On March 13, 1938 Austria was officially annexed by Nazi Germany and became an
integral part of the Third Reich. The Anschluss (union of
Germany and Austria) marked the beginning of a deliberate
anti-Jewish campaign marked by violence and organized looting.
During the first week many Jews were dismissed from their
posts, all Jews were expelled from the army and numerous
Jewish communal leaders were arrested. An Aryanization campaign
was launched to take over all Jewish businesses, and by the
summer of 1939, 18,800 such enterprises had been seized from
their original owners.
The Nazis initially sought to facilitate the mass emigration abroad of Austrian
Jewry and entrusted the task to Adolf Eichmann, who opened
a special office for this purpose (Zentralstelle fur Judische
Auswanderurg) in August 1938 in the Rothschild palace in
Vienna. The Jews leaving Austria were systematically stripped
of all their possessions after being forced to pay an exorbitant
emigration tax.
In the wake of Kristallnacht, Eichmann
deported numerous Jews to concentration camps and speeded
up the liquidation of the provincial Jewish communities.
By the outbreak of World War II, over 126,000 out of an original
population of 185,000 Jews had already emigrated form Austria
and an additional 2,000 Jews managed to leave before emigration
was prohibited on November 10, 1941.
Shortly after the outbreak of World
War II, the Nazis began deporting Austrian Jews to concentration
camps or to sites of mass murder in Eastern Europe. In early
October 1939, over one thousand youth and elderly Jews were
deported to Buchenwald and in the same month two additional
transports were sent to the Nisko area of Poland. In February
and March 1941, about 5,000 Jews were deported to Kielce,
Poland, from whence they were sent in 1942 to the Belzec
and Chelmno death camps. Mass deportations of the remaining
Austrian Jews commenced in mid-October 1941: 5,000 Jews to
Lodz, and later in the same year an additional 5,000 to the
same ghetto and 3,000 to ghettoes in the Baltics. Following
the Wannsee conference in January 1942, the deportations
from Austria were accelerated: 3,200 to Riga; 8,500 to Minsk
and 6,000 to Lublin. Later that year 14,000 elderly Jews
were deported to Theresienstadt.
In November 1942, the Vienna Jewish
community was dissolved and only 7,000 Jews, most of whom
were married to non-Jews, remained in Austria, where those
fit for work were taken for forced labor. Deportations to
the East continued, albeit at a slower pace, and by the end
of the war only 1,000 Jew survived in Vienna, one-third in
hiding.
More than 65,000 Austrian Jews were
murdered or perished in Eastern Europe during World War II.
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