Black Earth(37)

Austrians separated themselves from their fellow citizens and the disappearing state not only by their behavior and by their expressions, but also by their lapel pins—like the pavement propaganda, another example of Austrian political culture. Not only Nazis but also people who had been Social Democrats or Christian Socials before March 11 began to wear Nazi lapel pins. Standing by during the “scrubbing parties” was thus by no means a neutral position or a simple act of observation. The very act of spectating communicated the new group boundaries and assigned blame for the past. We watch, they perform. The Jews were responsible for Austria, for that old order, not us. Their punishment now is proof of their complicity then. Our separation is proof of our innocence. Thus responsibility was perfectly excised, in perfect bad faith. In an instant, violence organized by race replaced two decades of political experience.

The Austrian satirist Karl Kraus had written in 1922 that Austria was a laboratory for the end of the world. It now became a realm of experimentation for the Germans, with some surprising lessons. One Viennese Jew recalled that “Austrians became antisemites all of a sudden and taught the Germans how to treat Jews.” There had been no Austrian Nuremberg Laws, no restrictions of Jews in public life, no exclusion of Jews from society. Until the day of Schuschnigg’s address, Jews had been equal citizens. Jews had an important role in the economy, and some had performed important functions in the regime. The end of the Austrian state brought violence against Austrian Jews in five weeks that was comparable to the suffering that German Jews had endured under Hitler over the course of five years. The organizers in Austria were usually Nazis, but they were operating in conditions of state collapse that allowed their revolution to proceed further and faster. Ironically, the SA, which had been humiliated in Germany in the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, did make something like the “second revolution” its murdered leaders had wanted—only in Austria rather than Germany.

What Austrian Nazis managed to achieve in a matter of hours and days was indeed an unexpected inspiration for German Nazis. Hitler himself was pleased and surprised by the immediate support for annexation. On the Heldenplatz, the grand square beneath the royal castle in Vienna, Hitler proclaimed the Anschluss. This was on March 15, four days after Schuschnigg’s capitulation. Along with Hitler came the Nazi leaders who exploited the anarchy created by the SA and turned it to their own purposes. On March 28, Hermann G?ring required an orderly redistribution of stolen Jewish property. Some four-fifths of Jewish businesses in Austria were aryanized by the end of 1938, far surpassing the pace in Germany itself. In August, Adolf Eichmann, the head of the Jewish section of Reinhard Heydrich’s SD, established in Vienna a Central Office for Jewish Emigration.

In 1938, some sixty thousand Jews left Austria, as compared to some forty thousand who left Germany. And most of those German Jews emigrated after Nazis applied the lessons that had been learned in Vienna.

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In 1935, German Jews had been reduced to second-class citizens. In 1938, some Nazis discovered that the most effective way to separate Jews from the protection of the state was to destroy the state. Any legal discrimination would be complicated by its unforeseen consequences for other aspects of the law and in bureaucratic practice. Even matters that might seem simple, such as expropriation and emigration, proceeded rather slowly in Nazi Germany. When Austria was destroyed, by contrast, Austria’s Jews no longer enjoyed any state protection and were victimized by a majority that wished to distance itself from the past and align itself with the future. Statelessness opened a window of opportunity for those who were ready for violence and theft. By the very logic of Anschluss, the Nazi state itself had to close that window, since Austria was meant to become a part of Germany, and anarchy fomented by the SA would undo its own ability to rule. But even a moment of temporary statelessness had profound consequences. March 1938 was the first time that Nazis could do as they pleased with Jews, and the result was humiliation, pain, and flight.

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Avraham Stern, the radical Zionist and client of the Polish regime, happened to be in central Europe at the time. He was visiting Warsaw for consultations with Polish authorities after a Revisionist Zionist congress in Prague in January 1938. On his way back from Poland to Palestine he stopped in Austria and spoke to the new Nazi authorities about the emigration of a few right-wing comrades to Palestine—one of the men he brought out believed that Stern had “negotiated with Eichmann.” This was the kind of thing that Polish authorities had been hoping that Stern could do, though on a far larger scale.