The Jews of Vienna

The Jewish community of Vienna was, by 1938, the largest German-speaking Jewish community in the world after Berlin and a more thoroughly integrated bourgeoisie than any of its peers. The 1934 census recorded 176,034 Jews in the city, around 9 per cent of its population and approximately 90 per cent of all Austrian Jews. The Anschluss of March 1938 led to a campaign of dispossession and emigration faster and more violent than anything yet seen in Germany. By the time deportations began in October 1941, around 130,000 Viennese Jews had emigrated and 65,000 remained in the city. Of these, around 47,000 were murdered. Around 4,000 survived in the city itself, mostly in mixed marriages.

Vienna and the Jewish nineteenth century

The Viennese Jewish community was the work of the long Habsburg nineteenth century. Emancipation under the 1867 Austro-Hungarian constitution had given Jews civil rights, and the imperial capital had drawn migrants from across the empire, particularly from Galicia and from Bohemia and Moravia. By 1900 Vienna was one of the great Jewish cultural cities of Europe, alongside Berlin, Warsaw and New York. The Stadttempel, the city’s main synagogue on Seitenstettengasse, dated from 1826 and survived the Holocaust because of its position embedded in surrounding buildings; the SS could not burn it without destroying the residential block. The Leopoldstadt district across the Danube canal contained the larger and visibly identifiable working-class Jewish quarter, with the Tempelgasse synagogue (destroyed in November 1938) at its centre.

The cultural contribution of the community to fin-de-siècle Vienna and the early twentieth century was extraordinary. Sigmund Freud lived and worked in the city from 1860 until his forced emigration in 1938; the founding of psychoanalysis happened at his apartment at Berggasse 19, now the Freud Museum. Gustav Mahler had been director of the Court Opera. Arnold Schoenberg was the founder of the Second Viennese School of composition. Ludwig Wittgenstein came from one of the wealthiest Jewish families in the empire. Karl Kraus edited Die Fackel, one of the most influential satirical journals in German. Stefan Zweig was the most-translated German-language novelist of the interwar period. Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises came out of the Austrian School of economics centred on the University of Vienna. Joseph Roth and Hermann Broch came out of the Galician Jewish migration of the late nineteenth century. The list could be extended at length.

The Anschluss of March 1938

German troops crossed the Austrian border on 12 March 1938 to popular acclaim from much of the Austrian population. The events of the following weeks in Vienna were a compressed version of what had taken five years in Germany. Jewish public servants were dismissed within days. Jewish-owned businesses were Aryanised within weeks. Public humiliations of Viennese Jews, including the forced washing of street signs and political slogans by Jewish women on their hands and knees, were photographed and circulated widely. The Eichmann Central Office for Jewish Emigration, established in Vienna in August 1938, became the model for the Reich-wide office established the following year; the Viennese model of forcing Jews to emigrate after stripping them of their property was adopted across the Reich.

The pogrom of 9 to 10 November 1938 was particularly destructive in Vienna. Forty-two synagogues, almost every synagogue in the city, were burned or seriously damaged. Around 6,500 Viennese Jews were arrested and many sent to Dachau. The destruction of the Tempelgasse synagogue in the Leopoldstadt was photographed and the photographs widely circulated.

Emigration accelerated. Around 130,000 Viennese Jews left between March 1938 and October 1941. They went to Britain, where the Kindertransport saved around 4,000 Viennese Jewish children; to the United States, with the established Jewish community of New York making particular efforts; to Palestine; to Shanghai, which required no entry visa; to Latin America; to Australia. Many left their elderly relatives behind in the certainty that they would follow on later transports. The borders closed in October 1941 before they could.

The deportations

The first deportation transport from Vienna left on 15 October 1941, carrying 1,003 Jews to the Łódź ghetto. Between October 1941 and the end of the war some 47,000 Viennese Jews were deported, most to Theresienstadt, Riga, Minsk and Auschwitz. The deportations were carried out by the Vienna Gestapo with the cooperation of the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde, the Jewish community organisation, forced into the role of compiling lists. The community organisation had been allowed to continue operating because it was useful for the deportation process; the same officials who had administered the community before 1938 found themselves issuing deportation summons until they themselves were deported.

The 4,000 Viennese Jews who survived in the city itself almost all owed their survival to mixed marriages. The protection of mixed marriages varied through the war and depended on whether the Jewish partner was male or female, whether the marriage had produced children, and whether the children had been baptised; the system was less generous than its German equivalent and many of the protected Jews of Vienna were deported in the closing months of the war. Of the 47,000 deportees, around 1,800 returned.

Afterwards

The post-war Viennese Jewish community was small. A few hundred survivors returned to the city in 1945 and 1946; a small number of pre-war emigrants returned over the following decades; Soviet Jewish migration after 1990 added a further layer. The community in 2026 numbers around 8,000 to 10,000 and is centred on the Stadttempel. It is the largest Jewish community in Austria but a fraction of the pre-war community.

The Jewish Museum Vienna in the Dorotheergasse opened in 1996. The Museum at Judenplatz, opened in 2000, includes the foundations of a medieval synagogue uncovered during the construction of the Holocaust memorial designed by Rachel Whiteread, the cast-concrete Nameless Library that stands above it. The Wiener Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, established in 2010 in the building where Simon Wiesenthal lived in Vienna, holds his archive. The Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien has restored the Stadttempel and continues to operate it.

See also

Sources

  • Doron Rabinovici, Eichmann’s Jews: The Jewish Administration of Holocaust Vienna 1938-1945, Polity Press, 2011
  • Bruce F. Pauley, From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism, University of North Carolina Press, 1992
  • Marsha L. Rozenblit, The Jews of Vienna 1867-1914: Assimilation and Identity, State University of New York Press, 1983
  • Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews 1867-1938: A Cultural History, Cambridge University Press, 1989
  • Evan Burr Bukey, Hitler’s Austria: Popular Sentiment in the Nazi Era 1938-1945, University of North Carolina Press, 2000
  • Gerhard Botz, Nationalsozialismus in Wien: Machtübernahme, Herrschaftssicherung, Radikalisierung 1938/39, Mandelbaum Verlag, 2008
  • Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance (DÖW), https://www.doew.at
  • Jüdisches Museum Wien, https://www.jmw.at