The exhibition "The Viennese Model of Radicalization. Austria and the Shoah" shows how Adolf Eichmann found Vienna an experimental site for the Holocaust
Austria was deeply infiltrated by National Socialists and "prepared" for anti-Semitism even before the Anschluss to Hitler's Germany. Proof for that cannot only be found by an increasing number of findings in recent anti-Semitism research. A new open-air exhibition on Vienna's Heldenplatz, which is located between the Weltmuseum and the Äußeres Burgtor, now also shows for the first time the complex model of the Viennese persecution of Jews and its repercussion for the entire German Reich.
The exhibition The Viennese Model of Radicalization. Austria and the Shoah was created in cooperation between the Haus der Geschichte, the University of Vienna and the Academy of Sciences. The historians Heidemarie Uhl, Michaela Raggam-Blesch and Isolde Vogel were among the main curators. The history of the massively celebrated Anschluss in 1938, the gradual intensification of discrimination against the Jewish population, and the deportation and extermination of the Jews are presented and explained at eight different stations.
Individual fates are shown with excerpts from files of the Nazi bureaucracy; the exhibition also sheds light on survival strategies, Jewish everyday life under the impact of persecution and, above all, the perfidious system of forced emigration that led to the first deportations to ghettos, extermination camps and murder sites in the East starting in 1941, exactly 80 years ago.
Austria as an Experimental site
Adolf Eichmann, who was sentenced to death in Israel in 1961 as the main organizer of the Holocaust, found a perfect career springboard in Vienna in 1938, explains curator Heidemarie Uhl. Here he developed the new Nazi authority "Central Office for Jewish Emigration," which had the goal of systematically dispersiob the Jewish population. Following the Viennese model, further such central offices were established in Berlin and Prague in 1939 and in Amsterdam in 1941.
But not only that, pogroms also took place in Austria in anticipatory obedience immediately after the Anschluss, even before the anti-Jewish measures of the Nazi regime had been taken. "The Nazis in Germany were surprised what was possible in Vienna," says Uhl. Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels found an experimental size in Austria and drew inspiration from it for the upcoming June and November pogroms initiated by the highest authorities throughout the Nazi state.
The Viennese Gauleiter Baldur von Schirach pursued the plan to make Vienna the first major city in the Reich to be "free of Jews". For this reason, the first systematic deportations to the East took place from Vienna on Hitler's express orders in February 1941 - the beginning of the organized mass murder. Between 1938 and 1941, 130,000 Austrian Jews were able to flee or were forced to flee, 17,000 of whom were recaptured and murdered by the Nazi regime in countries of refuge such as France or the Netherlands. The countries who granted refuge to the most people were Great Britain (31,000), the USA (29,000), Palestine (15,000) and China (6,000).
The Fate of the Freudian Sisters
A total of 65,000 Austrian Jews died, only about 8,000 managed to survive in Vienna. One of them: the artist Arik Brauer, who died this January. A non-Jewish mother protected him from deportation, but Brauer still had to endure forced labor and repression, including wearing the Jewish star.
Another striking fate shown in the exhibition is that of Sigmund Freud's sisters. While the founder of psychoanalysis managed to emigrate to London in 1938, his elderly sisters Marie, Adolfine, Pauline and Rosa remained behind in Vienna.
All four sisters died in 1942 in the camps Theresienstadt and Treblinka. Only Anna Bernays, the oldest of the Freud sisters, survived in New York. "Older people in particular often had problems getting exit visas for the destination countries," Uhl explains. Younger people were more likely to succeed in escaping - until they were banned from leaving the country in 1941, when the Nazi regime switched to extermination in parallel with the invasion of the Soviet Union.
The exhibition will be on display at Heldenplatz in Vienna until December 10. After that, it will tour as a traveling exhibition through Austrian cultural forums, especially in former countries of refuge. (Stefan Weiss, 10/15/2021)