were brutal murders. Whole villages were cleared. In one, three hundred were driven from their homes. An American Quaker who witnessed the expulsions recorded: “We have never seen anything as bad as that in Germany.” The sentiment was echoed at the monthly meeting of the British Board of Deputies: “The Situation in Austria is even worse than the situation in the German Reich. What took the Nazis five years to accomplish in the Reich has been done in five weeks in Austria.”
The fate of the ancient Jewish community rapidly became a cause célèbre. On May 3, 1938, a Czech rabbi, Michael Dov Weissmandl, visited Lambeth Palace to drum up support for the Burgenländer. He had a letter of introduction from Isaiah Porritt, the senior Orthodox rabbi in Vienna, and Samuel Epp, the senior rabbi in Burgenland. They were seeking a safe haven for 3,000 Jews. Lang’s secretary, Alan Don, wrote to Samuel Hoare at the Home Office to ask if a special favor might be granted in this instance.
The plight of the Burgenland Jews is the subject of Franz Werfel’s short story “Die wahre Geschichte vom wiederhergestellten Kreuz” (“The True Story of the Remaking of the Cross”) of 1942. Werfel conceived it as part of his unfinished novel Cella , which was set in northern Burgenland. The Catholic priest Ottokar Felix relates the martyrdom of the rabbi of Parndorf, Aladar Fürst, on the night of March 11 and his own role in seeking to protect the Jews in his village and accompany them into exile. Aladar Fürst did not exist, but the other events described in the story took place on April 20. The local SA, drunk with power—and wine—threw between twenty and thirty Jews out of their homes and took them to the Hungarian border at Mörbisch on the Neusiedlersee. There they spent four nights in no-man’s-land, as the Hungarians were not prepared to accept them. They were eventually allowed to go to Vienna. Another event that was later dramatized was the expulsion of the Jews from Kittsee, which formed the basis of Friedrich Wolf’s play Das Schiff auf der Donau ( The Boat on the Danube ). In Kittsee the Jews were forced across the border into Czechoslovakia, but as they had no papers, they were made to endure weeks on an island and later a boat before the Czechs would take them in.
In the state capital Eisenstadt, an exception was made for Alphons Barb, the director of the state museum. The commissioner for cultural issues in Austria asked for a stay of two or three months in his case, since the archaeologist had made an important contribution to knowledge of German pre-history in Burgenland through his excavation of gravesites, proving that the Germans got there before the Magyars. Barb had been making an unconscious contribution to Ahnenerbe , the research into Germanic roots that was replacing religion for Nazi extremists. He was allowed to continue to live in Vienna until 1939, when the British Museum organized his transfer to London.
Heinrich Himmler was the first Nazi VIP to arrive in Vienna. His two Ju-52 aircraft touched down in Aspern at 5 AM on March 12. On the way down from Berlin he slipped and almost fell out of the aircraft, and his intelligence chief claimed he saved his master’s life. He was accompanied by the lofty figures of Reinhard Heydrich, Karl Wolff, and Kurt Daluege and a large team of SD and Gestapo men dressed in grey uniforms: This was to be the unveiling of the new Waffen-SS kit. They were met on the tarmac by Austrian police chief Skubl and a police guard of honor. The Germans then went about their task with proverbial efficiency, ridding their new province of the enemies of the Reich. A willing civil servant was able to provide Himmler with all the state’s police records, including criminal records of the banned Left. Very few wriggled through the net.
Skubl’s attentiveness did him no good. He was replaced by Kaltenbrunner, one of the few Austrian Nazis ever to achieve high rank in Berlin.
The fate of the ancient Jewish community rapidly became a cause célèbre. On May 3, 1938, a Czech rabbi, Michael Dov Weissmandl, visited Lambeth Palace to drum up support for the Burgenländer. He had a letter of introduction from Isaiah Porritt, the senior Orthodox rabbi in Vienna, and Samuel Epp, the senior rabbi in Burgenland. They were seeking a safe haven for 3,000 Jews. Lang’s secretary, Alan Don, wrote to Samuel Hoare at the Home Office to ask if a special favor might be granted in this instance.
The plight of the Burgenland Jews is the subject of Franz Werfel’s short story “Die wahre Geschichte vom wiederhergestellten Kreuz” (“The True Story of the Remaking of the Cross”) of 1942. Werfel conceived it as part of his unfinished novel Cella , which was set in northern Burgenland. The Catholic priest Ottokar Felix relates the martyrdom of the rabbi of Parndorf, Aladar Fürst, on the night of March 11 and his own role in seeking to protect the Jews in his village and accompany them into exile. Aladar Fürst did not exist, but the other events described in the story took place on April 20. The local SA, drunk with power—and wine—threw between twenty and thirty Jews out of their homes and took them to the Hungarian border at Mörbisch on the Neusiedlersee. There they spent four nights in no-man’s-land, as the Hungarians were not prepared to accept them. They were eventually allowed to go to Vienna. Another event that was later dramatized was the expulsion of the Jews from Kittsee, which formed the basis of Friedrich Wolf’s play Das Schiff auf der Donau ( The Boat on the Danube ). In Kittsee the Jews were forced across the border into Czechoslovakia, but as they had no papers, they were made to endure weeks on an island and later a boat before the Czechs would take them in.
In the state capital Eisenstadt, an exception was made for Alphons Barb, the director of the state museum. The commissioner for cultural issues in Austria asked for a stay of two or three months in his case, since the archaeologist had made an important contribution to knowledge of German pre-history in Burgenland through his excavation of gravesites, proving that the Germans got there before the Magyars. Barb had been making an unconscious contribution to Ahnenerbe , the research into Germanic roots that was replacing religion for Nazi extremists. He was allowed to continue to live in Vienna until 1939, when the British Museum organized his transfer to London.
Heinrich Himmler was the first Nazi VIP to arrive in Vienna. His two Ju-52 aircraft touched down in Aspern at 5 AM on March 12. On the way down from Berlin he slipped and almost fell out of the aircraft, and his intelligence chief claimed he saved his master’s life. He was accompanied by the lofty figures of Reinhard Heydrich, Karl Wolff, and Kurt Daluege and a large team of SD and Gestapo men dressed in grey uniforms: This was to be the unveiling of the new Waffen-SS kit. They were met on the tarmac by Austrian police chief Skubl and a police guard of honor. The Germans then went about their task with proverbial efficiency, ridding their new province of the enemies of the Reich. A willing civil servant was able to provide Himmler with all the state’s police records, including criminal records of the banned Left. Very few wriggled through the net.
Skubl’s attentiveness did him no good. He was replaced by Kaltenbrunner, one of the few Austrian Nazis ever to achieve high rank in Berlin.
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