Austria and the Legacy of the Holocaust
by Robert S. Wistrich

Postwar Policies

The SPÖ itself moved to the right after 1945, breaking with its prewar Austro-Marxist legacy. Its dominant figures now were party chairman Adolf Schärf, interior minister Oskar Helmer and the president of the republic, Karl Renner. When it came to the “Jewish Question” Helmer was the most influential. He blamed the old party leadership under Otto Bauer (of Jewish origin) for the fiasco of the February 1934 workers’ rising and the resulting collapse of democracy in the First Republic. He attributed the radical line of the older Austro-Marxism to the preponderant role of Jewish intellectuals in the prewar party, which, in his opinion, had provoked the class enemy and dangerously strengthened fascist tendencies in the Austrian middle classes. According to Helmer, the SPÖ before 1934 had been burdened by Jews (jüdisch belastet) who had simply been too numerous in the party leadership. This explains why, together with Schärf, he sought to dissuade Socialist functionariesof Jewish origin from returning after 1945. The postwar Socialist leaders did not want to be saddled with a new “Jewish Question.” The new leaders were well aware that, ever since the defeat of 1934, anti-intellectual and anti-Semitic sentiments had made headway among the rank and file of the Socialist workers movement. Rather than fight these trends, populists like Helmer nurtured them, even played on them, and made anti-Jewish remarks whenever expedient. For example, in a cabinet meeting on November 9, 1948, Helmer echoed the common Austrian prejudice that Jews had too much influence in business and finance, that they engaged in dishonest practices and were allergic to manual labor. Though there were only a few thousand native-born Jews left in Austria after the Holocaust, he declared that “everywhere I can see only Jewish expansion, among the doctors and in commerce-especially in Vienna.” He pointedly stated that the Jews would have “to earn their living like everyone else in Austria.” Moreover, he added, since the English began fighting the Jews in Palestine, the “atrocities of the Jews” would affect world opinion in such a way as to help the Austrian government continue to procrastinate in negotiations over restitution. The Jews, Helmer concluded, would understand this when they “realize that a lot of people are opposed to them.” This Socialist echoed the views of conservative ministers that there could be no “special treatment” for Jews. After all, he reminded his colleagues, Austrian Nazis had had everything taken away from them in 1945. Nazi academics now found themselves working on building sites!

Austrian president Karl Renner also showed considerably more empathy for the Nazis-especially the smaller fry who were ready to declare loyalty to the Austrian state-than for their Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Even before de-Nazification had begun, he warned his cabinet colleagues against “doing the same as the Nazis did,” taking revenge on those who had simply followed orders, with no idea that they were supporting a war of aggression. In a speech before officials of the new Austrian administration on April 30, 1945, he expressed the hope that the little Nazis “can all go peacefully back to their normal life and that they will be able to carry on quietly in their jobs.” It was not right, Renner believed, to confiscate their property. At the same time, Renner opposed a special law compensating Jews, which, he noted, did not address the claims of the socialist movement, whose property and assets had been confiscated by the “clerico-fascist” state in 1934. Renner’s comparison implied that the repression of the labor movement by “Austro-fascism” was somehow analogous to the mass murder of Jews by the Nazis. Worse still, it suggested that those who had been persecuted for “political” reasons deserved at least equal priority with those who had suffered for “racial” reasons. Both these assumptions survived intact among most Social Democrats well into the Kreisky era.

Renner’s indifference to Jewish suffering between 1938 and 1945 probably reflected a combination of opportunism and latent German nationalism (he had welcomed Hitler’s Anschluss) rather than anti-Semitism per se. This was not the case with Helmer, who showed extreme cruelty to Otto Leichter on his return to Vienna, never bothering to express condolences about his wife, Käthe (a militant Jewish Socialist leader in her own right), who had been murdered in a concentration camp. Helmer made it plain to Leichter that émigré Jews were not welcome in Vienna. He also told Rosa Jochmann, a Socialist leader who had been in the Ravensbrück camp, to stop talking about her wartime experiences there as this would put voters off.

Helmer’s desire to win over anticlerical pro-Nazi voters in the bourgeois camp, and thereby to weaken the Austrian People’s Party (Österreichische Volkspartei-the postwar successor to the prewar Christian Socials) was clearly a factor in his attitude. He made a point of cultivating the war veterans, and behind the scenes he also contributed to the establishment of a third party in 1949, the League of Independents (Verband der Unabhängigen, VdU), which represented ex-Nazis, German nationalists, and some liberal malcontents. Its top officials had for the most part been members of the NSDAP and a few of them had even served short prison sentences after 1945. The chairman of this newly established political grouping, Dr. Herbert Kraus, called for compensation for ex-Nazis, the abolition of de-Nazification laws, and the rapid integration of the ehemaligen (former members of the NSDAP) in Austrian society. He vigorously defended the rights of the “Aryanizers”-those who had taken over property confiscated from Jews-and of wounded Wehrmacht soldiers, even members of the SS who had “heroically” defended Austria in what was allegedly a preventive and defensive war. The VdU stigmatized the de-Nazification law, comparing it to Nazi terror. Allied internment camps were depicted (grotesquely) as equivalent to concentration camps: the ex-Nazis were being martyred! In the March 1949 elections the VdU won fifteen seats in the Austrian parliament. Shortly after, pension rights for ex-Nazi civil servants were restored.

Incredibly, influential voices echoed the views of the VdU and called for the amnesty of war criminals. The archbishop of Salzburg, Andreas Rohracher, warned that the anti-Nazi legislation was too harsh and would only create martyrs. Karl Renner had spoken out against ostracizing the Nazis since 1945, and in 1948 Helmer argued that they had indeed suffered enough-a position endorsed by Chancellor Figl. Unlike the situation in Germany, conservatives and Socialists in Austria were already competing to win votes from the German national camp and former Nazis. This was tacitly accepted by the Western Allies, since the onset of the cold war had made fear of Soviet intentions in Austria paramount, freezing any pressure for further de-Nazification.

For its part, the Jewish community was far too small, fractured, lacking in leadership, and devoid of economic, political, or cultural influence to affect the new balance of forces. Already in the early 1950s Austrian Jews found themselves cold-shouldered as the ehemaligen (ex-Nazis) were integrated into positions of administrative, judicial, economic and executive power. In contrast to Germany, there was no countervailing “philosemitic” discourse, no official vocabulary of “reconciliation” or “restitution,” no Austrian analogue to Adenauer’s stand that “there had to be recompense if we wished once more to gain respect and standing among the world’s nations.”

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