Deportations of Jews from Vienna

On 15 February 1941 a train left the Aspang station (Aspangbahnhof), the smallest of Vienna’s terminus stations, carrying, under police escort, about a thousand Viennese Jews: men, women, children and the elderly. Its destination was Opole Lubelskie, a small town in the Lublin District of the General Government. It was the first of five transports which by 12 March had carried some 5,000 people from Vienna to five small towns in occupied Poland, according to the figures of the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance (Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes, DÖW). The deportations were carried out by the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, set up in 1938 by Adolf Eichmann, and they were initiated by Vienna’s new Gauleiter and Reich Governor, Baldur von Schirach, who wanted to obtain flats for “Aryan” Viennese in this way.

It is often written that on this day “the deportation of Austrian Jews to ghettos in Poland began”. This needs two qualifications. It was not the first deportation from Vienna: as early as October 1939, under the Nisko Plan, Eichmann had deported more than fifteen hundred Viennese men to the San river. Nor were these yet ghettos in the full sense: the deportees were sent to overcrowded small towns in which the Germans were only beginning to designate Jewish quarters. In Kielce and Opatów closed ghettos were established at the beginning of April 1941, after the Viennese had arrived. Moreover, there were hardly any “Austrian” Jews outside Vienna by then – by 1940 almost all those from the other federal provinces had been forced to move to the capital.

Vienna’s Jews since the Anschluss

Before the Anschluss in March 1938 the Jewish communities in Austria numbered about 182,000 members, 167,000 of them in Vienna. Under the criteria of the Nuremberg Laws, introduced in Austria in May 1938, some 200,000 people were classed as Jews, about 90 per cent of them living in Vienna. From the first days after the Germans marched in they were beaten, humiliated and robbed, and their shops and flats were taken over by party members. In November 1938, during Kristallnacht, almost all of Vienna’s synagogues were burnt down, and several thousand men were sent to Dachau.

Nazi policy at that time aimed to push the Jews out of the country at the price of their property. In August 1938 the Central Office for Jewish Emigration (Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung) began operating in the requisitioned Rothschild palace. It was in effect run by Eichmann, and from the autumn of 1938 one of his closest associates was a young Austrian SS man, Alois Brunner. The office gathered under one roof all the agencies needed for departure and extracted taxes, fees and a “levy” for the benefit of poorer emigrants from those leaving. The Viennese model was extended to the whole Reich in January 1939. The Jewish community, closed down in March 1938 and reopened in May under SS supervision, was forced, under the direction of Josef Löwenherz, to organise departures and relief for the impoverished.

By October 1941 more than 130,000 people had managed to flee Austria. Those who remained were mostly older, poorer and without any prospect of a visa. Evicted from their homes, they had to crowd into “collective flats”, above all in Leopoldstadt, Vienna’s second district. According to the calculations of the historian Jonny Moser, at the end of 1940 the city still had 61,135 inhabitants classed as Jews.

Schirach’s request

At the beginning of August 1940 Adolf Hitler recalled the unpopular Gauleiter Josef Bürckel from Vienna and entrusted his offices to Baldur von Schirach, until then leader of the Hitler Youth. The new Gauleiter and Reich Governor soon returned to an issue that the Viennese NSDAP had been raising since 1938: the housing shortage. Removing the Jews from the city was to free several tens of thousands of flats for party functionaries, soldiers’ families and officials.

At the beginning of October 1940 Schirach put the matter to Hitler. According to Martin Bormann’s note of a conversation in the Reich Chancellery on 2 October, also attended by the Governor-General Hans Frank and the Gauleiter of East Prussia, Erich Koch, Schirach declared that he still had more than 50,000 Jews in Vienna whom Frank would have to take over. For months Frank had been protesting against more deportees being sent to the General Government, but this time the decision was taken over his head. On 3 December 1940 the head of the Reich Chancellery, Hans Lammers, informed Schirach that the Führer, “in view of the special conditions prevailing in Vienna”, had decided that some 60,000 Viennese Jews should be deported to the General Government while the war was still on.

The Viennese plan fitted into the SS’s broader intentions. At the turn of 1940 and 1941 Reinhard Heydrich was preparing another resettlement programme, which envisaged deporting hundreds of thousands of Poles and Jews from the territories annexed to the Reich into the General Government. After the abandonment of the Madagascar Plan, occupied Poland had once again become the place to which the Nazis wanted to “get rid of” the Jews of the Reich, although the decision to murder them had not yet been taken; it was, however, anticipated from the outset that many would die of hunger and disease.

Organising the deportations

Preparing the transports fell to the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, which from the beginning of 1941 was headed by Brunner; since December 1939 Eichmann had been running the section for Jewish affairs and evacuations in the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin. On 12 February 1941 representatives of the party, the Gestapo and the administration met in Vienna to discuss the rules of the deportations. It was decided, among other things, that for the time being Jews living in mixed marriages and foreign nationals would not be deported, and the special treatment of Jewish disabled veterans of the First World War was discussed for the first time. On 13 February Eichmann sent a telex to all Gestapo offices on the “evacuation of Jews from Vienna to the General Government”. Viennese Jews were forbidden to leave the city without the Central Office’s permission – a similar ban was introduced for the whole Reich only in September 1941.

The Jewish community had to supply lists, send out summonses and appoint stewards to help with the round-ups. Those summoned were held for several days at assembly points set up in two schools in Leopoldstadt, at Castellezgasse 35 and Kleine Sperlgasse 2a. From there they were driven in broad daylight on open lorries through the city to the Aspang station, often to the jeers of passers-by. The choice of a small, little-used station in the Landstraße district was meant to limit disruption to rail traffic, but the deportations were not concealed. On the way the trains were guarded by the Order Police. Austrian historians stress that in February and March 1941 Vienna rehearsed the entire procedure – assembly points, lists, escorts, the seizure of flats and property – that was applied in the autumn of the same year to the great deportations from the whole Reich.

Five transports

Each of the five trains carried about a thousand people. Austrian studies give the total number of deportees as anything from just over 5,000 to 5,031:

• 15 February 1941 – to Opole Lubelskie,
• 19 February – to Kielce, in the Radom District,
• 26 February – again to Opole Lubelskie (according to the DÖW, the two transports to Opole carried 2,003 people in all),
• 5 March – to Modliborzyce near Janów Lubelski,
• 12 March – to Łagów and Opatów in the Radom District.

Among the deportees were many elderly people and lone women with children, because most of the young and the better-off had already managed to leave. According to studies of Opatów, the last transport consisted mainly of women, children, the sick and the elderly.

In the small Polish towns

On arrival the Viennese encountered poverty such as they had never known. In Opole Lubelskie the German authorities designated a “Jewish residential district”, into which, besides the local Jews, people expelled from Puławy, Kazimierz Dolny and the surrounding villages were also brought. In March 1941 some 8,000 people lived there, seven to ten to a room, without sewerage or running water. The newcomers were put in collective quarters, where they slept on the floor. In winter hunger and cold reigned, and soon a typhus epidemic broke out. A report of the Jewish Social Self-Help (PL) of 13 February 1942 recorded that over the previous year 18.8 per cent of Opole’s pre-war inhabitants, 21.4 per cent of the deportees from Vienna and 24 per cent of those expelled from other parts of the General Government had died there. From May 1941 those fit for work were sent to forced labour camps, at Dęblin among other places.

In Kielce the German authorities ordered the creation of a ghetto on 31 March 1941, into which all Jews had to move within a few days; the gates were closed on 5 April. In time some 27,000 people were crammed into it, in buildings meant for 15,000 at most. The Opatów ghetto was established on 6 April 1941, and the arrival of nearly a thousand Viennese, divided between Opatów and Łagów, made the situation even worse in a town that was already home to several hundred refugees from other regions.

The local communities, themselves robbed and impoverished, shared what they had with the newcomers but could not support them. The Viennese depended on parcels and money orders sent by their families and by the Jewish community in Vienna. The surviving letters and postcards, which the DÖW published under a title taken from one of them – “…in this wretched nest” – speak of hunger, of a sense of having been cast out beyond the bounds of civilisation, and of attempts, despite everything, to work, teach the children and preserve their dignity. A Viennese woman, Gertruda Zeisler, wrote from the Kielce ghetto that her work looking after children allowed her to forget her dark thoughts.

The deportations halted

After the fifth transport, in mid-March 1941, the deportations were abruptly halted. The railways and the army needed the full capacity of the lines leading east: the Wehrmacht was preparing for the Balkans campaign and, above all, for the invasion of the USSR planned in Directive No. 21. The people already gathered at the assembly points for a sixth transport were released and sent home. Of the 60,000 people whom Hitler had allowed to be deported, about one twelfth had been taken away.

Brunner then announced a “resettlement operation” within Vienna itself: Jews were to leave all districts except the second, ninth and twentieth. Löwenherz had to call on them in the community newspaper to “move closer together”, to keep only the most essential furniture and to sell, give away or burn the rest. Brunner presented this crowding together as an alternative to further deportations. It was a false hope.

The fate of the deportees

The pause lasted only six months. In the summer of 1941, after the invasion of the USSR, policy towards the Jews moved from expulsion to murder. In August emigration was forbidden to men aged 18 to 45, and in October to all Jews in the Reich; from September they had to wear the Star of David. On 15 October 1941 the first train of a new wave of deportations left Vienna, for the Łódź ghetto. Others went to Kaunas, Minsk, Riga, Izbica, Sobibór and Theresienstadt. By the autumn of 1942 Vienna was almost “free of Jews” – about 8,000 people remained, mostly living in mixed marriages or born of them.

The Viennese deported in February and March 1941 were murdered together with Polish Jews in Operation Reinhard. The first transport from Opole Lubelskie left for the Bełżec extermination camp on 31 March 1942, and further ones in May and October for Sobibór. The Kielce ghetto was liquidated on 20–24 August 1942: some 20,000–21,000 people were deported to Treblinka, and about 1,200 were shot on the spot. The Jews of Opatów were also sent to Treblinka in October 1942, and in the same month the Jews of Modliborzyce were driven to Zaklików and deported from there to Bełżec. Many of the Viennese did not live to see those days – they died of hunger and typhus or perished in labour camps.

Very few survived. According to the DÖW, of the more than two thousand people deported to Opole, 28 survived the war; other Austrian tallies give 79 survivors for Opole, and 21 survivors from Kielce, 13 from Modliborzyce and 16 from Opatów are known by name. Of the roughly 5,000 people deported in February and March 1941, therefore, a few per cent at most survived the war.

Place in the war

The five trains of February and March 1941 were a short but significant episode. For the first time the authorities of the Reich deported to the occupied East not selected men, as to Nisko in 1939, but whole families, with children and the elderly, with the intention of being rid of them for ever. They did so at the request of a Gauleiter who wanted flats, with Hitler’s approval and using an apparatus created earlier to enforce emigration. The procedures tested in Vienna – lists drawn up by the community, assembly points, escorted trains, the seizure of vacated flats – became the model for the deportations that from the autumn of 1941 engulfed the whole Reich and then occupied Europe. Brunner, who ran them, later organised deportations from Berlin, Salonika, France and Slovakia.

According to Moser, the Holocaust claimed some 65,000 Austrian Jews, the vast majority of them Viennese. In 1942 Schirach boasted publicly that by deporting “tens of thousands” of Jews from Vienna to the ghettos of the East he was making “an active contribution to European culture”. In 1946 the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg sentenced him to 20 years’ imprisonment for these deportations, finding that he had known that, at best, a miserable existence in the ghettos awaited the deportees. Eichmann was executed in Israel in 1962. Brunner escaped punishment – he died in Syria, probably in the early 2000s.