Vienna was ahead of Berlin in the expulsion of Jews

In 1922, controversial Austrian journalist and writer Hugo Bettauer’s novel “The City Without Jews” was published. The book was a political satire about Austrian antisemitism.

A politician comes to power on the slogan “Throw out the Jews.” An expulsion law is passed. Vienna’s Jews are loaded onto stock car trains and deported eastward.

In Bettauer’s novel, the absence of Jews causes the economy to dramatically slide. Vienna demands the return of the Jews. The expulsion law is repealed, and the Jews are welcomed back.

Bettauer had converted to the Lutheran church at 18, a fact that meant nothing to his critics. The founder of the Austrian Nazi party described the novel as “the most impudent mockery ever by a foreign-race people of an indigenous population whose hospitality they enjoy.” The novel sold 250,00 copies in 1922 and was made into a feature film.

Bettauer’s novel was eerily prophetic. From the targeting of Jewish wealth to the expulsion of Austria’s Jews, it all became reality after Germany’s Anschluss (forcible uniting of Germany and Austria in 1938).

Bettauer didn’t live to see Vienna go from the second largest Jewish city in Europe to a few thousand Jews by the end of World War II. He was killed in 1925, shot five times by a 21-year-old dental technician, a Nazi who lived with his parents. At his trial, a jury found the young Nazi guilty of murder. But the presiding judge acquitted the killer.

Douglas Smith quotes Austrian historian Gerhard Botz: “From 1938 on, Vienna was always a few steps ahead of Germany in the process of persecution of the Jews. Not only were the comparable measures applied earlier in Vienna than in Germany, but they could also count on much broader support among the non-Jewish population.”

Historian Douglas Smith (not the actor by the same name) is author of “The City Without Jews: Life and Death in Nazi Vienna” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Smith has been going to Russia for some 40 years, studying the history, people and culture. His books cover various aspects of Russian history. “The City Without Jews” is his first non-Russian history.

Smith combines macro- and micro-history to tell the story of Austria’s embrace of Nazism. He details how the Austrian government was brought down “from without and within, by enemies foreign and domestic.”

On the evening of March 11, 1938, before the German Army marched into Austria, Austrian Nazis began seizing government buildings and started looting Jewish apartments in Vienna. The looters carted off money, jewelry, furniture and art.

The looting shifted to a new phase after the Nazi takeover: state confiscation of Jewish assets.

The book’s micro-history includes accounts of those who attempted to emigrate; for example, Hermann and Chana Hauser. In June 1938, Hermann was imprisoned in Dachau. Then in September 1938, Hermann became one of some 2,400 prisoners sent to the newly opened Buchenwald concentration camp. Meanwhile, his wife Chana was busy doing everything she could to obtain their emigration.

Smith writes: “One day she heard someone say that a Texas grocer named Joe Weingarten was offering affidavits of support (so that the prospective immigrant would not become a burden to the state) to people he didn’t even know. She wrote down his name and address and sent him a letter explaining the family’s plight.

“He wrote back to say he had given out so many affidavits that the State Department wouldn’t let him submit any more. His brother-in-law, Irving Alexander, however, was willing to help, and he did. He provided Chana with an affidavit.”

Chana managed to have Hermann freed from Buchenwald in February 1939. Hermann, Chana and their son Ernst boarded a train to Zurich. They finally made it to New York. Ernst later said the Alexanders in Texas never asked for any recognition of the gift they gave the Hausers. “Theirs was the highest form of charity. Without it, we would have gone up in smoke,” Ernst testified.

Those familiar with their local history know something about Joseph Weingarten. From modest beginnings as the owner of a downtown Houston grocery store, Weingarten founded a chain of supermarkets throughout Texas. He also served as a board member of the Texas Medical Center and was a founder of Beth Yeshurun synagogue.

Alexander Irving and his wife Harriet operated apparel stores in Hereford and Amarillo for more than 30 years. Of course, these details are beyond the scope of Smith’s book.

One of the features that makes this book a worthy read is how the Nazis legislated social values; for example, the issue of mixed marriages between Jews and non-Jews in Austria which numbered some 17,000 between 1919 and 1937.

Douglas writes that authorities went to great lengths to appeal to Aryan wives to divorce their Jewish husbands. They used threats, intimidation and lies that ex-husbands would be exempt from deportation. “Marital fidelity was remarkably strong among mixed race couples,” writes Douglas. Few divorced. More than 90% of Jews in mixed marriages in Austria survived the war.

Another feature that makes this book special is that Douglas had access to the diary of Mignon Langnas. On July 18, 1939, Langnas began what would become a six-year-long diary of her life in Nazi-ruled Vienna. During the war years, she saw more than 108 Jews extracted from her building who then perished.

Langnas was able to take a class and earned a nursing certificate. She began working 20-hour shifts at the Malzgasse, one of the few Jewish hospitals the Nazis allowed to operate. Her skills as a nurse probably kept her from being deported.

October 1942 marked a halt to deportations from Vienna. The Nazi administration declared Vienna free of Jews. Of course, that wasn’t true. There were some 8,000 remaining in Vienna. Many of them were people protected by Aryan spouses.

In January 1943, the deportations resumed, although on a much smaller scale. Some 1,216 Jews were deported over the course of the year, mostly to Theresienstadt.

Langnas watched as nearly every Jew she knew disappeared into the camps. She endured as the Allies saturated Vienna with aerial bombs, reducing the city to rubble. She was one of few Viennese Jews to experience the liberation and the period directly after the war. Finally, she was able to immigrate to her family in the U.S.

About the immediate post-war Vienna, Langnas wrote: “Everybody hates the Jews – no one feels the least remorse or any sense of guilt – and so how will things ever change?”

Given all she endured, it’s an appropriate question.