. . . these Berlin potato-faces fill the streets, together with their full-bosomed females. Thanks to the rate of exchange they are able to make off with everything for a song, including goods that are no longer available in Germany and the . . . shelves are empty. They are behaving like a horde of servants whose masters are away, who have found the keys to the wine cellars and are now having an orgy with their women . . .36
Some Germans mopped up the flood of Austrian Jewish property. One of these was Papen, who was destined for the embassy in Istanbul. He acquired the country place of the Eggers, industrialists in Styria.37 Ribbentrop absorbed Schloss Fuschl, and added it to his burgeoning collection. The former owner, von Remnitz, was murdered in Dachau.38 Goebbels threw a little confetti in the direction of the Austrians. He sponsored a lavish production of Lohengrin for the Salzburg Festival, but refused to allow Hans Tietjen to direct it.
On the same day as the poll, the new government in the Ostmark introduced the Reichsfluchtsteuer. It had actually been introduced in Germany on 31 January 1931, before Hitler came to power: any person (not just Jews) leaving the country had to pay the tax if they had an income of 20,000 RM (30,000 Austrian Schillings) in any year since 1931, or if they possessed a fortune of 50,000 RM (75,000 Austrian Schillings) at the time of applying to leave.39 It is a measure of the success of the ‘Viennese Model’ that state income from the emigration tax more than quadrupled in 1938, from 81,354,000 RM to 342,621,000 RM. In 1939 it fell by a third to 216,189,000 RM.40 Smuggling was rife, particularly of jewellery, which was small and potentially of great value. Aryans volunteered to carry jewellery for Jews. In one case in the summer of 1938, the smuggler was arrested by British customs. The case against the woman was dropped after representations from Jewish bodies.41
On 13 April, as Poland and Lithuania moved to the brink of war again, a law was passed requiring Austrian tradesmen to find Aryan owners for their businesses before 10 October. The Nazis had coined a new verb to dignify the process of robbery: arisieren.42 Until their sale, Jewish businesses were to be placed in the hands of commissioners, who tended to be trusted Party members. The trust placed in them was seldom rewarded: they merely bled the businesses white and deposited a lifeless carcase on the market for sale. After the takeover of Jewish businesses, the only Jews left working were a ‘very few’ doctors who could treat Jews only and a similar number of lawyers who were allowed to act as consultants to Jewish clients. About 1,500 Jews were retained in industry where there was a shortage of labour. Between 3,000 and 4,000 were being retrained subject to the payment of certain taxes. Many elected to learn agriculture with a view to getting to Palestine. Artists and writers saw their publishers refuse to pay out royalties, even when those came in from abroad. Such was the case of Felix Salten, the author of Bambi, whose publishers were now able to absorb a huge income from his foreign sales. Another ripe plum was the royalty income of the film-score composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold.
At first some thought they would ride the storm. The dentist Hugo Schneider felt that now Jews could no longer go to Aryan dentists his business would expand. Within three months, however, his hopes were shattered by the appearance of a man in SA uniform at his door. He announced that he was also a dentist, and half the practice now belonged to him.43
There were 26,236 Jewish businesses in Austria: one for every 270 Austrians. This was a far greater concentration than in the old Reich, where the figure was one for every 1,693 Germans. They were mostly small businesses. The Aryan Austrians rushed to take over the firms. There were four times as many applications as there were businesses to acquire. Seyss-Inquart’s excuse for the measure was to produce a legal framework for an orderly takeover. Some Austrians, however, were still not keen on the legal route. Parents encouraged their children to pilfer from defenceless Jews. Flats were stolen under the noses of their owners by maids with the assistance of their lovers. The victims could not go to the police; the only way to protect themselves was to offer the maids presents on their departure. Some companies were robbed over and over again, with fleets of lorries being brought up to take away the goods.44
There was a particularly high concentration of Jews in certain businesses. One in seven of Austria’s pharmacies was Jewish owned, and in Vienna the figure was more than a third. The normal sale price for a business of this sort was two to two and a half times the yearly income. Now the official sales price was one-tenth of the pre-1938 value. The 25 per cent Reichsfluchtsteuer had to be subtracted from this. There was no recourse to the courts: if a Jew complained he was put in prison.45
The measures did not necessarily benefit the Austrian economy. The sacking of the Jewish textile workers, for example, caused a slump in the clothing industry, as there were no skilled workers to take their place.46 The interpretation of the law was draconian, especially in a city like Vienna where many people had a dash of Jewish blood. The illegitimate children of Jews, even Mischlinge who had only one Jewish grandparent but could produce no baptismal certificate, forfeited their rights. If one of these had 25 per cent of the company, or a seat on the board, the company was defined as Jewish.47
As the authorities removed the Jews, the Viennese began to feel the loss. The central market in the Naschmarkt emptied out. The corn trade was 80 per cent Jewish, as well as 31 per cent of the leading wine companies. At the time of the harvest that year a cooperative had to be created to take the place of the old trade. The Hungarians complained that their firms were being closed down too and made a diplomatic protest.48 When foreign trade began to suffer Göring started to sweat. On 29 October he told the Viennese authorities to slow down.
In the schools the Jewish children were made to feel increasingly unwelcome. The eleven-year-old Hans Schneider, the son of the dentist Hugo, was summoned out into the playground by his headmaster and told that it was impossible for true Germans to associate with Jews like him. His parents told him that the man in question had begun as a red (communist), had seen the advantage of becoming ‘black’ (a supporter of the Corporate State) and was now turning brown (Nazi). Hans Schneider took this to heart and stopped taking the chameleon headmaster seriously.49
HITLER’S BIRTHDAY
Hitler was forty-nine on Wednesday, 20 April. Easter had fallen the Sunday before but the Christian festival was upstaged by the antics of the Prussian boxer Max Schmeling, who was making a bid to regain the world championship he had lost to Jack Sharkey. On Easter Saturday he met the American Steve Dudas in the ring in Hamburg, and knocked him out in the fifth round. Goebbels called him a ‘brave lad’.50
Two weeks before, the Hitler Youth leader, Baldur von Schirach, had decreed the Führer’s birthplace, Braunau, to be a place of pilgrimage for young Germans.51 His birthday was marked by the usual military parades, a laudatio from Göring and a special gift from Goebbels: a collection of recordings of his speeches on Austria. Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia was screened and universally admired. Goebbels noted that she would win the film prize that year and receive 100,000 RM. There was lunch for a small group of Hitler’s intimates and Keitel came too.
Since the death of Paul Ludwig Troost, Albert Speer had become the Führer’s favourite architect. He was able to bring Hitler a present of the plans for the first part of Berlin’s intended great axis, four miles long and flanked by 400 street lamps. It was to house the principal ministries and part of a crossing of streets that would stretch thirty miles to the east and west and twenty-five to the north and south. Some of the designs – the great dome and the triumphal arch – had been sycophantically worked out from drawings supplied by the Führer himself.52 For technical reasons, Hitler was in two minds about Berlin as a capital. The city was built on sand and there was a high watertable requiring the new Chancellery to be constructed on a concrete raft. Hitler had wanted to shift the capital to Lake Muritz. On the 24th his ministers had the chance to look over Speer’s building, which was already impressively grandiose.
In the evening of Hitler’s birthday there w
as a command performance: Furtwängler conducted Die Meistersinger. The Third Reich also celebrated by issuing a warrant for the arrest of Archduke Otto for high treason, while Der Stürmer revealed that the first Habsburg had actually been a Jew.53 After the festivities, Hitler called Keitel to him and asked him to adapt the plans for Operation Green, a pre-emptive strike against Czechoslovakia.54 Keitel was given the brief to study the Czech system of fortifications. The original blueprint had been drawn up to deal with the eventuality of a Soviet attack on Germany, using their Czech ally as a springboard. Hitler told Keitel there was to be a big opening in the east. The attack had to succeed in four days – the time the French needed to mobilize and come to their ally’s aid.
The German Foreign Office had been sponsoring ethnic German resistance within Czechoslovakia for four years. Now with Ribbentrop in power in the Wilhelmstrasse there was an even greater desire to see the Czechs embarrassed by the complaints of the Sudetenländer. Göring, it seems, was not the prime mover, and he was one of the last to be won round to a Czech adventure: he had given Mastny his word, after all.ix He pointed out that the West Wall was not ready. It was Hitler who convinced him. On 23 April he was secretly named Hitler’s successor. In Karlsbad on 24 April, Henlein outlined his new eight-point programme. Since the Anschluss, his hopes had been raised. On 28 March he had been up to Berlin to see Hitler and Ribbentrop and receive his orders. Hitler told him that a pretext would be found for a German invasion; in the meantime he was to continue making excessive demands. Ribbentrop told him to maintain the closest contact with him; he did not want to miss the party this time. The British and French response found an echo in Jochen Klepper’s diary: they formed a military alliance. Once more Germans feared Hitler was driving them to world war.55
The Karlsbad Programme called for autonomy for the German regions and German-speaking regiments in the Czech Army. On 28 April Goebbels noted with interest that Prague was looking for security from London and Paris, and that Chamberlain did not appear keen.56 The British put pressure on President Beneš to accommodate the Sudetenländer, but by honouring Henlein’s requests he would have destroyed his state. Goebbels had been moved to see his Führer sitting and brooding over a map of Czechoslovakia.57 Hitler had told Keitel that Czechoslovakia had to be destroyed because of a showdown with the Slavs, and not because of any injustice shown towards the Bohemian Germans. The timing for the attack would be to some degree dependent on progress in constructing his own defensive wall in the west, the answer to the French Maginot Line, designed to keep the French out if they chose that moment to honour their commitments to the Little Entente.
PASSOVER
In the days leading up to Passover, the spotlight fell on Berlin’s Jews. Goebbels conferred with Helldorf. Their movement was to be curtailed: they were to have one swimming pool, and a few restaurants and cinemas, ‘otherwise access forbidden. We are going to take away Berlin’s character as a Jewish paradise.’ ‘The Führer wants to drive them out gradually. He is going to negotiate with the Poles and the Romanians. The best place for them would be Madagascar.’58 Göring too was turning on the heat in his fight against Jewish capital. ‘It won’t be long before we floor them,’ wrote Goebbels.59
Pessach was from 23 to 26 April, and over the weekend of 25–26 April prominent Jews were subjected to unspeakable acts of public degradation in the Prater park in Vienna. Kaltenbrunner had made attempts to rein in the SA but with little success. Near the Reichsbrücke over the Danube, Jews were forced to spit in one another’s faces. One who refused died in a concentration camp soon after. In the Taborstrasse in the heavily Jewish Second District, orthodox Jewesses were obliged to remove their wigs and form a parade for the amusement of the Nazi thugs. Jews were strapped into the giant Ferris wheel and spun round at top speed.60
The Czech Consul-General in Vienna reported on the brutal scenes in the Prater on 24 April. Jews were forced to run around with their hands up. Others were stripped and beaten by SA-men. They had their beards shaved off and were obliged to lick human excrement. The sixty-six-year-old chief rabbi was beaten up. On the 26th and 27th twenty-eight Jews committed suicide, including five members of one family. The Jewish General Sommer appeared in uniform and was made to wash the pavement.61 In the Aryan Johann-Strauss Café, opposite Gestapo HQ on the Morzinplatz, Jewish regulars were protected by the owner. When the SA came to make the customers clean the streets the proprietor replied, ‘Over my dead body.’ The café acted as a welfare centre.62
The violence culminated in a new edict from the Ministry of the Interior: Jews and Jewish women married to Aryans had to reveal their fortunes of 5,000 RM or above by 30 June, whether in the Reich or abroad. In Austria the fortunes of a quarter of the Jews accounted for a sum of 2 milliard marks.63 At the same time, the ministry decreed that its approval was required for all transfers of businesses from Jews to Aryans. Once again they were keen to close the stable door, even if some of the horses had bolted. The British Consul-General, Gainer, noted bitterly, ‘It would almost seem as if the manner of their going, whether by the process of emigration to other countries, or by starvation in their own, was of little consequence to those in authority.’
The Zionist Leo Lauterbach wrote to the Central Bureau for the Settlement of German Jews on 27 April. Since the closing of the IKG, the process of emigration had come to a standstill. He had observed in Vienna that the authorities were ‘bent upon an early evacuation of Austria by the Jews’. According to Lauterbach the message had gone home, and was voiced in the queues outside the British consulate. He was concerned that the maximum number should reach Palestine and that there were funds to help them. The preferred candidates were artisans – Chalutzim. Lauterbach also hoped for an extension of the Ha’avara scheme.64
Lauterbach arrived in Vienna with the former civil secretary to the Palestine Mandate, Sir Wyndham Deedes, on 18 April. The two left again on the 21st and proceeded to Berlin, where they stayed from 22 to 24 April. Deedes was equipped with letters of introduction to the appropriate bodies: the Foreign Office in Berlin and its Viennese branch. He was representing the Council for German Jewry and came with promises of financial support for those wishing to travel to Palestine. The message he transmitted to German official bodies was that it was important to reopen the offices of the Jewish congregation as quickly as possible so that organized emigration could proceed. They wanted the Jewish leaders to be released from Dachau to this end. The financial costs could not be entirely borne by foreign institutions and it was therefore necessary that the IKG raise money to fund emigration. The wild seizure of Jewish property would not help in the long run.
Deedes and Lauterbach met Gainer, Taylor and Passport Control Officer Kendrick, also the American chargé d’affaires, Wiley. Deedes paid similar calls in Berlin, as well as visiting officers of the German army, Quakers and ‘non-Jewish non-Aryans’.65 In Vienna they were fobbed off with minor officials from the Foreign Office and the Emigration Office. Attempts to see the governor, Seyss-Inquart, or members of the Gestapo came to nothing. They were able to visit the mayor, Neubacher, who expressed the desire to see emigration proceed in an orderly and humane manner. In Berlin they had a sympathetic meeting with Freiherr von Marschall at the Foreign Office, but he admitted to being powerless. He directed them to Himmler, who was not available. They saw some Gestapo officials including Dr Leo Lange, who was on his way to see Eichmann. He informed them that the problem of the Austrian Jews was being dealt with in Vienna. They did not receive the impression that the policy had been fully decided.
Visas were issued on a temporary basis. There was also the problem of finding transit visas. Switzerland and France were generally willing to grant these. Italy needed proof of baptism, and this led at least one Jewish family to visit Hugh Grimes at the Anglican chaplaincy. Lorli Rudov née Perger, then aged ten, remembered him ‘totally unruffled . . . surrounded by a crowd of Jewish people . . . He was taking an enormous risk in offering help . . .’ As in many other Jewish
families, theory was stymied by practice: the Pergers needed to sell their house and pay the Reichsfluchtsteuer. By the time they had done so, the Italian window had closed.66
For many, business connections proved useful. That way money could be transferred without being taxed by the Nazi authorities. Connections also meant employment once the refugee entered Britain. Women could generally enter the country by agreeing to go into domestic service. A note in the files at Friends’ House asks whether the dentist Dr Edith Mahler is ‘capable of doing housework . . . We are trying to get her a permit, but have failed once.’67 The equivalent for men was to enter full-time education. A remarkable number of Central European Jews, for example, applied to enter the Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester – one can only imagine because its entrance requirements were relatively undemanding. Zionist organizations also set much store by farming, and there was even some cooperation with the Gestapo in Austria, which ran a farm where non-Aryans trained Jews. Many went because it was seen as a means of leaving the country early.68 The baptismal certificate might work, but it was no guarantee; an Anglican conversion was of more interest for someone hoping to go to Britain or the Dominions.69
The facts do not always bear this out, however. The British Empire let in a smattering of Jews: Southern Rhodesia was taking fifty a month by May 1939; Kenya admitted about 650 but were demanding a valid reentry visa to Germany as a precondition of acceptance, something the Germans were not prepared to consider;70 Mauritius let in 1,250, Cyprus 744, Jamaica 500, British Guiana 130, Hong Kong forty-two, Malta eighteen, British Honduras twelve, Ceylon six, Aden, North Borneo and Grenada five apiece, Fiji and Tanganyika, Barbados, Leeward Islands and Uganda two each and Sierra Leone one. St Helena allowed a solitary dentist.71 The Dominions were all different: Australia admitted 10,000 ‘in spite of the government’s best efforts’;72 South Africa took virtually none after passing the Aliens’ Act of 1937; New Zealand took 1,100, including Karl Popper, who mentions a helpful man at the New Zealand High Commission in London.73
1938: Hitler's Gamble Page 15
