The Jews of Nazi Vienna, 1938-1945: Rescue and Destruction, Ilana Fritz

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Jews of Nazi Vienna, 1938–1945: Rescue and Destruction by Ilana Fritz Offenberger Evan B. Bukey The Jews of Nazi Vienna, 1938–1945: Rescue and Destruction. By Ilana Fritz Offenberger. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 321 pages. $29.99 (paper). This meticulously researched book explores the daily lives of Viennese Jews between Adolf Hitler’s takeover of Austria in 1938 until the collapse of his murderous regime in 1945. Unlike other studies of the Holocaust, it focuses on what the author calls the [End Page 207] “pre-genocidal” years between 1938 and 1942. This is not to deny that recent scholarship, particularly by the Historiker Kommission, has explored the despoliation, humiliation, and violence perpetrated by the Nazis on Vienna’s Jewish population in the months following the Anschluβ. Nevertheless, relatively little attention has been paid to the responses of individuals and families. Relying on letters, interviews, and archival documents in Austria, Germany, Israel, Poland, and the United States, Ilana Offenberger seeks to address this question in gripping detail. The author divides her study into nine chapters, six of which discuss the plight of Vienna’s Jews prior to the mass deportations to the killing fields in 1941–1942. Here she defends the much-criticized decisions of the Jewish Religious Community (Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien, IKG), under the leadership of Dr. Josef Löwenherz and Benjamin Murmelstein, to cooperate with Adolf Eichmann to manage Jewish affairs and facilitate the forced emigration of Austrian Jews. Through scrupulous examination of multiarchival evidence and postwar testimony, Offenberger demonstrates that there was no other choice. In May 1938, the ambitious Eichmann had re-opened the IKG, compelling its officials to assume the responsibility of making the Danubian city Judenrein. After establishing the Central Office for Jewish Emigration (Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung) in August, he and other Nazi officials raised funds from confiscated assets and encouraged sporadic waves of mob violence that included numerous beatings, “scrubbing squads,” and even young women lifting their skirts to urinate on prostrate victims. During the Anschluβ pogrom, orchestrated in part by Hitler himself, over 500 Jews committed suicide, over 1,000 were deported to Dachau, and countless others imprisoned or brutalized in public. Some Jews, such as Ruth Klüger’s family, decided to stay in Vienna, while others remained in denial. The overall effect, however, was to persuade a majority of Vienna’s fissiparous Jewish community that emigration was their only key to survival. This collective realization thus enabled the IKG to move quickly in establishing priorities, registering assets, obtaining passports, arranging [End Page 208] exit visas, and collecting various Nazi-imposed taxes. Unlike their coreligionists in the Altreich prior to 1938, the author shows that Austrian Jews were motivated by shock, anxiety and hope, and not least by the IKG’s success in saving lives. While losing their homes, possessions, and even family members tragically left behind, between 1938 and 1941 some 136,000 Viennese Jews, two thirds of the Jewish community, found refuge abroad largely due to the efforts of the IKG and foreign aid. On the other hand, once deportations to the East began in October 1941 the cooperative relationship between the IKG and the Nazi authorities led unwittingly to the murder of Vienna’s 44,000 surviving Jews. The introduction of the Star Decree in September 1941, for example, did not come as a life-changing event, primarily because Jewish officials and residents had been desensitized. Everyone had become involved in such a “vicious cycle,” that even Löwenherz and Murmelstein believed that those packed off in freight cars to Opole, Theresienstadt, and Auschwitz were destined to labor in the German war effort. Throughout this excellent book Offenberger skillfully intersperses personal recollections, letters, diaries, IKG records, German documents, and diplomatic reports of American consular officials to reconstruct the impact of the Nazi era on the lives of Jewish men, women, and children during the Anschluβ years. Her account of the difficulties in securing American affidavits according to stipulated quotas is balanced, fair-minded, and, in places, stomach churning. In one tragic case, Mrs. Harriet Portman in Waltham, Massachusetts spent two years seeking financial assistance to obtain an affidavit for a Viennese attorney...