feeling like Captain von Köpenick from his own play. The SS man told his soldiers to take Zuckmayer’s cases on to the train. They had not even been examined. He countermanded the strip-search as well. He was the only person on his train to be exempted.
As the SS man took him to the station buffet to wait for the rest to pass or fail the examination, an acquaintance of Zuckmayer’s wife came up to him and identified himself. His Jewish wife was on the other train waiting in the station. She had a broken leg. Zuckmayer now chanced his luck again. Omitting to tell the SS man she was a Jewess, he said she was not able to come to the interrogation: “If you testify for these people, then it is all right,” the Nazi said. The couple were placed on the Swiss train.
There were agonizing moments before the train left. He sat in the buffet with the SS man, and they drank their way through Zuckmayer’s last twenty schillings. The Nazi told him he wanted to prove himself in the field. Zuckmayer comforted him: There would be a new war soon. He did not hate the Nazi; he pitied him. He saw him as he had seen so many, lying ashen-faced in a pool of blood. Every now and then an SA man interrupted their drinking to report a big haul in marks or valuables. Dawn was breaking when Zuckmayer’s train finally began to move, and he was able to quit his sinister companion. Only when Swiss guards entered his carriage did he know for certain: He was not going to Dachau.
Not just the Jews but all the Corporate State’s elite had been enemies of the Third Reich. Zuckmayer records that aristocrats were forced to scrub the streets because they, too, had stuck up for an independent Austria. Both the former vice chancellor and head of the Fatherland Front, Emil Fey, and the Minister of War, General Wilhelm Zehner, apparently “committed suicide.” Fey allegedly killed his wife and son first. Their bodies were removed from his flat in sealed tubes and taken to the anatomical institute. His corpse was reported to contain twenty-three bullet holes.
Göring saved the foreign minister Guido Schmidt by sending his own aircraft to collect him. Schmidt was later appointed to the board of the Hermann Göring Works. Around 15 percent of the judges were dismissed; both the minister of justice, Robert Georg Winterstein, and the senior judge Alois Osio perished in the camps. Other victims of the new broom were monarchists. Otto von Habsburg was still perceived as a threat. They naturally had no time for the upstart Hitler. Many of them were arrested and dispatched to Dachau.
THERE WERE only tiny pockets of Jews outside Vienna: some 2,000 in Styria, in the Vorarlberg just 18. There was a significant community in Burgenland, however, where 3,632 Jews inhabited seven acknowledged, protected old communities: Eisenstadt, Matersburg, Kobersdorf, Lackenbach, Deutschkreuz, Frauenkirchen, and Kittsee. They amounted to a little more than 1 percent of the population in Austria’s easternmost state, but they had lived there for several centuries, whereas many Austrian Jews had only quit the shtetls of the east a generation before.
Until 1921 the region had been a part of Hungary, and the older Jews were often in possession of Hungarian papers. The Nazis wanted to assert Burgenland’s “Germanity” before all else, and the violence against the Burgenland Jews began as soon as Schuschnigg announced his resignation. It frequently took the form of rounding them up and driving them over the nearest frontier. The Czechs, Hungarians, and Yugoslavs responded by closing the crossings. The leader of the Frauenkirchen Jews, Ahron Ernst Weis, managed to escape on a tourist visa to Palestine, while his dentist brother committed suicide. Most of those expelled found refuge in Vienna. Lauterbach and Sir Wyndham Deedes visited three families from the dusty border town of Deutschkreuz who had been expelled “with a few trifles” by the local gendarmerie. In Rechnitz there
As the SS man took him to the station buffet to wait for the rest to pass or fail the examination, an acquaintance of Zuckmayer’s wife came up to him and identified himself. His Jewish wife was on the other train waiting in the station. She had a broken leg. Zuckmayer now chanced his luck again. Omitting to tell the SS man she was a Jewess, he said she was not able to come to the interrogation: “If you testify for these people, then it is all right,” the Nazi said. The couple were placed on the Swiss train.
There were agonizing moments before the train left. He sat in the buffet with the SS man, and they drank their way through Zuckmayer’s last twenty schillings. The Nazi told him he wanted to prove himself in the field. Zuckmayer comforted him: There would be a new war soon. He did not hate the Nazi; he pitied him. He saw him as he had seen so many, lying ashen-faced in a pool of blood. Every now and then an SA man interrupted their drinking to report a big haul in marks or valuables. Dawn was breaking when Zuckmayer’s train finally began to move, and he was able to quit his sinister companion. Only when Swiss guards entered his carriage did he know for certain: He was not going to Dachau.
Not just the Jews but all the Corporate State’s elite had been enemies of the Third Reich. Zuckmayer records that aristocrats were forced to scrub the streets because they, too, had stuck up for an independent Austria. Both the former vice chancellor and head of the Fatherland Front, Emil Fey, and the Minister of War, General Wilhelm Zehner, apparently “committed suicide.” Fey allegedly killed his wife and son first. Their bodies were removed from his flat in sealed tubes and taken to the anatomical institute. His corpse was reported to contain twenty-three bullet holes.
Göring saved the foreign minister Guido Schmidt by sending his own aircraft to collect him. Schmidt was later appointed to the board of the Hermann Göring Works. Around 15 percent of the judges were dismissed; both the minister of justice, Robert Georg Winterstein, and the senior judge Alois Osio perished in the camps. Other victims of the new broom were monarchists. Otto von Habsburg was still perceived as a threat. They naturally had no time for the upstart Hitler. Many of them were arrested and dispatched to Dachau.
THERE WERE only tiny pockets of Jews outside Vienna: some 2,000 in Styria, in the Vorarlberg just 18. There was a significant community in Burgenland, however, where 3,632 Jews inhabited seven acknowledged, protected old communities: Eisenstadt, Matersburg, Kobersdorf, Lackenbach, Deutschkreuz, Frauenkirchen, and Kittsee. They amounted to a little more than 1 percent of the population in Austria’s easternmost state, but they had lived there for several centuries, whereas many Austrian Jews had only quit the shtetls of the east a generation before.
Until 1921 the region had been a part of Hungary, and the older Jews were often in possession of Hungarian papers. The Nazis wanted to assert Burgenland’s “Germanity” before all else, and the violence against the Burgenland Jews began as soon as Schuschnigg announced his resignation. It frequently took the form of rounding them up and driving them over the nearest frontier. The Czechs, Hungarians, and Yugoslavs responded by closing the crossings. The leader of the Frauenkirchen Jews, Ahron Ernst Weis, managed to escape on a tourist visa to Palestine, while his dentist brother committed suicide. Most of those expelled found refuge in Vienna. Lauterbach and Sir Wyndham Deedes visited three families from the dusty border town of Deutschkreuz who had been expelled “with a few trifles” by the local gendarmerie. In Rechnitz there
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