Eichmann's Jews

The Jewish Administration of Holocaust Vienna, 1938-1945

Doron Rabinovici, Nick Somers

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780745694689
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

The question of the collaboration of Jews with the Nazi regime during the persecution and extermination of European Jewry is one of the most difficult and sensitive issues surrounding the Holocaust. How could people be forced to cooperate in their own destruction? Why would they help the Nazi authorities round up their own people for deportation, manage the 'collection points' and supervise the people being deported until the last moment?

This book is a major new study of the role of the Jews, and more specifically the 'Judenrat' or Jewish Council, in Holocaust Vienna. It was in Vienna that Eichmann developed and tested his model for a Nazi Jewish policy from 1938 onwards, and the leaders of the Viennese Jewish community were the prototypes for all subsequent Jewish councils. By studying the situation in Vienna, it is possible to gain a unique insight into the way that the Nazi regime incorporated the Jewish community into its machinery of destruction.

Drawing on recently discovered archives and extensive interviews, Doron Rabinovici explores in detail the actions of individual Jews and Jewish organizations and shows how all of their strategies to protect themselves and others were ultimately doomed to failure. His rich and insightful account enables us to understand in a new way the terrible reality of the victims' plight: faced with the stark choice of death or cooperation, many chose to cooperate with the authorities in the hope that their actions might turn out to be the lesser evil.

1
PROLOGUE

When I was teaching in Cleveland, a young Jewish political scientist, engaged to a German woman, said to my face, without flinching: ‘I know what you survivors had to do to stay alive.’ I didn't know what we had had to do, but I knew what he wanted to say. He wanted to say: ‘You walked over dead bodies.’ Should I have answered: ‘But I was only twelve’? Or said, ‘But I am a good girl, always have been’? Both answers implicate the others, my fellow prisoners. Or I could have said, ‘Where do you get off talking like that?’ and gotten angry. I said nothing, went home to my children, and was depressed. For in reality the cause of survival was almost pure chance.

Ruth Klüger, Landscapes of Memory: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered¹

Survivor guilt

The mass murder of millions of Jews was a collective crime. Although it was organized centrally, the work was split up and carried out by different authorities. Not just the police and the judiciary, but also the railways and banks, universities and industry offered their services to help isolate and rob the Jews, expel and exterminate them. What happened in the concentration camps and behind the front was officially kept secret, but here, too, quite a few people were involved in the misdeeds, and many were aware of some of the things that were going on. Only a few might have had an idea of the full magnitude of the crimes, but practically everybody knew that it was something not to be talked about.

A study of the files reveals the zeal, speed and thoroughness with which the anti-Jewish measures, decrees and laws were passed in Vienna in 1938 – a far cry from the proverbial sluggishness of Viennese bureaucracy. The crime was a social phenomenon: its progress was acclaimed in the newspapers and the plundering, beatings and pogrom that took place in November 1938, the deaths, arson and rape, were hailed triumphantly.

The mass murder would not have been possible without the indulgence and tacit consent of the population. One aspect of the misdeed was that the victims were deprived of any support. They were betrayed and at the mercy of everybody, completely defenceless in the face of the crimes committed. Before the physical annihilation, the victims were destroyed socially and psychologically.

On 15 October 1945, the head of the Vienna State Police filed charges with the public prosecutor's office against Wilhelm Reisz. During the Nazi era, Reisz had been subordinate to SS-Scharführer [squad leader] Herbert Gerbing. He was involved in the Aushebung, as it was called, of the Jews (literally ‘lifting out’) – finding out where Jews listed for deportation lived, noting their names and helping them to pack the few things they were allowed to take with them. Reisz's actions, remarked the Austrian head of the State Police, were ‘particularly reprehensible’ because he ‘brought misfortune on his compatriots in order to gain advantage for himself’.²

Why was Reisz exceptional? Was he ‘particularly reprehensible’ because otherwise Austrians did not bring misfortune on their compatriots in order to gain advantage for themselves? Not at all: the National Socialist Jewish policy in Austria was not imposed from without, by the Old German Reich against the will of the people. Austrian anti-Semites went to work with great fervour in 1938, proceeding with a fanatical sense of duty that was as yet unimaginable in Berlin. Was Wilhelm Reisz then unexceptional in a country that after 1945 styled itself merely as Hitler's ‘first victim’? No, he was an exception: Reisz was a Jew – and he survived. He ‘brought misfortune’, as the Vienna State Police put it, ‘on his compatriots’, Jews persecuted by the Nazis.

Wilhelm Reisz had been appointed by the Kultusgemeinde [Jewish Community authorities – IKG] in 1939 after he had demonstrated his ability to obtain passports even in difficult cases. When, after 1941, Jews were no longer being expelled but deported and killed, the SS demanded Jewish marshals [Ordner] from the IKG to assist the SS men in their round-ups. Josef Löwenherz, the head of the IKG, attempted initially to obstruct this request, but the SS threatened to use members of the Hitler Youth to collect Jews from their homes and take them to the assembly points. Then the Nazi authorities appointed a Jewish Gestapo informer to recruit a squad of thugs. At this point, Löwenherz agreed to designate trusted Jewish employees, who would answer directly to the SS men.³ Each member of the SS was to be accompanied by a Jewish Gruppenführer [group leader] and a troop of assistants [Ausheber – literally ‘lifters’]. Those who refused were likely to be immediately deported.

Wilhelm Reisz was Gruppenführer of the Jewish marshals under SS-Scharführer Gerbing. He had not volunteered for this task but was not in any position to refuse it. As a victim of the Nazi persecution of the Jews he was forced to cooperate, drawing attention to himself through his excessive zeal as a means of making himself indispensable and of surviving in this way. Testimony relating to Reisz was mixed. Some said under oath that they had him to thank for their lives. He had worked initially in the emigration department of the Kultusgemeinde and helped Jews to flee from the Nazis. As a Gruppenführer, he also intervened in individual cases to prevent expulsion. For most of the victims, however, he was known as the ‘meshuggene Reisz’, roughly treating the people he rounded up and singling out to the SS-Scharführer the ones who were to be deported. For the round-up operations, Gerbing sent his subordinate Reisz in advance. Gerbing himself remained in a car in front of the building, or sat comfortably in an armchair and dozed off while Jews were being ferreted out and their homes cleared. Once he had a dentist explain his medical equipment to him while Reisz was getting on with the ‘official business’. Jewish witnesses described Gerbing as a ‘would-be medical student’ with refined manners, ‘not as rough and vigorous as the other Scharführer, most of whom were butchers’, said one witness at Reisz's trial before the Austrian People's Court.⁴ The judgement reflected this estimation.

Witnesses in other trials, by contrast, present a Herbert Gerbing who was not particularly notable for his good manners. One witness of a round-up recalled at the trial of Anton Brunner: ‘When we left the house, I saw Gerbing battering a certain Dr Gross with brass knuckles until the man's eye dangled from its socket and his nose was broken.’⁵

And yet Gerbing gave many victims to understand that he had nothing to do with the round-ups. While some of his colleagues enjoyed tormenting the Jews themselves, Gerbing appears to have taken particular pleasure in letting Reisz do the work for him. Sometimes, if they were not working satisfactorily, the Ausheber, including Reisz, were beaten. The Jewish Gruppenführer had to hope for his own sake that he would find enough victims. His own life depended on it. Sometimes, if the quota was not filled, if people listed for deportation could not be found, the Jewish helpers were transported in their place. The court said on this matter: ‘The accused took on work in this way that was not in fact part of his duties.’⁶

Wilhelm Reisz also volunteered for a journey to Berlin. Three Austrian Jews had been ordered to show how the round-ups in Vienna were being carried out. On his return, he expressed his surprise to other Jews that the non-Jewish population of Berlin resisted the round-ups. One witness stated that even in Theresienstadt, Berlin Jews had complained about the Viennese methods, mentioning Reisz explicitly.⁷

The Austrian People's Court found Reisz guilty and sentenced him to fifteen years' imprisonment, including three months' hard labour. Fifteen years for a Jew who had previously been under a death sentence and had escaped the mass extermination only because as a Gruppenführer he had made himself indispensable to Gerbing.

Johann Rixinger, the Gestapo clerk responsible for Jewish affairs in Vienna, who had had enormous decision-making powers during the deportations and was implicated in the organization of the mass murder, was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment. He served only six and a half years.⁸ The Gestapo treasurer Bernhard Wittke was sentenced to three years.⁹ The notoriously brutal SS man Ernst Girzik, holder of the Blood Order, was sentenced to fifteen years' imprisonment like Reisz – albeit without having lived constantly in fear of death in the same way Reisz, as a Jew, had done. He was granted amnesty by the Austrian Federal President in December 1953.¹⁰

The Jewish Gruppenführer Wilhelm Reisz thus received five years more than Johann Rixinger. Unlike Reisz, Gestapo officials could claim that they had been obliged to obey orders. It might be pointed out in this regard, however, that police officers or soldiers in the Third Reich were able to refuse to participate in crimes against civilians and in shootings and mass killings. No one was prosecuted because he did not feel capable of taking part in genocide. All that it meant was that he would be transferred and not get promotion. Reisz's ‘zeal’, by contrast, was held against him: ‘The accused did more than was required of him. The Peop...

Table of contents

• COVER
• DEDICATION
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE
• LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
• 1: PROLOGUE
• 2: THE VIENNA KULTUSGEMEINDE BEFORE 1938
• 3: PERSECUTION
• 4: STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL AND ESCAPE
• 5: THE VIENNA JEWISH COMMUNITY UNDER NAZI CONTROL
• 6: NOVEMBER POGROM – OVERTURE TO MURDER
• 7: THE JEWISH COMMUNITY AFTER THE POGROM
• 8: BEGINNING OF THE END
• 9: DEPORTATION AND EXTERMINATION
• 10: THE ADMINISTRATION OF EXTERMINATION
• 11: THE KULTUSGEMEINDE – AUTHORITIES WITHOUT POWER
• 12: DISCUSSION OF THE JEWISH COUNCILS AND THE SITUATION IN VIENNA
• GLOSSARY
• INDEX