether Gretl, Käthe, and she went to Australia or the United States, she did not expect to be back in Europe for years, if ever again. Because she could see no prospect of the Nazi rule of Austria’s ending, she could not imagine returning. Besides, she was desperate for distractions and the opera offered an escape. By the end of September, she had been eleven times. In October, she spent another eighteen evenings there, attending performances of Wagner’s Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, and Die Meistersinger, which, she remembered, received thunderous applause.
Annelore also saw more than ever of the Vienna Boys’ Choir because her conversion meant that she was finally able to go to the Burgkapelle, the chapel of the old Imperial Palace, where the choir sang each Sunday. As she wrote a few years later, she “learned to love and appreciate High Mass there in preference to any other church.” While she thought Rektor Schnitt’s replacement “knew nothing about the boys and little about music,” she still wanted to see them whenever possible. Their program that October was wonderful. She heard them perform Mozart’s Coronation Mass, Schubert’s Mass in F Major, Haydn’s Theresa Mass, Mozart’s Sparrow Mass, and Schubert’s Mass in G Major, which probably were all new to her. As a result, the Burgkapelle became her symbol of Vienna as the “City of Music.” She thought there never had been “a more perfect combination of Art and Religion.”
Vienna remained the City of Music for her at the start of November. She attended the Burgkapelle for Haydn’s Holy Mass on All Saints’ Day and Mozart’s Requiem on All Souls’ Day. That night she saw Strauss’s Salome at the opera. On Friday she saw Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Two days later she was at the Burgkapelle for another Sunday mass.
Gretl and Annelore knew that November 9 was Blutzeuge, the most sacred Nazi public holiday. While festivities during the day in Vienna commemorated the fifteenth anniversary of Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch, three thousand new members of the SS were to parade from late in the evening until early the following morning, swearing allegiance to Hitler at the city’s Heldenplatz at midnight. These celebrations gave Gretl particular reason to keep Annelore home but, with just a few days to go before they were to leave Vienna, Annelore insisted on one last night at the opera. For the third time in two months, she went to Mozart’s The Magic Flute. When she got home, she recorded the performance in her concert book as usual. About half an hour later, the Gestapo in Vienna received the order from Munich to instigate the pogrom that became known as Kristallnacht.
Anne remembered none of this more than fifty years later—or anything of the next two and a half days in Vienna, when she went across the city several times. While Anne checked her concert book when she wrote her story, she was misled by her entry for The Magic Flute because the date could be read as either November 3, when the Vienna Opera did not perform The Magic Flute, or November 9, when it did. Anne read this date as the third, which fit her recollection that Gretl and she left Vienna before Kristallnacht and that Käthe was still there because she wanted to give her lawyer more time to retrieve her jewelry from the Gestapo. Anne wrote: “In the end he succeeded and she left a few days after us, but by that time the Crystal Night had already taken place and I was extremely worried whether she would make it.”
I discovered Anne was mistaken a few days after she died in 2003, when I began dipping into her Viennese theater books. The last of these books included her entry for the performance of The Magic Flute, which I immediately read as November 9. When I confirmed this date in the library, I briefly was overcome by frustration at not being able to talk to her about what I had found, that it was too late for me to tell her where she had been on Kristallnacht and see if she could remember anything about it. Then I realized that, for all my curiosity, it was probably better that I had not challenged her in this way when she had been so troubled to discover the unreliability of memory while writing her story. I would simply have fueled her doubts about exactly what she had done as a girl and who she had been.
5
Subterfuge
The most extensive account of the art looted in Vienna following the Anschluss is by the art historian Sophie Lillie. The 1,439 pages of her book Was einmal war, or What Once Was, document the 148 biggest collections, identifying their owners, what the Nazis stole, and the roles played by key officials. Lillie also reveals where these collections were located, creating a remarkable map of wealth, directory of theft, and geography of loss. One street, the Rathausstrasse in the First District, was home to four confiscated collections. The Wohllebengasse was home to three. The merchant Fritz Wolff-Knize and his wife, Anna, had one of the great collections of modern art, as well as a spectacular ethnographic room. The property magnates Gottlieb and Mathilde Kraus collected nineteenth-century Austrian art. The artist Wilhelm Krausz combined Old Masters with Louis XIV furniture, baroque crucifixions, Persian carpets, and a bronze Buddha.
The proximity of these collections in 1938 is all the more significant because there are just ten houses on one side of the Wohllebengasse and nine on the other. The prominence of the Wohllebengasse in Lillie’s book is testimony to the wealth of its inhabitants, their taste for art, and their Jewish origins. Because the Nazis confiscated all of the Kraus and Krauz collections and the ethnographic collection of the Wolff-Knizes, the Wohllebengasse was one of the prime sites of Nazi plunder. Becau
se the Wolff-Knizes hid their paintings in the Romanian embassy in Vienna and Gretl and Käthe fled with all their pictures and furniture, the Wohllebengasse was also the source of the best collection to escape the Nazis while remaining within Austria and the best private collection to get away.
An array of laws, both old and new, governed what Gretl and Käthe took. One was a cultural protection law, which Austria introduced in 1918 in an attempt to stop the pillaging of its art following World War I and then amended in 1923 so that all objects of historic, artistic, or cultural significance could be preserved in the public interest. Another law introduced in Germany to stem a loss of capital during the Great Depression provided for a departure tax, which the Nazis set at one-quarter of the value of each refugee’s property. Yet another law, introduced in Germany as a Depression measure but toughened by the Nazis, stopped refugees from converting their remaining property and money into foreign currency. The Ordinance for the Registration of Jewish Property introduced in 1938, provided the Nazis with information about whom to target, as well as a basis for determining the departure tax that refugees paid when they left.
The most valuable pieces of property that Gretl and Käthe had to leave behind were the houses in the Wohllebengasse and Alt Aussee that they owned jointly with Erni. As part of the family’s long-standing involvement in the gas industry, Gretl and Käthe had also made big loans to two gas companies that they could not recover. Although Gretl had significant shares and bonds at the time of the Anschluss, she had to sell them to pay her departure tax. While Käthe’s lawyer persuaded the Nazis to treat the shares, bonds, and cash that the Gestapo had taken in April as her payment of the departure tax, this decision was of little consequence since Käthe could not take her other money with her. The same was true of Annelore, who had bonds and debentures in Austria’s Postsavings Bank.