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The exterior of a Jewish-owned business damaged by Austrian Nazi terror bombing before the annexation of Austria. Vienna, Austria, between 1933 and 1938. See more photographs |
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VIENNA |
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The capital of a large multi-national empire under the German-speaking Habsburg dynasty for five centuries, Vienna after 1918 became the capital of the small Republic of Austria. With a population of 1.9 million, Vienna housed 28 percent of the country's entire population in 1934. In 1938, some 170,000 Jews lived in the city, as well as approximately 80,000 persons of mixed Jewish-Christian background. 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. Vienna was an important center of Jewish culture and education. The city was also a center of Zionist thought and Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, had studied at the University of Vienna. Many Viennese Jews were well-integrated into urban society and culture. Jews made up significant percentages of the city's doctors and lawyers, businessmen and bankers, artists and journalists. |
In March 1938, Nazi Germany incorporated the Austrian Republic in what became known as the "Anschluss." Once in power, the Nazis quickly applied German anti-Jewish legislation to Vienna and the Austrian hinterland. The intent of this legislation was to exclude Jews from the economic, cultural, and social life of the former Austria. Officials closed Jewish community offices and sent the board members to the Dachau concentration camp. By the summer of 1939, hundreds of Jewish-owned factories and thousands of businesses had been closed or confiscated by the government. EMIGRATION FROM VIENNA |
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See artifact Desecrated Torah scrolls |
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. 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). 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. |
KRISTALLNACHT IN VIENNA German police officials arrested some 6,000 Austrian Jews and deported them to the Dachau concentration camp. A small number of those arrested were sent to Buchenwald concentration camp. Only those who promised to emigrate immediately, leaving their property behind, were released. Twenty-seven Austrian Jews were murdered in the course of the pogrom. DEPORTATIONS FROM VIENNA By October 1942 only about 8,000 Jews remained on Austrian soil. German officials deported approximately 1,900 of these Jews in 1943 and 1944. Some Jews remained in hiding. Many of the others still in Vienna were persons married to non-Jews. All in all, SS and police deported some 47,555 Austrian Jews to the east. The vast majority of these Jews, along with approximately 18,000 refugees to Austria, were murdered during the Holocaust. FORCED LABOR IN VIENNA Soviet forces liberated Vienna on April 4, 1945. Under joint Allied occupation, Vienna, like Berlin, was divided into four zones. The joint four-power arrangement formally ended in May 1955. |
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