Letters from Vienna #38
1938
“Today, on Shrove Tuesday,” Victor Klemperer wrote on the 1st of March, 1938, “…Hitler presented Field Marshal Göring with a marshal’s baton… They have no idea about how ridiculous they actually are… Their comedy consists of infamy against the defenceless. Here, in Dresden, there is a carnival parade: “Exodus of the Children of Israel”. Probably as a prelude to a week of propaganda beginning on March 4 (meetings and marches): “Either peace between Nations or Jewish Dictatorship…”
On the 20th of March, a Sunday, he wrote: “The last few weeks have been the bleakest of our lives so far. The tremendous act of violence of the Austrian annexation, the appalling increase in power both internally and externally, the defenceless, trembling fear of England, France, etc. We won’t live to see the end of the Third Reich…”
On 12th of March 1938 the Nazis had marched into Austria and Austrians had begun to steal flats, cars, petrol and other items belonging to Jews.
On the 16th of March Egon Friedell, who lived in the Gentzgasse, in Vienna’s 18th district, told the Nazis who’d come to pick him up to wait a moment. He then went to his study, called out to the pedestrians below to watch out and jumped out of the window.
On the 1st of April the first transport of Austrians, which included the writers Raoul Auerheimer and Jura Soyfer, was sent to Dachau.
The plundering of Jewish property was extremely thorough: houses, hotels, bars, cafes, shops, restaurants and fairground attractions (including the famous Ferris wheel) were confiscated while the Kunsthistorisches Museum acquired roughly 20,000 objects.
For Franz Stangl (the Austrian-born SS commandant of Sobibór and Treblinka), who was in a good position to know, the whole point of the Shoah was to get hold of the property of the Jews.
In 1938 there were roughly 166,000 Jews (approximately 10% of the city’s population) and about 59 synagogues in Vienna.
Over 100,000 emigrated before the war (of whom about 18,000 were later caught in other European countries). Another 18,500 managed to escape before the general ban on emigration in the fall of 1941.
Between October 1939 and September 1942, the vast majority of Jews were sent to labor, concentration or extermination camps and in November 1942 the Jewish community of Vienna was officially dissolved.
By June 1945 the number of Jews, those who had survived either in hiding or the concentration and labor camps, was estimated to be about 4,000.
This time around the Genocide by Jab is aimed at everyone and not just Jews (although the fact that it began in Israel is by no means an accident). This time around Klaus Schwab is telling us that we’ll have nothing and be happy. For him clearly: death is a good thing.
My mother told me that my family lived in continual fear and anxiety about being sent to a concentration camp, not because the family was Jewish but because my grandfather was openly and fiercely critical of the Nazis. He’d served in the First World War on the Eastern Front (where he’d fraternised with the Russians), was skeptical and mistrustful of the Nazis and was worried about the prospect of war. As it turned out: he happened to be right.
It is strange to be told today that Nazis aren’t “extreme right-wingers” but are actually to be found on the left of the political spectrum. I wonder what the members of my family who became Nazis would have said to that.
One side-effect of the current crisis is that I have become reconciled to the idea that there were Nazis in my family (if people can be so easily brainwashed today, I tell myself, how much easier was it then!).
One member of my family, who knew Visconti, got extremely angry when I mentioned the fact that he was a communist. “He wasn’t a communist!” she screamed. The worst insult she could hurl was to call them a “communist”. Indeed, from my experience of those Nazis I knew (all of whom have since passed away), the world could be divided into Nazis (the good) and Communists (the bad). There really was very little in between.
What does it say about our society today if the Nazis are now regarded as being on the “left”, the party of decency and compassion? Are we worse than the Nazis? Possibly. The brain-washing is the same, if not worse, and the callous willingness to sacrifice the lives and liberties of others and to ignore their plight, is perhaps even more intense. What does that say about the modern soul? Do we have one anymore?