1938 (9 page)

Those Jews who had fled on four wheels abandoned “a whole car park” of vehicles and hid in the woods closest to the frontier. The cabaret artist Jura Soyfer tried to cross the Swiss border on skis but was arrested and taken to Innsbruck. Other Jews boarded trains to Romania but were turned back at the border; even when they had Romanian papers, the authorities refused to take them back.

Naturally the wisest ones made for the borders as quickly as they could. That was particularly important for anyone on a Nazi blacklist. Malwine Dollfuss (widow of the murdered chancellor), two Habsburgs, and Guido Zernatto of the Vaterländischen Front were successful, as was the comedian Karl Farkas; but many found no way through. Brno, in Czechoslovakia, was often the goal. It contained a large German minority even in 1938, and many of Vienna’s Jews had family in southern Moravia. Once in Czechoslovakia, they could catch the “flying Moses” from Prague, the aircraft that flew the children of Israel away from the Nazi peril.

Writers whose works had been burned on the Opernplatz in Berlin were best advised to go before the Germans took hold of the city. One of these was the German dramatist Carl Zuckmayer, who had been living near Salzburg for years but who happened to be in Vienna at the time of the Anschluss. He was in the theater all day and oblivious of political developments until he heard Schuschnigg’s resignation broadcast that evening.

Zuckmayer had survived a dozen battles on the Western Front and the terrible upheavals of the postwar years; he had been on the streets at the time of the Hitler putsch in Munich and witnessed the Nazi takeover of power in Berlin, but nothing compared to those days in Vienna. “It was the witches’ Sabbath of the plebs that laid all human values to rest.” That night he was traveling in a taxi when the mob decided that he and his companion were Polish Jews and needed to be beaten up. Zuckmayer only escaped by shouting out something that sounded like “
Heil Hitler!
” in his best Reich German accent—like a sergeant major drilling his squad. When the skies blackened with German bombers making their way to the airport at Aspern, a new, equally sinister noise joined the screams of the tortured. After a while one got used to that too. All those new sounds merged into one: “The air was filled with the cacophony of Armageddon.”

Zuckmayer’s play
Bellmann
was shortly to open at the theater in the Josefstadt, directed by Ernst Lothar. In the middle of rehearsal on Sunday, two actors came to Lothar and declared they represented the theater’s National Socialist cell: Zuckmayer’s play could not be performed because the author was part Jewish. Lothar promptly resigned and went home to his flat on the Beethoven Platz, next to the Imperial Hotel, where Hitler was staying that night. Shortly afterwards, the police arrived to impound his passport. Lothar’s wife, the actress Adrienne Gessner, lost her temper: “Go to Mr Gauleiter, or whatever title the idiot uses, the fellow who sent you . . . and tell him that I threw you out.” Lothar apologized for his wife and gave the policemen his passport. He sensed that he would have considerable problems getting the papers back and promptly negotiated an exit visa from the local police for the vast sum of 25,000 schillings, then set out for his brother in Switzerland with his daughter in a new, chauffeur-driven car.

Everything went well until they approached the border at St. Anton in the Vorarlberg, where they were flagged down by the local gendarme. He had been told to look out for the car. He was perfectly polite and had even read Lothar’s novels, but he had been told to inform the SA. Lothar waited upstairs in the police station while his daughter and the driver stayed by the car. The SA men rolled up soon after. They said the Lothars would have to undergo a strip search, grabbed the daughter, and prepared to tear off her blouse. Lothar was quick on the uptake: The SA too wanted to be bought off, in this instance with the car. The Nazis were in raptures over their booty. As soon as he had signed an affidavit to say that he had given it to them of his own free will, they drove the Lothars to the border in Feldkirch. The SA headed off in the car, leaving the theater director and his daughter at the station. Fortunately the border official was a fan and had been to several of Lothar’s productions; he waved them off to freedom with a friendly “
Auf Wiederschaun in Österreich
.”

AUSTRIAN OFFICIALS weren’t all so friendly. Writer Gina Kaus’s books had been burned in Berlin. She had an Italian passport by virtue of the fact her former husband had been born in Trieste. Together with her son, Peter, and her lover, Eduard Frischauer, she managed to board a train on Monday that was full to bursting. They were delayed five hours at the border. An outraged English skier related that she had been “gynaecologically investigated.” When they reached the Swiss border, she felt like hugging the conductors.

As a rule only Jews or
Mischlinge
of mixed Jewish and Gentile blood made haste to leave. Exceptional was the Gentile writer Franz Theodor Csokor or the musicians Erich Kleiber and Ralph Benatzky. The Nazis wrongly thought the latter actually was a Jew. Those who went, or preferred to remain abroad, make an impressive list: musicians like Robert Stolz and Fritz Kreisler and the more heavyweight Arnold Schönberg, Hanns Eisler, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and Egon Wellesz; conductors such as Bruno Walter and Joseph Krips; singers of the caliber of Lotte Lehmann, Maria Jeritza, Alfred Piccaver, and Richard Tauber; theatre and cinema artists like Max Reinhardt, Otto Preminger, Fritzi Massary, Elisabeth Bergner, Oskar Homolka, and Anton Wohlbrück (later Walbrook).

In Berlin, Goebbels was hatching plans to “de-Jew” Vienna and located a few collaborators in the process, such as the actor Attila Hörbiger, who was able to report on his wife Paula Wessely with her many Jewish friends. Vienna’s music was all “Jews and Jewlovers.” A desire to set some traditional Aryan composers on the pedestals formerly occupied by Brahms and Bruckner led to Franz Schmidt’s commission to write “Eine deutsche Auferstehung” (A German Resurrection) in 1938. Goebbels wanted the pro-Nazi Karl Böhm for the National Opera, while Hitler favored Hans Knappertsbusch.

Bruno Walter had had the good fortune to be in Holland for the Nazi triumph. He took out French citizenship, and the new powers in the land made off with the contents of his flat. Arnold Rosé, for fifty-seven years the leader of the Philharmonic, fled to London, where a new Rosé Quartet was founded. The portraits of Mahler and Walter and an engraving of Rosé disappeared from the historic wall of the offices of the Philharmonic. Mahler’s bust was removed from the foyer at the Opera. The Gustav Mahlerstrasse became the Meistersingerstrasse. The wife and children of the poet and dramatist Hugo von Hoffmannsthal emigrated in March. The writer Hermann Broch spent months in prison before he was able to reach England. Robert Musil left in August, clutching the manuscript of
A Man Without Qualities
.

THE PLEBISCITE had been largely funded by Jewish money, something that made the Jews appear particularly culpable. The first acts of bestiality were carried out by the homegrown SA, although they were quickly joined by Himmler’s men, who carried their own hit lists. Before Adolf Eichmann’s arrival, the most important body in Vienna was Department II-112, SS-Oberabschnitt Donau. There were two days of “wild” persecution between March 11 and formal annexation on the 13th. Franz Rothenberg, president of the Creditanstalt bank, was hurled from a car at top speed but survived. Others were not so lucky. Isidor Pollack, managing director of the Pulverfabrik chemical works, died of the wounds he sustained from his beating. Later the Deutsche Bank would take over the Creditanstalt, and I. G. Farben would appropriate the Pulverfabrik.

Jews were made scapegoats for the last acts of the Corporate State and had to wash the pro-Schuschnigg graffiti off the walls and pavements. At the Café Herrenhaus, the owner and his wife, together with seven customers, were forced to scrub the—presumably unsullied—walls. The chief rabbi, the Zionist Dr. Israel Taglich, was philosophical about cleaning the streets: “I am washing God’s earth.” They called themselves
Araber
(Arabs), because they were
a raber
(
reiber
) or scrubbers. This was not a Nazi invention; it was the Fatherland Front that had originally instituted this form of punishment and meted it out to illegal Nazis, when they were caught daubing slogans.

As in Zuckmayer’s case (see below), it was still possible to impress some Nazis by flashing a medal for bravery. The writer Leo Perutz, for example, escaped a nasty scene on the 13th by pointing to his EK1, Iron Cross 1st Class. Later, even this would have no effect on the Viennese thugs. The huge amount of booty they accrued was taken to 36 Prinz Eugenstrasse, the headquarters of the SA group Donau-Wien, before being transferred to the Hotel Metropole, which had been seized from its Jewish owners and turned into Gestapo HQ.

The Prinz Eugenstrasse was the location of the Rothschilds’ town palace, and their vast fortunes naturally concentrated the minds of the Nazi brigands. The young Dudley Forwood, equerry to the Duke of Windsor, knew the Rothschilds well and had the run of their country house. He was on vacation there on March 12, prior to leaving for Paris the next day. A footman brought him a message: The
gnädige Baronin
had called. He was not to show surprise if anything strange were to happen on the train. He found the station filled with troops. At Feldkirch the passengers were ordered off. Over the loudspeaker he heard: “
Alle Leute ’raus. Juden auf der linke Seite
” (“Everyone out. Jews on the left”). At that moment he saw the Rothschilds’ English nanny coming toward him with the children. They pretended to be his. He remembered what the servant had told him and went along with the game. He got them out.

The mask had fallen, revealing the depths of antisemitism in Austrian society. In an officers’ mess in Neudiedl am See, a subaltern suddenly refused to play billiards with another officer because he was a Jew. The latter walked out of the mess. No one attempted to hold him back. On March 14 the army was purged of Jews, and officers and men had to swear an oath of loyalty to Hitler. The Jewish general Erich von Sommer appeared on the street in full rig with medals. This time the SA showed respect and saluted him. It did not work twice.

It was not just violence. “Confiscations” were the order of the day—shops were emptied of their wares, garages of their cars. Rich Jews were incarcerated for months until they were convinced to hand their property over to the Gestapo. This was important if there were artworks and collections to steal under a dubious cloak of legality. Money disappeared into the pockets of Nazi thugs. The Zionist Leo Lauterbach expressed his astonishment at their ferocity: “Nobody who knew the average Viennese until that moment would believe that he could sink to such a level.”

In the Twentieth District, a local thug called Josef Graf had taken it upon himself to visit the cafés, beat up Jewish customers, and make them drink from the spittoons. On the fourteenth he was leading a squad of Jews toward the Northwest Station hall to perform physical jerks. A group of SA men coming in the opposite direction decided he was going too far, and liberated the Jews. Graf had earlier forced a Gentile to carry a panel up and down the street after visiting a Jewish café. It read “
Arisches Schwein geht zum Judencafé rein
” (“Aryan pig goes into Jewish cafés”). The gymnastics were extended to Jewish children, who were assembled and forced to perform until they collapsed. The purpose behind this was to extort money from the parents, who could not bear to watch their offspring being abused in this way. Once the torturers had been paid off, more Viennese appeared and took over where the others had left off.

RICH JEWS were arrested and prepared for the first transport for Dachau. Since the police and the SA had drawn up their own lists, there was a certain rivalry over their prey. The brothers Schiffmann, department store owners, were seized in the Taborstrasse and their staff dismissed—likewise Gerngross and Herzmansky in the Mariahilferstrasse, the shoe magnate Krupnik, the carpet merchant Schein, the stocking manufacturer Schön with its eighty branches, the industrial baker Anker, the lightbulb producers Kremenzky and Pregan, the jeweler Scherr, the men’s fashion merchant Katz, and the clothier Gerstel. The emptying of the Schiffmann stores lasted three whole days. Jews with valuable art collections, like various members of the Gerngross family, found their possessions put up for auction.

At least some of these people had made large donations to Schuschnigg’s plebiscite funds. Gerstel’s surname was unfortunate: It was the slang word for cash. As the local Nazis put it at the time, “
Darr Jud muss weg und sein Gerschtl bleibt da!
” (“The yid must get out, but he has to leave his dough behind”). The Nazis took over prominent businesses and arrested the owners, like the Kuffners, proprietors of the famous Ottakringer brewery. Of assets totaling 9 million marks, two and a half were confiscated at once, and when the Kuffners sold out, they gave a further 35 percent to the Nazis. Restaurants were obliged to hang up signs banning Jews.

One of those who tried to cross the Czech border on the 13th was Fritz Grünbaum, but the train was sent back and those on board plundered. The unlucky ones were also arrested, including Grünbaum, who was sent to the new prison in the Karajangasse, where he shared a mattress with Bruno Kreisky, later Austrian chancellor. Grünbaum died in Dachau after a bungled suicide attempt. His wife, Lilly, was murdered at Maly Trostinec. His huge art collection sold for a song, and the money went into the coffers of the Reich.

IN THE provinces the atmosphere was calmer. With the exception of Burgenland, there were few Jews. Graz had the reputation of being the most Nazi city in Austria. The Jewish legal clerk Helmut Bader observed on March 13 that all his judges had donned swastika armbands. He was summoned before the head of personnel and summarily dismissed. The physiologist Otto Loewi, who had won a Nobel prize for medicine in 1936, was arrested. The money he had been awarded was placed in a closed account.