Deportations from Viennaĭuring the war, German policy regarding the Jewish population shifted from one of expropriation and Jewish emigration to forced deportation. Twenty-seven Austrian Jews were murdered in the course of the pogrom. Only those who promised to emigrate immediately, leaving their property behind, were released.
A small number of those arrested were sent to Buchenwald concentration camp. German police officials arrested some 6,000 Austrian Jews and deported them to the Dachau concentration camp. Jewish businesses were also vandalized and ransacked. Many of these burned to shells as the public and fire department personnel looked on, intervening only when the blaze threatened neighboring buildings. Members of the Nazi Party and its various paramilitary organizations (including the SA and the SS) were joined by civilians, emboldened by the lack of police interventions, to form "spontaneous" mobs that torched most of the city's synagogues and small prayerhouses. The pogrom of November 1938, popularly known as Kristallnacht (or "Night of Broken Glass"), was particularly brutal in Vienna. Though the pace of emigration slowed to a trickle with the increasing threat of war and its outbreak in September 1939, another 28,000 Jews were able to leave Austria between May 1939 and the middle of 1942. By May 17, 1939, nearly half of Austria's entire Jewish population had emigrated, leaving only approximately 121,000 Jews in Austria (all but 8,000 in Vienna). In 1938, SS Captain Adolf Eichmann (later the Reich's most zealous deportation "expert"), working closely with the Inspector of Security Police and SD in Vienna, Brigadier General Walter Stahlecker (later commander of a mobile killing unit, Einsatzgruppe A), established a Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna. Would-be emigrants were forced to pay an exit fee and to register all of their immovable and most of their movable property, which was confiscated concurrent with their departure from the country. Those seeking exit visas and other documentation necessary for emigration were required to stand in long lines, night and day, in front of municipal, police, and passport offices. Emigration from ViennaĪfter the Anschluss, Vienna became the focal point of Jewish emigration from Austria.
By the summer of 1939, hundreds of Jewish-owned factories and thousands of businesses had been closed or confiscated by the government. Officials closed Jewish community offices and sent the board members to the Dachau concentration camp. The intent of this legislation was to exclude Jews from the economic, cultural, and social life of the former Austria. Once in power, the Nazis quickly applied German anti-Jewish legislation to Vienna and the Austrian hinterland. In March 1938, Nazi Germany incorporated the Austrian Republic in what became known as the Anschluss. Jews made up significant percentages of the city's doctors and lawyers, businessmen and bankers, artists and journalists. Many Viennese Jews were well-integrated into urban society and culture. The city was also a center of Zionist thought and Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, had studied at the University of Vienna. Vienna was an important center of Jewish culture and education. Including converts from Judaism, the Viennese Jewish population may have been as high as 200,000, more than 10 percent of the city's inhabitants. In 1938, some 170,000 Jews lived in the city, as well as approximately 80,000 persons of mixed Jewish-Christian background. Vienna's population of 1.9 million was 28 percent of the country's entire population in 1934. After 1918, following World War I, Vienna became the capital of the small Republic of Austria. Vienna was the capital of a large multi-national empire under the German-speaking Habsburg dynasty for five centuries.
0 kommentar(er)
