Jews and Intermarriage in Nazi Austria

Jews and Intermarriage in Nazi Austria Evan Burr Bukey explores the experience of intermarried couples – marriages with...

Author: Evan Burr Bukey

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Jews and Intermarriage in Nazi Austria Evan Burr Bukey explores the experience of intermarried couples – marriages with Jewish and non-Jewish partners – and their children in Vienna after Germany’s seizure of Austria in 1938. These families coped with changing regulations that disrupted family life; pitted relatives against each other; and raised profound questions about religious, ethnic, and national identity. Bukey finds that although intermarried couples lived in a state of fear and anxiety, many managed to mitigate, delay, or even escape Nazi sanctions. Drawing on extensive archival research, his study reveals how hundreds of intermarried couples pursued ingenious strategies to preserve their assets, to improve their “racial” status, and above all to safeguard the position of their children. It also analyzes cases of intermarried partners who chose divorce, as well as persons involved in illicit liaisons with non-Jews. Jews and Intermarriage in Nazi Austria concludes that although most of Vienna’s intermarried Jews survived the Holocaust, several hundred Jewish partners were deported to their deaths, and children of such couples were frequently subjected to Gestapo harassment. Evan Burr Bukey is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Arkansas. He is the author of Hitler’s Hometown: Linz Austria, 1908–1945 (1986) and Hitler’s Austria: Popular Sentiment in the Nazi Era, 1938–1945 (2000), as well as numerous articles and reviews. Professor Bukey was a Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge in 1993–94. He received the National Jewish Book Award in 2000 and the Austrian Cultural Book Prize in 2001.

Jews and Intermarriage in Nazi Austria

EVAN BURR BUKEY University of Arkansas

cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo, Mexico City Cambridge University Press 32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, ny 10013-2473, usa www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107002852 © Evan Burr Bukey 2011 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2011 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data Bukey, Evan Burr, 1940– Jews and intermarriage in Nazi Austria / Evan Burr Bukey. p. cm. isbn 978-1-107-00285-2 (hardback) 1. Intermarriage – Austria – Vienna. 2. Jews – Austria – Vienna. 3. Interfaith marriage – Austria – Vienna. I. Title. hq1031.b795 2010 306.84′30899240436–dc22 2010031512 isbn 978-1-107-00285-2 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

To the memory of my parents

Contents

List of Tables List of Figures Acknowledgments Glossary and Abbreviations 1

page ix x xi xv

Prologue: Jews and Intermarriage in Austria The Problem of Intermarriage in the Third Reich Jews and Intermarriage in Vienna before the Anschluß Impact of the Anschluß Nazi Policy Toward Families of Mixed Blood The Initial Response of Mixed Families and the Consideration of Choices

2

Contesting Racial Status: Successes and Failures Irregularities in Nazi Racial Policy The Dilemmas of Ancestral Proof The Appellate Process Administrative Appeals Nazi Activists Minors Soldiers and War Widows Biological Exemptions Marital Exemptions Other Exemptions Judicial Appeals Minors Adults The Elderly Conclusions vii

1 1 4 9 14 17 23 23 25 28 33 36 41 46 48 58 59 60 62 68 75 78

Contents

viii

3

4

Intermarried Divorce, 1938–1945 The Option of Divorce: Choice or Coercion? Marriage and Divorce in Austria, 1783–1938 Impact of the Anschluß and the Marriage Law of 1938 Intermarried Divorce: Political or Personal? Preliminary Proceedings Standardizing Procedures Matrimonial Repeals and Annulments Conventional Divorces Court Proceedings, 1938–1941 The Impact of Deportations to the East Court Proceedings 1941–1945 Suits Filed on Charges of Desertion Exile Divorce Suits against Deportees Other Cases Conclusions

82 82 85 88 92 98 100 102 110 111 116 118 119 122 124 129 133

Tightening the Noose: Arrests, Deportations, and Forced Labor, 1941–1945

141

Berlin’s Renewed Assault on Intermarried Couples and Their Offspring The Situation in Vienna: Local Initiatives and Official Policy Gender Differences Wives and Mothers Husbands and Fathers The Assault on the Mischlinge, 1942–1943 Policing “Interracial” Love Affairs Dissolving Legal “Mixed” Liaisons Resistance? The Viennese League of Mischlinge Viennese Mischlinge before the Nazi Bench Conscription and Compulsory Labor, 1943–1945

5

Epilogue and Conclusions

Bibliography Index

141 148 153 153 157 163 165 173 178 183 186 190 201 209

Tables

1. Racial Reclassification in Vienna, 1938–44 page 31 2. Age Distribution of “Racial” Appellants in Gau Vienna, 1938–44 32 3. Gender of “Racial” Appellants in Gau Vienna, 1938–44 33 4. Administrative “Racial Reclassification” in Gau Vienna, 1938–44 34 5. Judicial “Racial Reclassification” in Gau Vienna, 1938–44 34 6. Marriage and Divorce Numbers in Vienna, 1935–48 93 7. Intermarried Couples in Vienna, 1939–45 95 8. Intermarried Divorces in Vienna, 1938–45 97 9. Duration of Marriage among Mixed Couples in Vienna and Hamburg 98

ix

Figures

1. Lotte Freiberger and Her Mother Marie, 1929 2. Chart of Nuremberg Laws Depicting Degrees of “Jewishness” 3. Anthropological Field Kit Used in Biological Examinations 4. Dr. Josef Wastl (1892–1968), Vienna’s Foremost Racial Scientist 5. Gusti Moser and Her Sons, Gustav and Otto, 1899 6. Anton Wintersperger, President of the Viennese Court of Civil Affairs, 1938–45 7. Marie, Lotte, and Moritz Freiberger on the Kärtnerstrasse, 1939 8. Otto Horn (1923–91), Founder of the “Mischlingliga”

x

page 14 16 51 52 71 102 180 182

Acknowledgments

This study of the fate of Jewish–Gentile couples in Hitler’s Vienna grew out of numerous telephone conversations with Henry Friedlander and John Lukacs, both of whom spent hours relating harrowing tales of their adolescent years in wartime Europe. Henry answered questions about the views of his non-Jewish relatives in Berlin prior to his own deportation to Lodz; John offered fascinating details of a renegade life protecting his bridge-playing Jewish mother in a cellar during the German occupation and Russian siege of Budapest. For their assistance and wise counsel over the years I am most indebted. I also wish to express my gratitude at the outset of this project to Marian Kaplan and Beate Meyer, the foremost authorities on Jewish life in the Third Reich, for offering helpful email hints on how to investigate the Nazi state’s reach into home and family. Most of the unpublished records examined in Vienna for this project are housed in the Wiener Stadt – und Landesarchiv, now located in a shopping center in the renovated Gasometer. Working in such a comfortable up-to-date environment greatly facilitated my research, particularly with the gracious assistance of numerous archivists such as Dr. Brigitte Riegele. Longtime colleagues and friends in other Viennese repositories also deserve heartfelt gratitude. Among them are the General Director of the Austrian State Archives, Dr. Lorenz Mikoletzky, and the staff of the Documentation Archives of the Austrian Resistance, particularly Dr. Ursula Schwarz, Dr. Elisabeth Klamper, and my old friend Dr. Jonny Moser. Most of all, I wish to thank Dr. Winfried Garscha, who also serves as the Co-Director of the Austrian Research Center for Postwar Justice. He took an interest in this project from its inception, opened many doors, and spent many hours explaining the oxymoronic features of the Nazi xi

xii

Acknowledgments

judicial system. My wife joins me in thanking him and his wife, Ulli, for their many acts of kindness, solicitude, and hospitality during our sojourns in Vienna. Immense gratitude is also due to Professor Gerald Stourzh of the University of Vienna, who spent two long afternoons sharing his vast knowledge of Jewish–Christian conversions and interfaith marriages in Austria prior to 1938. My understanding of the plight of mixed families during the Anschluß era was enhanced enormously by lengthy conversations with several survivors. These included Dr. Jonny Moser, the late Alfred Kessler, and the recently deceased Elisabeth Welt Trahan. I am particularly grateful to Lotte Rybarski, a most charming and amiable woman, who spent many hours graphically recounting the sense of fear, uncertainty, and danger endured by herself and her parents between 1938 and 1945. In the United States I am beholden to attorneys Mark R. Killenbeck, Stephen Sheppard, and my brother David Bukey, for explaining recondite aspects of family law, most notably divorce procedures in Europe and America. I am also grateful to Donald Bobbit, former Dean of the Fulbright College, for allowing me to retain my office for months after retirement to complete a substantial portion of my study. For a critical reading of chapters of the original manuscript, I wish to thank James B. Powers, Ernst Hanisch, James F. Tent, and David Chappell, each of whom detected errors or made suggestions for conceptual improvement. Two anonymous readers for Cambridge University Press saved me from numerous pitfalls by insisting on greater clarity in categorizing and analyzing the many individual cases discussed in these pages. They also elucidated conflicting aspects of Nazi policies toward intermarried Jews that worked unwittingly to the advantage of some, while leading to the deaths of others. Above all, I wish to extend my gratitude to my colleague and friend Kurt Tweraser, who not only read versions of this study with meticulous care, but throughout four decades has provided much-needed aid and assistance in understanding the complexities of his native Austria. I am also most grateful to the editors and personnel of Cambridge University Press. Lewis Bateman encouraged me to undertake this study in the first place, while Eric Crahan guided me through the production process with aplomb, good cheer, and great skill. I also wish to thank Jason Przybylski for his technical suggestions and assistance, and Bindu Vinod for her sage advice on coping with copyediting problems. All errors, omissions, and shortcomings, however, must be regarded as mine alone.

Acknowledgments

xiii

Finally, I wish to thank my wife, Anita. In the course of a difficult decade, she spent many hours discussing the structure of this book as well as assisting in the interpretation of statistical data. She also devoted considerable time detecting an inexcusable number of arithmetical and typographical errors. For her love, devotion, and unstinting support, words of gratitude and affection do not suffice.

Glossary and Abbreviations

Abstammungsbescheid Abstammungsnachweis Ahnenpass BDM DÖW

Full-Jews Geltungsjuden

Gausippenamt Gestapo HJ IKG KPÖ Kreisleiter Mischlinge Mischlinge of the First Degree

Ancestral decision Certificate of Descent Ancestral passport Bund Deutscher Mädchen, League of German Girls Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes, Documentation Archives of the Austrian Resistance,Vienna Observant Jews or persons having three Jewish grandparents Jewish converts or partial-Jews enrolled in the Jewish Religious Community, “counting as Jews” District Kinship Office Geheime Staatspolizei (secret state police) Hitler Jugend (Hitler Youth) Israelitische Kultusgemeinde (Jewish Religious Community) Kommunistiche Partei Österreichs (Communist Party of Austria) Circuit leader(s) of the Nazi Party “Half-breeds,” persons having one or two Jewish grandparents “Half-Jews,” persons with two Jewish grandparents xv

xvi

Mischlinge of the Second Degree NSDAP

Ostmark OT Rassenschande RPA RSA RSHA SD SS Volksgerichtshof WSLA

Glossary and Abbreviations

“Quarter-Jews,” persons with one Jewish grandparent Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazi Party) Eastern March; Nazi name of incorporated Austria Organization Todt, forced labor and construction organization Racial defilement Rassenpolitsches Amt, Racial Political Office Reichssippenamt, Reich Kinship Office Reichssicherheitshauptamt, Reich Security Main Office Sicherheitsdienst (security and intelligence service of the SS) Schützstaffel (elite guard of the NSDAP) Peoples’ Court Wiener Stadt-und Landesarchiv, Viennese Municipal and Provincial Archives

1 Prologue Jews and Intermarriage in Austria

The Problem of Intermarriage in the Third Reich In recent years, scholars of the Holocaust have devoted increasing attention to the plight of Jewish mixed families in Hitler’s Germany. This is no coincidence. Prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, much was known about the confusing and contradictory guidelines issued by Nazi officials regarding intermarried couples, their offspring, and other Germans of partial Jewish ancestry. There was also widespread awareness of the fate of the famous wartime journalist, Jochen Klepper, who on 11 December 1942, committed suicide with his Jewish wife.1 But it was the publication of the voluminous secret diaries of Viktor Klemperer, hidden for decades in the German Democratic Republic, that brought worldwide attention to the suffering of a Jewish professor of Romance languages who survived the Third Reich with his Aryan wife in Dresden. Klemperer’s evocative account of daily life under Hitler portrays the multifaceted, split-minded attitudes of ordinary Germans. More significantly, it provides a detailed, first-hand account of the overlooked experience of “those in between”: that is, intermarried couples and their partial Jewish offspring.2 1

2

Jochen Klepper, Unter dem Schatten Deiner Flügel: Aus den Tagebüchern der Jahren 1932–1942 (Stuttgart, 1956). Viktor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 2 vols. (New York, 1998–99). Initially, scholars recognized that Klemperer survived because he was married to a non-Jewish wife. However, some also thought – incorrectly – that his service as a combat officer in the Great War may have been equally crucial. See, for example, Henry Ashby Turner, “Victor Klemperer’s Holocaust,” German Studies Review, XXII, 3 (October, 1999), 385.

1

2


Contemporary scholarship has revealed that the Nazi regime approached the question of mixed marriages with hesitation and uncertainty. The primary reason was Hitler’s fear of arousing social unrest among Aryan relatives, such as that which eventually erupted in the Rosenstrasse incident of February 1943, when hundreds of Berlin housewives took to the streets to protest the deportation of their Jewish husbands to Auschwitz. In some respects, Nazi bureaucrats and decision makers expended more time and energy coping with the problem of mixed marriages than they did seeking a “final solution” to the Jewish question itself. Goebbels, for example, relentlessly agitated to deport each and every Jew from the Reich. Once the mass murder of Soviet Jewry began in 1941, the issue of mixed couples and their offspring dominated Hitler’s dinner conversations. It also figured prominently in telegrams and correspondence between Himmler and the team of trained executioners under his command. On 20 January 1942, two-fifths of the Wannsee Conference was devoted to the subject. Thereafter, the knotty problem continued to be discussed at length during follow-up meetings until the very end of the war.3 That intermarried couples and their children suffered greater harassment and persecution in Nazi Germany is now better known than previously assumed. Stigmatized by neighbors, Aryan relatives, and Nazi activists, those families found it hard to cope with capricious intrusions that severely disrupted family life, pitted relatives against each other, and raised unanswerable questions about religious, racial, and national 3

For an introduction to the subject of Nazi treatment of intermarried couples and partial Jews or “Mischlinge,” see Jeremy Noakes, “The Development of Nazi Policy towards the German-Jewish ‘Mischlinge,’ 1933–1945.” Leo Baeck Yearbook 34 (1989), 291–354, especially 337–54; Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago, 1961), 257–77 ff; idem, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 1933– 1945 (New York, 1992), 131–8; Ursula Büttner, Die Not der Juden teilen: Christlichjüdische Familen im Dritten Reich: Beispiel und Zeugnis des Schriftstellers Robert Brendel (Hamburg, 1988); Nathan Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart:Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany (New York, 1996); Christian Gerlach, “The Wannsee Conference, the Fate of German Jews, and Hitler’s Decision in Principle to Exterminate European Jews,” Journal of Modern History, 70, 1 (1998), 759–812. Also useful are the preliminary studies by Bruno Blau, “Die Mischehe im Nazireich,” Judaica, 4 (1948), 46–57 and “Die Christen jüdischer und gemischter Abkunft in Deutschland und Österreich im Jahr 1939,” Judaica, 5 (1949), 272–88. For analysis of Goebbels’ views see Ralf Georg Reuth, Goebbels (San Diego, 1993), 275, 278, 297–9 and Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart, 131–3, 204–5, 243–4, 255, 263, 195. On the now famous Rosensrasse protests see Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart; Wolf Gruner, Widerstand in der Rosenstraße: Die Fabrik-Aktion und die Verfolgung der “Mischehen” 1943 (Frankfurt/Main, 2005); Antonia Leugers, Berlin, Rosenstrasse 2–4: Protest in der NS-Diktatur: Neue Forschungen zum Frauenprotest in der Rosenstrasse 1943 (Annweiler, 2005).

Prologue

3

identity. It is not difficult to imagine the anguish felt by countless Jewish mothers whose sons became enthusiastic members of the Hitler Youth and later the German Wehrmacht, especially those who distinguished themselves in combat. Even more devastating were the dismissals of Jewish spouses and those married to Jews from the civil service – including the railroads and other branches of the public sector. These dismissals were followed by regulations prohibiting them from pursuing medical, legal, or journalistic careers. Government measures also excluded marriage loans to intermarried couples. Worse, the regime harassed children in schools, interfered in custody disputes, and put pressure on Aryan partners to divorce their Jewish wives or husbands.4 The purpose of this study is to explore the experience of mixed families in Nazi Vienna, the residence of fully ninety percent of Austria’s Jews and, between 1938 and 1945, the second largest city in the Greater German Reich. There are several reasons to focus on the Viennese experience. In the first place, Jewish life in the former Habsburg capital had evolved within a different milieu than in Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden, and other cities of the Prussian German Reich. Whereas Jews had lived in Germany for centuries, those in Austria were relative newcomers, flocking to Vienna only after 1867. Like their bourgeois coreligionists in Germany, the upper and middle classes in Austria espoused the values of the Enlightenment, classical liberalism, and German culture. This approach proved relatively successful in promoting integration in Protestant Berlin, but in Roman Catholic Vienna it clashed with the prevailing Baroque culture, fostering a virulent antisemitic backlash and leaving the Jewish community isolated as a “protected minority.”5 After the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy, Viennese Jewish society split into contentious factions along religious, political, and cultural lines. Nevertheless, most Jews seemed oblivious to the virulent antisemitism still prevailing in the city; after the failure of a Nazi putsch in 1934 they tended to support the authoritarian regime of Kurt von Schuschnigg. When the Anschluß took place in March 1938, nearly every Jew was taken by surprise.6 4

5 6

Marion Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (Oxford, 1998), 74–93; Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart, 41–8; Noakes, “Mischlinge,” 290–301 ff; James F. Tent, In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Nazi Persecution of Jewish-Christian Germans (Lawrence, 2003), 31–2, 44–5; Brian Mark Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers:The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military (Lawrence, 2002), 19–50, 107–8 ff. Steven Beller, A Concise History of Austria (Cambridge, 2006), 174–7 ff. Bruce F. Pauley, From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (Chapel Hill, 1992), 260–5.

4


A second reason to focus on mixed families in Nazi Vienna is that intermarried Jews, their partners, and their children suddenly confronted a bewildering array of Nazi regulations that had evolved gradually in Germany between 1933 and 1938 These included job dismissals, ostracism by Gentile friends and relatives, harassment by indigenous Nazis, and multiple torments imposed by the Nuremberg Laws. Prior to the Anschluß, intermarried couples in the Third Reich had had time to adjust – however painfully – to uneven, confusing discriminatory measures, some of which were relaxed during the Berlin Olympics in 1936. Moreover, by early 1938, Reich German officials had reached a dead end in forcing Jews to emigrate.7 By way of contrast, the seizure of Austria provided a golden opportunity for Hitler’s government to take extreme actions against the Jewish population, not least because Berlin could count on the support of both the indigenous NSDAP and a majority of the Austrian people. The Nazis were thus able to set a “faster pace” in pursuit of their antisemitic goals.8 This meant that intermarried Viennese couples had to make life-and-death decisions overnight. Furthermore, they faced issues of national identity quite unlike those in the “Old Reich,” not to mention recurring waves of grassroots violence that shocked even German Nazi officials.9 In these respects, the initial experience of Viennese mixed couples and partial Jews was both different and much worse than that of those in Hamburg, Berlin, or Dresden. Nor was it a coincidence that the municipal branch of the Reich Kinship Office processed more decisions on racial ancestry than any of the other twenty-two regional agencies in Hitler’s Reich. The Anschluß, as we shall see, spurred countless members of Viennese mixed families to take immediate steps to appeal “racial classifications” perceived as endangering them or their relatives.

Jews and Intermarriage in Vienna before the Anschluß Long before the Anschluß of 1938, Vienna had the largest Jewish community in German-speaking Europe. According to the census of 1934, 176,978 registered members of the Hebrew religion constituted 7

8 9

Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair, 74–93; Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart, 76–7; Radomir Luza Austro-German Relations in the Anschluss Era (Princeton, 1975), 223–4. Luza, Austro-German Relations, 224. Evan Burr Bukey, Hitler’s Austria: Popular Sentiment in the Nazi Era, 1938–1945 (Chapel Hill, 2000), 134–44.

Prologue

5

9.4 percent of its municipal population. While most Viennese Jews tended to live a clannish existence in self-segregated neighborhoods, many of them had abandoned Judaism, converted to Christianity, or married Gentiles. Between 1919 and 1937, nearly 17,000 withdrew from the Jewish Religious Community (Israelitsche Kultusgemeinde).10 By the time of the Nazi takeover of 1938, the official number of enrolled Jews had shrunk to 169,978, although later estimates by Jewish and German authorities put the figure of “racial Jews,” including Christian converts, nonbelievers, and others not belonging to the Jewish Religious Community, at roughly 200,000. The Archdiocese of Vienna considered 50,000 of these to be “non-Aryan Christians.”11 The exact number of Viennese living in mixed marriages as defined by the 1935 Nuremberg Laws can never be known, however. This is because Austrian magistrates prior to 1938 recorded the religion of prospective brides and grooms, not their “race.” According to the German Census of 17 May 1939, there were 4,443 intermarried couples still residing in Vienna and 5,919 in Berlin.12 Although the Jewish population of Vienna was the largest in Germanspeaking Europe, most of its members were second- or third-generation immigrants. Between 1857 and 1910, the number of Jews in the city had risen from 6,217 to 175,318, an expansion precipitated not by natural increase but by massive migration from Bohemia, Moravia, and Galicia. In contrast to the great cities of Germany in which Jews had lived for centuries, the Jewish populace of Vienna had acculturated rapidly as a group. The process had two notable consequences: The first was that the Jewish community evolved as a highly visible, cohesive subculture; the second that fewer Jews in the Austrian capital officially chose Gentile spouses than their coreligionists in Berlin, Hamburg, and Frankfurt am Main. During the first years of the twentieth century, for example, the registered intermarriage rate in Vienna remained below 10 percent, whereas that in Hamburg soared to 21.2 percent.13 Even so, a number of luminaries 10 11

12

13

Harriet Pass Freidenreich, Jewish Politics in Vienna, 1918–1938 (Bloomington, 1991), 17. Philomena Leiter, “Assimilation, Antisemitismus und NS Verfolgung: Austritte aus der Jüdischen Gemeinde in Wien 1900–1944,” (diss: University of Vienna, 2003), II, 399. Statistik des Deutschen Reichs, Bd. 552, Volkszählung: Die Bevölkerung des Deutschen Reichs nach den Ergebnissen der Volkszählung 1939, IV, Die Juden und jüdischen Mischlinge im Deutschen Reich (Berlin, 1944), 66–8. Although accurate, Nazi statistics need to be approached with caution as the term “Mischehen” included unions of partialJews as well as those having only one Jewish grandparent. The figures indicating the number of Gentiles married to Jews in Vienna appear on p. 68, in Berlin on p. 66. Marsha Rozenblit, The Jews of Vienna, 1867–1914: Assimilation and Identity (Albany, 1984), 17, 128–31, 195–6; Steven M. Lowenstein, “Jewish Intermarriage and Conversion

6


lived in mixed marriages, among them Max Reinhardt, Koloman Moser, Wilhelm Neurath, Robert Musil, Franz Lehar, Stefan Zweig, Josef Krips, and most famously Alma Schindler Mahler, who within a decade of her renowned husband’s death in 1911 took another Jewish spouse, Franz Werfel. There were also prominent individuals such as Ludwig and Paul Wittgenstein and Hugo von Hofmannsthal who could claim partial Jewish descent. While religious, familial, and demographic differences indisputably inhibited intermarried wedlock in Austria, a greater impediment was the legal system. Until 1918, it was illegal for Jewish men and women to marry Christians. Legislation passed in May 1868 had made civil marriage possible, but according to Paragraph (§) 64 of the General Civil Code, of 1811, “matrimonial contracts between Christians and persons not professing the Christian faith can not be validly concluded.”14 This meant that neither Jews nor Christians could intermarry without converting to the religion of the other or declaring themselves “nonaffiliated” (konfessionslos). Those who renounced Judaism could expect official ostracism once the Jewish press posted and published their names. The public stigma did not apply, however, to Jews who married outside the Hebrew religion in a civil ceremony.15 With the passage of time, increasing numbers of Jews betrothed to Christians came to regard civil marriage (Notzivilehe) as a way out of their spiritual and cultural dilemma. To do so was not without serious consequences, particularly for Gentile brides and grooms who were required under law to withdraw from the Roman Catholic Church. Because religious membership was recorded in “every conceivable document” ranging from residential permits to passports, “nonaffiliated” Catholic apostates

14

15

in Germany and Austria,” Modern Judaism, 25, 1 (2005), 36. In his meticulous study, Lowenstein highlights the enormous regional variations within Germany, emphasizing the relatively high rate of intermarriage in Prussia, particularly during the early years of the Weimar Republic. In rural areas such as Baden, Bavaria, and Hesse-Darmstadt, the numbers were much lower. By way of contrast, a majority of the 15,000 Jews living outside Vienna seemed less inclined to marry coreligionists. In Graz, for example, two-thirds of those taking vows were to non-Jews. Bruce F. Pauley, From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (Chapel Hill, 1992), 59. Quoted in Anna L. Staudacher, “Die Trauungsbücher der Zivilmatriken in Wien: Das erste Trauungsbuch 1870–1882,” Adler Zeitschrift für Genealogie und Heraldik, 24/1 (January–March, 2007), 42. Rozenblit, Jews of Vienna, 127–31;Pauley, From Prejudice to Persecution, 58; Gerald Stourzh, “An Apogee of Conversions: Gustav Mahler, Karl Kraus, and fin de siècle Vienna,” in idem. From Chicago and Back: Intellectual History and Political Thought in Europe and America (Chicago, 2007), 243.

Prologue

7

were destined to suffer social and official opprobrium in a Roman Catholic monarchy. There can be no doubt that Jewish partners also had to put up with abuse from relatives and former coreligionists, but not to the degree borne by those who had converted to Christianity. Civil marriage thus became a means for Jews to marry Gentiles without forfeiting their spiritual or cultural identity – at least in their own minds. Indeed, recent research suggests that somewhere between 80 and 90 percent of those taking civil vows in late nineteenth century Vienna were of Jewish origin. The evidence also indicates that upon becoming parents, intermarried couples usually renounced their nonaffiliated status and reared their children as Christians or, less frequently, as Jews.16 As is well known, a number of Austrian Jews converted to Christianity between 1868 and 1918. While the actual numbers were relatively low, the American historian Marsha Rozenblit has shown that “Vienna’s conversion rate far outranked that of any other city in the Dual Monarchy or elsewhere in Europe.”17 The reasons for Jews proceeding to the baptismal font were complex and multifaceted, although career advancement and social integration appear to have been paramount, most famously in the case of Gustav Mahler. Because many converts including Mahler and Hermann Broch later wed Gentiles, their matrimonial bonds were technically Christian, not “mixed.”18 If one takes into consideration these “Christian–Christian” marital unions and those performed by civil magistrates, the number of “mixed marriages” in late Imperial Vienna must have been much higher than the official figures already mentioned. In the view of one authority, the number of intermarried couples may, in fact, have equaled or even surpassed those in Berlin.19 Of those Jews who chose to marry Gentiles prior to 1914 there appear to have been several distinctive groups. The first consisted of an unknown number of members of the economic and cultural elite. In 1873, for example, the industrialist Karl Wittgenstein took the half-Jewish Leopoldine Kalmus as his wife.20 Three years later the distinguished Jewish 16 17 18

19

20

Stourzh, “Apogee,” 241–5; Staudacher, “Trauungsbücher,” 45. Rozenblit, Jews of Vienna, 132. For this reason alone, Stourzh writes, “it is impossible to draw up statistics of mixed marriages by looking for ‘Jewish-Christian’ couples.” Stourzh, “Apogee,” 244. Ivar Oxal, “The Jews of Hitler’s Vienna,” in Ivar Oxal, Michael Pollak, and Gerhard Botz, Jews, Antisemitism, and Culture in Vienna (New York, 1987), 32. Wittgenstein’s Protestant father, Hermann Wittgenstein, bitterly opposed his son’s marriage to a Roman Catholic woman of Jewish descent. That his own parents had been born into the Hebrew religion was a matter of which he was unaware. Alexander Waugh, The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War (New York, 2009), 15–16.

8


composer David Popper married the Christian cellist Sofie Wilhelmine Menter, a pupil of Liszt, in a civil ceremony. Among the groomsmen were the wealthy piano manufacturer Ludwig BÖsendorfer, and the renowned founder of the St. Petersburg Conservatory Anton Rubinstein. Other distinguished Jews who married Gentiles in the chambers of the Viennese Rathaus included the composer Adalbert Goldschmidt, the Social Democratic theorist Karl Kautsky, and the photographer Max Jaffé.21 Of the less famous Jewish brides and grooms, Rozenblit has identified two sets divided primarily along lines of gender. One group tended to be middle-class men who made their living as merchants or commercial employees. Because most of the Jewish grooms wed “nonaffiliated” brides, Gentile wives from bourgeois backgrounds do not appear in the records. There is little evidence, however, that Jewish men “married up” for status or wealth. Another group consisted largely of lower-class Jewish women from the garment district who went to the baptismal font in order to marry men they had met at work. There also appears to have been a number of middle-class brides who sought to enhance their status.22 Less is known about those Gentiles who chose Jewish partners, although a number of army officers are known to have married Jewish women, as did the renowned architect Adolf Loos, the Arctic explorer Julius von Payer, and the operetta composer Johann Strauss the Younger.23 On the basis of court records examined for this study, it appears that many non-Jewish wives frequently hailed from working-class or peasant backgrounds.24 There were also a number of servant girls who married older professional men. Beyond that, it is difficult to generalize. During the interwar period, the annual number of mixed marriages declined in both Vienna and throughout Central Europe. In contrast to the Imperial era, moreover, it became more common – or at least more open – for brides and grooms to prefer a civil ceremony and to eschew religious ties. There also developed a noticeable “gender gap,” although one narrower than that in Germany, where between 1919 and 1933, 6,517 more Jewish men took their wedding vows than Jewish women. According to the German census of 1939, 57.5 percent of intermarried husbands in Vienna were “non-Aryan,” as compared to 64 percent in Hamburg and 65 percent in Berlin.25 21 22 23 24

25

Staudacher, “Trauungsbücher,” 43–7. Rozenblit, Jews of Vienna, 128–40. Pauley, From Prejudice to Persecution, 58; Staudacher, “Trauungsbücher,” 47. See, for example, the fascinating memoirs of Vilma Neuwirth, Glockengasse 29: Eine jüdische Arbeiterfamilie in Wien (Vienna, 2008), especially 26–41. Ibid.; Lowenstein, “Jewish Intermarriage and Conversion,” 37; Meyer, “Mischlinge,” 25.

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On the other hand, the number of mixed marriages in Vienna was substantial. Between 1919 and 1937, according to one highly exaggerated estimate, some 17,000 intermarried couples took their vows.26 On 17 May 1939, Nazi statisticians determined, as we have already seen, that even after the expulsion of 100,000 persons in the year following the Anschluß, there still remained 4,443 intermarried couples in the Danubian city as well as 3,524 additional families in which one of the partners had at least one Jewish grandparent. By way of comparison, the numbers in Berlin were 5,919 and 4,332, respectively. The census figures also revealed that 2,195 of those Viennese Jews living in mixed unions were wed to half-Jews, and 512 to quarter-Jews. The overall Jewish population of both cities was thus comparable in size, but Vienna had fewer “half and quarter Jews” (20,813) as compared with Berlin (27,116). There were also more Christian converts, even though over half of all intermarried couples remained childless.27 Put another way, Jewish assimilation in Austria had produced a mixed kinship network that was fairly thick but not as extensive or as deeply rooted as in Germany. Impact of the Anschluß Shortly before twilight on Friday, 11 March 1938, the Nazis seized power in Austria. The following day, motorized German troops crossed the border. They were accompanied by marching infantry and later in the afternoon by Hitler himself. As the gray-green columns sped toward Vienna, they were acclaimed by cheering throngs and pealing bells. At nightfall, the dictator himself rolled into Linz, his boyhood home. He was so moved by the euphoric welcome that he spontaneously abandoned earlier plans for “a personal union” of Austria and Germany. On Sunday afternoon he signed a hastily drafted Anschluß Act. Two days later, he stood on the balcony of the Hofburg to deliver a spellbinding address to a quarter of a million delirious Viennese in Heroes Square. He concluded by proclaiming the return of his homeland to the German Reich. It is now well known that the Anschluß triggered recurring waves of antisemitic violence in Vienna that did not abate until after the bestial savagery of Kristallnacht in mid-November. For months crowds of men

26 27

Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, 54 Volkszählung, IV, 6–8, 66–9; Lowenstein, “Jewish Intermarriage,” 37; Blau, “Die Christen jüdischer und gemischter Abkunft in Deutschland und Österreich im Jahr 1939,” 283–4. Hilberg estimates that 25,000 Christian Jews were living in Austria in 1938. Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders, 151.

10


and women surged through the streets of Vienna, forcing Jews to scrub cobblestone streets on their hands and knees, to perform deep kneebends, and in one instance to eat grass. Nazi thugs expropriated Jewish homes and businesses, beat up Jews, and, now and then simply murdered them.28 On 23 April, Hitler appointed Josef Bürckel Commissioner for the Reunification of Austria with the German Reich. The new proconsul moved immediately to restore some semblance of order, but he did so by transforming the many acts of “wild aryanization” into what one authority has called “a system of state-sanctioned robbery.”29 Such a system had begun to unfold within hours of the Anschluß. On 15 March, the new regime ordered the discharge or dismissal of all Jewish military personnel, civil servants, judges, attorneys, and notaries. Three days later, the Gestapo occupied the headquarters of the Jewish Religious Community and sacked its employees. On 26 March, Hermann Göring proclaimed the government’s intention to expropriate Jewish enterprises, two days later issuing a directive “to take quiet measures for the appropriate redirecting of the Jewish economy in Austria.”30 This order was followed by a purge of the Jewish faculty and students at the University of Vienna. On 26 April, Göring and Bürckel issued a Decree on the Declaration of Jewish Assets, mandating the registration of all property in excess of 5,000 marks. Shortly thereafter, SS Untersturmführer Adolf Eichmann turned up in Vienna to establish the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, an agency designed to expel Jews by means of a conveyorbelt system that robbed them of their cash and belongings. Finally, on 20 May the Nuremberg Laws went into effect.31 The subsequent flood of decrees, ordinances, and regulations passed throughout the Greater German Reich – including incorporated Austria – prohibited Jews from working in real-estate firms, tourist agencies, and credit information bureaus. The measures banned Jews from livestock and meat markets, severely restricted their right to practice medicine and law, and excluded them from parks, swimming pools, and even public 28

29 30

31

The best contemporary eyewitness accounts are Karl Zuckmayer, A Part of Myself (New York, 1984), 29–94 and G.E.R. Gedye Betrayal in Central Europe: Austria and Czechoslovakia: The Fallen Bastions, 270–315. For an up-to-date, comprehensive account of the response of Vienna’s Jews to the Anschluß and their subsequent fate under Nazi rule, see Ilana Fritz Offenberger, “The Nazification of Vienna and the Response of the Viennese Jews” (diss. Clark University, 2010). Steven Beller, A Concise History of Austria (Cambridge, 2006), 234. Quoted in Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, I: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New York, 1997), 242. Ibid., 242–45; Bukey, Hitler’s Austria, 133–6.

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11

benches. On 23 July, a special decree required Jews to acquire identity cards marked by a red “J” on the cover, a photograph, and two fingerprints; they were to be carried at all times and produced upon demand. Shortly thereafter, another decree compelled Jews to adopt “Sara” or “Israel” as middle names by the end of the year. Moreover, to expedite the seizure of Jewish assets, a Property Transfer Office (Vermögensverkehrsstelle) took over Jewish-owned banks, businesses, and shops, managing to liquidate all but a handful of 33,000 Jewish enterprises by mid-August. The Transfer Office also supervised the expropriation of “non-Aryan” domiciles. Within fourteen months, 44,000 Viennese apartments out of 70,000 belonging to Jews had been seized, 25,400 businesses liquidated, and, RM 2.042 billion seized or placed in escrow.32 By that time, some 67,648 Jews had fled abroad.33 Austrian and German families of Jewish “mixed blood,” did not escape Hitler’s onslaught unscathed. Indeed, those without ties to Judaism, especially “Aryan” partners in mixed marriages, initially found themselves “hit hardest.”34 Until 1939, Nazi officials in incorporated Austria made no exemptions for non-Jewish wives or husbands. The new masters prohibited them and their hybrid children (Mischlinge) from voting in the April plebiscite; they also required intermarried couples to pay special taxes.35 Mixed families were also targeted by competing authorities in the Reich Ministry of the Interior and the Nazi Party, who sought to exploit the fluid situation in Hitler’s homeland in order to ostracize intermarried couples and their offspring from the National Community. The Decree on the Declaration of Jewish Assets, for example, also included “Germanblooded” spouses.36 In a similar way, the Decree for the Reorganization of the Austrian Civil Service, issued six weeks later, forced Jews, civil officials married to Jews, and Mischlinge into early retirement. This was a measure, one authority has noted, that reduced the status of Austrian Mischlinge to a position lower than that stipulated by German law.37 32

33

34

35

36 37

Vermögensentzug während der NS-Zeit sowie Rückstellung und Entschädigung seit 1945 in Österreich: Forschungsbericht der Historikerkommission der Republik Österreich: Zusammenfassungen und Einschätzungen: Schlussbericht (Vienna, 2003), 73–95. Jonny Moser, Demographie der jüdischen Bevölkerung Österreichs 1938–1945 (Vienna, 199), 27. Ursula Büttner, “The Persecution of Christian-Jewish Families in the Third Reich,” in Leo Baeck Yearbook, 34 (New York, 1989), 283. Ibid. Gerhard Botz, Nationalsozialismus in Wien: Machtübernahme, Herrschaftssicherung, Radlkalisierung 1938/39 (Vienna, 2008), 201–6. Walk, Sonderrecht, 223. Noakes, “German-Jewish ‘Mischlinge,’ ” 325.

12


Popular sentiment and commercial groups also set their sights on halfand quarter-Jews. Pressure from the Association of Austrian Industrialists and the German Labor Front, in fact, led to the dismissal of so many Mischling employees and workers that on 5 July 1938, Bürckel issued a stop-order for fear of disrupting a still-fragile economy. Two months later, both the Party and Ministry of the Interior concurred, arguing that a constellation of jobless partial-Jews would not only place an undue burden on social services, it would also spawn a new proletariat hostile to the state.38 Even so, a supplementary decree prohibited Aryan physicians married to Jews from practicing medicine.39 The experience of intermarried Viennese couples and their families during the Anschluß era defies easy generalization. While a substantial number appear to have emigrated, such as the distinguished conductor Josef Krips and his Jewish spouse,40 those who remained endured an uncertain, kaleidoscopic existence that ranged from tolerance to discrimination to severe persecution. Several prominent musicians and other cultural luminaries such as Franz Lehar and Theo Lingen received special dispensations for their Jewish wives; others including the film comedian Hans Moser failed to secure such an exemption, although Moser managed to obtain permission to visit his “non-Aryan” spouse in Budapest on a regular basis.41 There were also individuals who kept their businesses through connections or by entrusting their affairs to Aryan relatives.42 In addition, several thousand Aryan husbands and their Mischling sons fought in the armed forces, including a few hundred who remained on active duty long after Hitler had ordered the discharge of all “Jewish soldiers” in April 1940.43 That said, the very persistence of tight-knit mixed families constituted what Marion Kaplan calls in her classic study of Jewish life in Germany “a form of defiance and was seen as such by the government.”44 Most intermarried couples and their children suffered some form of 38

39 40

41

42

43 44

Wolf Gruner, Zwangsarbeit und Verfolgung:Österreichische Juden im NS-Staat 1938– 1945 (Innsbruck, 2000), 46. Leiter, “Assimilation, Antisemitismus und NS-Verfolging,” 408. Krips resumed his symphonic career in Belgrade. After Hitler’s conquest of Yugoslavia, he was forced to work in a food-processing plant. Jonny Moser, Wallenbergs Laufbursche: Jugenderinnerungen 1938–1945 (Vienna, 2006), 126–7. Günter Nenning “Schwalbenglück,” in Georg Markus (ed.), Mein Elternhaus: Ein östereichisches Familienalbum (Vienna, 1990), 203–9. Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (Oxford, 1998), 88.

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13

ostracism, harassment, or outright persecution. The vast majority of non-Aryan husbands, as we have already seen, forfeited their jobs or businesses, found themselves unable to practice their professions, or, in some cases, had no choice but to become street cleaners or common laborers. One Jewish partner, to cite one example, managed initially to maintain his position as a prosperous textile wholesaler through connections in Berlin. But after Kristallnacht the Nazis expropriated his business, his home, and his financial assets. Thereafter, he was forced to take menial jobs wrapping batteries, stamping rubber cylinders, and eventually shoveling snow.45 In the weeks following the Anschluß, at least nine Jewish partners committed suicide, while fifteen others fell victim to Nazi thugs.46 The fate of the grown children of intermarried couples was hardly enviable. Following the Anschluß, for example, the up-and-coming historian Hanns Leo Mikoletzky lost his position at the Austrian State Archives, went to work in a munitions factory, and late in the war witnessed the deportation of his mother to Theresienstadt. Even more harrowing was the experience of those enrolled in the Jewish Religious Community who “counted as Jews” (Geltungsjuden). In April 1938, eighteen-yearold Lotte Freiberger was expelled from school but learned to become a seamstress. Her newly acquired skill enabled her to avoid compulsory labor on a German asparagus farm by securing a position in a local firm that fabricated gloves “for export” and later clothing for bombed-out civilians in the Ruhr. But after September 1941, she was compelled to wear the six-pointed star, regularly spat upon in public, and was three times ordered by the SS to pack her bags for evacuation to the East. Only through the sharp wits of her “Aryan” mother was Lotte Freiberger spared deportation and death. Even so, ten members of her family died in the Holocaust.47 From today’s perspective it is clear that most intermarried couples, their children, and others of partial Jewish ancestry “suffered alone.”48 While the Catholic Church provided some assistance to baptized families, the hard-pressed Jewish Religious Community either shunned Jewish spouses in mixed marriages or simply lacked the resources to lend a 45

46

47 48

Dokumentationsarchiv des Österreichischen Widerstandes (DÖW) Jüdische Schicksale: Berichte von Verfolgten (Vienna, 1993), 198–9 ff. DÖW, Projekt Namentliche Erfassung der österreichischen Holocaustopfer: Fast nur Mischehen. See the testimony of Lotte Freiberger in DÖW, Jüdische Schicksale, 197–205. Tent, In the Shadow of the Holocaust, 15.

14


Figure 1. Lotte Freiberger and Her Mother Marie, 1929. Provided courtesy of Lotte Rybarski.

helping hand.49 As James F. Tent has put it, intermarried couples and their Mischling offspring “were for all practical purposes abandoned to their fate.”50 Nazi Policy Toward Families of Mixed Blood That Jewish “mixed families” in Greater Germany – including incorporated Austria – faced an insecure, uncertain future after 1938 can be attributed in no small measure to the ambivalent attitudes of Hitler himself. On the one hand, the dictator condemned “racial crossing” as “contrary to the will of Nature,” arguing in Mein Kampf that intermarried unions “poisoned the blood of others,“ not least because they produced bastards [that] take after the Jewish side.”51 On the other hand, he recognized the political risk of alienating large numbers of Aryan citizens with Jewish or “mixed-breed” relatives and, now and then, even wavered in his conviction that persons of partial Jewish blood could never be absorbed into the National Community. As was often the case, Hitler commissioned 49

50 51

See the testimony of Otto Horn in Elisabeth Klamper, “Zwischen ‘Arien’ und ‘Nichtarien’ – Mischlinge ersten Grades,” in DÖW, Jüdische Schicksale, 329. Tent, In the Shadow of the Holocaust, 16. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Boston, 1971), 285, 316. Here and elsewhere Hitler compared Jewish-Gentile marriages to “unions between ape and human.” Quoted in Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, Mass., 2003).

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15

subordinates to resolve his own inhibitions. This approach led to heated debates between stalwarts in the NSDAP and civil servants in the Ministry of the Interior over what it meant to be a Jew. While both groups agreed on the need to separate the “races,” party radicals insisted on designating both quarter- and half-Jews as “full-Jews” and forcing the dissolution of all mixed marriages. In contrast, the traditional bureaucrats emphasized both the Germanic characteristics of Mischlinge and the danger of turning them and their relatives in high places, notably the Reichswehr, into enemies of the state.52 On 15 September 1935, Hitler proclaimed the Nuremberg Laws. The legislative package withdrew citizenship from German Jews but constituted a compromise of sorts.53 According to two decrees issued on 14 November, the Jews were reduced to “subjects.” They were forbidden to marry or engage in sexual relations with citizens of “German or kindred blood,” to employ female domestics under the age of forty-five, or to display the swastika flag. However, the decrees granted the Mischlinge “provisional” citizenship, in effect creating a new racial category. While full-Jews were designated as the descendants of three or four Jewish grandparents, their Mischling kin were divided into two groups: halfJews (Mischlinge of the First Degree) and quarter-Jews (Mischlinge of the Second Degree). Half-Jews were defined as having two Jewish grandparents, and quarter-Jews as having only one. While both groups were permitted to serve in the Reich Labor Service and the Armed Forces, neither could hold a position of authority, own an entailed farm estate, or become a public official. On the other hand, quarter-Jews had the right to marry Aryans, but half-Jews did not. They could, however, take their vows with each other or with Jews. Finally, Mischlinge enrolled in a Jewish Religious Community were to be counted as full-Jews (Geltungsjuden).54 Although the Nuremberg Laws appeared to establish a system of statutory segregation based on clear-cut rules and regulations, they contained many anomalies. Their definition of racial identity depended on religious criteria.55 As Noakes notes, a quarter-Jew by blood could be designated

52 53

54 55

For details see Noakes, “German-Jewish ‘Mischlinge,’ ” 319–36. On the making and implementation of the Nuremberg Laws see Karl A. Schleunes (ed.), Legislating the Holocaust: The Bernhard Loesener Memoirs and Supporting Documents (Boulder, 2001). Noakes, “German-Jewish ‘Mischlinge,’ ” 306–15. Ibid., 315. For detailed information on the judicial confusion and inconsistencies in implementing the Nuremberg Laws see Ingo Müller, Hitler’s Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 90–119.

Also belonging to the Jewish race:

The law distinguishes between:

Grandparents

Grandparents Thesa at German Blood belong to the German blood and national community and can become citizens of the Reich

Jews belong to the Jewish blood- and national community and cannot become citizens of the Reich

Mischlinge of the 2nd Degree belong only to the German national community and can become citizens of the Reich

Parents

Mischlinge of the 1st Degree belong only to the German national community and can become citizens of the Reich

Membership in one of these groups is determined by ratio membership of the grandparents

3 grandparents Jewish only 1 grandparent of German blood therefore: Jewish

Who is a Mischling of the 2nd degree?

Who is of German blood?

Grandparents

Grandparents

Grandparents

Grandparents Parents

Parents

Only 1 grandparent Jewish 3 grandparents of German blood therefore: Mischling of the 2nd degree

All grandparent parties of German blood therefore: of pure German blood

Who is a Mischling of the 1st degree?

Who is a Jew?

Grandparents


All grandparent parties Jewish therefore: Jewish

Grandparents


2 grandparents Jewish 2 grandparents of German blood therefore: Mischling of the 1st degree

Which marriages are forbidden?

Also regarded as a Jew: a Mischling who is a member of the Jewish religious community.

It should be taken into account that marriages already existing will remain unaffected. Also to be regarded as races, whose blood is not related to German blood, are, e.g., Negroes (case) and Gypsies.

Forbidden!

Also regarded as a Jew: a Mischling who is married to a Jew. The children will be Jews. between those of German blood and Jews

Forbidden!

Also regarded as a Jew: a Mischling coming from a marriage with a Jew that took place after 17 September, 1935.

between Jews and Mischlinge of the 2nd degree

Forbidden!

between Mischlinge of the 2nd degree

Also regarded as a Jew: a Mischling coming from forbidden extramarital relations with a Jew and who was born out of wedlock after 31 July, 1936.

Forbidden!

Further, one should not enter into a marriage if it is expected that the offspring will jeopardize maintaining the purity of the German blood.

Figure 2. Chart of Nuremberg Laws Depicting Degrees of “Jewishness.” Credit: Stadtarchiv Bielefeld, Germany.

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a full-Jew if he or she belonged to a Jewish Religious Community. Additionally, incomplete certificates of birth, baptism, marriage, and death frequently made it difficult, if not impossible, to determine identity. These irregularities were recognized at the time. Two paragraphs of the Nuremberg Laws made it possible for individuals to apply for exemptions. Paragraph (§) 16 of the First Supplementary Decree for the Protection of German Blood enabled engaged couples to apply for special permission to marry if one of the applicants lacked proof of Aryan ancestry or could make a compelling case based on physical appearance, service to the NSDAP, or evidence of some unique talent or ability. Between 1935 and 1942, a Reich Committee for Marriage Dispensations processed thousands of such petitions, primarily by half-Jews. By December 1938, however, the Office of the Deputy Führer had aggregated sufficient power to veto most incoming applications, so that thereafter only a few dozen ever met official approval.56 Of greater significance for Jewish mixed families in Vienna was § 7 of the First Supplementary Decree of the Reich Citizenship Law. It allowed persons classified as Jews or Mischlinge to appeal for a change in their “racial status” based on gaps or errors in their ancestral tree, dubious paternity, or outstanding performance in the Nazi cause or on the field of battle. Applicants would file petitions with regional authorities, who proceeded to scrutinize genealogical documents, to assess the testimony of Aryan relatives, and, in a number of cases, to order a medical or anthropological examination. Upon the finding of a major discrepancy or gap in the family record, officials would grant a writ or stay order that protected the applicant from racial discrimination until proven Jewish. The petitions were then forwarded to Berlin to be processed by the Ministry of the Interior and the Party Chancellery before submission for final approval to Hitler himself.57 The Initial Response of Mixed Families and the Consideration of Choices The immediate reaction of members of Jewish–Gentile families in Vienna to the Anschluß appears to have been one of great confusion and stunned

56

57

For details see Diana Schulle, Das Reichssippenamt: Eine Institution nationalsozialistischer Rassenpolitik (Berlin, 2001), 176–230. See also Horst Seidler and Andreas Rett, Das Reichssippenamt entscheidet (Vienna and Munich, 1982), 121–32. Noakes, “German-Jewish ‘Mischlinge,’ ” 318–19.

18


disbelief. While there are few contemporaneous accounts and only a handful of autobiographical sketches and postwar interviews, the scanty evidence suggests that nearly all intermarried couples shared the shock and dread of other Jews.58 Overnight, most became pariahs, shunned by classmates, neighbors, and the general public. Because many family members did not consider themselves Jewish, the fear and anxiety within those in which one partner was “non-Aryan” and the other “German blooded” were particularly acute. In May 1938, for example, the Jewish owner of a cardboard-packaging company shot himself, hoping to preserve both his firm and assets for his Aryan wife and mixed-breed children.59 He was not alone. At least nine other intermarried Jews took their lives in the months following the Anschluß.60 Nearly all Jewish husbands lost their jobs and livelihood. “German-blooded” wives were dismissed from jobs or harassed in the workplace. Most of the city’s 20,813 registered Mischlinge, particularly school children, were astonished to find themselves ostracized as second-class citizens. One young woman claimed never to have heard the term “half-Jew” prior to the Nazi takeover.61 Another was dismissed on the spot as an apprentice, simply because her father was Jewish. Yet another recalled that while her gymnasial professors suddenly became distant and aloof, they did not harass her as they did fellow Jewish classmates.62 By mid-summer 1938, conditions seem to have improved slightly or at least become clearer, most likely as a consequence of Bürckel’s stop-order of 5 July. Jewish partners and their relatives continued to suffer abuse at the hands of Nazi thugs. But once the Reich Commissioner began demarcating lines of authority and started implementing the Nuremberg Laws, a number of mixed families realized that their plight was not quite as grim as that of unambiguously “full” Jewish families. For example, it was possible for intermarried Jews to resume working, though not as public officials or professionals. After losing his position in the municipal administration, Dora Baumann’s husband found a job as a traveling salesman.63 Further, Mischling youngsters discovered that they could continue their 58 59 60 61 62 63

See Klamper, “Zwischen ‘Ariern, und, Nichtariern’,” 302–35. Ibid., 313. DÖW, Fast nur Mischehen. Volkszählung, 1939, IV, 35; Klamper, “Zwischen ‘ Ariern’ und ‘Nichtariern,’” 309. Ibid., 309, 320 Ibid., 311. On the other hand, Baumann’s father emigrated in 1939 to Amsterdam. After the German conquest of the Netherlands, he was picked up by the Gestapo, and later died in Thersienstadt. Her sister, a psychiatric patient, was murdered by SS doctors at Castle Hartheim.

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schooling at vocational or commercial academies or even matriculate at the University of Vienna. Among those conscripted into the Wehrmacht, a number came to hope that military service would ease their reintegration into society, protect Jewish family members, or even provide opportunity for career advancement.64 Under the Nazi system of statutory segregation, mixed couples and partial Jews were subjected to severe restrictions, although a number apparently concluded their future was not quite as bleak as those classified as “full-Jews.” If so, the savagery of Kristallnacht in mid-November 1938 must have come as a severe shock precisely because the pogrom did not spare Jews living in mixed marriages from arrest, incarceration in concentration camps, or payment of an “atonement tax.”65 Popular outrage was so great throughout Greater Germany, however, that prominent figures complained both to Hermann Göring, the head of the Four Year Plan, and to Nikolaus Horthy, the Regent of Hungary.66 Although GÖring had played a major role in the November pogrom, he concluded that it was in the regime’s best interest to spare intermarried couples with children from further persecution. There was particular concern about the situation in Vienna, where the authorities and the mob were still tormenting Mischlinge as “full-Jews.” In December 1938, GÖring persuaded Hitler, always attuned to civilian morale, to issue several directives dividing intermarried couples into the “privileged” and the “nonprivileged.”67 The first category included households in which the husband was “German blooded” or whose children had not been designated Jewish. The second were headed by Jewish husbands who were either childless or whose offspring formally belonged to the Jewish Religious Community.68 On 30 April 1939, Hitler’s directives went into effect. According to § 7 of the Law of Jewish Tenancies, childless mixed couples were compelled to move into isolated neighborhoods or “Jew houses.” Further, 64 65 66 67

68

Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, especially 38–50 passim. Büttner, “The Persecution of Christian-Jewish Families,” 283. Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart,102; Büttner, Die Not der Juden teilen, 40. The Führer’s intention was to prevent social unrest among Aryan relatives in advance of his upcoming war, especially among those occupying important positions in the economy and the armed forces. On Hitler’s belief in consensual support as a source of power see Stoltzfus Resistance of the Heart, 3–16 and idem., “The Limits of Policy: Social Protection of Intermarried Jews in Nazi Germany,” in Robert Gellately and Nathan Stoltzfus, Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany (Princeton, 2001), 117–34, especially 117–22. Ibid., 283–90; Noakes, “German-Jewish ‘Mischlinge,’ ” 320–5; Stotzfus, Resistance of the Heart, 102–3.

20


“German-blooded” wives were forced to subsist on reduced rations and shop during restricted hours. Because these same restrictions applied to families whose children “counted as Jews” (Geltungsjuden), the pressure to improve their social status or, in some cases, to divorce became irresistible. The Law of Jewish Tenancies did not specifically refer to mixed couples as “privileged” or “nonprivileged,” but both categories were implicit and remained in force until 1945. This meant that while “privileged” couples were allowed to retain their homes and assets, nearly all wished to escape social ostracism, to resume their careers, and, above all, to protect their Mischling children from discrimination and harm.69 Karl Weinberger, for example, managed to continue his profession as a chemist in an industrial plant throughout the Anschluß era and for many years thereafter. But while the Nazis never disturbed his family at home, fear and anxiety eventually induced him to find a hiding place for his Jewish wife and infant son in Upper Austria.70 In retrospect, the Anschluß impelled Viennese families of Jewish mixed blood to consider several grim choices. One was to join other Jews in fleeing abroad. The available evidence does not reveal how many intermarried Jews or partial-Jews emigrated. Since 17,000 mixed marriages apparently took place between 1919 and 1937, the number of emigrants must have been substantial. According to the German census of 17 May 1939, only 7,957 mixed marriages – including those wed to half- or quarter-Jews – still lived in Vienna.71 The more precise number of Jewish–Gentile couples was, as we have seen, 4,443. How many were caught up in Eichmann’s conveyor-belt system of expulsion, arranged for their children to join a Kindertransport to the United Kingdom, or eventually decided to go into exile is unknown. Court records examined for this study indicate that several dozen Jewish husbands found refuge in Switzerland or Britain, 69

70

71

For the legislative package signed by Hitler, see Walk, Sonderrecht, 292–3 and Schleunes, Legislating the Holocaust, 177–9. In her otherwise excellent study Ursula Büttner mistakenly writes that the division of intermarried couples into “privileged” and “nonprivileged” categories was never written into law. She is correct, however, that the terms did not appear in the legislation. Büttner, Die Not der Juden teilen, 44. For the impact of the designations on Jews living in mixed marriages in the Old Reich see Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair, 148–50. The Weinbergers preserved their assets, survived the war, and spent the rest of their lives in Vienna. However, Frau Weinberger lost her mother and three siblings in the Holocaust. According to their granddaughter, “she never forgave herself, neither did my grandfather. Until the very end, he would mention how he wished he could have saved his favorite mother-in-law, his brothers-in-law, and his wife’s grandmother.” Ruth Weinberger to the author, 3 May 2010. Jonny Moser, Demographie der jüdischen Bevölkerung Österreich 1938–1945 (Vienna, 1999), 54.

Prologue

21

leaving their wives and children behind. Some of the émigrés longed for a homecoming after what they hoped would be a brief storm; others intended never to return. The fate of a single “mestizo,” as Alfred Kessler (1921–99) liked to call himself, illustrates the experience of one mixed Viennese family. Kessler was born the only child of a Gentile mother and Jewish father, both of whom were Lutheran converts. He grew up in Döbling, where he attended a gymnasium with a relatively small number of Jewish students. Blond and blue-eyed, he got on well with his classmates, including a group of outright Nazi sympathizers who adopted him as their “Jewish Siegfried.” He and his family were “thunderstruck” by Hitler’s seizure of Austria, he recalled years later. Neither he nor his father suffered initially at the hands of the Nazis. In late 1938, however, his parents arranged for Alfred to join a distant relative in Nigeria, who was then serving as an official in the British colonial administration. Not content to stay in Africa, young Kessler made his way to England shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. There he took a job on a dairy farm. Once the Churchill government confronted an imminent invasion threat in the summer of 1940, he was incarcerated as an “enemy alien” in a Liverpool prison. There he shared a cell with two German Communists, a Viennese physician, and an American safecracker.72 On 10 July, Kessler was compelled to join 2,035 other refugees from Germany and Austria on the HNT Dunera to be deported to Australia. After nearly three years of internment in New South Wales, he and other volunteers were permitted to return to Britain as enlistees in the British army. Entering the line shortly after Arnhem, he survived the Battle of the Bulge and ended the war in Hanover. Within days of the German surrender, he hopped a flight to Vienna where to his astonishment he found his parents unscathed and in relatively good health.73 While Kessler’s experience was by no means paradigmatic, it does reveal one option open to mixed families. Another option available only to Aryan partners belonging to the Jewish Religious Community was to return to the Roman Catholic Church. In at least one instance there is reason to believe that a mother’s second baptism saved the lives of both

72

73

Personal interviews and telephone conversations with Professor F. Parkinson November 1993–August 1998. In keeping with British military policy Kessler changed his name to Fred Parkinson. He became a British citizen and subsequently pursued a distinguished career as a member of the Faculty of Laws of University College, London, and later as a Research Fellow at the Institute of Latin American Studies of the University of London.

22


her husband and her teenaged daughter.74 Like other Jews, many of those in mixed marriages dithered about emigration until the brutality of the regime convinced them that they “had to get out of the country as quickly as possible.”75 On the other hand, there is evidence that some partners in “privileged mixed marriages” concluded that they had little to fear, at least for the present.76 One of them, Dr. Michael Stern, even managed to carve out a lucrative career as a legal intermediary between the Jewish Religious Community and the Gestapo.77 Inasmuch as 85 to 87 percent of intermarried Jews living in Vienna survived Nazi rule, their decisions may not have been misplaced. Even so, increasing hardship and arbitrary persecution compelled many to consider special strategies to improve their status and, above all, to safeguard the position of their children. The most obvious approach was to take advantage of § 7 of the First Supplementary Decree of the Reich Citizenship Law to petition the Ministry of Interior for an exemption from the regime’s racial laws. Another was to contest their racial classification in court. A third path was for “German-blooded” partners to file for divorce with the hope of becoming full-fledged members of Hitler’s National Community. What follows is an attempt to reconstruct and analyze the experience of those who worked through the Nazi system to achieve these goals, or, like Viktor Klemperer in Dresden, simply to survive. In examining individual cases, we shall see how certain peculiarities of Austrian jurisprudence enabled hundreds of Viennese intermarried Jews and others of “mixed blood” to take advantage of fluctuating regulations as well as overlapping prerogatives of government ministries, the SS, and the NSDAP to delay, abate, or escape persecution, most notably deportation to the East. In addition, we shall explore why others were less fortunate. 74

75

76 77

Interview of Lotte Freiberger by the author, 24 November 2008. Between March and September 1938, some 1,702 Jewish converts returned to the Roman Catholic Church seeking to protect their Mischling children. In addition, approximately 4,000 apostate Jews flocked to the baptismal font, half of them professing faith in the Church of England in an obvious attempt to find refuge in the United Kingdom. Later, 150 of the Catholic converts received assistance from Theodor Cardinal Innitzer in fleeing to South America. Unless born to non-Jewish parents, however, those accepting baptism remained Jews in the eyes of the Nazis. Rosenkranz, Verfolgung und Selbstbehauptung, 192; Leiter, “Assimilation,” 383–91; Pauley, Prejudice to Persecution, 298–9. George Clare, Last Waltz in Vienna: The Rise and Destruction of a Family (New York, 1980) 191. Nenning, “Schwalbenglück,” 203–9. Doran Rabinovici, Instanzen der Ohnmacht: Wien 1938–1945: Der Weg zum Judenrat (Franfurt am Main, 2000), 395.

2 Contesting Racial Status Successes and Failures

Irregularities in Nazi Racial Policy On the eve of the 1938 Anschluß, the official status of mixed families in the Third Reich remained in flux. The passage of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 had, in effect, created a “third race.” Behind closed doors, moreover, heated debates continued to rage between agencies of the Nazi Party and the Ministry of the Interior over the definition of race and Jewish identity. Adding to the tug of war were the aspirations of party careerists, youthful bureaucrats, and various interest groups including genealogists, anthropologists, and physicians. There were also nasty personal rivalries. Representing the NSDAP was Dr. Walter Gross, head of the National Socialist Racial Policy Office (Rassenpolitisches Amt – RPA). He and his colleagues persisted in pressing for measures to dissolve mixed marriages and to reduce the status of half-Jews to that of full Jews. Their collaborators in the Office for Kinship Research, headed by Dr. Walter Mayer, worked closely with an agency in the Interior Ministry having a similar name: the Reich Office for Kinship Research (Reichsamt für Sippenforschung [RfS], which was changed in 1940 to the Reich Kinship Office (Reichssippenamt – RSA).1 As may be surmised, party officials and civil servants quarreled incessantly over the ultimate power to make racial classification decisions. It is true that in 1938 the Office of the Deputy Führer considered a proposal to clarify lines of authority, though after the outbreak of war, Rudolf 1

Eric Ehrenreich, The Nazi Ancestral Proof: Genealogy, Racial Science and the Final Solution (Bloomington, 2007); idem. “Genealogy and Genocide: The Nazi ‘Ancestral Proof’ and the Holocaust” (diss., Madison, 2004), 220–34.

23

24


Hess blocked any measure altering the organizational structure of the NSDAP.2 One trend did emerge. Because the professional bureaucrats in the Ministry of Interior possessed both the executive skills and expertise to weigh and judge documentary evidence, the Reich Kinship Office gradually assumed a senior role in the decision-making process.3 While it would be erroneous to conclude that the civil servants had the final say, Dr. Bernhard Lösener, head of the Jewish desk in the Interior Ministry from April of 1934 to March of 1943, came to play a key and frequently decisive role. Backed to a certain degree by State Secretary Wilhelm Stuckart, Lösener stubbornly resisted the efforts of Nazi militants to equate half-Jews with full Jews, unwittingly becoming a protector of the “third race” of Jewish Mischlinge and their Jewish–Gentile families. For reasons that have never been fully clarified, Lösener argued that “because the Führer had decided that half-Jews were not to be treated as Jews, and one-quarter Jews were to be treated significantly better than half-Jews, it was impossible to treat a family member who was a fully Jewish parent or grandparent, as a complete pariah without jeopardizing the family as a whole.”4 For applicants fortunate enough to have their appeals forwarded to Berlin, one authority writes, Lösener’s “long and successful struggle to prevent the legal equalization of half-Jews with full Jews . . . ultimately saved the former from deportation and death.”5 By 1938, the time of the Anschluß, rivalries and overlaps involving party officials and ministerial bureaucrats remained largely unresolved. At the local level, however, organizational structures and administrative procedures tended to be more cooperative and well oiled. On 1 June 1938, Reich Commissioner Bürckel established a Branch Office for Kinship Research in Vienna that functioned as an umbrella agency to ascertain the ancestral descent of the Austrian people. Under the direction of Arthur Schultze-Naumburg, a professional genealogist brought in from Berlin, the Branch Office published guidelines for procedures on ancestral research and the preparation of certificates of descent. The

2 3

4

5

Schulle, Reichssippenamt, 204. By the time of the Anschluß, Thomas Pegelow writes, the Reich Kinship Office “had become the sole body for processing complicated cases of descent in the population at large.” Thomas Pegelow, “Determining ‘People of German Blood,’ ‘Jews’ and ‘Mischlinge’: The Reich Kinship Office and the Competing Discourses and Powers of Nazism, 1941–1943,” Contemporary European History, 16 (2006), 45. Bernhard Loesener, “At the Desk for Racial Affairs in the Reich Ministry of the Interior,” in Schleunes, Legislating the Holocaust, 66. Christopher Browning as quoted in Schleunes, Legislating the Holocaust, 14.

Contesting Racial Status

25

bureau was to coordinate its activities with the local Reichsstatthalter to supervise subordinate kinship agencies, and to prepare preliminary decisions in difficult or dubious cases by issuing a “certificate of acceptability” (Unbedenklichkeitsbescheid) or a “small ancestral certificate” (Kleiner Abstammungsnachweis). The former was based largely on sworn testimony; the latter on the registered religion of the cardholder’s grandparents.6 Because the real function of the Branch Office was to ferret out the large number of Austrian Jews and their relatives from the general population as quickly as possible, the certificates became one of several stamps of racial identity. For that reason it is hardly a coincidence, as mentioned earlier, that between 1938 and 1940 the Vienna Branch Office for Kinship Research appears to have made more decisions on ancestry than any of the other twenty-two regional agencies in Greater Germany. This was a trend that continued after Schultze-Naumburg and his staff returned to Berlin, leaving racial affairs in the hands of an overarching authority that included members of the Gau Kinship Office (GSA), the District Racial Political Office (RPA), the SS, and Gauleiter Baldur von Schirach.7

The Dilemmas of Ancestral Proof As new citizens of the German Reich, Austrians became subject to German law. This meant that nearly everyone was required to produce evidence of Aryan descent in order to retain their positions as public officials, attorneys, notaries, physicians, nurses, engineers, architects, journalists, editors, or musicians. By 1938, the requirement had been extended to bankers, businessmen, and employees in the private sector.8 Providing ancestral proof generally took the form of a sworn oath attesting to nescience of Jewish lineage, the purchase of an “ancestral passport” (Ahnenpass) notarized by parish officials or civil registrars, or, most commonly, the completion of a questionnaire applying for a “small ancestral certificate.” All applicants were obliged to provide their own birth certificates, those

6 7

8

Schulle, Reichssippenamt, 231–4. Eric Ehrenreich estimates that between 1938 and 1945 the Viennese Kinship Office made 5, 760 ancestral decisions. Ehrenreich, “Genealogy and Genocide,” 11. The records of the GSA indicate that between late 1938 and 1940 the agency issued 125,769 “small ancestral certificates” and 4, 697 “certificates of authenticity.” WSLA, A 2, Box 2: Tätigkeitsbericht des Gauamtes für Sippenforschung, 31 December 1940. For the various decrees and ordinances applying to incorporated-Austria see Schulle, Reichssippenamt, 232, n. 143, 144.

26


of their parents and grandparents, and an assortment of other family documents that usually included records of baptism, marriage, and death. Although some families were able to comply by consulting parish or civil registries, others had to hire genealogists or other researchers to locate the necessary records.9 Given the anomalies inherent in the Nuremberg Laws, the innumerable delays in assembling a genealogical portfolio, various gaps in family trees, or the unexpected discovery of a Jewish ancestor, countless individuals applying for a “small ancestral certificate” had to submit their paperwork to the regional kinship authorities for an “ancestral decision” (Abstammungsbescheid). The rule also applied to members of the Nazi Party and their spouses who were required to obtain a “large ancestral certificate” (Grosser Abstammungsnachweis), a document that verified the non-Jewish lineage of forebears born after 1800. Before the collapse of Hitler’s regime in 1945, the Reich Kinship Office rendered 150,000 judgments on ancestry, and the District Kinship Office in Vienna, an estimated 5,760 judgments or just over one-fourth of those individuals registered in the census with partial-Jewish “blood.”10 Although all ancestral decisions had to meet the approval of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, it was still possible to appeal a finding of “racial incompatibility” through established channels. This could be done by petitioning the Ministry of the Interior to consider new genealogical evidence impugning the original decision, or by filing a paternity suit in which the plaintiff claimed “German-blooded” descent by denying the identity of his or her legal father or grandfather. Both procedures were cumbersome, lengthy, and expensive, not least because professional genealogists sometimes charged fees ranging from RM 200 to RM 1,000.11 In addition, petitioners were liable for administrative or court costs.12 There was also a third approach, pursued only by a handful of unknown individuals with connections in high places or with substantial assets deposited abroad. One of these was Alice Strauss, the Jewish daughter-in-law

9 10

11

12

For details see ibid, 161–206 and Ehrenreich, Nazi Ancestral Proof, 58–78. Cf. Ehrenreich, “Genealogy and Genocide” especially 295–9 and Lowenstein, “Jewish Intermarriage,” 37. Cf. Noakes, “German-Jewish Mischlinge” 318–9; Meyer “Jüdische Mischlinge,” 109–51; Thomas Pegelow, “Linguistic Violence: Language, Power and Separation in the Fate of Germans of Jewish Ancestry, 1928–1948” (diss. Chapel Hill, 2004), 491–7; Ehrenreich, Nazi Ancestral Proof, 75. In one (unsuccessful) case the plaintiff had to pay RM 2,000. WSLA, Lg. Z., 3 Cg., Box 80: 7/42.


27

of the famous opera composer Richard Strauss. After years of harassment and house searches of Alice’s Viennese home, the composer managed to persuade a reluctant Goebbels to grant quasi-Aryan status to his Mischling grandchildren and to leave his family in peace. Even so, Alice was interrogated by the Gestapo in 1943 and lost her grandmother and twenty-five other relatives in the Holocaust.13 More successful were the efforts of the renowned concert pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who managed to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles to purchase Mischling certificates for his two elderly sisters. Wittgenstein was initially hampered in this endeavor because the family’s foreign securities were held in a Swiss trust account worth 9.6 million Swiss francs from which capital could not be withdrawn until 1947. Furthermore, according to the Declaration of Jewish Assets mentioned in Chapter I, all such securities were to be returned to Greater Germany and converted into Reich marks at a rate determined by Berlin. These and other entities including real estate and personal property were then subject to a capital levy of 20 percent. This meant that unless Hermine Wittgenstein and her sister Helene Salzer, along with her family, were willing to emigrate by sacrificing all but 10 percent of the family fortune, they would be classified as “full Jews,” even though the family had been Christian for three generations. The only way out of the dilemma, according to the Director of the Reich Kinship Office in Berlin, was for Paul Wittgenstein and his American sister Gretl Stonborough to prove that their paternal grandfather Hermann Christian Wittgenstein had been born the illegitimate son of Prince George of Waldeck and Pyrmont in 1802!14 From his base in Switzerland, Wittgenstein succeeded in smuggling his mistress and two infant children out of the Ostmark. He and Gretl also managed to secure valuable manuscripts, musical instruments, and a number other precious belongings from Vienna. In early 1939, however, he concluded that the only hope of obtaining Mischling status for his sisters who refused to leave their Austrian home, was to negotiate a settlement with the Nazis that would also enable him to retain a portion of the family fortune. By this time the Germans were willing to come to the table because although they had seized $235,000 of Paul’s gold, they could not legally touch it without his signature. Furthermore, they saw an opportunity to gain access to a share of the family holdings in 13

14

For details see Michael H. Kater, Composers of the Nazi Era: Eight Portraits (New York and Oxford, 2000), 252–7. Waugh, The House of Wittgenstein, 206–19.

28


Switzerland through a loophole by which all beneficiaries would agree to dissolution of the trust. The details of numerous, lengthy, and acrimonious meetings undertaken in Europe and the United States need not detain us here. Suffice it to say that within days of invading Poland, Hitler himself signed a document classifying the Wittgensteins “Mischlinge of the First Degree.” To obtain the Führer’s signature, Paul had paid 1.2 million Swiss francs, forfeited his gold reserves to the Greater German Reich, and transferred his remaining assets in incorporated Austria to his elderly sisters. Whether other Jewish mixed families in Vienna also succeeded in elevating their racial status by paying a king’s ransom is not known.15

The Appellate Process Between 1938 and 1944, at least 497 other Viennese petitioned the Reich Kinship Office or went to court seeking a change in racial status. The files of the District Kinship Office at the Wiener Stadt und Landesarchiv contain what appears to be a complete collection of 399 cases that reached the RSA on appeal. The files also include the records of 98 cases adjudicated by the Viennese Court of Civil Affairs. In the absence of full internal statistics, the records of these cases do not constitute the sum total of those who managed to appeal the decisions of local authorities to Berlin or to seek racial reclassification through the legal system.16 Nor is the information in each and every file complete. Nonetheless, the records represent well over half of the appellate cases, thus constituting a much larger database than those compiled for other cities in Greater Germany. For that reason, scrutiny of the documentation reveals much about the lives and attitudes of mixed families in Nazi Vienna, as well as the strategies many pursued to survive or to gain social acceptance in Hitler’s Reich. It also illuminates the labyrinthine decision-making process that involved party 15 16

Ibid., 219–55. Surviving statistical information on those who contested their racial status in court is difficult to interpret. According to an internal memorandum prepared in 1943, some 533 persons filed papers between 1938 and 1942, but only 276 cases made it beyond the filing stage. Of these, 198 (71.8 percent) were “settled without success.” Given a subsequent flood of complaints from Party officials, the Gestapo, and SS directed against the Viennese judiciary, it seems reasonable to assume that the opposite was the case, that is, that the Nazi statisticians meant that 71.8 percent of the appellants persuaded the court to elevate their racial status. Wiener Stadt – und Landesarchiv (WSLA), A2, Box 4; Zahlungsübersicht über die Rechtsstreitigkeiten wegen Feststellung der blutmässigen Abstammung.


29

officials and civil servants, genealogists, physicians, anthropologists, and other racial scientists. Tabulation of the files indicate that two-thirds of appellate ancestral decisions were handed down in 1942, the year of the deportation of over 30,000 Austrian Jews to Nazi killing centers in Poland. Few of the records indicate exactly when members of Jewish–Gentile families first took advantage of § 7 of the Reich Citizenship Law to petition Hitler for a change in racial status. It may be assumed, however, that most began the paperwork shortly after Kristallnacht of 9–10 November 1938, the savage pogrom that did not exempt intermarried Jews from persecution. As we have already seen, Hitler’s decision to divide mixed families into “privileged” and “nonprivileged” units as embodied in the 1939 Law of Jewish Tenancies, provided clarity and some relief for the intermarried Jews it privileged. But the same legislation isolated childless couples in “Jew houses” and imposed restrictions on families whose children “counted as Jews” (Geltungsjuden). The new law, in other words, kept “nonprivileged” Jews on the same track set for them by the Nuremberg Laws as “full Jews.” In the meantime, another legislative package passed shortly after the Anschluß had already laid the groundwork for partial-Jews to petition for a change in their racial status, especially to appeal an unsatisfactory finding. According to the Law for the Alteration and Amendment of Regulations Pertaining to Family Law, German and Austrian husbands lost their exclusive right to determine the paternity of their own children. The legislation authorized a prosecuting attorney to file a paternity suit “in the interest of the child or public.” The new law was intended to resolve dubious cases involving adopted children, orphans, and other illegitimate offspring, but it enabled the sons and daughters of “Germanblooded” mothers to file suits questioning the identity of their legal fathers. The law also granted evidentiary status to “genealogical–racial” opinions issued by anthropologists, physicians, and other racial scientists. And because the Reich Kinship Office required judicial officials to place credence in the testimony of “German-blooded” women, a number of intermarried couples seized the opportunity to protect their families by having Gentile wives testify that their progeny were the consequence of an illicit or adulterous relationship with a “German-blooded” lover.17 17

For the best overall analysis see Pegelow, “Linguistic Violence,” 421–25 ff. See also Meyer “Jüdische Mischlinge,” 109–31. For behind-the scenes information consult Lösener, “At the Desk of Racial Affairs,” 61–74.

30


Between 1938 and 1944, no fewer than 104 appeals were filed by intermarried Viennese parents of minors in a desperate attempt to promote the status of Mischling children. In cases involving shotgun weddings, thirty-eight mothers provided sworn affidavits that their Jewish husbands had not fathered their sons or daughters. Few of the surviving records indicate exactly when partial-Jews or those classified as “counting as Jews” (Geltungsjuden) first appealed their “racial status,” but the number evidently shot up following the notorious Star Decree of 15 September 1941. According to this order, all Jews over the age of six were required to wear a yellow six-pointed star tightly sewn on the left breast of their outer clothing. Slightly smaller than the size of a hand, the badge was outlined in black and inscribed with the word Jude. Shortly thereafter the Security Police ordered all Jewish households to post a similar star on the front doors of their domiciles. These measures had little impact on Jews living in “privileged mixed marriages,” because Jewish wives were not obliged to wear the yellow star. But those living in “nonprivileged” unions now found themselves marked as outcasts, subject to the same restrictions imposed on other “non-Aryans.” Furthermore, the Labor Office had already begun to conscript Austrian Jewish wives to work in the “Old Reich” (Altreich). Moreover, by the end of the year, the Gestapo was hard at work rounding up Jews to be transported to killing centers in Poland, Latvia, and the Ukraine. Although Jews living in both “privileged” and “nonprivileged” mixed marriages remained exempt from deportation, there is ample evidence that many families survived in constant fear that they, too, would eventually feel the full brunt of Nazi persecution.18 Examination of the following table reveals that 418 (84.1 percent) of known Viennese applicants succeeded in elevating their racial status. Nearly one-third of those classified as Jews were promoted to half-Jews, one-fifth to quarter-Jews, and an astonishing 35.2 percent to the status of “Persons of German or Kindred Blood.” While the decisions of the RSA met the grudging acceptance of local Nazi authorities, those of the Viennese courts provoked a formal complaint in 1943 to the Ministry of the Interior. It charged that local “judges lacked the requisite knowledge in adjudicating cases of blood-line descent” and that “procedures were not followed as completely as stipulated later by regulations aligning family law.” Furthermore, the 18

Walk, Sonderrecht, 347–5 ff; Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago, 1967), 120–22; Gruner, Zwangsarbeit, 194. Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart, 150–6 ff.


31

Table 1. Racial Reclassification in Vienna, 1938–44 a) Successful Improvement of “Racial Status” Altered Designation “Jew” into “Mischling of the First Degree” “Mischling of the First Degree” into “Mischling of the Second Degree” “Mischling of the Second Degree” into “German-blooded” “Mischling of the First Degree” into “German-blooded” subtotal

Number of Cases

Percent

138 98

27.8 19.7

7

1.4

175

35.2

418

84.1

b) Denied Improvement of “Racial Status” Permanent Designation

Number of Cases

Percent

“Mischling of the Second Degree” “Mischling of the First Degree” “Jew” Suicide

2 27 34 1

0.4 5.4 6.8 0.2

subtotal

64

12.8

c) Dismissed, Not Ascertained, or Unresolved

15

3.0

497

100.9

total

Source: Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv (WSLA), A1: Abstammungsunterlagen; A3: Diverses; 3Cg: Landesgericht für Zivilsachen

complaint claimed, the Court of Appeals had violated the statute of limitations by accepting cases definitively settled by 1942.19 Although the files provide insufficient data to construct a social profile of all appellants, the available information suggests that many of the petitioners were well-educated, relatively affluent, or, in the case of military personnel, able to count on the backing of commanding officers.20 There were exceptions, particularly in cases involving illegitimacy. But even in otherwise well-documented court records, it is not always possible to determine occupation or social status. Information on age and gender, however, is fairly complete. As the following tables reveal, seven of the applicants were over sixty years old, and six were less than two. The median age of 464 individuals with known dates of birth approximated 19 20

WSLA, A 1, Box 7, Folder 2: Kramer to Frick, 5 May 1943. This is the conclusion reached by Meyer in her examination of a much smaller number of cases in Hamburg. Meyer, “Jüdisische Mischlinge,” 103.


32

Table 2. Age Distribution of “Racial” Appellants in Gau Vienna, 1938–44 Date of Birth

Number

Percent

1870–9 1880–9 1890–9 1900–09 1910–19 1920–29 1930–39 1940–

7 25 48 80 109 138 49 6

1.4 5.0 9.7 16.1 21.9 27.8 9.9 1.2

subtotal NA

462 35

93.0 7.0

total

497

100.0

Source: WSLA, A1: Abstammungsunterlagen; A3: Diverses; 3CG: Landesgericht Für Zivilsachen.

35, the average age roughly 35.7. A mere glance at the data demonstrates, however, that these numbers are misleading, if not meaningless. This is because nearly 40 percent of the applicants were born between 1920 and 1939. If one deducts those born in 1938 and adds twenty-four who came into the world in 1919, it becomes apparent that nearly half of the applicants (45.5 percent) were underage at the time of the Anschluß. Put another way, the overwhelming majority of these petitions appear to have been filed and pursued by one of the “German-blooded” parents in a mixed marriage, most often the mother. As for gender, 49.4 percent of the applicants were male, 50 percent female. In short, there was virtually no “gender difference.”21 In questioning a finding of “racial incompatibility,” most petitioners appear to have chosen one of two approaches: either to appeal through administrative channels to the Reich Kinship Office in Berlin, or to proceed through the local courts. Both paths turned out to be expensive, complicated, and time consuming. As the following tables reveal, fourfifths of the appellants followed the administrative route, quite possibly because Lösener’s office exempted dubious cases from legal discrimination until final judgment had been rendered. The data also indicate significant 21

Ehrenreich’s sample of 149 initial applicants in Vienna found 59 percent were male, 41 percent female. For Greater Germany he calculated 57 percent were male and 43 percent female. Ehrenreich, Nazi Ancestral Proof, 99.


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Table 3. Gender of “Racial” Appellants in Gau Vienna, 1938–44 Number

Percent

Male Female

247 250

49.6 50.4

total

497

100.0

Source: WSLA. A1: Abstammungsunterlagen; A3: Diverses; 3 Cg: Landesgericht für Zivilsachen

differences in outcomes. Nearly 90 percent of those who proceeded through the Nazi bureaucracy succeeded in “improving” their racial statutes, whereas only 60 percent of those filing civil suits persuaded the judges to reverse unsatisfactory findings. On the other hand, 60 percent of the half-Jews who went to court emerged from the judicial chambers reclassified as “German or Kindred blood.” There was also a notable difference in gender: while 60 percent of those appealing their racial status through the Nazi hierarchy were men, 55 percent of those filing paternity suits were women. The difference may be explained by the persistence of traditional administrative structures partial to men that coexisted with revised family legislation favorable to women. In the aggregate there was, however, no significant “gender difference,” as we have already seen. Administrative Appeals The records of those appealing a finding of “racial incompatibility” through bureaucratic channels are filed in scattered folders at the Wiener Stadt – und Landesarchiv. The collection consists of at least 116 duplicates as well as copies of eight judicial decisions forwarded to the Gauleitung for further processing. There are also folders that contain only a carbon copy of the Interior Ministry’s final decision. Other files provide a more extensive paper trail, but even these tend to summarize genealogical records, sworn affidavits, or, in at least one-fourth of the cases, the results of biological examinations, which are explained later in this chapter. Normally, an appellant’s case would first reach the desk of the District Racial Policy Office. After providing a brief summary of the ancestral record, the director would prepare a recommendation based largely on genealogical records and the results of a biological examination. The appeal would then be forwarded to the District Office of Personnel and the Deputy Gauleiter. Occasionally, other officials, such


34

Table 4. Administrative “Racial Reclassification” in Gau Vienna, 1938–44 a) Successful Improvement of “Racial Status” Altered Designation “Jew” into “Mischling of the First Degree” “Mischling of the First Degree” into “Mischling of the Second Degree” “Mischling of the Second Degree” into “German-blooded” “Mischling of the First Degree” into “German-blooded” subtotal

Number of Cases 132 96 7

Percent 33.1 24.1 1.75

124

31.1

359

90.05

b) Denied Improvement of “Racial Status” Permanent Designation

Number of Cases

Percent

“Mischling of the Second Degree” “Mischling of the First Degree” “Jew” NA

1 14 19 6

0.25 3.51 4.76 1.5

subtotal

40

10.02

399

100.07

total

Table 5. Judicial “Racial Reclassification” in Gau Vienna, 1938–44 a) Successful Improvement of “Racial Status” Altered Designation “Jew” into “Mischling of the First Degree” “Mischling of the First Degree” into “Mischling of the Second Degree” “Mischling of the First Degree” into “German-blooded” subtotal

Number of Cases

Percent

6 2

6.1 2.0

51

52.0

59

60.1

b) Denied Improvement of “Racial Status” Permanent Designation “Mischling of the Second Degree” “Mischling of the First Degree” “Jew” Suicide Dismissed or unresolved

Number of Cases 1 13 15 1 9

Percent 1.0 13.3 15.3 1.0 9.2

subtotal

39

39.3

total

98

99.9


35

as Director of Finance, would become involved before the complete dossier, including birth and marriage certificates, was forwarded first to the Higher Regional Court or in two-thirds of the cases directly to Berlin. Although the District Kinship Office under Arthur Schultze-Naumburg had labored hard and long in making initial “ancestral decisions,” it was the Racial Policy Office that wielded greater influence in the appeal process. Between 1938 and 1941 its director was Dr. Heinrich Edmund Wamser, a self-styled “family researcher” and member of the Anthropological Institute of the University of Vienna. Born in 1903, Wamser had grown up in Hietzing, graduated from a Realschule, and become a postal official. Shortly after Hitler’s electoral breakthrough in Germany in 1930, Wamser joined the minuscule Austrian NSDAP. According to Party records, he distinguished himself in the SA and between 1935 and 1938, served three prison terms as an “illegal” activist.22 As head of the Racial Policy Office, Wamser became known for his devotion to biological purity. Of 275 appellants who succeeded in elevating their “racial status,” Wamser endorsed the applications of only two. Before his death at the front in 1942,23 he rejected those of sixty-six others out of hand. Without overlooking the genealogical record, he relied primarily on the results of biological examinations that found “morphological features indicative of a racial mixture typical of the Jewish people.” He bitterly resisted the promotion of half-Jews to quarter-Jews, as well as the reclassification of anyone with the slightest trait of non-Aryan ancestry as “German or Kindred blood.” Consistent in his opinions, he contended that even exceptional cases constituted a clear and present danger for the future of the German people.24 Authorities in the Gau Personnel Office tended to be more pragmatic. Although no less ideological than Wamser, they tended to favor younger appellants of partial-Jewish descent, who had been members of the “illegal” Hitler Youth, serving soldiers of the Wehrmacht, or individuals known to be “nationally minded.” In other cases, they raised no objections or passed on Wamser’s recommendations without comment or notation. Much the same can be said of other officials in the Gauleitung, although Schultze-Naumburg appears to have made a number of hardline decisions during his years in Vienna. Around the time of his arrival

22

23 24

Österreichisches Staatarchiv (ÖStA), Archiv der Republik (AdR), Gauakt: Heinrich Edmund Wamser. WSLA, A2, Box 2: Personalfragen, 12 February 1942. For examples, see WSLA, A3:241/57234; 241/50443; 241/50312.

36


in the Danubian metropolis, Naumburg had proclaimed that “racial science” disproved “the belief in the equality of everyone who had a human face.”25 Given the large number of cases examined in this study, the many petitions of those appealing to Berlin for improvement of their racial status will be described and analyzed in the following categories: Nazi militants; minors; soldiers and war widows; individuals compelled to undergo pseudoscientific biological examinations; and a handful of fiancées seeking permission to marry a non-Jew. Attention will also be directed to a minuscule number of individuals seeking economic gain. As we shall see, nearly half of the appellants were minors, whose parents pursued multiple strategies to spare their children from Nazi sanctions as “Geltungsjuden.” Their petitions included genealogical documents such as birth, baptismal, and death certificates; notarized medical records; or sworn affidavits by desperate Gentile mothers claiming that a “German-blooded” lover had begotten their offspring. Similar techniques were pursued by those examined by Hitler’s racial scientists, though in these cases evidence of illegitimacy tended to be more decisive than biological test results. That officials in Berlin relied primarily on traditional forms of evidence in reaching a decision should reveal something about the commitment of the Nazi regime to maintaining a semblance of the rule of law. Nazi Activists Scholars who were examining the dossiers of those elsewhere in Greater Germany who questioned the “racial classification” of family members have noted a striking number of shocked Nazi activists who had discovered a “non-Aryan” ancestor in their family tree.26 This was also true in Vienna, where no fewer than nineteen appellants filed papers claiming unawareness of Jewish ancestry, service to the “illegal” NSDAP, or evidence of German Nationalist activities. The most prominent of these may have been Dr. Karl Kuch, Chairman of the Panel of Judges of the Court of Civil Affairs. On 30 June 1938, Kuch was promoted to Court President, only to learn shortly thereafter that his maternal grandmother had been Jewish. Within a month he submitted a formal application to remain at his post in accordance with § 7 of the First Supplementary Decree of the 25

26

WSLA, A3: 241/50770; 241/15069; 241/50443; 241/51034. For the Schultze-Naumann quotation see Ehrenreich, “Genealogy and Genocide,” 125. Most notably Ehrenreich, “Genealogy to Genocide,” 300–3. See also Meyer, Jüdische Mischlinge, 122–3. For case studies involving military personnel see Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, 235–46.


37

Reich Citizenship Law. Although opposed by the District Kinship office, his petition was endorsed by Reich Commissioner Bürckel, whose legal experts contended that Kuch was only “one-eighth Jewish by blood,” who furthermore had acquitted himself with distinction during the Great War, and who as “a bitter enemy of the [Dollfuss-Schuschnigg] system” had consistently treated Nazi defendants accused of terrorist acts with exceptional leniency. After a year of exhaustive paperwork, the Ministry of the Interior and the Office of the Deputy Führer finally declined to reclassify Kuch as “German-blooded.” They agreed, however, to grant him special dispensation according to a provision (§ 3) of the Decree for the Reorganization of the Austrian Civil Service. In other words, a key magistrate who made life and death decisions involving cases of “racial descent” was now himself a person of “non-Aryan” stock.27 A similar, though less dramatic case, came to the attention of the authorities in early 1942. At that time, Dr. Karl Kundraditz-Worzikowsky, a prominent pediatrician and erstwhile “illegal” activist, applied to Gauleitung to elevate the status of his half-Jewish wife to “Mischling of the Second Degree” and that of his adolescent daughters to “persons of German-blood.” The appeal was drafted in the form of a personal request and perhaps for that reason received the enthusiastic endorsement of the Viennese Nazi Medical Association. The SD noted sarcastically that Kundraditz-Worzikowsky sought to advance the career of his eldest daughter in the Reich Labor Service by taking advantage of his extensive social connections within the municipal medical community and police force. Nevertheless, the security men did not actively oppose the appeal. On 15 March 1943, the Reich Chancellery granted the applicant’s request, though on condition that neither daughter could pursue a career in the NSDAP nor marry a professional military officer.28 On the other hand, membership in the Nazi Party and connections to people in high places did not always ensure success. In October of 1942, Margarethe Bernhuber, a well-known actress in the Burgtheater, approached the Gestapo with a plea to spare her sixty-four-yearold stepmother, Fanny Dux, from deportation. Once in the hands of Hauptsturmführer Alois Brunner, the petition became a death warrant. The merciless Gestapo agent acknowledged that Bernhuber and her immediate family were “German-blooded,” that her husband was a National Socialist, and that the couple appeared frequently in the company of 27 28

For details see the full correspondence at ÖStA, AdR, Gauakt: Dr. Karl Kuch. WSLA, A3, Box 15: 241/51751.

38


Party luminaries. Nonetheless, it was inexcusable, he opined, to make an exception for an “impudent Jew.” On 25 February 1943, Fanny Dux was deported to Theresienstadt. Two months later she died.29 Of the remaining appellants who sought “clemency” by stressing devotion to Hitler’s cause, ten succeeded in elevating their “racial” status: three were designated “German-blooded,” three quarter-Jews, and four half-Jews. There were also three who failed and two whose cases went unresolved. Of the total number of those petitioners, ten were men and five women. Each case was so different that it is difficult to perceive a distinctive pattern. This was particularly true of those individuals promoted to the status of “German blood.” Herbert Kiefer, for example, was only three years old when his father appealed for a parity of status, based largely on his own record as an “illegal” activist. In Vienna, Wamser rejected the application, but the RSA, while paying no attention to the father’s credentials, ruled that the child was only one-eighth Jewish by blood. In contrast, Kurt Sandor, a veteran of Hitler’s movement, discovered the Jewish identity of his grandmother only in 1941. As a holder of both the Golden Party Badge and Blood Order, he saw his application sail through the bureaucracy within months.30 More complex was the case of Ruth Sobotka, the twenty-three-yearold daughter of a highly decorated Jewish officer of the Habsburg army. During the interwar period, her brother had fled to Germany where he joined the Luftwaffe. Deployed to Spain as a pilot in the Condor Legion, he was shot down early in 1938. Just before Christmas, the father, Colonel Camillo Sobotka, applied to Göring for full Reich citizenship. The Field Marshal’s office declined the request but suggested filing a formal appeal through Bürckel to the Reich Kinship Office. This appeal came to grief within a year, but for reasons not revealed in the surviving documentation the Reich Chancellery later granted Sobotka “clemency,” presumably under § 7 of the First Supplementary Decree of the Reich Citizenship Law. This further set the stage for Ruth Sobotka to petition the authorities for a change in her own racial status. Within the Gauleitung, the officials charged with decisions involving kinship, racial policy, and personnel all joined in opposing her appeal. They conceded that the appellant supported the new order with considerable enthusiasm, but that “positive statements and views cannot possibly conceal her prevailing Jewish bloodline.” Paradoxically, SS Hauptsturmführer Dr. Hermann Vellguth, himself 29 30

WSLA, A3, Box2:241/300; DÖW, Namensliste der österreichischen Holocaust Opfer. WSLA, A3: 241/51718


39

a physician, raised the issue of her family’s war record, especially the posthumous award of the Spanish Cross to her fallen brother. Whether Vellguth’s official report tipped the scales in Ruth Sobotka’s favor cannot be known for certain,31 but within a month, on 12 December 1942, the Reich Chancellery reclassified her as “German-blooded according to German Racial Law and subsequent legislative decrees with all rights and obligations pertaining thereto.”32 In considering the appeals of three half-Jews for reclassification as “Mischlinge of the Second Degree,” Wamser opposed only one petitioner, a young man who wished to marry his pregnant bride. Other officials looked the other way, however, lauding the petitioner’s faithful service in the Hitler Youth. The other two cases involved a young woman activist in the Sudeten-German party and a thirty-two-year-old motorcyclist, who had distinguished himself as a police informer before 1938.33 The files of the four appellants promoted from “Jew” to “Mischling of the First Degree” also make reference to service to the Nazi cause, but only one provides detailed information. In late 1938, Ernst Altmann, a trained bookbinder, sought to change jobs, apparently assuming that his career in Storm Troop 23 would enhance his chances of landing a more lucrative position. A routine Gestapo check revealed, however, that Altmann had two Jewish grandparents, the discovery of which led to his expulsion from both the SA and the NSDAP. His file then made its way to the desk of the Racial Policy Office, whose genealogical researchers discovered that Altmann once belonged to the Jewish Religious Community. Demoted to pariah status, Ernst “Israel” Altmann submitted a direct appeal to Hitler claiming that while his Jewish stepmother had compelled him to enroll in the Jewish Religious Community, he had always considered himself an Aryan dedicated to the Nazi movement. For reasons not revealed in the surviving records, officials in the Reich Chancellery accepted the petition. On 3 November 1941, Dr. Werner Feldscher informed the Viennese Gauleitung that Altmann was “no longer to be treated as a Jew.” Six months later, however, Hauptsturmführer Herman Vellguth questioned the decision by producing evidence of Czech ancestry. Whether Altmann retained his Mischling status remains unknown.34 31

32 33 34

For information on Vellguth’s career see Herwig Czech, Erfassung, Selektion und “Ausmerze”: DasWiener Gesundheitsamt und die Umsetzung der nationalsozialistische “Erbgesundheitspolitik” 1938 bis 1945 (Vienna, 2003), 15. WSLA, A3, Box 28: 241/306. WSLA, A3, Box 1: 241/50451; Box 34: 241/50620; Box 13: 241/50498. WSLA, A3, Box 1: Ernst Altmann.

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One of the strangest cases processed by Nazi genealogical–racial authorities in Vienna was that of Dr. Viktor Lefford. Born in 1881, he and his family had moved in 1900 from Bohemia to the Habsburg capital, where he matriculated and earned a doctorate. After the collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy, Lefford published numerous pamphlets and books condemning the Paris peace treaties, most notably Zwanzigtausendkilometer Zollmauern: das Unrecht von Versailles, a work that attracted the approval of Goebbels’s Ministry of Propaganda and Popular Enlightenment. In addition, he churned out scurrilous tracts for underground Nazi movements in both Austria and Czechoslovakia. Within months of the Anschluß, the District Kinship Office exposed Lefford as a “racial” imposter. Scrutiny of genealogical records revealed that both parents, Julie and Hermann Lasch, had been Jewish, that he had been circumcised, and that until 1907 he had practiced the Hebrew faith. It was in that year he had converted to Roman Catholicism and assumed a new identity. Lefford responded immediately by admitting that his mother was indeed Jewish, but that his biological father was a Roman Catholic priest with whom his mother had enjoyed a long affair. He then solicited letters of support from officials in the Sudeten-German Heimatbund, the Viennese NSDAP, and even the Propaganda Ministry in Berlin. These efforts availed him not at all, nor did the outcome of a biological examination that concluded he was a “full-blooded Jew.” Undismayed, Lefford applied for “clemency” under § 7 of the First Supplementary Decree of the Reich Citizenship Law. He flooded the Gauleitung with petitions of appeal coached in Nazi parlance, all of which encountered fierce, heavily documented, opposition. Wamser, for example, conceded that Lefford demonstrated exceptional skill in concealing his invidious goals, which “point for point, page for page reveal the authentic, two-faced character of Jews.” Nevertheless, his dogged persistence paid off. On 26 February 1942, the RSA reclassified Lefford a “Mischling of the First Decree.”35 Of the three appellants who either failed or encountered difficulty in improving their “racial” status by claiming prior service to the Nazi Party, only one left an extensive paper trail. On 12 September 1939, the fortyseven-year-old Ernst Geringer appealed his classification as a quarter-Jew, providing genealogical evidence that although his maternal grandmother had belonged briefly to a Jewish congregation, she was in fact of Aryan stock. Although designated a Mischling of the Second Degree, he appealed to the Gauleitung, which endorsed his petition. After two years of 35

WSLA, A 1: Box 22.


41

paperwork, the Reich Chancellery reclassified him as “German-blooded,” but shortly before Berlin’s decision, Geringer was arrested and sentenced to three months in jail for trafficking with Jews in precious metals. In May of 1942, the Gau personnel director reduced Geringer in grade and ordered him expelled from the Nazi Party. The decision was supported by another Party official, who added that Geringer’s Jewish blood-line and criminal behavior made him unworthy of Hitler’s movement. There the matter rested until 12 November of the following year, when a dispatch arrived from Berlin reinstating Geringer’s “German-blooded” status.36 Minors Close to half of the Viennese appellants (45.5 percent) who sought to better their racial status through administrative channels had been minors at the time of the Anschluß. Of these, 87 were male and 97 female. Threequarters of the youthful petitioners had been born between 1919 and 1929, one-fifth between 1930 and 1937, and the rest between 1938 and 1942. As might be expected, the onerous work of hiring genealogists, attorneys, and other racial specialists to file a formal appeal could not be left to toddlers or teenaged children. The incomplete files reveal that at least ninety-five Aryan parents, including eighty-one mothers and fourteen fathers, expended enormous time and energy to improve the plight of their Mischling offspring, and in a number of instances literally saving their children’s lives. Scrutiny of the written record also provides evidence of ingenious survival strategies, but also of family tensions provoked by Nazi discrimination. Nearly half of those Gentile parents who filed appeals on behalf of their children sought to prove that according to the Nuremberg Laws, their sons and daughters should not be “counted as Jews” (Geltungsjuden). Because many were widowed, divorced, or had lost contact with husbands in exile, this was an approach that proved surprisingly successful, as it did in Hamburg.37 Forty-eight of the appellants were elevated from “Jew” to “Mischling of the First Degree.” Of the other cases, four were elevated to “Mischling of the Second Degree,” and seven to “German or kindred blood.” While the motivation of the intermarried parents is generally clear, the record of their testimony is less easy to interpret. What was crucial for them was to prove that their children had not been enrolled in the 36 37

WSLA, A3: Box 9. Meyer, “Jüdische Mischlinge,” 114–23.

42


Jewish Religious Community or had withdrawn their membership prior to the Anschluß. Because both Stuckart and Lösener in the Ministry of the Interior were seeking to reclassify all Geltungsjuden as “Mischlinge of the First Degree,” divorced or widowed parents were usually able to make a persuasive case.38 Thus, a number of mothers went out of their way to dissociate themselves from their Jewish partners, but others made no reference to their husbands or to their marital status. In contrast to court cases, their sworn affidavits consisted of a simple sentence or none at all. Fourteen of the mothers had been divorced, eleven before the Anschluß, three thereafter. None alluded to political differences with their former partners, although one divorcee did express indignation that her nineyear-old son had been expelled from school as a “Jew.”39 Nine of the petitioners were widows, one of whom wrote a heart-rending and revealing letter to HJ Leader and Vienna Gauleiter Baldur von Schirach. In wellcrafted prose, Cilli Glüxmann explained that she had married a Habsburg officer, who subsequently “compelled” her to convert to Judaism. As a simple chambermaid, the petition continued, she had no understanding of “racial feeling or racial doctrine,” naively considering Judaism simply a religion. For that reason her son Alfred, born in 1923, remained a member of the Jewish Religious Community, even after her husband’s premature death from lung disease. Even so, her son never socialized with Jews or considered himself “non-Aryan.” Although she had appealed for “clemency” on 20 August 1938, her petition had gone unanswered for three years. It was thus out of ever-increasing desperation that Glüxmann appealed to Schirach to consider her plight: “For me as an Aryan and my son as a Jew,” she concluded, “it is dreadful to live apart. We cannot even take a walk in the park, since for me as an Aryan everything is allowed, while for him as Jew everything is forbidden.” Within three months Alfred Glüxmann was reclassified as “Mischling of the first Degree.”40 Nineteen of the Gentile mothers involved in the appeal process of minors denied the Jewish paternity of their children. Because all but one of the appellants were in their late adolescence, there is reason to believe that they either initiated the appeals or colluded with their mothers. Seven of the parents were, however, widowed or divorced. Whatever the truth, it became quite common for those seeking to alter or reverse a finding of “racial incompatibility” to claim that they were 38 39 40

Lösener, “At the Desk for Racial Affairs,” 76. WSLA, A 3, Box 15: 241/50436. WSAL, A 3, Box 8: 241/50380.


43

not biologically related to their legal fathers. As we shall see, however, most plaintiffs tended to be adults and proceeded normally through the courts.41 Of the nineteen Viennese mothers who testified on behalf of their teenaged sons and daughters, nine had been unwed at the time of birth. Some designated a Jew the begetter; others later “married up.” On 5 February 1921, for example, Maria Morawec gave birth to a baby girl, designating Emil Cohen as the biological father. Because Cohen died within months of the birth and the mother admitted to promiscuity, the Reich Kinship Office ruled that credibility should be placed in the word of an Aryan woman, thus elevating her daughter to “German-blooded” status. In a similar case, Flora Heiligenbrunner identified a traveling salesman, Samuel Steiner, as the father of her illegitimate son, born in 1921. After the Anschluß, however, she presented a sworn affidavit, designating a certain Franz Muthentaler, with whom she had had a brief fling, as the begetter. Once again, the authorities accepted the word of a loose woman primarily on the basis of her “race” to reclassify her son a “person of German-blood.” Two other cases followed a similar trajectory. In the first, the Reich Kinship office promoted Franziska Hiller, born in 1920, to “German-blooded” status by accepting evidence of maternal “sexual intercourse with multiple partners during the period of conception.” In the second, Maria Kryschanitsch simply could not recall the identity of the father of her ten-year-old daughter, even though the Guardianship Authority (Vormundschaftsamt) had designated the father a Jew. Because Kryschanitsch admitted to multiple affairs, the authorities threw up their hands, ruling that as they were “in no position to determine the begetter of the daughter,” she was per force a “person of German blood.”42 Three of the mothers denying the “non-Aryan” paternity of their offspring had later taken a Jewish husband. One, Giesela Ruckendorfer, claimed that Count Karl Firmian zu Krometz und Meggel was the father of her “premarital” daughter, Liselotte Frisch, born on 2 August 1919. Three months later, she married Paul Frisch, who adopted the infant and in 1925 became the father of a second daughter. In 1940, the Frisch family presented an iron-clad case to the genealogical authorities in the form of three depositions, including that of a sister and two close friends, as well as photographs of both daughters. Within less than a year, the Reich Kinship Office reclassified Liselotte Frisch a “person of German blood.” A less dramatic appeal was filed by the nineteen-year-old 41 42

Ehrenreich, “Genealogy and Genocide,” 285–6. WSLA, A 1, Box 24.

44


Katherina Hechter. Born an illegitimate child in 1922, her mother had married a Jew two years later. On 20 March 1941, Katherina’s mother then presented a sworn affidavit naming a Yugoslav businessman as her daughter’s biological father. The case was then submitted to the Anthropological Institute on the Ringstrasse for professional assessment. After conducting blood tests and an examination of the candidate’s morphological features, the racial specialists were unable to reach a definitive conclusion. However, they did pay close attention to the legal father’s “disgusting Jewish appearance,” ultimately deciding that Katherina’s father must have been a “man of kindred blood.” A similar case, that of seventeen-year-old Melititta Peskar, had a similar outcome.43 Most remarkable were three petitions in which otherwise respectable mothers claimed that their progeny were the result of an adulterous relationship with an Aryan paramour. Of these the most sensational may have been that of a Bohemian aristocrat, Countess Elisabeth Seranyi. According to a surviving court transcript, Countess Seranyi had married an affluent Viennese Jew, Alfred Bader, on 29 September 1912 during a stay in London. Ten years later, she gave birth to a daughter Elisabeth. Upon reaching her majority, Elizabeth Bader filed a petition claiming that her biological father had been a certain Count Johann Alois Maria von Hardegg-Eisfaldy. The daughter’s contention was backed up by the mother, who in a salacious deposition boasted that she had indeed enjoyed a long-term, passionate relationship with von Hardegg. The two also presented evidence that Bader had been confined to a psychiatric hospital at Innersdorf between 1902 and 1905, and on multiple occasions between 1908 and 1923. Further, they produced medical records that the legal father had undergone testicular surgery leaving him both impotent and sterile. Possibly because Bader was deceased by this time the daughter’s appeal was forwarded to the Court of Civil Affairs for adjudication. On 14 June 1944, Judge Anton Wintersperger ruled in Elizabeth Bader’s favor, enabling the Reich Kinship Office to grant her “German-blooded” status.44 In two other cases there is reason to believe that both parents conspired to have the mother provide false testimony of adultery. In late 1939, Anna Adler provided a sworn deposition that her Jewish husband had not fathered her nine-year-old son. Even earlier, Josefa Barber appeared before the authorities in the company of an erstwhile lover, 43 44

Ibid. Ibid.


45

both of whom offered written depositions that together they had sired Arno Erich Barber, born in 1921. Whether the Jewish fathers had been cuckolded or had colluded with their wives to admit to an adulterous relationship is unknown. What the records do make clear is that both children were accorded “German-blooded” status and that their parents remained united in matrimony.45 Nazi officials within the Gauleitung appear to have paid cursory attention to most maternal petitions. Wamser characteristically rejected each and every appeal on grounds of “physical appearance,” even in cases of strikingly beautiful daughters.46 Those in charge of personnel or placement occasionally took note of religious or political attitudes, realizing that, except for cases of extreme hostility, most appeals would meet approval in Berlin. They tended to take a closer look at the backgrounds of widows or wives whose husbands had fled abroad, noting, for example, whether the mother had remained Roman Catholic, “still consorted with Jews,” or remained hostile to the regime. As for those mothers who denied the paternity of their progeny, the authorities appear to have accepted changes in family law that favored the testimony of Aryan women in dubious cases.47 Overall, they endorsed the petitions of eight appellants, disapproved those of eleven, and either ignored or considered the rest “harmless” or “innocuous.” This is not to suggest that the Viennese authorities commiserated with the appellants, four of whom suffered deportation and death as a consequence of recommendations made by the Gauleitung. 48 In one solitary case, the Director of Placement expressed backhanded sympathy for a twenty-year-old student who had fled from the home of his widowed Aryan mother and her Polish lover to take refuge in a Capuchin monastery.49 We have already seen that three of the Aryan fathers who filed appeals on behalf of their underage children stressed their own prior military service or devotion to the Nazi Party. This was the approach taken by 45 46 47 48

49

Ibid. See, for example, the photograph of Esther Muschl at WSLA, A 3, Box 29: 241/50090. See fn. 39. WSLA, A3, Box 7: 241/50521, 241/50654; Box 8: 241/50380, 241/50729; Box 9: 241/50458, 241/50774, 241/50530, 241/50664; Box 11: 241/50436; Box 15: 241/50436; 241/50686; Box 16 241/50653; Box 17: 241/51922; Box 17: 241/ 51922; Box 18: 241/50714, 241/50333, 241/497; Box 20: 241/51722; Box 21: 241/50090; Box 27: 241/51698; Box 28: 241/51660; Box 30: 241/50139, ; Box 31: 241/50505; Box 33: 241/50345, 241/50253, 24150204; Box 34: 241/51678; Box 35: 241/50514, 241/50335, 241/50350; Box 36: 241/50168, 241/50528; Box 39: 241/50311. WSLA, A3, Box 31: 241/50505.

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five others as well, including one who succeeded in elevating the status of his daughter to “German-blooded.” On 15 October 1941, for example, Karl Lehotzky filed a formal appeal on behalf of his two daughters: Rosa, born in 1923, and Anna, in 1924. In a letter to the Racial Policy Office he stressed his previous war record as a combat infantryman and subsequent career as a police constable. As his Jewish wife was deceased, he continued, there was no reason why his teenaged daughters should be “counted as Jews” (Geltungsjuden), forced to wear a star, and forbidden to work as apprentices. Predictably, Wamser rejected the appeal, but the District Placement Officer took exception noting that Lehotzky had returned to the Roman Catholic faith in 1936, and had enjoyed a reputation as a loyal servant of the regime. Commensurately, on 17 March 1942, the Reich Kinship Office reclassified Rosa and Anna as “Mischling of the First Degree.”50 In a similar case Gustav Rühl parlayed his record as an “illegal” activist to win the endorsement of the Gauleitung for elevation of his daughter to half-Jew, an appeal approved by Berlin a month later.51 Finally, there was a motion filed by retired Lieutenant Colonel Alfred Gross on behalf of his half-Jewish daughter Ilse, born in 1924. Although married to a Jewish wife for many years, Gross evidently possessed considerable clout in Berlin. Within months of his having submitted a formal letter of appeal to Führer Headquarters in East Prussia, Ilse was granted “German-blooded” status; her Jewish mother received exemption from all restrictions under the Nuremberg Laws.52 Soldiers and War Widows Upon its formal integration into the German Wehrmacht on 23 March 1938, General Wilhelm Keitel discharged all Jews from the Austrian army. A November follow-up order discharged all military personnel married to Jews or to half-Jews, but also stipulated that quarter-Jews could remain in the armed forces. These measures applied, however, only to career servicemen. All other Mischlinge, as elsewhere in Greater Germany, were to be subject to the draft. This meant that after the outbreak of the Second World War, thousands of partial-Jewish soldiers soon distinguished themselves in combat, but upon returning home on furlough discovered that their Jewish parents or relatives were suffering the full brunt of Nazi restrictions. Perceiving a threat to both civilian and military morale, 50 51 52

WSLA, A 3, Box 19: 241/50307. WSLA, A 3, Box 26: 241/50632. WSLA, A 3, Box 9: 241/50208.


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Hitler decided the following spring to discharge all half-Jews from the armed forces. He also expelled Gentile soldiers married to Jews as well as those married to half-Jews. On 8 April 1940, the Armed Forces High Command (OKW) issued the Führer’s order, but by the time his directive made its way through the chain of command, a number of Mischling soldiers had already been decorated for gallantry or promoted during the early campaigns in Poland, Scandinavia, and Western Europe. As the best way out of an awkward situation, Hitler made it known that discharged servicemen could apply for “clemency” to remain on active duty or, in special cases of heroism, for reclassification as “German-blooded” citizens.53 Somewhere between ten and fifteen Viennese appellants took advantage of this opportunity to improve their racial status. The exact number is difficult to ascertain because most of the surviving documents make only fleeting reference to their service in the Wehrmacht. This, in turn, may be explained by the fact that most Viennese Mischling soldiers apparently filed their petitions through military channels. As late as 1943, hundreds of them remained on active duty, usually as enlisted men, but some served as NCOs and officers. Attempts by the Viennese Gauleitung to track down their names, ranks, and units in that year appear to have come to naught. Deputy Gauleiter Karl Scharizer even circulated an angry memorandum, alerting his staff to the large number of Mischlinge seeking “German-blooded” status through enlistment.54 That Scharizer was unaware Hitler had already ordered an end to enlistments and petitions for “clemency” by half-Jews is not without interest.55 The documentation on those soldiers who petitioned Viennese authorities for “racial reclassification” contains virtually no specific information or details. Fritz Fuchs, for example, had been discharged from the Wehrmacht in September of 1940. Upon returning to Vienna, he learned that he had been designated a “Jew.” Two years later the Reich Kinship Office intervened to designate him a half-Jew on the basis of his “courageous” performance in the Polish and French campaigns. A similar fate befell Herbert Frasser who, after four years of active duty, was elevated to quarter-Jew. Of those who remained in the Wehrmacht, Corporal Lukas Freund, a quarter-Jew, was declared eligible for promotion, while 53

54 55

Cf. Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, 106–20 ff. Noakes, “German-Jewish ‘Mischlinge’,” 328–36. On this issue see the correspondence and circulars in WSLA, A 1, Box 7, Folder 2. Hitler’s order was published by the OKW on 24 October 1942. Noakes, “German-Jewish ‘Mischlinge’,” 335.

48


Lance Corporal Hermann Karplus was designated “German-blooded” for the duration of the war. Two other partial-Jewish servicemen received the same distinction, though for reasons unknown.56 More complete are the records of three war widows who were upgraded from quarter-Jews to “persons of German-blood.” On 22 May 1941, Leopoldine Amersin petitioned the Racial Policy Office on behalf of her daughter Ilse Bernges, whose husband had fallen during the French campaign as a member of the Waffen SS. While Wamser matter-of-factly rejected the appeal even in the face of a “favorable” biological examination, the District Placement Office pointed out that the mother had struggled valiantly for the Nazi cause prior to 1938, and that her daughter had headed a local group of the League of German Girls (Bund Deutscher Mädchen-BDM). Within a year, the Reich Chancellery had granted parity of status to the twenty-three-old widow. A similar courtesy was extended to Franziska Ratay after the death of her husband on the Eastern Front, as well as to Birgit Faber under similar circumstances. It is not surprising that Frau Ratay moved immediately to have her infant children reclassified as Aryans.57 Biological Exemptions In the cases examined so far, only nineteen of the Viennese appellants denied their partial-Jewish ancestry. What the majority sought was “clemency” according to § 7 of the First Supplementary Decree of the Reich Citizenship Law or in the case of the “Geltungsjuden” reclassification as “Mischling of the First Degree.” That their cases took months or years longer to resolve than elsewhere in Greater Germany can be explained by several factors: first, a heavy work-load and, second, alternating guidelines within the Reich Kinship Office as to how to interpret “racial descent.” More importantly, confusion lingered among Nazi authorities over the cut-off point for the Nuremberg Laws in incorporated Austria. Was one’s “racial status” to be determined by the passage of the Reich Citizenship Law in 1935, or upon its implementation in the Ostmark? Had intermarried couples who had taken their vows between 15 September 1935 and the Anschluß committed “racial defilement”? Should Mischlinge who had withdrawn from the Jewish Religious Community between1935 and 1938 be “counted as Jews”? 56

57

WSLA, A 3: Box 1, Folder 5: Erleichterung für Personen jüdischer Abstammung durch die Kanzlei Adolf Hitler A-Z; Box 3 (Johann Presser), 241/50659; Box 7, 241/866; Box 16 (Hermann Karplus). WSLA, A3, Box 1: 241/50770, 241/51888; Box 7: 241/51851.


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The 1935 date went into force in Hitler’s homeland within two months of the Anschluß.58 Nevertheless, officials in the Interior Ministry questioned and debated its validity, presumably on ex post facto grounds. Finally, on 12 October 1942, Under Secretary Wilhelm Stuckart issued a top-secret order modifying § 5 of the Nuremberg Laws as it applied to the Ostmark. According to the directive, the cut-off date for Austrians petitioning for an elevation in “racial” status from “counting as a Jew” (Geltungsjude) to “Mischling of the First Degree” was changed from 16 November 1935 to 14 March 1938. Further, the ruling stipulated that petitions for “clemency” be granted to applicants who provided documentary evidence of withdrawal from the Jewish Religious Community prior to the Anschluß. It also extended the cut-off date to underage children of widowed or divorced “German-blooded” mothers, in effect ratifying decisions already discussed above.59 Of the remaining appellants for whom information is available, ten applied for marital exemptions, seven to keep their jobs and the rest for other, more disparate reasons. In these cases at least one-third of the appellants, including the parents of the minors discussed above, contested their “non-Aryan” ancestry, claiming genealogical errors or arguing that a legal parent or grandparent, usually the father, was not Jewish but a “man of German-blood.” In order to provide scientific proof, many appellants called upon anthropologists or physicians to conduct a “hereditary and racial-scientific examination” (“erb und rassenkundliche Untersuchung”), mentioned earlier and translated here as a “biological examination.”60 Sometimes, they had no choice: Nazi authorities compelled them to undergo what was frequently a time-consuming and expensive procedure.61 Biological examinations had been conceived in Vienna shortly after the Great War. Like modern DNA tests, they constituted a scientific attempt to determine a person’s genealogy, particularly in paternity disputes. By 58

59

60

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Leiter, “Assimilation,” 418. See also Helfried Pfeffer (ed.), Die Ostmark: Eingliederung und Neugestaltung: Historisch-systematische Gesetzsammlung von 16 April 1941 (Vienna, 1941), 166 ff. and Egbert Mannlicher, Wegweiser durch die Verwaltung unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Verwaltung im Reichsgau Wien sowie in den Reichsgauen Kärnten, Niederdonau, Oberdonau, Salzburg, Steiermark und Tirol mit Voralberg (Berlin, Leipzig, Vienna, 1942), 207–8. WSLA, A2, Box 3: Stuckart an den Reichsstatthalter in den Reichsgauen, 12 October 1942. In his dissertation Ehrenreich uses the term “biological proof,” which is acceptable but slightly misleading. Ehrenreich, “Genealogy and Genocide,” 316; in his monograph he prefers “biological investigation.” Cf. Ehrenreich, “Genealogy and Genocide,” 316 and idem., Nazi Ancestral Proof, 121. For an itemized list of fees see Seidler and Rett, Das Sippenamt entscheidet, 193.

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1931, they had become an integral part of family law in Central Europe. After Hitler’s consolidation of power in Germany, officials in the Interior Ministry directed the Reich Kinship Office to employ scientific experts to refine the biological examination to determine “race.” This meant that procedures originally based on testing and empirical evidence gave way to tests “riddled with inconsistencies, often mixing sophisticated forensic evaluation with haphazard methodology and flawed logic.”62 Furthermore, the anthropologists and physicians charged with conducting “hereditary and racial-scientific examinations” recognized the flaws in the new procedures, as the notion of “race” itself lacked a scientific foundation. While the examiners always claimed they could recognize “alien” or “Jewish characteristics,” they were careful to report their findings in terms of “probabilities.” For all their skill and knowledge, Eric Ehrenreich reminds us, Hitler’s racial scientists were ideologues dedicated to the realization of a biological utopia.63 A standard biological examination normally began with a blood test based on the ABO blood groups discovered in 1901, ironically enough, by the Viennese Jewish physician and later Nobel laureate Karl Landsteiner.64 Inconsistencies in blood typing, however, made it difficult to determine paternity, even if the identity of both parents was known with absolute certainty. For this reason Hitler’s racial scientists devoted more attention to photographs and the careful measurement of fifty morphological characteristics. These included fingerprints; facial features such as eyes and eye lids, ears and ear lobes, nostrils, lips, and chin; cranial shape; hands and feet; body weight and size; hair and eye color, and skin pigmentation. The data would then be assessed on the basis of comparative models and complex mathematical formulae to weigh the presence of Germanic or Jewish traits. Not infrequently these would be presented in terms of percentages.65 62 63 64

65

Ehrenreich, “Genealogy and Genocide,” 319. Ibid., 316–79. Landsteiner had converted to Roman Catholicism as a young man, but according to the Nuremberg Laws he would have been classified a “Jew.” Given Hitler’s obsession with the “protection of German blood,” it is not without irony that Landsteiner and his team of researchers at the Vienna School of Medicine were of Jewish ancestry. The standard biography is Paul Speiser and Ferdinand Smekal, Karl Landsteiner: Entdecker der Blutgruppen: Biographie eines Nobelpreisträger aus der Weiner Medizinischer Schule (Vienna, 1990). Altogether, examiners measured and evaluated 130 body parts. Pegelow, “The Reich Kinship Office and Nazism,” 50. For a full discussion and analysis of “hereditary and racial-scientific examinations” see Ehrenreich, Nazi Ancestral Proof, 121–33.


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Figure 3. Anthropological Field Kit Used in Biological Examinations. Photo: Wolfgang Reichmann. ©: Naturhistorisches Museum Wien, Anthropologische Abteilung, 2010, Burgring 7, 1010, Vienna, Austria.

In Vienna, the foremost racial scientists were Dr. Dora Maria Kahlich, Dr. Karl Tuppa, Dr. Werner Pendl, and Dr. Josef Wastl. Kahlich and Tuppa worked at the University of Vienna, Pendl in City Hall, and Wastl at the Natural History Museum. Together they and their assistants made a formidable team, carefully studying elderly Jews in welfare institutions, illegal immigrants detained in the Prater, and other “alien” individuals. Wastl eventually purchased hundreds of Jewish skulls from killing centers in Poland, had 220 skeletons exhumed from a Hebrew cemetery, and collected over 300,000 photographs and color slides.66 In 1942, his associate, Dora Kahlich, undertook field work in the Tarnow ghetto, taking meticulous notes on the appearance and culture of the inhabitants before they were dispatched to the gas chambers in Belzec.67 As we shall see, most Viennese appellants undergoing biological examinations had filed paternity suits in the Viennese Court of Civil Affairs. Nonetheless, at least 103 persons, including the nineteen minors already

66

67

Benoit Massin, “The ‘Science of Race’,” in United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race (Washington, 2004), 112–20 ff. On Kahlich’s career see Gretchen E. Schrafft, From Racism to Genocide: Anthropology in the Third Reich (Urbana and Chicago, 2004), 15–36.

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Figure 4. Dr. Josef Wastl (1892–1968), Vienna’s Foremost Racial Scientist. Photo: ©: Naturhistorisches Museum Wien, Anthropologische Abteilung, 2010, Burgring 7, 1010, Vienna, Austria.

discussed, claimed Aryan descent by appealing to the District Kinship Office. There was a certain logic in this approach, as 50 percent of all appellants had been born to unwed mothers and several others claimed descent from orphaned or illegitimate grandparents. This made it easier for them to call their “racial classification” into question, not least because the authorities in Berlin were inclined to accept Aryan ancestry in dubious cases.68 Furthermore, forty-two mothers and seven fathers were able to provide notarized documents or to testify on their progeny’s behalf. As a group, those petitioners who denied Jewish ancestry tended to be older than others seeking to improve their “racial status” through administrative channels. Five (4.8 percent) had been born before 1879 and 53 (51.4 percent) between 1880 and 1919. Of the young adults, twenty (19.4 percent) had come into the world before 1917. For rather obvious reasons, all but a handful underwent a biological examination. 68

In 1941, for example, an official in the Reich Kinship Office ruled: “When Jewish ancestry is not certain,” a decision should not be issued “that will place the heaviest burden on a family for all the future.” Quoted in Ehrenreich, Nazi Ancestral Proof, 104.


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The oldest of the appellants, Adolf Birnbaum, had been born to a Jewish couple in 1873. He grew up as an observant member of the Viennese congregation, but claimed that at age thirty-one his dying mother confessed his biological father had been a Christian. For that reason he converted to Roman Catholicism. Unable to produce evidence other than a baptismal certificate, Birnbaum sought to escape deportation in 1942 by undergoing a biological examination at the Museum of Natural History. The anthropological report concluded that morphological measurements of both the appellant and his sister revealed “numerous features characteristic of the Nordic race making it probable that the examinee was not sired by a Jew but by a man of German or kindred blood.” Within days Birnbaum was able to discard his Yellow Star and resume a relatively normal life as a “Mischling of the First Degree.”69 Like Birnbaum, thirteen other appellants had been born before 1889. Only a few of the middle-aged petitioners had been reared in a Jewish family but each claimed to have had an Aryan father. Although each underwent a biological examination, at least three were able to provide records from the Guardianship Authority that they had been adopted as orphans by Jewish or partial-Jewish families, evidence that facilitated their reclassification as “persons of German-blood.” Another petitioner, Giesela Hansler, nee Singer, claimed that her adopted Jewish parents made no secret of her origins as an illegitimate child of a chambermaid and a soldier. Yet another, Friedrich Stetter, claimed to be a changeling. One of the more interesting appeals was filed by Dr. Viktor LoewenfeldRuss, whose case proceeded through the courts before approval by the Reich Kinship Office. Born in 1880 to Gabriele and Felix Loewenfeld, the petitioner’s father had died in a psychiatric hospital in 1883. The widowed mother then remarried a member of the Imperial Reichsrat,70 who adopted her son and underwrote his education at a prestigious gymnasium in Melk and later the University of Vienna. By 1940, Dr. Loewenfeld-Russ had made his mark as one of Vienna’s most prominent internists, at which time the District Kinship Office made him aware of the “non-Aryan” identity of his paternal grandparents. Desperate to preserve his medical practice, Loewenfeld-Russ produced a packet of love letters exchanged between his mother and stepfather at the time of his conception. He also presented evidence that his legal father had been ill 69 70

WSLA, A 1, Box 24. The court transcript mistakenly states that the stepfather belonged to the “Reichstag,” that is, to the German parliament. WSLA, A 1, Box 24.

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and presumably impotent. According to the court transcript, SchultzeNaumburg found in favor of the appellant on the basis of handwriting samples but ordered a biological examination. The racial specialists concurred, concluding that Russ-Loewenfeld belonged to the Dinaric race and was a “person of German or kindred blood.”71 Over half of those Viennese partial-Jews who appealed to administrative agencies to better their “racial status” had been born between 1890 and 1918. Thirty-six of them had come into the world as illegitimate children: twenty-three female, thirteen male. Thirteen of their mothers later took a “non-Aryan” husband, while nineteen simply registered the begetter as Jewish. Although local officials looked askance at claims of illegitimacy, alerting their superiors to this approach, it was a technique that proved highly successful – at least in the Ostmark: Twenty-eight of the appellants were reclassified “German-blooded, two others “Mischling of the First Degree.” Such positive outcomes were likely because officials in the Reich Kinship Office tended to accept the word of “German-blooded” women in paternity disputes, an attitudinal trend, Thomas Pegelow suggests, that may be attributed to “cultural norms of female frailty and femininity easily seduced by strong [Aryan] male suitors.”72 In the topsyturvy world of Nazi morality, it was thus more respectable to be a bastard than a “non-Aryan,” to “have a prostitute for a mother, than a ‘Jew’.”73 This certainly seems to have been true of those appellants whose mothers remained single parents. Both in 1939 and 1942, for example, Anna Forster, testified that she could never identify the father of her thirtyyear-old son since he was the result of a drunken one-night stand with “an unknown man.” Although designating a Jewish lover the begetter, police records revealed that she had taken up with the putative father less than three months before giving birth. In a similar case, a forty-yearold housewife, Adolfine Werner, was able to provide credible evidence that her unwed mother had been so promiscuous that paternity could never be established, not least because the designated father, Abraham Fuchs, had consistently denied the allegation. By the same token, Irene Haml’s unwed mother provided a sworn deposition confessing that she had named a wealthy Jew with whom she once had a fling the father of 71 72 73

WSLA, A 1, Box 24. Pegelow, “Linguistic Violence,” 487. Ehrenreich, “Genealogy to Genocide,” 290. It should not be forgotten that Nazi policy makers, particularly within the SS, actively promoted illegitimacy. See Dagmar Herzog, “Hubris and Hypocrisy: Incitement and Disavowal : Sexuality and German Fascism,” in Dagmar Herzog, Sexuality and German Fascism (New York, 2005), 33–5.


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her child in hopes of securing a cash payment. Several other mothers provided similar depositions, including two Habsburg army nurses who registered Jewish physicians as the father of their illegitimate offspring. There were also four “non-Aryans” who at first acknowledged paternity but later recanted. Given the social background and marginally credible testimony of this group of appellants, it is not surprising that each and every one underwent a biological examination. Nor is it a wonder that the racial scientists found no morphological evidence of Jewish descent so as to accord them “German-blooded” status.74 More problematic are the cases of appellants whose unwed mothers later took Jewish husbands. At least eighteen appear to have been Gentile girls who “married up,” as at least ten took their vows between two to seven years after the birth of their children, and an additional three well after a decade had passed. In these cases there was good reason to believe that the Jewish husbands had not fathered their adopted offspring. But because a good many of the older parents had died, the weight of proving Aryan descent fell to their Mischling offspring. Even so, at least five appellants managed to present sworn affidavits from their mothers to support their claims. Characteristic of this group was the case of Gertrude Hacker, born in 1917. Her twenty-nine-year-old unwed mother appears to have been a salesgirl, who in 1923 married the prominent attorney Dr. Adolf Hacker in an elaborate Jewish marriage ceremony. According to parish records, the mother had designated her future husband the begetter at the time of birth. Nevertheless, the daughter claimed that her biological father was an office clerk with whom her mother had had an intimate relationship during the Great War. As early as 1 December 1938, Gertrude arranged to undergo a biological examination that concluded that, because Hacker’s paternity was “highly unlikely,” the candidate should be reclassified “German-blooded.” Also typical was an appeal filed by a forty-year-old housewife, Anna Kretschmer. Her Aryan mother had married a Jewish rabbit farmer in Hungary some four years after her daughter’s birth. Records from the Guardianship Authority revealed, however, that her biological father was an officer candidate in the Habsburg army. These and other documents proved so persuasive that the appellant was granted “German-blooded” status without undergoing a biological examination.75 In yet another case, Wilhelmine Fischer-Pochtliker argued 74 75

WSLA, A 1, Box 24. Ibid.

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that her mother’s marriage to a Jew, Viktor Tugendhut, eight years after her birth had been a “mere formality,” a contention that passed muster with RSA authorities, although not without the support of Hitler’s racial scientists.76 While ten of the other appellants succeeded in improving their “racial status” – primarily because of the time elapsed between their date of birth and the marriage of their Gentile mothers – one was not so fortunate. Shortly after the Anschluß, a twenty-eight-year-old housewife, Margarete Feigel, appealed her classification as a “Geltungsjüdin.” Acknowledging that her unwed mother, Karoline Zwach, had married Ignaz Kohn on 29 November 1917, she presented a sworn affidavit from her mother that her biological father was an “unknown man of German blood.” The Nazi authorities responded by agreeing to a biological examination, the results of which proved ambiguous. Four years later a second examination opined that despite the absence of photographic evidence, “no Jewish features could be detected.” This should have settled the matter. Just at that moment, however, a report arrived from the Municipal Registration Office that both parents had been cohabiting since 1898 and that in 1901, the mother had converted to Judaism. On 23 February 1943 the Reich Kinship Office ruled that “Margarete “Sara” Feigel, née Kohn, counts as a Jew according to § 5, Section A of the First Supplementary Decree of the Reich Citizenship Law.”77 Tellingly, nine appellants had been born the legitimate children of Jewish couples, of whom at least one set of parents were Catholic converts. As in similar cases, the applicants contended that their legal father was not biologically related. One of them, Theresia Fischer, née Gotthilf in 1900, produced evidence that her biological father had been a certain Friedrich Ullmann, deceased since 1925. The documentation was sufficient to trigger a biological investigation by Vienna’s foremost racial anthropologist Dr. Josef Wastl. After careful scrutiny of photographs and precise measurement with calipers and other medical instruments, Wastl reported that the appellant “neither in her appearance nor her psychological behavior demonstrated any features characteristic of the Jewish race.” In another case, Walter “Israel” Horna did not contest the legitimacy of his birth in 1900 to a Jewish couple, Friedrich and Ernestine Schick. Rather, he claimed that his biological father was the “Germanblooded” Emmanuel Horna, whom his mother had married shortly after 76 77

Ibid. Ibid.


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a nasty divorce the following year. He next produced a sworn affidavit of paternity from his adopted father as well as records from the Municipal Registration Office that his mother had left Schick in 1894 and moved in with Horna four years later. As subsequent scrutiny of photographs revealed an “unmistakable resemblance between Emmanuel Georg Horna and the applicant,” the Reich Kinship Office reclassified Horna a “Mischling of the First Degree.”78 In keeping with the tenets of Nazi “racial science,” it was not uncommon for appellants to produce medical evidence that their legal fathers had suffered from venereal disease or were incapable of fostering children. This technique had proved successful, as we have seen, in the case of Countess Elisabeth Seranyi on behalf of her teenaged daughter. Two of the adult appellants improved their status by taking a similar approach. The oldest, Margarete Königsberger, born in 1907, appears to have colluded with her widowed mother to claim that her legal father had been both syphilitic and impotent. In a sworn deposition the mother, Maria Havas, testified in 1938 that her uncle had sired both her children as a surrogate for a sexually impotent husband. Two years later, Margarete provided medical records that documented the diagnosis and treatment of her legal father for syphilis. In addition, police registration reports revealed that her mother and uncle had been living together since 1903. As both “fathers” were deceased, the appeal was referred to the Anthropological Institute at the University of Vienna Here the racial scientists were unable to reach consensus, although the report of a handwriting expert supported the appellant’s claim. In 1941, the Königsberger file was forwarded to Berlin, where the Reich Kinship Office reclassified her “a person of German or kindred blood” on the basis of medical evidence alone.79 The second appellant, Edith “Sara” Heinrich had been born to a Jewish couple in 1913. Like Königsberg, she claimed that her legal father, Julius Heinrich, was syphilitic and incapable of sexual intercourse. She even contended that he had encouraged her mother to fulfill her sexual needs with other men. Because both parents were dead, she could not name a begetter but considered an Aryan businessman, Franz Bauer, a likely candidate. After considerable effort, Edith provided written confirmation from the provincial hospital in Graz that Julius Heinrich had died from paralytic syphilis in 1917. She also produced witnesses who attested to the promiscuity of her mother, as well as Franz Bauer himself. Because 78 79

Ibid. Ibid.

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blood tests eliminated Bauer as the biological father, Edith underwent an extensive biological examination. It placed considerable emphasis first on comparative handwriting samples, and second on the professional opinion of a physician, who concluded that the petitioner had inherited “strikingly non-Jewish features from a third, unknown party.” On 8 March 1941, the Reich Kinship Office granted the appeal, reclassifying Edith Heinrich a “Mischling of the First Degree.”80 Marital Exemptions Of the eleven appellants seeking permission to marry a man of “German blood,” all but one were half-Jews. As the Nuremberg Laws permitted quarter-Jews to take an Aryan spouse, the petitioners appear to have undergone biological examinations to differentiate their Germanic from their Jewish characteristics. The results would determine whether they would be reclassified as quarter-Jews or granted an exemption. The results were then forwarded to the Viennese Racial Policy Office for assessment. In most cases, Wamser would acknowledge that an appellant had been judged “biologically a quarter-Jew” but gratuitously add that a matrimonial union would “hardly constitute a gain for the German National Community.” Sometimes, he would note that “Jewish blood-line characteristics” were all too visible to the naked eye, or that the appellant behaved in “an impudent and hostile way.” Only in one instance did he refrain from comment, other than to note that the petitioner was already pregnant with her second child. In a case appealed in 1939, however, Wamser demonstrated sympathy for a twenty-year-old fiancée, owing to her service to the state and party. Her application actually made its way to Party Headquarters in Munich, where in February of 1941 it was rejected on the basis of a negative anthropological assessment. But one month later officials in the Interior Ministry persuaded those in Munich to change their minds, authorizing the young woman to make her way to the altar.81 Overall, Berlin reclassified six of the appellants quarter-Jews and permitted them to marry Aryan bridegrooms. The authorities denied three appeals,82 and in late 1944 reversed a third. In that case, Helene Maria S. 80 81

82

Ibid. WSLA, A 3 Box 1: 241/50451; Box 2: 241/18; Box 4: 241/278; Box 26: 241/50524; Box 33: 241/50818; Box 35: 241/50136, 241/50251. Two of those denied permission to marry were “German-blooded” women who had divorced Jewish husbands. One had belonged briefly to the Jewish Religious Community, the other sought to marry a German officer WSLA, A3, Box 4: 241/278; Box 17 241/2187.


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a half-Jew, had been living in a marital relationship with an SS man since 1939 and had given birth to two children. The couple had appealed for permission to wed shortly after the Anschluß and may indeed have taken their vows. The evidence, however, is unclear. What is clear is that on 19 June 1944, the Gestapo charged S. with “racial defilement,” ordering her to terminate her marriage – if that is what it was. Interestingly, the Local Group Leader came to her defense requesting legalization of the couple’s relationship. In mid-November, the Racial Policy Office denied the appeal, stating that marital exemptions for half-Jews had ended in March of 1941. “Whether the woman enjoys a good or bad reputation is a matter of disinterest. Even a Mischling can keep track [of that]. Longterm relationships are strictly forbidden and must be dissolved. So far as we are concerned Helene S. remains a Mischling of the First Degree, must end her relationship, and never again consort with anyone of Germanblood.”83 Other Exemptions Of the remaining appellants for which information is available, at least seven – and presumably more – sought to improve their racial status for blatant economic reasons. On 20 July 1939, Margarethe Hecht appealed her husband’s classification as a half-Jew by presenting genealogical documentation that only one of his grandparents had belonged to a Hebrew congregation. Unable to counter the new evidence, Wamser made a point of emphasizing that Johann Hecht enjoyed a well-paid position as a departmental manager in a local firm, Bensdorp AG. Although Wamser added that anthropologists had detected “Near Eastern” facial features in both children, the Reich Kinship Office reclassified Hecht a “Mischling of the Second Degree,” his children as “German-blooded.” In another case, a stunningly beautiful “Geltungsjüdin” sought to regain her position as a dental technician, contending that in 1936 she had become a Protestant through marriage. The District Placement Officer raised questions about her character, but Berlin paid little heed reclassifying her as a “Mischling of the First Degree.” Two other appeals involved young women from humble backgrounds. One managed to return to work as a beautician once designated a half-Jew, the other to keep her position as Dr. Josef Wastl’s official photographer. On 28 January 1944, the Racial Policy Office filed an angry complaint that a quarter-Jew should be employed by

83

WSLA, A 3, Box 9: 241/50862.

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the Reichsgau’s most prominent racial scientist. Wastl, however, appears to have been pleased by her services.84 Overall, 90 percent of the partial-Jews who appealed their “racial classification” through administrative channels succeeded in improving their status, three-fourths through genealogical evidence alone, another one-fourth by submitting a portfolio that included the results of a biological examination as well as supporting documents. Political connections, military service, and favoritism also counted, as did personal experience. Examination of the files of the forty-three appellants denied promotion suggests that the opinions of racial scientists counted for less than genealogical documents, sworn testimony, and other more substantial evidence.85 The statistical evidence suggests that the authorities in the Reich Kinship Office were inclined to be lenient, as Lösener argued after the war. But this was not always the case. Nineteen of the petitioners were classified as Jews, of whom at least three perished in the Holocaust.86 Another, Siegfried Gansel, was discharged from the Wehrmacht, reclassified a “Geltungsjude,” and murdered in Auschwitz.87 There were also two sisters, Martha Lang and Annelies Klein, who had filed paternity suits in the Viennese Court of Civil Affairs. Frustrated by the long, drawnout process, they withdrew their suits and appealed to the Reich Kinship Office for an immediate decision. At this point, the Gestapo intervened and dispatched Martha Lang to Maly Trostinec, where she was shot upon arrival by the Security Police.88 Judicial Appeals On 26 November 1944, an SS official circulated a memorandum from the Party Chancellery discussing procedures taken by Mischlinge to improve their racial status by filing paternity suits. “It has been established through experience,” the author complained, “that every mother is willing to commit perjury when it’s a question of the German ancestry of her child.”89 For those who bothered to read the report this was hardly news. In 1935 Göring and Hitler had accepted a legal affidavit from the mother of Field Marshal Erhard Milch certifying that her son 84

85 86 87 88 89

WSLA, A3, Box 9: 241/50407; Box 11: 2411/50312; Box 18: 241/495; Box 34: 241/51668. This supports Ehrenreich’s estimate in Nazi Ancestral Proof, 121. DÖW, Namensliste Erfassung der österreichischen Holocaust Opfer. WSLA, A 3, Box 8: 241/825. Pegelow, “The Reich Kinship Office,” 62–3. Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, 29.


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had been sired by a deceased uncle, not her Jewish spouse.90 Word of Hitler’s act of “clemency” spread rapidly through the population, so that by 1938 increasing numbers of “German-blooded” mothers were willing to follow Clara Milch’s example to enhance the racial status of their offspring.91 Exemptions were, for the most part, rare, but as we have already seen, changes in German family law following the Anschluß made it possible for partial-Jews to file civil suits denying the identity of their legal fathers. Exactly how many suits went forward is unknown, even though judges were instructed in dubious cases to accept the testimony of Aryan mothers. A directive issued by the Ministry of Justice on 24 May 1941, however, modified this order by requiring the courts to discount such testimony if the mother “is only interested in protecting her child from the disadvantages of Jewish descent.”92 As we have already seen, one-third of those Viennese classified as Jews or partial-Jews seeking to elevate their “racial status” through administrative channels claimed to be the offspring of Aryan fathers or grandparents. For those who chose to proceed through the courts, this contention became the procrustean bedrock of their appeals. The records of most of these cases can be found in the files of the District Kinship Office and the Racial Policy Office in the Wiener Stadt – und Landesarchiv; others appear to be scattered in various collections of the Viennese Court of Civil Affairs. The second part of this chapter focuses on ninety-eight cases of an unknown number tried in Vienna between 1938 and 1944. The surviving transcripts generally contain more information than that found in the records of those seeking “racial reclassification” through the civil administration. Unlike the random samples examined by Ehrenreich and Pegelow, however, the data are insufficient to reconstruct a social profile.93 Among the appellants were two engineers, two attorneys, an accountant, a translator, a language teacher, an actor, a musician, four commercial employees, a housewife, an electrician, and a butcher’s assistant. The occupations of the other applicants are unrecorded. Given the exorbitant costs of going to court, it may well be that most of them came from relatively affluent families, but the available evidence makes it impossible to reach such an absolute conclusion. While most of the plaintiffs aimed at proving they were not Jewish, they did not, with one or two exceptions, resort to Nazi discourse or claim to 90 91 92 93

Ibid. Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, I, 153. Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 51–2. Ehrenreich, Nazi Ancestral Proof, 100; Pegelow, “Linguistic Violence,” 464.

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be nationally minded. Nor did they blatantly seek to preserve family assets or request permission to marry an Aryan. Since at least sixty-five decisions were handed down between 1942 and 1944, it seems reasonable to assume that the appellants sought to avoid compulsory labor service or, in the case of twenty-two Geltungsjuden, deportation to the East.94 Reading between the lines, there is also ample evidence of family hardship imposed by Nazi harassment and wartime conditions. And for single mothers, a favorable ruling could mean much needed assistance for underage children. Because a third of the applicants had been born illegitimate, they had considerable difficulty producing birth certificates, baptismal records, or other genealogical documents to prove their ancestry. Twenty-three mothers, four fathers, and one grandmother thus testified on their behalf, occasionally providing prurient details of promiscuity. Others contended they had taken a lover in order to produce a legitimate heir for husbands suffering from a venereal disease or impotence. As Beate Meyer noted in her study of sixty-six similar cases in Hamburg,95 those filing paternity suits in Vienna tended to name as begetters deceased relatives, farm hands, soldiers-on-leave, traveling salesmen, Hungarian barons, or, in one instance, a Rumanian diplomat. As the putative fathers were unlikely to appear in court, maternal testimony usually sufficed to trigger a biological examination upon which the fate of the plaintiff hung. The cases of those Viennese members of mixed families who went to court to contest their racial classification will be examined in three categories: minors, adults, and persons over fifty-five years of age. In contrast to those who filed administrative appeals, well over half of the individuals seeking a judicial decision were mature adults. As we shall see, those born out of wedlock stood the best chance of a successful outcome, even though fewer of the total number of known plaintiffs won their suits than in Hamburg. In weighing the evidence, municipal and regional judges took into consideration the results of biological examinations, but, for the most part, based their decisions on documentary evidence following the rules of traditional jurisprudence. Even so, they never questioned the irrational assumptions of Nazi racial law. Minors As in Hamburg, just under one-third of those filing paternity suits were minors. Fifteen had come into the world between 1920 and 1929, nine 94 95

Cf. Meyer, “Jüdische Mischlinge,” 114. Meyer, “Jüdische Mischlinge,” 114–15 ff.


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between 1930 and 1939, and four between 1940 and 1942. Although only nine had been born out of wedlock, twenty-three were represented by their mothers, one by a father, and another by a stepfather. One of the most tawdry and bizarre cases – at least in its outcome – was filed in 1940 by a Gentile widow on behalf of her three teenaged daughters. According the court transcript, Sophie Fanfule Bardach had become pregnant in 1921 while working as a manicurist in a beauty salon. Fearful of “embarrassing” her eighteen-year-old lover Friedrich Hack, she had accepted the proposal of a Jewish businessman, Edwin Bardach, whom she married for “moral reasons” in a synagogue on 28 September 1921. Three months later, the newlyweds celebrated the arrival of a daughter, Gertrude. Two years later Sophie Bardach gave birth to another child, Rosa, and in 1931 to Ruth Marie. According to custom, the entire family was enrolled in the Jewish Religious Community, at least until 1935 when Edwin Bardach passed away. Thereafter, mother and daughters withdrew their membership. Four years later, that is within a year of the Anschluß, the widowed mother appealed the “racial classification” of her daughters as half-Jews to the Viennese Branch of the Reich Kinship Office. When the application was rejected out of hand by Roland Wamser, she filed a legal challenge in the Viennese Court of Civil Affairs.96 In her suit she claimed that because her late husband suffered from erectile dysfunction and was frequently away on business, Friedrich Hack had fathered all three children. Because Hack, whom she married on 30 September 1940, supported her testimony, the court directed Dr. Werner Pendl to conduct a biological examination of all parties involved, including Hack. Pendl’s report concluded that while the “racial appearance of Gertrude and Rosa Bardach is free of features characteristic of Jewish and Near Eastern races,” the physiognomy of eleven-year-old Ruth could not be ascertained with certainty. Bloodwork and other evidence, however, ruled out Hack as the begetter. Following Pendl’s report, Judge Robert Seibt, a stickler of the old school,97 decided that while Gertrude, Rosa, and Ruth Bardach had “in all probability” been sired by a “German-blooded

96 97

WSLA, A3. Born in 1892, Seibt had been admitted to the bar in 1916 and thereafter served briefly in the Habsburg army. In 1922, thanks largely to the influence of his father-in-law, Dr. Rudolf Peltauf, then Minister of Justice, Seibt received a judicial appointment in Graz. A decade later he returned to Vienna, where he became a member of the bench of the Court of Civil Affairs. In 1939, he was promoted to the District Commercial Court, but continued to preside over domestic disputes. He never joined the Nazi party. ÖStA/ AdR, III?A, NA: Box 559.

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father,” it was not in the “legal interest” of the court to grant Franz Hack patrimonial rights since German law did not require identification of the Aryan father.98 In two other cases filed on behalf of underage Mischling children, Gentile mothers swore that an Aryan lover had produced a legal heir for an impotent Jewish spouse. In the first, the widow Anna Fante claimed that her present husband, Robert Pelikan, had fathered her son W., born in 1930. She also produced Pelikan, who admitted to agreeing to such an arrangement in 1926. As a subsequent biological examination revealed “numerous similarities” between Pelikan and her son, the court ruled on behalf of the plaintiff.99 In the second case, a married couple appeared before Judge Alexander Judex with the putative father of their toddler son. According to the court transcript, Marie and Joseph Baumert had married on 5 July 1928, apparently in a civil ceremony. Within two years, diabetic impotence had put an end to normal sexual relations. Encouraged by her husband to produce an heir, Marie Baumert then began an affair with the “German-blooded” Franz Stöger, which on 3 July 1937 had led to the birth of a baby boy. Even though all three parties agreed on particulars, Judge Alexander Judex ordered both a medical work-up and a biological examination. Microscopic tests revealed an abnormally low sperm count in the semen of the legal father, but blood samples did not completely rule out his paternity. For that reason, Dr. Karl Tuppa conducted an extensive biological examination that involved careful scrutiny of skulls, facial features, hands, and finger prints. The statistical data, he reported, indicated the probability of Stöger’s fatherhood at no less than 75 percent. On 30 November 1943, Judex ruled that Baumert had not begotten his legitimate son, thus granting the plea of a six-year-old appellant.100 How many other intermarried couples colluded to sacrifice a mother’s reputation on behalf of a Mischling child is unknown,. The records of at least one paternity suit suggest evidence of such an arrangement. On 20 March 1923, Stephanie and Josef Freimuth had taken their vows in a ceremony in the chambers of the Jewish Religious Community. Exactly five years later, the couple experienced the birth of a daughter. Following the Anschluß, the family was designated “nonprivileged,” presumably forced to move into a Jewish tenement, and their daughter classified a 98 99 100

WSLA, A 1, Box 23: 28 Cg 222/41. WSLA, A 1, Box 23: 7 Cg 241/41. WSLA, A 1, Box 23: 25 Cg 263/41.


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“Geltungsjüdin.” In late 1941, the mother went to court claiming that during the period of conception, while her husband was abroad on business, she had had a fling with a certain Herbert Spandang. After extensive investigation of registration records, the court ruled in favor of the appellant, thus granting her daughter Aryan status.101 Seven of the paternity suits to come before the Court of Civil Affairs involved minors born out of wedlock. Although five mothers provided depositions swearing to “German-blooded” begetters, two failed to persuade the jurists. Maria Hutschikowsky, for example, had given birth to an illegitimate son in 1923. Four years later, she had the child baptized in a Roman Catholic church and on 23 January 1930 married Leopold Bader. Eleven years later, Marie Bader went to court claiming that her son’s biological father was a certain Josef Hengel. Unspecified documents, presumably from the Guardianship Authority, called this testimony into question as did the behavior of the mother herself ; the court reporter noted that she “made an unfavorable impression” before the bench and “seemed confused.” After a biological examination had reached inconclusive results, the judge threw the case out, confirming the son’s classification as a half-Jew and fining Maria Bader RM 1,000.102 More serious was the case of the illegitimate daughter of Theresia Dachsberger, born on 11 May 1932. Within months of her birth, the mother designated Gustav Fried the begetter, a man whom she took as her husband four years later in a Jewish ceremony. In 1939, Fried emigrated to the United States leaving wife and daughter behind as “Geltungsjüdinnen.” The surviving documentation does not reveal whether mother and child chose to stay in Vienna or simply lacked the resources to follow. In 1941, Theresia Fried filed papers claiming that a local farmhand, Franz Taufmann, had fathered her nine-year-old daughter. This was obviously an act of desperation, as documents gathered from administrative courts in Hietzing and Hernals provided indisputable proof of Fried’s paternity. On 11 May 1942 the court dismissed the suit out of hand.103 The outcome of other suits involving unwed mothers were more successful but no less seemly. In 1934, Marie Wildner, employed as a chambermaid by a Jewish family in Gänzerndorf, had given birth to a baby boy. Claiming to have been raped by Simon Kutscher, the son of her 101 102 103

WSLA, A 1, Box 23: 11 Cg 297/41. WSLA, A 1, Box 23: 28 Cg 287/41. WSLA, A 1, Box 23: 11 Cg 247/41.

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employer, she had designated him the father. But as she had also admitted to a long-time relationship with an unemployed workman, Franz Salzer, the Viennese Guardianship Authority had gone to court to determine paternity. Although a biological examination conducted in early 1935 was unable to reach a definitive conclusion, the Anthropological Institute suggested that the weight of evidence favored Salzer. Shortly thereafter, the mother married another man and the matter seemed settled. Once her son was classified a half-Jew following the Nazi takeover, she changed her mind. In 1941, she filed a paternity suit disavowing earlier charges of sexual assault by Kutscher and emphasizing her erstwhile relationship with Salzer as proof of his paternity. In reaching its decision, the court spent considerable time examining the transcript of the previous proceedings and ordered another biological examination. The case dragged on for years, but on 2 October 1944 the judges ruled that despite many loose ends, Simon Kutscher was “most likely not the father.” That Kutscher was already dead, murdered three years before by the SS in Serbia, was most likely unknown to the parties involved.104 Also indecorous was the sworn testimony of several non-Jewish mothers of infants and toddlers born following the Anschluß. In one instance, the wife of Eduard Friedrich Stark gave birth to a baby girl two years after he had fled to Great Britain. In her suit, Dr. Anna Stark complained that because her husband failed to correspond with her, she had taken up with Ing. Gilbert Aue. While her paramour readily acknowledged paternity of the infant, the case was complicated by police records indicating that Stark had returned to Vienna, registered with the authorities, and disappeared thereafter. These extenuating circumstances notwithstanding, the court ruled that the existing evidence – including blood samples – favored the infant plaintiff, in effect granting her Aryan status.105 In two similar cases, Gentile mothers in a mixed marriage had given birth to children in 1941 and 1942, respectively. Both infants were registered as the legitimate offspring of intermarried couples. But since their Jewish husbands had been deported to Nisko in October of 1939, the judges saw no point in pursuing the matter, thus reclassifying the children “German-blooded.”106 Not every suit to come before the Viennese Court of Civil Affairs challenging the paternity of partial-Jews was filed by a Gentile mother 104

105 106

WSLA, A 1, Box 4: 12 Cg 10/43. DÖW, Namensliste der österreichischen Holocaust Opfer. WSLA, A1, Box 4: 17 Cg 128/42. WSLA, A 1, Box 4 (Hans Urmacher); Box 23: 29 Cg 120/43.


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or relative. In at least half a dozen cases it was the young appellants themselves who took the initiative, although not always with the desired results. In early 1942, for example, the seventeen-year-old Herbert “Israel” W. went to court with the encouragement of his guardian. Born four days after the marriage of his recently deceased parents, he recalled a childhood of acrimonious discord leading in 1934 to his parents’ divorce. Characterizing his mother as a slut, W. claimed that his biological father was a lumber merchant, Josef Hartl. The court, in response, subpoenaed Hartl, who denied any contact with the plaintiff’s mother other than as a customer in the Arizona Bar where she once worked as a barmaid. As Hartl’s testimony was supported by another witness as well as police registration records, Judex dismissed the suit on 18 November 1943.107 In a similar case, a half-Jew, Willy Nassau, sought to improve his racial status by claiming ignorance of Jewish ancestry and devotion to the Nazi cause. A student at the University of Vienna, he filed papers on his own although not without the knowledge of his widowed mother. In a sworn affidavit she testified that once impregnated by the artistic director of the Viennese State Opera, she had married a respectable Jewish banker in order to preserve her lover’s reputation. Because her husband had become depressed and had hanged himself within a year, there was no reason, she continued, to reveal the identity of her son’s father until after the Anschluß. Unimpressed by the mother’s words, the court nonetheless agreed to a biological examination the results of which indicated evidence of “Jewish features.”108 One of the more unusual paternity suits filed by underage plaintiffs during the Anschluß era appeared on the docket on 1 April 1941. In it, Hans and Elisabeth Nichtenhauser claimed to be the progeny of their mother’s first husband, the “German-blooded” Josef Berger, whom she had divorced in 1920. According to their attorney, Anna Berger had subsequently married the man who became their legal father, Alfred “Israel” Nichtenhauser on 2 May 1922 in a Jewish ceremony. However, the children contended, “Alfred Nichtenhauser was unable to engage in sexual intercourse with our mother.” For that reason she had continued marital relations with Berger, who had fostered them, until his death in 1938. Aside from raising questions about intimate knowledge of their mother’s personal life, there was ample reason for the court to suspect that Hans and Elisabeth Nichtenhauser’s testimony was fabricated. 107 108

WSLA, A 1, Box 4: 22 Cg 240/42. WSLA, Lg. Z: 3 Cg, Box 66: 143/40.

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This was because the two minors had been living in Great Britain, an enemy belligerent, since 1939. The case was further complicated by the fact that in 1936 the District Court had declared the mother’s earlier divorce invalid, thus dissolving both her marriage and family. Because the Anschluß subsequently cost Nichtenhauser his job and assets, both he and his ex-wife were left penniless. By claiming that the “Germanblooded” Josef Berger had fathered her daughters, Anna Nichtenhauser evidently hoped to receive some form of public assistance from the state. But what may have once been a happy family had been torn to shreds. On 30 June 1941, her former husband angrily denied charges under oath of sexual neurasthenia, also testifying that the two had remained together as man and wife until their children had found safe haven in Yorkshire. Five months later, the court threw out the case, leaving the estranged couple to fend for themselves. What happened to the plaintiffs and their distraught mother is unknown. Gestapo records reveal that on 14 September 1942, Alfred Nichtenhauser was deported to Maly Trostinec. Four days later he was shot by the SS.109 Adults Well over half of the plaintiffs filing legal challenges of Jewish or partial-Jewish classification in Vienna between 1939 and 1944 were young and middle-aged adults; they ranged in age from their early twenties to mid-fifties. Because twenty-three had been born out of wedlock, the Viennese Court of Civil Affairs generally adhered to a ruling of the German Supreme Court of 15 June 1939 that authorized judges to establish “the blood-based descent” of both legitimate and illegitimate children. This meant that lower courts generally followed guidelines from the Ministry of the Interior that favored petitioners “if Jewish descent was not certain.”110 As a consequence, all but five born to single mothers managed to improve their “racial status.” On the other hand, two of them remained half-Jews, two still “counted as Jews” (Geltungsjuden), and a fifth committed suicide. Furthermore, those who had come into the world as children of married couples did not fare so well. While nine succeeded in calling into question their Jewish ancestry, eighteen failed to marshal sufficient evidence to persuade the court to alter their racial classification: nine remained “Mischlinge,” nine others “Geltungsjuden.” 109

110

WSLA, Lg. Z: 3 Cg, Box 73: 71/41; DÖW, Namensliste der österreichischen Holocaust Opfer. Pegelow, “Linguistic Violence,” 421–5.


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Most of the paternity suits filed by illegitimate adults tended to proceed in a straightforward, almost predictable manner. Seven of the appellants claimed that their mothers had become pregnant while employed as domestic servants in a Jewish household. All but two subsequently married an elder son, in one case a prosperous banker, in another a physician. As Meyer’s research in Hamburg has demonstrated, the legal fathers were usually deceased and thus unable to appear in court.111 Seven mothers provided sworn affidavits, however, that ranged from the banal to the sensational. In 1941, the mother of thirty-nine-year-old Oskar Fischer testified that she had become pregnant after a one-night stand at a tavern in the Vienna Woods with a man named Anton. Once aware of her condition, she seduced Viktor Krauss, the son of her Jewish employer, later designating him the father of her son. The family reluctantly paid child support, her affidavit continued, until she later took a husband. In a similar case, Theodor Englisch, an up-and-coming civil servant, persuaded his elderly mother to testify that she, too, had designated a prosperous Jew his biological father in order to receive financial support. As the documentary evidence in these and several other cases was exiguous, including one based solely on the deposition of a grandmother, the court turned to Hitler’s racial scientists for professional advice. In these instances, the anthropologists paid particular attention to skulls, eye sockets, nose, chin, mouth, fingerprints, and, above all, to photographs. Although the court ruled in favor of each and every one of the plaintiffs, Judge Franz Pölzl made a point of emphasizing that 27 percent of Oskar Fischer’s morphological features were “slightly suspect.”112 On 28 December 1940, Helene Behounek went to court claiming to be the daughter of a “German-blooded” landed aristocrat. Born out of wedlock in 1899, she was deemed legitimate under the law through the marriage of her mother twelve years later to a Jewish widower, Karl Wagner. The plaintiff claimed that her biological father was a certain Johann Kuryvall who, although yearning to marry her mother, had felt obliged to take a wealthy heiress as his wife in order to preserve the family estate. Supported by the tearful testimony of her elderly mother, Behounek pressed the court to reach a timely decision as the only way to retain her husband’s position as a municipal civil servant. According to the court transcript, Judge Arnold Hofmann was profoundly moved by the “noteworthy deposition” of the plaintiff’s mother. And once the 111 112

Meyer, “Jüdische Mischlinge,” 114. WSLA, A 1, Box 23: 6 3 C 213/40; 64 C 33/40; 2 Cg 154/40.

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results of a biological examination indicated “no evidence” of Jewish features, he ruled in favor of the plaintiff.113 Helene Behounek was not the only appellant to claim aristocratic lineage in the Viennese Court of Civil Relations. In 1941, a fifty-one-yearold language teacher, Friedricke “Sara” Bendek went before the robed magistrates to contend that she was not the daughter of Ludwig Stern but of a Hungarian baron killed in a duel of honor. Swayed by both her “credible testimony” and the “professional opinion” of Dr. Karl Tuppa, the court granted the plaintiff’s plea, in effect elevating her racial status from a “Geltungsjüdin” to a “person of German or kindred blood.” 114 Even more sensational was a plea filed by two middle-aged brothers, Gustav and Otto Witttels, the legitimate offspring of a well-known actress and her Jewish husband. Appearing before the Viennese bench, the plaintiffs spelled out the details of a fin-de-siècle romance between their mother, Gusti Moser, and the Director of the Imperial Ministry of Economics, Baron Karl Prileszky. The affair had begun in Bad Ischl, home of the renowned operetta composer Franz Lehar, a relationship that led to a pregnancy threatening both the young woman’s career and her reputation. For reasons unrevealed in the documentation, she persuaded one of her admirers, a middle-aged Jewish tuberculosis patient, to take her as his lawful wedded wife. Three months later, on 23 August 1893, she gave birth to Gustav. Because her husband did not object to her behavior and remained confined largely to a sanitarium, she was able to continue her adulterous affair with Prileszky, by whom she had another son, Otto, born in 1897. Judging from the court transcript, Gustav Wittels, by now a distinguished electrical engineer, prepared the ancestral case with considerable care. He and his brother produced sworn affidavits from a maternal aunt, a former housekeeper, and Dr. Elemer Baron Prileszky, the legitimate heir of the putative begetter, each of which supported the plaintiffs’ contentions. After careful scrutiny of family photographs and three biological examinations, Dr. Karl Tuppa reported that none of the parties involved showed signs of Jewish morphological features or characteristics. On 20 December 1941 the court designated Baron Prileszky the biological father of both plaintiffs.115 Of the remaining adults who succeeded in improving their “racial status” by calling into question the Jewish identity of a father or grandparent, 113 114 115

WSLA, A 1, Box 23:12 Cg 153/40. WSLA, A 1, Box 23: 12 Cg 148/41. WSLA, A 1, Box 4: Cg 152/41. The details of the Wittels case seemed to have been relatively well-known at the time. See http://www.univie.ac.at/biograiA/datentext/bio/ wittels-moser.htm.


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Figure 5. Gusti Moser and Her Sons, Gustav and Otto, 1899. Courtesy of Dr. Peter Wittels.

nearly all provided genealogical documentation or credible testimony by relatives, medical experts, or other witnesses. They also managed to pass a mandatory biological examination. In 1942, a half-Jew, Rudolf Hönig, presented the court with a sheaf of documents that included baptismal certificates and records from the Municipal Registration Office. Born to a Roman Catholic couple in 1915, he had been astonished to learn that his mother had been born out of wedlock to Jewish parents. After what appears to have been considerable research, Hönig filed a paternity suit claiming that because his legal parents had separated in 1908, his begetter was a certain Michael Radhammer. Further investigation revealed, however, that his mother had moved into an apartment with her father and a certain Josef Howarth, a man whom she married in 1921. Municipal registration records thus cinched the case. On 14 August 1943, Dr. Anton Wintersperger granted the plaintiff’s petition.116

116

WSLA, A 1, Box 23: 5 Cg 87/42.

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Other successful appellants were able to sway the court by presenting medical evidence to disprove the paternity of their legal fathers. Livia Löwinger, for example, presented the court with sworn affidavits from a team of eye, ear, and nose specialists at the College of Medicine that her Jewish father suffered from a congenital shoulder malformation that she should have inherited. On the basis of that evidence alone, the judge ruled in her favor.117 In another case, the court accepted testimony of sterility, and in several others of sexual impotence.118 As was frequently the case, testimony of infidelity, either by a surviving mother or by a close relative, was considered admissible evidence. Even so, it was usually the results of a biological examination that carried the most weight. In this regard, the official reports of Dr. Josef Wastl tended to be thorough and couched in scientific terms, whereas those of Dr. Karl Tuppa and Dr. Werner Pendl usually consisted of a boilerplate paragraph or two. What the reports of Hitler’s racial scientists had in common, Ehrenreich points out, was a “lack of methodological consistency.”119 On the other hand, the assessments were not inconsistent in placing emphasis on physical appearance. The striking good looks of Valerie Giebisch, née Friedländer, for example, clearly influenced the magistrates to rule that it was “unlikely that the plaintiff is descended from a full-Jewish father.”120 What of those plaintiffs who failed to convince the court of their nonJewish ancestry? As with those who succeeded, it is impossible to discern a distinctive pattern – partly because of insufficient documentation,121 partly because of the capricious, arbitrary nature of Nazi racial policy. Some cases were thrown out on a technicality. In 1943, for example, the court denied standing to an appellant who had moved to Hungary122 and one who, although a member of the German Wehrmacht, had retained his Slovakian citizenship.123 Later in the same year, Wintersperger dismissed a third paternity suit on grounds of an amendment to the German legal code that restricted the right of a plaintiff to challenge the “racial status” of forbears other than that of his or her immediate parents.124 There were also at least half a dozen cases that remained unsettled. 117 118 119 120 121

122 123 124

WSLA, A 1, Box 4: 18 Cg 114/42. WSLA, A 1, Box 23: 14 Cg 231/41; Box 4: 17 Cg 193/43. Ehrenreich, Nazi Ancestral Proof, 126. WSLA, A 1, Box 23: 26 Cg 177/41. Although most court transcripts have survived intact, in the files of the Wiener Stadt – und Landesarchiv it is not uncommon to find a single page summary statement. WSLA, Lg. 3 Cg, Box 85: 191/42. WSLA, Lg. Z. 3 Cg, Box 84: 162/42. WSLA, A 1, Box 23: 11 Cg 196/41.


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Generally speaking, the surviving appeals rejected by the court appear to have been prepared in desperation, often lacking documentation and composed in haste. This was not true of each and every case, as demonstrated by the flimsy evidence accepted by the court in several successful petitions discussed in this study. Nor is the observation intended to impugn the efforts of the petitioners or their attorneys, let alone to justify National Socialist legal procedures. Nevertheless, the judges sometimes found themselves poring over a virtually empty portfolio. In 1943, for example, Richard “Israel” Bauman claimed that his biological father had been an Aryan aristocrat, Witold von Major. However the only evidence he produced was a brief letter, dictated by his mother on the eve of her deportation to the East.125 The previous year, Josef “Israel” Stier had offered the court a thicker packet of documents, though one that consisted primarily of personal testimony from an earlier case involving “racial defilement” (of which he had been cleared). Stier claimed in lengthy depositions to have been abused by both parents at an early age, charging that his father not only forced him to attend temple services against his will, but also thrashed him repeatedly. Upon hearing that he was actually the offspring of domestic servants, Stier left home, withdrew from the Jewish Religious Community, and, according to the court transcript, became a rabid antisemite, Included in his brief were sworn affidavits attesting to the plaintiff’s success in blackballing Jews from his engineering fraternity. None of this evidentiary material impressed the court. Careful research by clerks and other judicial employees demonstrated that Stier had falsified academic records and misrepresented details of his family life. Furthermore, a thorough biological examination revealed “distinctly Near Eastern morphological features.” On 2 June 1942, Wintersperger ruled against the plaintiff, confirming his classification as a “Jew.”126 Another appeal virtually devoid of genealogical documentation was filed in 1941 by a fifty-one-year-old opera singer, Wilhem Alt. Although his elderly mother testified that she had conceived her son during an extramarital affair while her husband was abroad, the court held that such a confession a half-century after the fact strained credulity. When a follow-up biological examination opined that Alt’s legal father had

125

126

WSLA, A 1, Box 23: Baumann. The mother was presumably Adele Baumann, born in 1877, murdered at Maly Trostinec on 28 May 1942. DÖW, Namensliste der österreichischen Holocaust Opfer. WSAL, A 1, Box 4: 7 Cg 162/42.

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indeed begotten him, the judge on 9 March 1943 reconfirmed his racial status as a “Jew.”127 One of the most tragic paternity suits to come before the Viennese Court of Civil Relations during the Anschluß era was filed on 19 September 1941 by a half-Jew, Adele Mildner. As an illegitimate child married to a “German-blooded” man, she appeared to have a strong case. According to the sworn affidavit of her sixty-nine-year-old mother, Maria Gütig, her biological father had been a vocational teacher in Steyr. After Adele’s birth in 1899, the mother contended, her father had put pressure on her to wed a Jewish manager in the Steyr munitions factory. The matrimonial relationship appears to have been a mariage de convenance, since the mother continued her relationship with her paramour, by whom she had another child. In 1928, Adele formally withdrew from the Jewish Religious Community and five years later took an Aryan husband. While the anxieties suffered by the plaintiff and her relatives are not recorded in the various depositions presented to the court, the family’s anguish and despair proved unbearable. On 21 February 1942, Maria Gütig met a violent death in Vienna, presumably murdered by the Gestapo or SS. Six weeks later, a police report indicated that Adele Mildner had taken her own life.128 A similar case based primarily on oral testimony had a less dramatic, though no less satisfactory, outcome. The plaintiff, Leopold Geschandter, also a “Mischling of the First Degree,” had been born out of wedlock in 1898. When his mother married a prominent Jewish businessman thirteen years later, the Jewish Religious Community enrolled her son as a legitimate member according to law and custom. Within days of the Anschluß, Geschandter filed an unsuccessful paternity suit, claiming that his biological father had been an Aryan, Michael Oelinger. Having lost his situation as the manager of a bank, Geschandter waited until 1940 to appeal the decision, this time providing a sworn affidavit from his mother that she had not laid eyes upon her husband prior to 1900. In reaching a decision, Wintersperger focused on the lack of genealogical documentation as well as the failure of the mother to designate Oelinger the begetter of her child at the time of delivery. Still, it was the opinion of the racial scientists that proved decisive. According to the official report, neither Geschandter nor his legal father “showed outward signs characteristic of Jewish or Near Eastern peoples.” Nevertheless, both father and 127 128

WSLA, A 1, Box 23: 16 Cg 85/41. WSLA, Lg. Z. 3 Cg 205/41; DÖW, Namensliste der österreichischen Holocaustopfer.


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son shared the same blood type as well as near-identical morphological features, specifically “asymmetry of the face, structure and color of both skin-color and iris, the entire shape of the back of hands and fingers, and the make-up of the ears.” Also noteworthy, the report continued, “is the [similarity] of the left corner of the lips and a distinctive curvature of the upper lip.” On 19 September 1942, Judge Wintersperger denied Geschandter’s appeal, placing particular emphasis on the results of the appellant’s biological examination. As for the father, he had already been deported to Theresienstadt.129 The Elderly Eleven of the individuals who appealed their “racial status” by filing a paternity suit were senior citizens; the oldest had been born in 1871, the youngest in 1888. As a group they did not fare as well as other petitioners. Three walked out of the courtroom as persons of “German-blood,” three as “Mischlinge of the First Degree.” The others failed to win their suits: One remained a “Mischling of the First Degree”; four remained stigmatized as “Jews.” The arguments and evidence presented in court did not differ from that of the younger appellants. Adolf “Israel” Jokl, for example, had been born in 1873 into a Jewish family. Because his father had died before his birth, he had been reared by his mother and a “family friend,” Dr. Friedrich Berghammer. Thereafter, Jokl had gone onto distinguish himself as an officer in the Habsburg army, ending the Great War as a lieutenant colonel. Once classified as a “full Jew” by the Kinship Office, Jokl filed a paternity suit contending that his biological father had been his mother’s “friend,” Dr. Berghammer. To prove his case, Jokl produced a birth certificate indicating that he had come into the world ten months following the death of his legal father, Adolf Jokl. Whether Berghammer was, in fact, the plaintiff’s biological father did not concern the court. It summarily ruled that Adolf Jokl had not begotten the retired officer, in effect reclassifying him a “Mischling of the First Degree.”130 In a similar case, Anna “Sara” Exel succeeded in winning her appeal, although not without considerable effort and expense. Born in 1887 to Ignaz and Klara Epstein, she grew up an observant Jew. At the age of twenty-two, she converted to Lutheranism; the following year she married an Aryan, Dr. Erich Exel. In October of 1939, the District Kinship 129

130

WSLA, A 1, Box 23; 18 Cg 67/42; DÖW, Namensliste der österreichischen Holocaust Opfer. WSLA, A 1, Box 23: 13 Cg 91/41.

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Office designated her a “Jew” although in an odd gesture of solicitude provided authorization to challenge her “blood-line descent.” To prepare her brief, Exel and her attorneys appear to have pulled out all stops. Exel denied the paternity of her legal father by claiming that she was the progeny of a long relationship between her mother and a financial official, Eduard Kitzinger. She contended that her father had abused her as a child and refused either to provide a dowry or underwrite her marriage to a Gentile. Thereafter, he had in effect disowned her and taken to calling her a “Christian whore.” As for Kitzinger, he had consistently shown a “paternal” interest in the appellant’s well-being and gone out of his way on numerous occasions to provide assistance. Judging from the court transcript, the magistrates were impressed by this operatic testimony, especially after interviewing the plaintiff’s husband and two other “German-blooded” witnesses. Still, it was the professional opinion of Dr. Karl Tuppa that proved decisive. Scrutinizing “new photographic evidence,” he discovered a rare but distinctive Central European morphological feature in “the angle of the [examinee’s] palpebral fissure,” a feature not present in either Jewish parent. On 11 April 1943, the court ruled in favor of the plaintiff, though also assessing a hefty cost of RM 1,000.131 Another complex, though successful, appeal took years to resolve, primarily because the sixty-five-year-old appellant, Rosa “Sara” Wildner, had been born in the Bukovina, a far-flung province of the Habsburg Monarchy annexed by Rumania in 1919. In a carefully crafted brief, Frau Wildner, a Roman Catholic convert, contended that her biological father was Constantin Cogalniceanu, a Rumanian diplomat whom her Jewish mother had met at a Czernowitz coffee house. The two lovers had considered divorce and remarriage, the plaintiff claimed, but owing to the anti-Jewish hostility of the local populace and the impotence of her father, chose instead to continue their relationship as an extramarital affair. Wildner’s far-fetched appeal would most likely never have made it to chambers had not the aged Cogalniceanu been serving in the Rumanian consulate. Under oath he stepped forward to certify Rosa Wildner as his biological daughter. The court record suggests that Judge Wintersperger expressed skepticism, but after interviewing the appellant’s husband, referred the matter to the Anthropological Institute of the University of Vienna. After conducting a thorough biological examination, the racial scientists reported that the plaintiff belonged to a “mixed race 131

WSLA, A 1, Box 23: 25 Cg 290/41–27.


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of dark Ostian-Cro-Magnon ancestry with faint Near Eastern-Oriental features found in Russian society.” Exactly what Wintersperger thought of this bizarre diagnosis must be left to the imagination. On 24 June 1944, he ruled in favor of the plaintiff, thus removing the racial stigma of “Jew.”132 Of the other elderly appellants who persuaded the Viennese Court of Civil Affairs to improve their “racial status,” one was able to exploit his illegitimate birth to an Aryan chambermaid in order to win the endorsement of racial scientists, another to provide photographic evidence that she had been sired by a Polish prince, and a third to produce documentation that he had been born ten years after the emigration of his Jewish father to the United States.133 Of those who failed, most did not prepare their briefs well or were unable to provide the sort of evidence that might have swayed a Nazi court. Dr. Bruno “Israel” Klagsbrunn, for example, had been born in 1886 in Odessa. He filed papers within a year of the Anschluß, contending that he was not the son of Johanna and Ignaz Klagsbrunn. There was little in his portfolio, however, either in the form of documentary or testimonial evidence, to support his claim. Much the same observation can be made in the case of Baroness Olga von Direntaka, born to Jewish parents in 1888. While she was able to prove that her entire family had converted to Roman Catholicism shortly after the turn of the century, the record of her convoluted testimony contained little of substance. More unfortunate was the fate of the sixty-year-old Johann “Israel” Friedländer. Although born to intermarried Roman Catholic parents, he had himself taken a Jewish wife. For that reason alone the court denied his appeal in late October 1942 and reclassified him as a “full Jew.” Eleven months later he was deported to Theresienstadt, Hitler’s concentration camp for the “retired,” from which he did not return.134 That the outcome of a paternity suit could mean the difference between life and death for persons of mixed blood was revealed even more dramatically in the case of Otto “Israel” Himler. Born the illegitimate child of a Jewish mother on 17 January 1877, he had been adopted by the “full-Jew,” Sigmund Himler, whom his mother wed in 1883. According to court records, Otto Himler had enjoyed a successful career as a sales representative until shortly after the Anschluß when he was designated a “Jew.” Before the end of the year, Himler appealed his racial classification, 132 133 134

WSLA, A 1, Box 4: 22 Cg 199/43. WSLA, A1, Box 23: Friedrich Kügler; 8 Cg 240/41; A 3, Box 1: 12 Cg 37/40. WSLA, A 1, Box 23: 6 Cg 61/40; 7 Cg 217/41; II Cg 34/41, DÖW, Namensliste der österreichischen Holocaust Opfer.

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claiming to be the son of an Aryan estate owner, Josef Tögl. Officials in the municipal administration discounted the appellant’s plea and on 14 November 1939 mailed a Jewish identity card to his home address. Two and one-half years later, Himler filed another unsuccessful appeal, this time to the Reich Kinship Office in Berlin. Simultaneously, however, Himler and his attorneys also filed a paternity suit, producing medical evidence that his legal father and paternal ancestors had all suffered from schizophrenia. By the time the brief reached the Viennese Court of Civil Affairs, Himler had been picked up by the Gestapo and confined in a detention center in the Kleine Sperlgasse awaiting deportation to Auschwitz. It was at this point, on 29 June 1942, that Judge Anton Wintersperger intervened to order a thorough investigation of the case, including scrutiny of family medical records and a biological examination. The court’s mandate was carried out by a team of physicians in the Institute of Judicial Medicine of the University of Vienna. Their report substantiated the plaintiff’s charge of extensive schizophrenia in the legal father’s family tree while finding no evidence of mental illness in Himler himself. On 2 December 1942, Wintersperger issued a lengthy ruling that the appellant’s Jewish father had not begotten him. The decision allowed Himler to walk out of the SS collection center a free man, or at least one eligible for reclassification as a “Mischling of the First Degree.”135

CONCLUSIONS Sixty percent of the partial-Jews who filed paternity suits during the Anschluß era succeeded in improving their racial status by demonstrating to the Viennese Court of Civil Affairs that their legal fathers had not begotten them. Moreover, well over half of the petitioners emerged from chambers for all intents and purposes reclassified as “persons of German blood,” a percentage considerably higher than the third promoted to Aryan status by appealing to the Ministry of the Interior in Berlin. On the other hand, two-fifths of the Viennese plaintiffs failed to win their suits or saw them dismissed out of hand. Of these, 15 percent retained the demonic stigma of “Jew,” at least one of whom died at the hands of the SS. Exactly why those of “mixed blood” who chose to exercise their right to appeal by filing a legal challenge rather than proceeding through the 135

WSLA, Lg. Z., 3Cg., Box 80: 272/41.


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bureaucracy is not altogether clear. In at least three successful cases, the parties turned to the courts only after the civil authorities had rejected their appeals. In two others the District Kinship Office encouraged the petitioners to file papers. Appellants born out of wedlock may have thought that they stood a better chance in chambers once they became aware of changes in German law that favored the testimony of “Germanblooded” mothers, no matter what their birth or station in society. Others may have taken legal action believing they would enjoy the protection of the law until their case had been settled.136 Such an approach might have worked, for example, to the advantage of those born in far-flung areas of the former Habsburg Monarchy, since years could pass before certificates of birth, baptism, and death might be assembled in an attorney’s brief. Still others, indeed a great many, filed suit out of desperation, not least because they believed, or at least hoped, that a scientific biological examination might alter their racial status. Even though the outcome of nearly all judicial appeals depended on professional opinions of Nazi racial scientists, the cases considered here suggest that favorable decisions were largely based on documentary evidence that included sworn affidavits, police registration certificates and medical records. Five of the plaintiffs were even able to produce hospital evidence of syphilitic impotence. In reaching their decisions, the judges appear to have devoted considerable attention to family trees, sometimes scrutinizing two or three generations of ancestors to differentiate those of Jewish or non-Jewish origin. At the same time, neither the magistrates nor the plaintiffs questioned the scientific validity of biological examinations as admissible evidence.137 In the aggregate, those Viennese members of mixed families who sought to alter their racial status either by appealing to the Ministry of the Interior or by filing a paternity suit thought of themselves as Austrians or Austro-Germans. Most realized they were in some sense victims of the Anschluß, but few identified themselves as Jews, even though a number continued to socialize with non-Aryan friends and relatives.138 With

136

137

138

This assumption may have been correct. After World War II, a former official in the Ministry of Interior testified that whenever Jewish ancestry was in doubt “the examinee was not to be treated as Jew, until the proceedings had been concluded.” Quoted in Schleunes, Legislating the Holocaust, 98. For a thorough analysis of this phenomenon see Ehrenreich, Nazi Ancestral Proof, 121–40. See, for example, Elizabeth Welt Trahan, Walking with Ghosts A Jewish Childhood in Wartime Vienna (New York, 1998), 108 passim.

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the passage of time, some half-Jews came to think they belonged to a “third race,” a few even organizing a small resistance group called the “Mischlingliga.” Nevertheless, most members of “mixed families” simply “could not redefine themselves according to ideology.”139 The idea of being part-Jewish and part-German made little sense in a society based on notions of discrete races. Strolling through a park, for example, a young woman later recalled wondering on which side of a bench marked “only for Aryans” she should sit.140 Based on the records of those partial-Jews seeking “racial reclassification,” most preferred the Aryan side. Some wished to maintain their jobs, their assets, or their social status. Some requested permission to marry a “German-blooded” fiancé or to pursue a career in the armed forces. Still others sought to protect their children, other family members, or, after 1941, themselves from forced labor or deportation to the East. As for the Nazis, even Hitler himself seemed of two minds. Although wary of “racial contamination,” the dictator initially was willing to grant exemptions from the Nuremberg Laws and seems to have thought that quarter-Jews and their progeny might eventually be absorbed into the National Community.141 On the other hand, he continued to view halfJews as a threat and in 1940 discharged them from the Wehrmacht. He also banned quarter-Jews from holding positions of authority and gradually changed his views on heredity. Within a year of launching the Final Solution, he angrily remarked that “even if there was only a tiny drop of Jewish blood, over the generations a racially pure Jew would ‘Mendel’ out.”142 These shifting, contradictory views were refracted in the debates and deliberations of the genealogical researchers, civil servants, anthropologists, and Party officials who labored to define who was a Jew. Much like their Führer, they remained acutely aware of the impact of anti-Jewish measures not only on the large number of Aryan relatives of intermarried families, but also on the wider populace. In the eighteen months following the outbreak of war officials in the SS, the Party Chancellery, and the Racial Policy Office gradually gained the upper hand, intending to put an end to exemptions and reclassify half-Jews as Jews to be included in the Final Solution. At the same time, officials in the Reich Kinship Office continued to classify illegitimate children as “Mischlinge of the First Degree” 139 140 141

142

Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, 27. Klamper, “Zwischen ‘Arien’ und Nichtarien’,” 302. H.R. Trevor-Roper (ed.) Hitler’s Seret Conversations 1941–1944 (New York, 1953), 116. Noakes, “German-Jewish Mischlinge,” 333.


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or “persons of German blood.”143 Even as Reinhard Heydrich was drawing up invitations to the Wannsee Conference, Lösener contended in a written brief that the mixed-breeds were “biologically insignificant” and themselves hostile to Jews. Designating them as Jews, he argued, would be counterproductive precisely because their “Germanic genetic component” would strengthen world Jewry.144 The statistical evidence considered in this study of 497 Viennese partial-Jews who appealed their racial classification through administrative and judicial channels suggests that the civil authorities tended to be lenient and the judges fair-minded. But this was not really the case, because sixty-six petitions came to grief, quite often for capricious and arbitrary reasons such as personal appearance or demeanor. Thirty-two of the appellants remained stigmatized as Jews, of whom at least a dozen, if not more, perished at the hands of the Gestapo or SS. To what extent those Viennese anthropologists, civil officials, and judges involved in the appeal process recognized the gravity of their decisions is not altogether clear, although racial scientists, such as Drs. Josef Wastl and Dora Kahlich, fully grasped the meaning of negative eugenics. It is possible that some of their superiors in the District Kinship Office, the Viennese Court of Civil Affairs, or even the Ministry of the Interior in Berlin remained ignorant or only marginally aware of the Final Solution. Nevertheless, their acceptance and refinement of categories based on race, Ehrenreich reminds us, indisputably made it possible.145 143

144 145

For details see ibid., 337–48; Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, 268–74; Gerlach, “ Wannsee Conference,” 759–812. Meyer, “Jüdische Mischlinge,” 97. For more information and analysis of this point see Ehrenreich, Nazi Ancestral Proof, 165–72; Pegelow, “The Reich Kinship Office,” 64–5; idem., “Linguistic Violence,” 595–607.

3 Intermarried Divorce, 1938–1945

The Option of Divorce: Choice or Coercion? The National Socialists, much like the Democrats in the American South, abominated “race mixing” and miscegenation. Whereas state and local governments in the United States had managed to restrict marital and sexual relationships between races by means of violence, legislation, and judicial decisions, Hitler’s regime faced the problem of dissolving tens of thousands of established marital unions. The most logical approach was to induce Aryans to divorce their Jewish wives or husbands, a scheme that could be implemented by promises of job security, bribes, social pressure, and threats. And because the divorce rate of mixed marriages was already disproportionately high in Germany, there was reason for the Nazis to anticipate more than a modicum of success. In the early years of Hitler’s regime, the available evidence suggests that a number of intermarried couples did dissolve their marriages, although the exact figures have never been determined. The grounds of those seeking divorce appear to have ranged from despair to purely selfish reasons. In some cases, an “Aryan” husband or wife would attempt to save family assets or facilitate the emigration of a partner; in others, the petitioner might seek to salvage a position or advance up the career ladder. In still others, individuals would go to court under Gestapo pressure or simply to end an unhappy relationship.1 Recent research has concluded that well over 90 percent of Jews living in mixed marriages in both Germany and Austria survived the 1

Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair, 87–93; Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart, 44–9, 74.

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Intermarried Divorce, 1938–1945

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Nazi era.2 The story of those unions that disintegrated therefore constitutes an anomaly. Nevertheless, scrutiny of these cases can reveal much about the experience of intermarried couples and their families in the Third Reich. Preliminary assessments have suggested that intermarried divorces occurred in two “spurts,” the first following promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935; the second after the horrors of Kristallnacht three years later. Scholars who have studied mixed couples have also assumed that “German-blooded” husbands were the ones to seek divorce, primarily because increased patriarchal power at home enabled them to discard “‘racially undesirable’ partners without proving ‘guilt’.”3 During the first “spurt,” this may well have been the case. Although the evidence is scanty and anecdotal, Marion Kaplan has argued cogently that Hitler’s brutal purge of the civil service may have shocked Aryan husbands into filing divorce papers as a desperate means of saving their livelihoods. There were also individuals who divorced in order to protect a family business or to provide income for their wives and children through alimony. Still others bowed to social pressure or to Gestapo threats.4 During the second “spurt” after 1938, it was Gentile women who appear to have been the petitioners.5 In a random study of 130 mixed marriages dissolved in Hamburg between 1937 and 1939, Beate Meyer reveals that only twenty-seven suits were filed by “German-blooded” men. While the motives of the 103 wives seeking divorce from their Jewish partners ranged from traditional marital offenses, such as adultery, sexual abuse, or mental illness, Meyer attributes the “gender-specific” shift – if that is 2

3

4 5

Extrapolating from a survey taken in September of 1944 by the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland, Stoltzfus contends that “some 98 percent of officially registered ‘full’ German Jews who outlived Nazism did so in intermarriages...” Kaplan estimates that 99 percent of Jews who did not emigrate from Hitler’s Reich survived in mixed unions. In mid-April 1945, Emil Tuchmann, Director of Vienna’s Jewish Community’s Health Services, reported that 96 percent of the city’s surviving Jews lived in mixed marriages. Considering the large numbers of German and Austrian civilians who died in the last seven months of the war, especially in Berlin and Vienna, these estimates may be a bit high, even though it is impossible to determine whether the percentages were disproportionate to those of other Jews who later returned from camps or emerged from hiding. Cf. Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart, xxvii and Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair; 89. For Vienna and Austria, see Evelyn Adunka, Die vierte Gemeinde: die Geschichte der Wiener Juden von 1945 bis heute (Vienna, 2000), 18; Jonny Moser, Demographie der jüdischen Bevölkerung Österreichs 1938–1945 (Vienna, 1999), 54. Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics (New York, 1987), 192. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair, 88–93. Roderick Phillips, Putting Asunder: A History of Divorce in Western Society (Cambridge, 1988), 551–2.

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what it was – first, to the introduction of a new marriage law on 8 July 1938, and second, to the decisions made by Hitler and Göring six months later dividing intermarried couples into “privileged” and “nonprivileged” categories.6 In the first instance, the Nazi regime modified the patriarchal structure of the German Civil Code of 1900 (Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch) by allowing women as well as men to petition for “no-fault divorce.”7 In the second instance, the regime enticed “Aryan” women married to Jews to seek divorce by designating them partners in a “nonprivileged mixed marriage.” As we have already seen, “nonprivileged” Aryan wives found themselves members of a Jewish household subject to all but a handful of discriminatory measures imposed on full-Jews, including expropriation of assets, ghettoization, and forced labor.8 While the embryonic literature on the experience of intermarried couples in Nazi Germany concurs that few wives or husbands actually petitioned for divorce, scholars disagree on the role of gender as opposed to the “real” reasons for the dissolution of mixed marriages. The available evidence makes it unmistakably clear that Gestapo intimidation drove a number of spouses to commit suicide, especially after the deportations began in late 1941. It also indicates that by the end of the war even Jews living in “privileged” mixed marriages faced the prospect of forced labor and extermination.9 But aside from Meyer’s work on Hamburg, itself based on incomplete or fragmentary sources, there are few empirical studies and statistical data. Furthermore, little is known about intermarried life within major Jewish communities outside the Hanseatic city, Dresden, and Berlin. In incorporated Austria, Hitler’s minions faced formidable obstacles in inducing intermarried couples to dissolve their unions. First, a majority of those husbands who were “non-Aryan” had everything to lose and 6

7

8

9

Meyer, “Jüdische Mischlinge,” especially 68–94; idem., “The Mixed Marriage. A Guarantee of Survival or a Reflection of German society during the Nazi Regime?” in David Bankier (ed.), Probing the Depths of German Anti-Semitism: German Society and Persecution of the Jews, 1933–1941 (Jerusalem, 2000), 54–77. For a discussion of the Marriage Law and its implications, see Jill Stephenson, Women in Nazi Society (London, 1975), 41–4 ff. and Meyer, “Mischlinge,” 68–72, ff. For the complete legislative package, see Reichsgesetzblatt (RGBl.) Nr 106, T. 1 (8 July 1938), 807–22 and Nr 117 (27 July 1938), 930–4. Meyer, “Jüdische Mischlinge,” 29–31 ff.; Noakes, “Mischlinge,” 337–8; Ursula Büttner, “The Persecution of German Jewish Families in the Third Reich,” Leo Baeck Yearbook, 34 (1989), 283–7 ff. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair, 91; Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart, 121; Tent, In the Shadow of the Holocaust, 111; Matthew Stibbe, Women in the Third Reich, 70; Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness, 1942–1945, 190 ff., especially 390–414; Meyer, “Jüdische Mischlinge,” 262–355; Gruner, Widerstand in der Rosenstraße, 178–9.


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nothing to gain by divorce. Second, the Roman Catholic Church, as we have seen, opposed civil divorce in any form. The Church refused to sanction anything other than separation by bed and board. Thus, while Theodor Cardinal Innitzer was known to support the new regime, Nazi officials were acutely aware that he would not countenance the divorce of Jewish–Catholic parishioners. Finally, there were impediments in existing marriage and divorce law that could be removed only by sweeping change.

Marriage and Divorce in Austria, 1783–1938 Although predominantly a Catholic society, Austria had been one of the first European states to introduce a secular element to the sacrament of holy matrimony. In 1783, Joseph II issued an edict to restrict cohabitation by defining marriage as a “civil contract.” The decree did not alter Canon Law, but it did constitute the basis of the General Civil Code of 1811 (Allgemeines Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch [AGBG]), which extended regulation of matrimonial and family matters to the state. As bureaucrats interpreted the Code to permit non-Catholic Christians and Jews to divorce, the Vatican put up a stiff resistance, later taking advantage of the failure of the revolutions of 1848 to persuade Vienna to reverse its course. According to the Concordat of 1855, the Roman Catholic Church recovered sovereignty over marital affairs in order to outlaw divorce altogether.10 Liberal reaction to the Concordat was so intense, however, that in 1868 it was abrogated and the previous regulations reestablished. Described as “anomalous,” the restored Code regarded the clergy as functionaries of the state authorized to join couples in wedlock. Priests, pastors, and rabbis supervised the contraction of marriages and performed the ceremonies. The Catholic Church retained the right to publish banns and, under certain circumstances, to deny prospective brides and grooms the marital sacrament. In such cases, couples had the right to appeal to civil tribunals that had final jurisdiction over matrimonial affairs. Even so, it remained illegal for Jews and Christians to intermarry.11 10

11

The Concordat invalidated the marital provisions of the General Civil Code of 1811, giving the Roman Church control of matrimonial affairs of all Austrians, including non-Catholics. See Judith von Schmädel “The History of Marriage Law in Austria and Germany: From Sacrament to Civil Contract,” Hiotsubashi Journal of Law and Politics, 37 (2009), 46. Max Haller, “Austria,” Divorce in Europe (Leiden, 1977), 211–13; Frederic R. Coudert, Marriage and Divorce Laws in Europe: A Study in Comparative Legislation (New York, 1892), 66–71.

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According to the revised Civil Code, Roman Catholics could file for a “perpetual separation” from bed and board (mensâ et toro) on grounds of adultery, malicious desertion, physical abuse, venereal disease, or the squandering of a dowry. This conformed to Canon law, which tolerated couples living apart but prohibited divorce and remarriage. The power to grant formal separations, however, was entrusted to judicial magistrates, who gradually found themselves beset with applications to circumvent the law to allow remarriage.12 Unlike Roman Catholics, parties who did not belong to an established church or religious group had the right to wed in a civil ceremony (Notzivilehe). Furthermore, non-Catholics and Jews could file for absolute divorce on grounds of adultery, desertion, or malicious abuse. They were also permitted to remarry after the legal dissolution of marital bonds.13 Shortly before the end of the nineteenth century, the number of judicial separations and divorces in Austria began to accelerate, reflecting both economic change and a general disillusionment with the prevailing notion of romantic love. The number of decrees issued on the territory of what is now the Republic of Austria climbed steadily from 491 in 1890 to 1,940 in 1913; in the municipality of Vienna it climbed from 305 in 1891 to 850 in 1910. Immediately following the Great War, countrywide figures shot up to 5,358 in 1920, fell slightly in 1925, and thereafter rose to an annual level of just under 6,000. Additional evidence, although spotty, suggests that roughly two-thirds of all separations, annulments, and divorces took place in Vienna. While it is usually assumed that infidelity constituted the main grounds for seeking the end of a marriage, the charges brought before judges most frequently involved alcoholism, physical abuse, and impotence. Furthermore, two-thirds of the petitioners were women, not men.14 12

13

14

For the well-heeled, it was always possible to obtain a “Transylvanian marriage,” a change in matrimonial status not unlike that later attainable in the American state of Nevada. As ecclesiastical courts in the Hungarian province enjoyed autonomy in marital affairs, individuals granted a legal separation by an Austrian court could convert to Protestantism and move to Transylvania. After a residence of six weeks, they could apply to a local denominational court for a full divorce. Once granted, they were free to remarry under Hungarian law. For details see Ulrike Harmat, “Divorce and Remarriage in Austria-Hungary: The Second Marriage of Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf,” Austrian History Yearbook, 23 (2001), 80–2. Coudert, Marriage and Divorce, 66–71; Harmat, “Divorce and Remarriage in AustriaHungary,” 70–84. Ernst Hanisch, Männlichkeit: Eine andere Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts (Vienna, Cologne, Weimar, 2005), 165–9 ff.; Haller, “Austria,” 226–7. In 1937, the courts granted 5,843 separations and divorces in Austria, of which 3,687 (including 254 annulments) were in Vienna. Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Wien (SJSW), 1937, 17.


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That more wives than husbands filed for divorce in Austria was by no means a coincidence. This can be explained by two interconnected factors, one legal, the other economic. According to the General Civil Code of 1811, marriage had been defined in patriarchal terms. Paragraph 91 stipulated: “The husband is head of the family. In this capacity he retains the exclusive legal right to oversee and direct household affairs.”15 The law reflected early nineteenth century conjugal and family arrangements, according to which the husband provided protection and sustenance, while the wife presided over the household, prepared meals, and cared for children. As the labor market expanded, however, increasing numbers of married women took jobs as seamstresses, milliners, or textile workers. They also found clerical positions in the service sector. While many wives may have sought to supplement family incomes, others realized that earning a livelihood enabled them to survive outside marriage. Divorce thus provided the opportunity for unhappy wives to escape legal servitude and achieve financial independence.16 Although one authority has stressed that marital disputes in Austria “transcended denominational, class, and gender barriers,”17 the most numerous suits filed before the First World War tended to be by industrial workers, driven to desperation by strikes, wage cuts, firings, and skyrocketing food costs. The data also indicate that fewer than half of those who filed papers had children, and that a disproportionate number were Jewish or intermarried Christian couples. After the collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy, the Social Democrats and German Nationalists tried vigorously to reform marital law to allow “divorced” Catholics to remarry, but they encountered stiff opposition from the Christian Social Party and the Vatican. More significantly, the civil courts of the First Republic continued to rule that Catholic marriages remained indissoluble. A number of provincial governors and administrative officials then took matters into their own hands by issuing “dispensations from the impediment of the existing matrimonial tie.” These edicts enabled “divorced” wives and husbands to enter into “dispensation marriages.” These were marital unions considered bigamous by the Catholic establishment but approved by the Constitutional Court. By 1930, over 50,000 such marriages had been performed. Even after the negotiation of a new Concordat in 1933–4 by the Dollfuss-Schuschnigg dictatorship, these weddings continued to take place. Furthermore, the courts did not refrain 15 16 17

Quoted in Hanisch, Männlichkeit, 166. Ibid.,166–9 ff. Harmat, “Divorce and Remarriage,” 70.

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from granting separations, annulments, and divorces. Thus, on the eve of the Anschluß, Christian-Corporative Austria had one of the most regressive marriage laws in Europe, but also the largest number of “divorced” couples on the Continent.18

Impact of the Anschluß and the Marriage Law of 1938 In the months following Hitler’s seizure of Austria in March of 1938, both Reich German authorities and indigenous Nazis faced intractable problems integrating the Ostmark – as it was now known – into the Greater German Reich.19 As we have seen, among their top priorities were the registration and expulsion of the Jewish populace. Responding to widespread antisemitic rioting that had broken out even before German troops entered the country, the Reich Ministry of Justice moved immediately on 15 March 1938 to dismiss all Jewish and half-Jewish civil servants from their posts. On 26 April, as mentioned earlier, all Jews and their spouses – including Aryans – were required to register domestic and foreign assets exceeding RM 5,000 in value. Two days later, Reich Commissioner Josef Bürckel ordered a ban on the marriage of Jews and Aryans; on 7 May, the Office of Ancestral Research issued guidelines requiring all public employees to verify their racial status by applying for a Certificate of Descent. Within forty-eight hours the same office issued additional regulations for the protection of German blood, including compulsory sterilization of the “hereditarily impaired.” Finally, on 20 May, the Nuremberg legislation of 1935 became law.20 The main objective of the Nazi onslaught was to expropriate “nonAryan” property and drive the Jews into exile, an effort that met with spectacular success under the direction of Adolf Eichmann’s Central Office for Jewish Emigration. Among the 100,000 individuals forced to flee abroad were countless families of “mixed blood,” as well as couples engaged to be married.21 Because a majority of the Viennese public

18

19

20

21

Hanisch, Männlichkeit, 166–85; Charles A. Gulick, Austria From Habsburg To Hitler, II (Berkeley, 1948), 785–8; Haller, “Austria,” 225. The best accounts remain Gerhard Botz, Die Eingliederung Österreichs in das Deutsche Reich: Planung und Verwirklichung des politisch-administrativen Anschlusses (1938– 1940) (Vienna, 1972) and Radomir Luza, Austro-German Relations in the Anschluss Era (Princeton, 1975). Herbert Rosenkranz, Verfolgung und Selbtsbehauptung: Die Juden in Österreich 1938– 1945 (Vienna, 1978), 31–3 ff. The exact number can never be determined, but see the figures in Moser, Demographie, 27.


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detested “race mixing,” the social and political pressure on intermarried couples became both vicious and intense.22 In addition to job dismissals and other discriminatory measures, there were house searches, arrests, and frequent denunciations by neighbors that included letters slandering Gentile wives as “married whores.”23 Such arbitrary and indiscriminate harassment drove some partners into exile, and others to kill themselves. Above all, it exacerbated matrimonial disputes, impelling some couples to consider the preferred Nazi option of divorce. Compelling intermarried couples to dissolve their martial bonds was, however, no easy task. Hitler’s government, it must be borne in mind, claimed to be based on a legal order sanctioned in 1933 by a freely elected Reichstag. This meant that even in incorporated Austria, the regime was constrained in establishing a purely prerogative order.24 And because the Nazis were also mobilizing the population for war, they felt compelled to leave the General Civil Code of 1811 in place and to refrain from a thorough purge of the judiciary. We have already seen that the regressive features of Austrian matrimonial law made it virtually impossible to obtain a full divorce that would allow either party to remarry without receiving a quasi-legal “dispensation” from local authorities. Moreover, the existing Reich German Civil Code also stood in the way of the Nazi goal of dissolving mixed marriages in a region in which one of the partners was most likely Roman Catholic.25 As Hitler’s regime sought to promote population growth and racial purity, the Academy of German Law in 1934 appointed a Family Law Committee. From the outset, the members recognized that the keys to success lay, first, in underwriting marriages that would produce healthy offspring, and, second, in preventing or dissolving “unsuitable” unions. By 1938, the regime had passed measures providing prenatal care and financial support to families producing robust, healthy children; it had restricted marriages between the physically and mentally handicapped; and through the Nuremberg Laws, it had outlawed 22

23

24

25

On the intensity of popular anti-Semitism in Vienna, see Safrian and Witek, Und keiner war dabei; Pauley, From Prejudice to Persecution, 275–300; Bukey, Hitler’s Austria, 131–52. Österreichisches Staatsarchiv (ÖstA), Allgemeines Verwaltungsarchiv (AVA), Rk, Box 173, Stiller to Bürckel, 15 May 1938. On the co-existence of prerogative and normative institutions in the Third Reich, see Ernst Fraenkel’s classic study The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship (New York, 1941). Fourteen months after the Anschluß, the German census of 17 May 1939 revealed that 6,174 Jewish Catholics still resided in Vienna. Moser, Demographie, 33.

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marriage and sexual relations between Jews and Aryans. On the eve of the Anschluß, the Family Law Committee completed the draft of a marriage code that would radically redefine marriage and divorce.26 The Reich Marriage Law promulgated on 8 July 1938 had its most sweeping impact, as both intended and expected, in the Ostmark. The new code mandated compulsory civil marriage, stipulating explicitly that ceremonies had to be performed by official registrars.27 It urged persons separated from bed and board or living in “dispensation” marriages under Austrian law to apply for a full divorce, which would be granted by judicial authorities for the payment of a small fee. The legislative package also sought to increase “productive” marriages throughout Greater Germany by encouraging estranged couples to dissolve marital bonds and enter into new partnerships that would produce children for the National Community. The specific clauses allowed filing of papers if a spouse refused to procreate or resorted to “illegal means to prevent a birth,” that is, abortion. Adultery and premature infertility survived as grounds for divorce, as did “other serious matrimonial offenses.” The Marriage Law altered both the Austrian General Civil Code of 1811 and the German Civil Code of 1900 in two distinct ways. First, paragraphs 49 and 55 gave women as well as men the right to sue for “no-fault divorce” as long as the couple had lived apart for three years and their union had “irretrievably broken down.” Second, and more insidiously, paragraphs 33–9 allowed a partner to apply for a “repeal of marriage” (Aufhebung der Ehe), most commonly by filing a writ of error (Irrtum). According to this provision (§ 37), the petitioner would claim to be “mistaken in the person of the other” by failing to recognize the “racial difference” of the spouse.28 26

27

28

Stephenson, Women in Nazi Society, 41–2. On Nazi efforts to dissolve mixed marriages through the courts prior to 1938, see Müller, Hitler’s Justice, 93–6 Although bitterly opposed by the Roman Catholic Church, compulsory civil marriage had been mandated by the Hungarian parliament in the late the nineteenth century. The law remained in force in the Burgenland after it became an Austrian province in 1921. For details see Christian Neschwara, “Rezeption als Reform: Das ungarische Eherecht in österreichischen Burgenland nach 1921,” Zeitschrift für Neuere Rechtsgeschichte, 11 (1989), 39–62. Ibid., 41–4 ff.; Meyer; “Jüdische Mischlinge,” 68–72 ff.; RGBl. Nr. 106, T. 1 (8 July 1938), 807–22; Nr. 117 (20 July 1938), 930–4. In her English-language study, “The Mixed Marriage,” Meyer defines “Aufhebung der Ehe” as meaning “annulment.” While this approach is useful in understanding the Nazi interpretation of § 37, it is also misleading because the traditional definition of annulment (Nichtigkeit) remained on the books. Furthermore, it was and remains possible in Austria for a partner to request a “repeal of a marriage” if the ceremony had been fraudulent or coerced. Cf. Haller, “Austria,” 214.


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That legislation ordaining civil marriage and legalizing full divorce incurred the wrath of the Roman Catholic Church came as no surprise to the Nazi regime. Although acutely aware of the danger of alienating the Catholic populace, Hitler still intended to throttle the Church, a goal he sought to achieve by manipulating the nationalist sentiments of the higher clergy and also by indirect pressure. In May of 1938, for example, the Ecclesiastical Ordinariate of Vienna readily accepted an ordinance enjoining the clergy from performing wedding ceremonies uniting “racial Jews” and Aryans.29 Two months later, however, the episcopate received a rude shock when the dictator revoked the Austrian Concordat of 1933–4, a pronouncement that also exempted the Ostmark from the protection of the Reich Concordat, thus stripping the Austrian church of its diplomatic status and corporate liberties. When the Vatican registered a formal complaint with the German ambassador on 31 July, it was ignored. Three weeks later the Austrian hierarchy issued its own pastoral letter of protest, but that, too, went unanswered.30 Despite growing friction between church and state (which in Vienna led to rioting and violence),31 the new divorce regulations gained wide acceptance.32 The Reich Statistical Office later reported that in 1939, the courts granted 71,950 divorces, of which 17,740 (24 percent) were approved according to § 55. In the Ostmark, the figures were 8,226 full divorces, of which 3,537 (43 percent) also fell under § 55; for the municipality of Vienna the numbers were 3,998 and 1,523 (38 percent), respectively.33 Because half of the marriages dissolved by the judiciary throughout Greater Germany had been concluded two decades before, Jill Stephenson is certainly correct to conclude that the new law brought relief to “estranged couples of the legal ties of a marriage which had in reality ceased to exist.”34 This sense of relief was no doubt greater in incorporated Austria, where the radical changes at long last restricted 29

30

31 32

33

34

Stefan Moritz, Grüß Gott und Heil Hitler: Katholische Kirche und Nationalsozialismus in Österreich (Vienna, 2002), 128. Radomir Luza, “Nazi Control of the Austrian Catholic Church,1939–1941,” Catholic Historical Review, 62 (1977), 537–72, especially 543–7. For a summary of these events, see Bukey, Hitler’s Austria, 102–4 For an excellent summary and analysis of the implementation of the Marriage Law in incorporated Austria, see Winfried Garscha and Franz Scharf, Justiz in Oberdonau (Linz, 2007), 93–8. Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Deutsche Reich, 59 (1941–42), 92–3. Stephenson’s figures of 62,000 divorces, derived from the periodical Wirtschaft und Statistik, are most likely not as accurate as those released later by the Reich government. Cf. Stephenson, Women in Nazi Society, 43. Stephenson, Women in Nazi Society, 43.

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clerical influence, helped alleviate the social stigma of divorce, and legitimized a good many illicit relationships. Between 1939 and 1942, for example, the courts in Vienna granted formal divorce status to 9,001 cases previously considered “perpetually separated.” And as the Nazis intended, the revised marriage statutes also helped precipitate a sharp rise in the marriage and birth rates, a trend that would decline slightly in 1940 but remain well above pre-Anschluß levels until 1944.35 It has been generally assumed that the divorce rate rose markedly in Austria after 1938.36 However, the number of couples filing divorce papers did not change significantly until after the Second World War. In Vienna, as the following table reveals, there was a noticeable rise in 1939, followed by a slight decline and tapering off that did not change until late in the war.37 Considered in the aggregate, the number of couples seeking to terminate marital bonds remained remarkably constant between 1935 and 1944, declining sharply only in the turbulent years 1938 and 1945. What transformed the familial landscape was not an upsurge in divorce, but rather the Nazi redefinition of matrimony, a redefinition that altered both the justification and political context for those seeking to dissolve a formal state of wedlock. No doubt personal considerations remained uppermost in the minds of those parties petitioning the courts, but their attorneys frequently framed pleas to conform to the new principle of “irretrievable breakdown,” even in cases where the more traditional rule of culpability still applied.

Intermarried Divorce: Political or Personal? Among those in Vienna taking advantage of the new divorce regulations were a small number of intermarried couples. While it is unlikely that the exact figures will ever be determined, examination of a representative sample may cast light on the contested issue of gender, as well as the internal and external pressures that led to marital breakdown. These divorces invite basic questions. What motivated those who filed papers against a Jewish spouse? Were they pressured by the Gestapo? Did they seek to 35

36 37

SJSW, 6 (1939–1942), 46–7, 56. The dramatic increase in marriages in 1939 can be attributed, in part, to the large number of divorced Catholics who took advantage of the new marital law to remarry. This is certainly implicit in Haller, “Austria,” especially in the chart on 226–7. These figures do not include 9,569 pre-Anschluß annulments and divorces converted between 1938 and 1945 to conform to the marriage legislation of 1938. Some 5,111 of these were registered in 1939 alone. SJSW, 6 (1939–1942), 56; 7 (1943–1945), 36.

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Table 6. Marriage and Divorce Numbers in Vienna, 1935–48 Year

Marriages

Separations

Annulments

Divorces

1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948

13,291 12,928 12,865 29,922 41,550 26,202 17,977 17,097 15,617 12,639 9,854 16,350 19,455 18,722

619 558 581 520

339 245 254 110 16 10 8 9 8 12 2 5 20 23

3,260 2,890 2,852 1,894 3,998 3,265 3,064 2,999 3,422 4,500 2,269 6,332 6,308 6,679

Repeals

186 51 37 20 30 39 10 20 22 23

Total Number of Dissolved Marriages 4,218 3,693 3,687 2,524 4,200 3,326 3,109 3,028 3,460 4,551 2,281 6,357 6,350 6,725

Sources: Statisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Wien, 4 (1937), 5 (1938), 6 (1939–1942), 7 (1943–1945), 8 (1946–1947), 9 (1948).

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save a family business or personal assets? Did they mistakenly hope to protect children or family members from persecution? Were religious or political factors involved? Did some selfishly seek to preserve or enhance their own personal status? Or, when all is said and done, did they simply seize the opportunity to end an unhappy marriage? In addition to the subtle pressure inherent in § 37 of the Reich Marriage Law of 1938, mixed couples were subjected to coercion by the Gestapo, by the judicial authorities, and by ordinary citizens. They also had to endure a deluge of radical new restrictions imposed after Kristallnacht, as already discussed in some detail. Another factor inducing intermarried couples to divorce was the regime’s policy of tightening the screws on “nonprivileged” families by compelling them to move into “Jew houses” and, after the outbreak of war, ordering them to shop during restricted hours, turn in their radios, and adhere to a night-time curfew that began at eight o’clock in the evening.38 For “German-blooded” partners of Jewish husbands these measures meant exposure to the full weight of Nazi persecution. Although not compelled to leave their Jewish husbands, childless Aryan wives were urged to file papers in order to rejoin “the community of German blood.” Göring made no secret of this intention.39 Scholars who have explored the fate of intermarried couples in Hitler’s Germany have estimated that the divorce rate ranged between 7 and 10 percent.40 In her meticulous study of Hamburg, Beate Meyer puts the figure at 20 percent.41 In Vienna, the numbers appear to have been considerably lower, although the evidence is insufficient to draw firm conclusions. In 1939, for example, the judges dissolved 186 marriages according to § 37. Even if one assumes that most of these involved Jewish–Gentile couples, they represented only 4.6 percent of the total number of separations and divorces.42 And while statistics are unavailable for other years, data in 38

39

40

41 42

Büttner, “Persecution of Christian-Jewish Families,” 283; Noakes, “Nazi Policy towards German –Jewish, ‘Mischlinge’,” 337–38; Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart, 108–9. Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, 114–16 ff.; Büttner, “Persecution of Christian-Jewish Families,” 283–9; Meyer, “Jüdische Mischlinge,” 29–31; Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart, 106–12; Saul Friedänder, Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939, 290–2. Büttner cites figures revealing that only 97 partners living in 1,355 mixed marriages (7.2 percent) in Baden-Württemberg divorced during the Nazi era; in Hamburg she indicates that 9.9 percent of intermarried unions were dissolved by divorce or death between 1942 and 1945. Büttner, Die Not der Juden teilen, 57, 298, n. 253. See also Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart, 306, n. 66. Meyer, “Mixed Marriage,” 66. SJSW, 6 (1939–1942), 56–7.


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Table 7. Intermarried Couples in Vienna, 1939–45 Date 7. V. 1939 30. VI1.1941 31. XII. 1942 1. VI. 1943 31.VIII. 1943 31. XII.1943 31. XII. 1944 31. I. 1945 28. II. 1945

Privileged Mixed Marriages

3,683 3,867 3,839 3,775 3,468 3,448 3,433

Nonprivileged Mixed Marriages

1,881 1,440 1,434 1,405 1,371 1,360 1,350

Total Intermarried Couples 4,443 5,076 5,564 5.307 5,273 5,180 4,839 4,808 4,783

Source: Moser, Demographie, 54.

the files of the Fifth Branch of the Viennese Court of Civil Affairs reveal a similar picture. Of the 479 cases brought before that bench in 1938, only 5.4 percent concerned intermarried couples; in 1939 the figure was 3.3 percent; in 1940, just under 1 percent.43 Despite the absence of precise statistics on intermarried divorce in Vienna between 1938 and 1945, there are reliable figures on the numbers of Jewish–Gentile couples residing in the city that may provide some clues. The above table reveals that while the sum of mixed unions remained surprisingly constant throughout the Anschluß era, the number of “privileged marriages” declined from 3,683 in December of 1942 to 3,433 in February of 1945 “nonprivileged marriages” declined from 1,881 to 1,350 (6.5 and 28.2 percent, respectively). Because meticulous research by Austrian scholars has revealed that no fewer than 327 intermarried Jews were deported from Vienna during the Holocaust,44 we are left with a figure of 394 individuals who may or may not have divorced, that is, 7 percent. While it is impossible to extrapolate further – if at all – from these exiguous data, the figures suggest that Marion Kaplan is correct in her contention that “mixed marriages remained quite steadfast.”45 The records of divorce proceedings brought before the Court of Civil Affairs during the Nazi era are now stored in the Wiener Stadt – und Landesarchiv. They are difficult to access, however, because the judicial 43 44

45

WSLA: Gerichtshof, 5 Cg. Register. DÖW, Projekt Namentliche Erfassung der Österreichischen Holocaustopfer. Fast nur Mischehen. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair, 93.

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documents have not been arranged or described except in the simplest chronological order. Furthermore, the files include virtually every kind of civil proceeding to go before the court, ranging from property disputes to other nonmatrimonial matters that include applications for public assistance, small claims, and requests for racial reclassification. Because the most numerous divorce cases appear to have come before the Fifth and Third judicial branches, this study is based on records found in ninety boxes of documents originating in those courtrooms. From the Fifth judicial branch, the files contain petitions, depositions, and decisions made between 1938 and 1944; from the Third, those made between 1940 and 1945. The cases uncovered should not be considered equivalent to the unknown number of divorces filed by intermarried couples in Vienna; others remain buried in the files of other courtrooms.46 Nevertheless, comparison and analysis with studies in other localities indicate that they constitute a workable sample.47 This sample consists of ninety-eight divorce cases involving mixed marriages, forty-one of which were presented to the court immediately following the Anschluß in 1938–9. Thereafter, the number declined to a mere seven in 1940, although during the mass deportations of 1941–2, it climbed to thirty-six. Between 1943 and the end of the war, only fourteen intermarried couples (14 percent) sought to dissolve their marital bonds, a figure that stands in noticeable contrast to the relatively large number of cases filed in Hamburg in 1943. As in the Hanseatic city, however, a substantial majority (61.2 percent) of the petitioners were women, of whom at least sixteen (16 percent) sought to “repeal” their marriages according to § 37 of the Marriage Law of 1938. Not every suit was granted, however. Of the ninety-eight petitions to come before the bench, the judges rejected fourteen and granted sixty-three. As for the twentyone other cases, they remained unresolved, were withdrawn, or never made it to the courtroom. In one bizarre instance, the court issued a divorce decree against the wishes of both parties. In considering the conjugal profile of intermarried partners seeking divorce, several factors stand out. First, nearly two-thirds of the families appear to have been nominally nonreligious. Although there is no way of determining the spiritual attitudes of individuals, it is striking that only nine of the marriages had been performed by a Jewish rabbi, eighteen by 46

47

The records of six intermarried divorce cases recently discovered by Hanisch in the files of the Second Branch have also been incorporated in this sample. For comparison and brief analysis of the cases, see Hanisch, Männlichkeit, 184–5. Most notably, Meyer, “Jüdische Mischlinge,” 68–94


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Table 8. Intermarried Divorces in Vienna, 1938–45 Year

Number of Divorces Filed

Granted

1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945

26 15 7 16 20 6 4 4

7 11 6 13 15 5 4 2

total

98

63

Denied

Petitioners Unresolved

Women

Men

8 2 2 2 0 0 0 1

3 4 2 1 5 0 1 1

18 7 7 8 15 3 1 1

8 8 0 8 5 3 3 3

14

21

60

38

Source: Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv: Lg. f. ZRS, Abt. 5 Cg (1938–1944); Abt. 3 Cg (1940–1945), Abt 2 Cg. (1942–1943).

a Catholic priest, and ten by a Protestant pastor. At least thirty-nine had been conducted by a civil registrar, as well as, most likely, nineteen others. Because it is well known that quarrels over faith, customs, and rituals frequently contribute to the breakdown of a marriage, there is reason to believe that unresolved spiritual disputes lay at the heart of a number of unhappy unions, especially those papered over by civil ceremonies. The documentary record suggests that petitioners sometimes took advantage of the Nazi matrimonial code by claiming “racial differences” in order terminate a marriage long sundered. A second, but sad, notable feature of those filing papers was the relatively long duration of the marriages they sought to dissolve. While onequarter of the intermarried petitioners had been united for less than a decade, well over half had been married between eleven and twenty-five years. Whether this was a consequence of external pressures or merely a reflection of the difficulties in obtaining a divorce in Austria before 1938 is hard to say. In Hamburg, by contrast, nearly two-fifths of those seeking an end to marital ties were younger and had been together less than a decade. Compared with the overall divorce rate in Austria before and after the Anschluß, the large number of those seeking to sever longstanding marital ties is striking when one considers that two-thirds of divorces normally granted occurred within a decade of marriage.48 Before analyzing specific cases, two other matters deserve mention. According to the surviving documentation in this sample, only twenty-nine 48

Haller, “Austria,” 231; SJSW, 9 (1948), 37.


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Table 9. Duration of Marriage among Mixed Couples in Vienna and Hamburg Length of Marriage

Number of Divorces Vienna

Hamburg

0–5 years 6–10 years 11–15 years 16–20 years 21–25 years 26–30 years More than 30 years No data

5 20 23 16 13 5 6 10

12 38 25 19 15 12 4 5

total

98

130

Sources: Wiener Stadt – und Landesarchiv: Lg. f. ZRS, Abt. 5 Cg., Abt. 3Cg.; Meyer “Mixed Marriage,” 77.

of the intermarried ninety-eight petitioners had children. Some perceived divorce as the best means of shielding their sons and daughters from persecution; others sought to protect themselves after learning that their families had found safe haven abroad. As for the remaining petitioners, twenty-seven were childless, or in the case of forty-two others, simply made no mention of offspring in their testimony. Within the total group of petitioners, there were thirty-three spouses who filed for divorce after their Jewish partners – mostly men – had emigrated. The documentation suggests that some of the wives had been unable or unwilling to leave home, that others thought initially in terms of a brief separation, and that still others sought to protect family businesses or assets from “aryanization.” As these cases came before the bench after the three-year period of separation required by § 55, the judges usually granted the petitions as a routine matter without reference to “race.” Consequently, the paucity of testimony presented to the courts in these proceedings makes motivation difficult to ascertain. It may be surmised, however, that the intentions of an additional sixteen women who filed papers after their husbands had been dispatched to concentration camps or deported to Auschwitz were less than eudemonic. Preliminary Proceedings In the four months between Hitler’s seizure of Austria and the implementation of his new Marriage Code, at least three intermarried partners filed


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for divorce in the 5th Branch of the Viennese Court of Civil Relations. The first of these suits was brought by a disgruntled husband, the second by an anxious mother, and the third by an unhappy wife. The court granted two of the petitions but denied the third. While each case differed from the others, each displayed common threads that would appear in subsequent proceedings. All three couples, for example, had been married for well over a decade. None of the marriages appear to have been harmonious, each torn to some degree by religious or cultural differences. In contrast to later cases, however, the court’s decisions rested on shaky or ambiguous grounds. Within a week after the Anschluß, Anton HÖnig filed papers against his wife Olga, a baptized Catholic, whom he had married in a civil ceremony on 28 July 1924. The petitioner claimed that as an ardent supporter of the Nazi movement, he could no longer share the same bed with a woman whose “mentality, nature, and appearance is so thoroughly Jewish.” In a formal deposition, Olga declined to contest the suit, explaining exhaustion from illness and verbal abuse, but tartly adding that her husband had failed to satisfy her sexual needs. The court agreed. It ruled that while race did not yet constitute legal grounds for divorce, “racial differences” had indeed led to an alienation of affection and the breakdown of the marriage.49 In a completely different case, a woman long separated from her husband sought to protect a family business. Margarethe and Dr. Deszö Höllander had taken their vows on 29 November 1913 in Budapest. After an unspecified number of years, the couple had separated but, according to independent depositions, remained wed under the law for the sake of their child. Because Höllander resided in Budapest, and his wife and daughter in Vienna, the court acknowledged the fact that their marriage existed in name only. However, it rejected Margarethe’s contention that her husband’s “Jewishness” lay at the root of matrimonial discord and disaffection, not least because it found no evidence of adultery or other offences. As both wife and daughter managed the Viennese branch of Höllander’s Hungarian commercial establishment, the judges denied the petition, arguing logically that the real reasons for seeking divorce had been to safeguard family assets. Quite unwittingly, they may also have saved Höllander’s life.50

49 50

WSLA, Landesgericht für Zivilsachen (Lg Z): 5 Cg. 87/38, Box 135. WSLA, Lg. Z., 5 Cg. 91/38, Box 135.ÖStA/AdR, Gauakt: Kuch, Dr. Karl.

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The third couple, Stefanie and Rudolf Heller, had wed in a Protestant ceremony in 1911. According to a handful of surviving records, the husband, a baptized Jew, had abandoned his wife after sixteen years of marriage. On 29 March 1938 she filed for divorce. Three months later, the court rejected the petition for reasons not revealed in the fragmentary evidence. In June 1942, Rudolf Heller perished in Theresienstadt.51 Standardizing Procedures Once the Reich Marriage Law went into force on 1 August 1938, the Viennese judges sought to standardize divorce procedures, particularly those involving petitions for a “repeal” or “annulment” according to § 37. Of the ninety-two cases to come before magistrates in the Third and Fifth benches, at least twenty-eight fell into that category. In contrast to Hamburg, there was only a slight gender difference: sixteen were filed by “German-blooded” women, twelve by men. Of the total number of suits, fifteen were approved, seven rejected, and one withdrawn. The remaining five never went to trial, one owing to news of the respondent’s death in Auschwitz. Although non-Jewish partners were required to file papers on grounds of “racial differences” within a year, the judicial authorities sometimes extended the deadline beyond 1939 or rendered their decisions according to other paragraphs of the marriage code. Divorce proceedings in incorporated Austria were held in camera, as they are today in the Second Republic. Only one partner was permitted to sue for divorce. The petitioner was required to submit an application for attempted reconciliation (Sühneversuch), a stipulation that soon came to be treated as a formality. Judges made decisions in private on the basis of written depositions or other evidence prepared by attorneys of the respective parties. Only in cases involving the division of assets or the custody of children were normal courtroom procedures followed.52 During the Anschluß era, the Reich Ministry of the Interior attempted to standardize legislative and judicial procedures in Hitler’s homeland, for example, by establishing special courts to try political cases. However, internal rivalries as well as the demands of military mobilization combined to leave the Austrian criminal and civil codes largely in place.53 Thus, most of the decisions handed down by the Third and Fifth benches 51 52 53

WSLA, Lg Z, 5 Cg. 93/38 Box 135. Haller, “Austria,” 214–15. Luza, Austro-German Relations, 95–6 ff.


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were made by a half-dozen Viennese judges who had to apply the provisions of the Reich Marriage Law with reference to the General Civil Code of 1811. Of these, three had presided over civil cases since 1908, while the others, although slightly younger, had managed to pursue successful careers in both the First Republic and the Christian Corporative state. All but one appear to have been attorneys of the old school who tried to adhere to the rules. On the other hand, the surviving documentation also suggests that two members of the Third bench, Dr. Hermann Mühlvenzel (1879–1944), an authority on cases involving vandalism and auto theft, and Dr. Alexander Judex (1877–?), embraced the cause of National Socialism with demonstrable enthusiasm. This was also true of Dr. Karl Kuch, himself a quarter-Jew, who presided over the Second bench in 1942–3. More ambiguous was the record of the justice of the Fifth bench, Dr. Julius Straniak. Born into a Protestant family in 1895, he began his career in 1920 as a legal clerk. Admitted to the judiciary the following year, he rose rapidly to become a municipal judge. In 1933 he was appointed to the Viennese Court of Civil Affairs and on 7 February 1938, a month before the Nazi takeover, was promoted to chair of the municipal judicial senate. This was a position he held throughout the Anschluß era, even though he did not join the NSDAP until 1941. After the war, an Allied denazification decree placed Straniak briefly on furlough. In 1947 he returned to the bench and in 1949 was promoted Chief Justice of the Court of Civil Affairs.54 The Court President of the Viennese Court of Civil Affairs between 1939 and 1945, Dr. Anton Wintersperger was a hardened Nazi and virulent racist. Born in 1882, he had studied at the University of Vienna, was admitted to the bar in 1907, and prior to the First World War had held several minor judicial positions in Lower Austria. During the conflict he served in the Judge Advocate Corps of the Habsburg army. He resumed his judicial career in 1919, and between 1930 and 1938 served as a member of the Higher Regional Court in Lower Austria. In 1932, Wintersperger joined the NSDAP. After the government’s crackdown the following year, he managed to retain his position on the bench but also became an active member of the “illegal” SA. For his services to Hitler’s movement prior to 1938, Wintersperger was promoted within days of the Anschluß to the more prestigious Viennese Court of Civil Affairs, where 54

For biographical details see the legal documentation and correspondence in ÖStA/AdR, Bundesministerium für Justiz (BMJ), III, A, Namensakten (NA), Box 559. See also ÖStA/ AdR, Gauakt: Kuch, Karl.

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Figure 6. Anton Wintersperger, President of the Viennese Court of Civil Affairs, 1938–45. Credit: Archiv der Republik, Vienna, Austria.

on 25 February 1939 he was appointed Court President. As mentioned in the previous chapter, he specialized in domestic disputes involving families of “mixed blood,” notably petitions seeking equalization of racial status or cases contesting ancestral descent. His colleagues recalled him as a “committed National Socialist, who demonstrated exceptional severity in proceedings against Jews.”55 Matrimonial Repeals and Annulments As we have already seen, twenty-eight of the petitions filed by an intermarried partner after the Anschluß to the Viennese Court of Civil Affairs requested a matrimonial “repeal” or “annulment.” Of these, all but five had been filed in 1938–9. Paragraph 37 of the Marriage Law required all plaintiffs to submit a “writ of error,” affirming that 55

For data on Wintersperger see his personnel records and related documents in ÖStA/ AdR, BMJ, III/A, NA, Box 559. For the quotation see doc. 51.823/46 (27 June 1946). I am grateful to Dr. Ursula Schwarz for making these records available to me.


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they had been “mistaken in the person of the other” or taken marital vows under erroneous circumstances. The Nazi officials who drafted the clause intended “German-blooded” partners to seek divorce on hardline racial grounds.56 One may well ask, however, whether those persons who filed papers under § 37 had been motivated by “racial aversion” or sought to take advantage of the paragraph to terminate a marriage as quickly as possible. Because the regime sought to lure Aryan partners to return to the National Community, readers may wonder why fully onequarter of the petitions were dismissed or rejected out of hand. It is also worth asking to what extent class or sexism had shaped the decisions of the judges. It turns out that more than half of those seeking a matrimonial “repeal” had been married for well over a decade, on the average for fourteen years. Their attorneys tended to follow a boilerplate. They claimed that a sudden awareness of “racial differences” led to an alienation of affection and marital breakdown. While the surviving depositions, testimony, and other evidence lend little credence to these claims, they do provide ample evidence that religious and cultural strife divided at least some intermarried couples. One frustrated husband, for example, referred to his wife’s sarcastic tongue and insulting behavior as “characteristically Jewish.”57Another argued that his own Jesuit upbringing had impelled him to think of marital quarrels in terms of religion, not race.58 Still another blamed his Jewish partner’s “unreasonable” resentment of National Socialism for driving the two apart.59 In one proceeding that came before the court on 4 November 1938, neighboring witnesses testified to loud and angry exchanges between the parties, in which the wife regularly hurled insults at her husband as a “Jewish pig” and he lashed out at her as a “Schikse.”60 In a number of other cases, women who had “married 56

57 58

59 60

See Müller, Hitler’s Justice, 93–6. The claim of being “mistaken in the person of the other” was written into the annulment clauses of the Marriage Law of 1938 to expedite the annulment of “racially mixed marriages.” Nonetheless, the grievance was rooted in German and Austrian family law as a means to challenge cases of bigamy or ignorance of the true nature of wedlock. In the United States a rough equivalent falls under the doctrine of mistake, the rules of which apply to contract cases and very rarely to petitions of annulment. WSLA, Lg Z, 5 Cg. 141/39, Box 139. WSLA, Lg Z, 5 Cg. 292/38, Box 136. For examples of similar arguments, see 5 Cg. 1938/368 and 1938/371, Box 136. WSLA, Lg Z, 5 Cg. 389/38, Box 136. WSLA, Lg Z, 5 Cg. 284/38, Box 136. Interestingly, the court issued a divorce decree according to § 49, ruling that racial differences had played only a minimal role in the irretrievable breakdown of the marriage.

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up” complained of patronizing treatment by their prosperous Jewish husbands or verbal abuse alien to their Roman Catholic upbringing.61 Material concerns also played a role in the minds of several non-Jews who sought a quick way out of mixed marriages without having to prove adultery or other serious matrimonial offenses. In filing papers under § 37, some were motivated by selfish reasons, others by fear, and yet others by hopes of protecting their children or other family members. At least seven spouses submitted petitions after their partners emigrated or were incarcerated. Whether the Gestapo placed pressure on them, as in Hamburg, is unknown.62 In the first case to come before the bench under the new Marriage Law (23 July 1938), the female petitioner claimed that her husband’s internment in Dachau provided proof of a “subversive attitude” that brought her family into disrepute. The court, in granting a legal “repeal,” added that the wife had taken her vows in 1924 against the wishes of her parents, that she had long ceased having sexual relations with her husband, and that the Anschluß had thus awakened her to the significance of “racial differences.”63 In a similar ruling handed down immediately after Christmas in 1938, Judge Straniak accepted the petitioner’s plea of racial aversion but stressed that the respondent’s criminal record of theft and receipt of stolen goods was of equal importance.64 In those cases in which wives had declined to follow their husbands into exile, the court readily granted a formal “repeal.” The decisions generally emphasized the husband’s abandonment or sympathetically pointed to the partner’s “humble background.”65 Sometimes, the circumstances and reasoning were more convoluted. Helena Hirsch, for example, filed papers in 1940 shortly after her husband Karl had emigrated first to Yugoslavia and then to the United States. Prior to the Anschluß, they had owned a prosperous auto dealership and repair shop, a business that 61 62

63 64

65

WSLA, Lg Z, 5 Cg. 433/38, Box 139; 452/38 Box, 140; 294/39, Box 142. According to legislation passed in West Germany on 23 June 1950, individuals compelled to terminate matrimonial ties during the Third Reich could file for a revocation of their divorce or “annulment.” The testimony of twenty-two applicants presented to Hamburg judicial authorities provides evidence of enormous pressure placed on intermarried couples by employers, social welfare agencies, and even representatives of the Reich Association of Jews in Germany. During the war the Gestapo further tightened the screws, in some cases even promising mercy for deported husbands already murdered in Auschwitz. See Meyer, “Jüdische Mischlinge,” 86–92 ff. Similar legislation was not passed in postwar Austria. WSLA, Lg Z, 5 Cg. 183/38, Box 135. WSLA, Lg Z, 5 Cg. 371/38, Box 136. For similar cases in Hamburg, see Meyer, “Jüdische Mischlinge,” 81–3 passim. WSLA, Lg Z, 5 Cg. 433/38, 452/38; 214/40, Box 153.


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was seized within days of the Nazi takeover. For the next twenty months, Helena tried to support her husband, daughter, and sister-in-law, but as the wife of a “non-Aryan,” she was unable to find full-time employment. Surviving testimony suggests that in her case, the loss of a thriving enterprise spawned tensions and anxieties in what had previously been a harmonious marriage. The Viennese court chided Helena for failing to recognize “racial differences” until long after the Anschluß, but in its decision pointed out that her difficulties constituted a salutary learning experience. Thereupon, the judge granted her request by ruling that she had been “mistaken in the person” of her Jewish spouse, who had in any case abandoned her without means of support.66 Among those petitioning for a matrimonial “repeal” were also a number of desperate individuals hoping to save their jobs, assets, or even positions in the Nazi Party. The extension of the Nuremberg Laws to the Ostmark, as well as by a Decree for the Re-Organization of the Austrian Civil Service in May 1938, led to the dismissal of all civil servants married to Jews and placed those employed in the private sphere in occupational peril. As we have seen, the legislation also required all Austrians to acquire a Certificate of Descent (Abstammungsnachweis), verifying their racial status.67 Because a number of individuals discovered a Jewish parent, relative, or spouse, it was not surprising that a number of persons took advantage of § 37 in order to preserve their careers. In one of the first such cases to come before the bench, the successful manager of a private firm freely admitted that in 1931 he had married an observant Jew. Claiming to have undergone a Damascene experience at the time of the Anschluß, he had walked out on his wife shortly thereafter. This petition fell on deaf ears. In fact, it earned the petitioner a harsh rebuke. In dismissing the suit out of hand, the court ruled that the plaintiff had been motivated by loss of situation and status, not “racial aversion.” The judge further argued that because the petitioner had come from a respectable bourgeois family, had attended a gymnasium, and had earned a university degree, his putative unawareness of “racial differences” was utterly unconvincing. The decision concluded that “racial doctrine was not conceived first by the NSDAP.”68 At least four other petitions involving occupational dismissal or status anxiety came to grief in the Viennese Court of Civil Relations. On 22 66 67 68

WSLA, Lg Z, 3 Cg. 301/40, Box 72. Noakes, “German-Jewish ‘Mischlinge,’ ” 325. WSLA, Lg Z, 5 Cg. 232/38, Box 135.

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November 1938, Dr. Richard Tengler, a distinguished gymnasial professor, filed papers seeking to recover his teaching position. He claimed in his deposition to have supported the NSDAP and for that reason to have incurred the wrath of his Jewish wife. Within a month the court rejected this plea, ruling that Tengler could not possibly been “mistaken in the person” of his wife as stipulated under § 37. The judge marshaled substantial evidence to reveal that the couple had known each other since childhood, had been engaged for seven years, and after the Anschluß had continued to live under the same roof with their children. Tengler appealed the judgment, implying that he intended to remarry a “Germanblooded” woman. The Higher Regional Court, however, upheld the verdict. It ruled that “in light of his views, the National Community sees little value in a new marriage by the plaintiff.”69 Shortly after the wild devastation of Kristallnacht, Theresa Hoffenberg petitioned for a “repeal” of her marriage of twenty-eight years. She claimed that, although wed in a synagogue, the November pogrom had shocked her into an awareness of the “racial differences” existing in her household. The court was not convinced. On 3 August 1939, it dismissed the suit, ruling that the “Jewish Action” had driven home the social disadvantages of intermarriage, not an aversion based on race: “Today there is no such thing as laws for two different kinds of marriage between racial equals and mixed breeds. Whosoever resolved to wed a racial alien made a lifetime commitment, the disadvantages of which must be born by the couple together.”70 A third petition for “repeal,” rejected by the court, had originated with the owner of an unspecified firm. Prodded by an informer, the chief executive ordered the accused, a company official, to investigate his wife’s racial origins or face arrest and certain dismissal. The terrified official conducted his own investigation, hastily concluding that his wife, whom he had wed in an elaborate Roman Catholic ceremony at Saint Rochus Church in 1922, was the illegitimate offspring of one or more Jewish parents. Astonished by the alleged revelation, the husband filed a writ of error requesting a matrimonial “annulment.” Whether he was motivated by fear, expediency, or both is impossible to say. The court, however, ordered an extensive investigation of its own, which produced no evidence of Jewish blood. Under these circumstances, the judge found that the petitioner had not been “mistaken in the person” of his “German-blooded” 69 70

WSLA, Lg Z, 5 Cg. 389/38, Box 136. WSLA, Lg Z, 5 Cg. 407/38, Box 136.


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spouse and dismissed the suit.71 In another case, the court adhered to the letter of the law by refusing the plea of a “half-Jewish” wife for an “annulment” of her marriage to a Jewish spouse for the simple reason that her petition defied both logic and existing law.72 Several other petitions took longer to resolve. One involved a traveling salesman, married for over a decade to a Jewish Catholic. The petitioner claimed that during the year following the Anschluß he had come to suffer “psychological agony” brought on by gradual realization of his exclusion from the National Community. When his case came before the court on 3 May 1939, his wife had fled to Edinburgh with their child; she had also hired an attorney to contest the suit. The judge delayed the proceedings until October, at which time he ruled against the plaintiff. Six months later, a high-ranking SS officer seems to have influenced the Higher Regional Court to overturn this decision, though not without persuading the judge to chastise the petitioner for an inexplicable delay in recognizing the “racial differences” in his marriage.73 At least two cases of mistaken identity filed under § 37 in the Viennese Court of Civil Affairs were brought by Nazi militants. One involved Karl Hessina, a clerk in a registry office who was long active in the NSDAP. In gathering documents for his wife’s Certificate of Descent, he discovered that she was the illegitimate offspring of a Jewish father. Although pleading ignorance, Christine, his like-minded spouse, did not contest her husband’s petition. Judge Straniak concurred in his ruling that neither party could possibly have been aware of “racial differences” at the time of their marriage in 1936. He thus granted a matrimonial “repeal,” although not on conjoint grounds. Instead, he held Christine culpable for “subjective and objective” indifference to her family background.74 More complex was a similar suit filed by Franz Teltscher, a retail clerk married to a Jewish Catholic for over two decades. Much like Karl Hessina, Teltscher learned from the Viennese branch of the Reich Kinship Office that his wife’s lineage included two Jewish grandparents. Instead of filing immediately for a matrimonial “annulment,” he waited for well over a year before going to court. Unable to find gainful employment, he also demanded an apartment and monthly welfare assistance. On 9 October 1939, Judge Straniak threw out the suit, contending that as

71 72 73 74

WSLA, Lg Z, 5 Cg. 76/39, Box 138. WSLA, Lg Z, 5 Cg. 453/39, Box 136. WSLA, Lg Z, 5 Cg. 141/39, Box 139. WSLA, Lg Z, 5 Cg. 323/39, Box 142.

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a Nazi activist Teltscher had surely known of his wife’s Jewish origins long before 1938, and, in any case, had waited far too long to seek a matrimonial “repeal.” Expelled from the NSDAP, Teltscher left his wife, took up with a Frau Marschall, and soon thereafter entered the armed forces. By 1943 he had become a staff sergeant stationed in Hamburg, when in October of that year, he appealed Straniak’s earlier decision to the Viennese Higher Regional Court. This time Teltscher was more successful. Within five months the judges granted him a divorce, arguing that after four years of marital separation, the weight of evidence clearly favored the petitioner, not least because his wife no longer contested an end to the marriage. The justices made a point of arguing, however, that although technically eligible for a matrimonial “repeal,” it made more sense to grant a divorce on grounds of “irretrievable breakdown.”75 Powerful feelings of anger and resentment appear to have motivated the most sensational case in our sample. On 3 November 1939, Viktoria Trebitsch filed papers from a hotel suite in Budapest. In a written deposition she made ugly claims of “racial aversion,” but devoted most of her brief to charges of sexual misconduct, alienation of affection, and abandonment of hearth and home. Above all, she sought a handsome settlement from her estranged husband, Oskar Trebitsch, a wealthy silk-weaving manufacturer who had left Budapest with his mistress to settle in Zürich. As the assessed value of her husband’s “aryanized” mills in Lower Austria and the Sudetenland exceeded RM 1,000,000, she claimed, Viktoria demanded a monthly income of RM 1,500 from the confiscated properties. In reaching a decision, Judge Straniak appears to have weighed the evidence with considerable care. As the parties had been married for thirty-five years, he discounted Viktoria’s claim of spontaneous “racial aversion.” More convincing, he continued, were her charges of infidelity, neglect, and abandonment. He also ruled that, although the couple had spent most of their married life in Hungary, they retained Austrian citizenship and were thus subject to the laws of the German Reich. As the respondent did not contest the suit, he went on to conclude that no reason could be found for dismissal, and thus granted the divorce on grounds of irretrievable breakdown according to § 49. He also ruled that Viktoria was entitled to a monthly pay-out from her husband’s assets for a period of twelve years, though at a sum considerably less than the RM 1,500 requested in her petition.76 75 76

WSLA, Lg Z, 5 Cg. 89/43, Box 168 b. WSLA, Lg Z, 5 Cg. 386/39, Box 144.


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Considered in the aggregate, our sample of intermarried spouses who sought matrimonial “repeal” or “annulment” on racial grounds suggests multiple reasons for going to court. Nearly all of their marriages appear to have been unstable or on the brink of dissolution long before the Anschluß. At least seven of the petitioners provided evidence of the sort of religious and cultural disputes that frequently divide mixed marriages, especially those exacerbated by in-laws or other family members. Given the widespread acceptance of eugenics at the time, it is possible that some petitioners concluded that “racial differences” were indeed at the root of their marital woes. Most of the other plaintiffs claiming “racial aversion” were less convincing. Some seized the opportunity to end an unhappy marriage, while at least half sought to salvage their jobs or social status. Pressure from employers, superiors in the civil service, Nazi officials, and even neighbors no doubt drove most of this group to file papers, but sworn affidavits and other testimony provide evidence of adultery, jealousy, and other matrimonial offenses as additional motivating factors. Ideology seems to have impelled Nazi activists to terminate relationships with partially Jewish wives, but even in the two clear cases examined here, jealousy or infidelity appear to have been involved from the evidence presented. Much more difficult to divine are the motives of those “Germanblooded” wives who failed to follow their husbands into exile. Those who had “married up” seem to have bowed to expediency. But others may have perceived divorce as the best means of riding out a storm and protecting their families. There was also a case of a desperate woman who saw no reason to stand by her man when he was moved into a “Jew house.”77 In contrast, those husbands seeking matrimonial “repeal” from wives in exile appear to have been more hardhearted. Conclusions about class and gender are more difficult to reach, because surviving court records provide only sketchy information about occupation and social background. Among the female petitioners, only five wives indicated that they were employed: One worked for a coal merchant, another as a ticket girl in a cinema, and a third as a clerk; the remaining two took in sewing. Those either jobless or filling traditional roles as homemakers were wed to an industrialist, an auto dealer, a physician, a Habsburg officer, a technician, and an alleged thief. As for the male plaintiffs, two were commercial employees, one a gymnasial professor, another a company official, and yet another a salesman. The two Nazi militants appear to have been unemployed. 77

WSLA, Lg Z, 3 Cg. 292/40, Box 71.

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Although the judgments of the court were often arbitrary, Judge Straniak appears to have made some effort to adhere to the letter of the Marriage Law of 1938. In the Trebitsch case, for example, he persuaded the petitioner to withdraw her motion for a matrimonial “repeal.” He advised her instead to file papers requesting a conventional divorce on grounds of irretrievable breakdown. In at least three cases, he dismissed claims of a Snow White awakening to “racial differences,” as stipulated according to § 37. On the other hand, he clearly toed the outwardly sexspecific line desired by the Nazis to favor “German-blooded” women.78 Of the fifteen suits filed by female partners, Straniak granted all but two, sometimes on the flimsiest of grounds. Of the nine suits requested by men, he rejected over half. The proportion of Gentile women seeking to end their marriage to a Jewish husband through matrimonial “repeal” or “annulment” (57 percent) was lower than the total proportion of all women filing papers for a normal divorce (approximately 73 percent). The role of gender in the breakup of mixed marriages in Vienna is thus difficult to discern; indeed, it may have been insignificant. What does seem clear is that Nazi policy on intermarriage throughout Greater Germany was “neither race-neutral nor gender-neutral.” Instead, as Matthew Stibbe has noted, “it favored the ‘Aryan’ over the Jew, the wife over the husband and the mother over the childless woman.”79 This became all too apparent in the cases of non-Jewish wives who sought a “normal” divorce, as we shall now see. Conventional Divorces During the Anschluß era, at least sixty-six intermarried partners filed papers for a conventional divorce in the Fifth, Third, or Second benches of the Viennese Court of Civil Affairs . Fifty-seven of the petitioners claimed “irretrievable breakdown,” two a refusal to procreate, and one mental derangement. Forty-three of the plaintiffs were Gentile women, but two were Jewish wives who had fled abroad; in addition, three Jewish men took advantage of the new divorce legislation: two in Vienna, the other in New York City. The numbers seeking a divorce were initially lower than those seeking a matrimonial “repeal.” In 1938–9, only fifteen individuals went to court under paragraphs 49 or 55 of the new German Marriage Law; the following year, only seven. Thereafter, the numbers rose steeply, 78 79

Meyer, “Jüdische Mischlinge,” 92. Stibbe, Women in the Third Reich, 70.


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almost certainly as a consequence of a renewed assault on the Jews, first in Vienna and then throughout the entire German Reich. Court Proceedings, 1938–1941 Until 1941, intermarried partners who had been living apart for three years or longer had little difficulty providing evidence of irretrievable breakdown. Their testimony usually paid lip service to racial differences, but for the most part it emphasized traditional matrimonial offences such as adultery, desertion, impotence, or alcoholism. Their attorneys appear to have convinced them that paragraphs 49 and 55 of the marriage law offered the best means for dissolving an irreparable marriage. Even so, the Nazi takeover induced a number of parties to file suit. One of the first such cases came before the court on 26 September 1938. According to the record of the proceedings, Maria Treu brought multiple charges against her Jewish husband Ludwig, whom she had married in 1931 in Vienna’s Neo-Gothic Rathaus. Her grounds were his “stubborn refusal to bring children into the world,” alcoholism, and desertion. She also testified that her husband had neglected her during a recent illness, and shortly thereafter abandoned her altogether. Exactly one month later, the court concurred that the marriage was irretrievably broken.80 The decision contained no reference to race or religion. In a similar case filed at approximately the same time, Valentine Henblum provided evidence that her “mosaic” husband had walked out on her in 1927. The court readily granted a divorce under § 55 adding, however, that racial discord had undoubtedly contributed to the breakdown of the marriage. It is not clear from the surviving records whether she deliberately emphasized the Jewish theme or the court added it on her behalf.81 In one of the few petitions filed by a Jewish partner in a mixed marriage, Josef Holländer supplied ample evidence of resentment, hostility, and slander on the part of Gertrud, his “German-blooded” wife. Neighbors testified that she was “quite nervous,” “intemperate,” and “hysterical.” One witness even considered her a danger to the couple’s eleven-year-old son. The court granted the divorce within a matter of weeks, ruling that Gertrud’s “unbearable” and “immoral” behavior had contributed to the breakdown of the marriage. Judge Straniak made no reference, however, to her long record of antisemitic verbal abuse, and he opined that she 80 81


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was by no means “hysterical.”82 Another suit filed by a Jewish husband, Alois Hekler, claimed irreconcilable differences on grounds of desertion and a refusal to “fulfill conjugal duties.” The Anschluß, he contended, had so disrupted family life that within months his wife had compelled him to sign over their home and put an end to sexual relations. On 3 January 1940, Hekler withdrew his suit. Whatever his motivations, they came to naught. On 2 June 1942, Hekler was murdered at Maly Trostinec, near Minsk.83 In contrast, racial policy appears to have played virtually no role in one of the more unusual intermarried divorce proceedings to be handled by the Viennese Court of Civil Affairs during the Nazi era. On 24 August 1918, Maria Josefa Hirsch and Oskar Kohn had taken their vows in a Habsburg military chapel. Although the Jewish bridegroom had suffered severe head wounds in 1916, he had recovered to return to active duty in the Austrian army in which he continued to serve during the interwar period. In 1934 Kohn again sustained cranial injuries, this time from truncheon blows at the hands of insurgents, presumably in the February Civil War. After receiving an honorable discharge, he took a position in a women’s apparel firm. Within two years, however, he began to experience dizziness and grand mal epileptic seizures that led to his confinement in Vienna’s psychiatric hospital Am Steinhof. According to the testimony of his wife and son, he also made five attempts at suicide. On 29 September 1938, Maria Kohn took advantage of the new Marriage Law to petition for divorce on grounds of mental derangement. Supported by medical evidence of irreversible amnesia, the court granted her request. In the meantime, Oskar Kohn slowly began to respond to psychiatric treatment. He gradually overcame attacks of vertigo and was permitted to pursue clerical work in the hospital. After two years, he was released to the care of his son and took a nonpaying job in a legal firm. In July of 1943, Oskar “Israel” Kohn filed suit to reverse the court’s divorce decree, providing a lengthy medical opinion written by Dr. Emil Raismann, the psychiatrist who had treated him and who apparently provided protection from the Gestapo. For purely selfish reasons, his former wife contested the suit. Nevertheless, on 24 March 1944, the Court of Civil Affairs granted Kohn’s petition, a decision that was upheld on 20 July by the Higher Regional Court largely on the basis of Dr. Raismann’s 82 83

WSLA, Lg Z, 5 Cg. 241/38, Box 136. WSLA, Lg Z, 5 Cg. 591/39; DÖW, Namenliste Erfassung der österreichischen Holocaust Opfer.


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professional prognosis. Even though the couple never reconciled, Oskar Kohn had managed to avoid deportation and murder through labyrinthine processes whose dimensions may never be fully known. It is not known whether he survived the war.84 Other intermarried partners seeking divorce on grounds of separation also ignored or played down charges of racial aversion in their petitions. Rudolf Hetzel, for example, convinced the court that a “shotgun wedding” lay at the root of his unhappy marriage, a charge his “non-Aryan” wife did not contest.85 In another case, a non-Jewish petitioner claimed to be an enthusiastic National Socialist who was appalled by her husband’s “hostile” political attitudes. The court granted her request, though not on racial grounds.86 Instead, it found the respondent guilty of negligence, marital violence, and desertion. Still, most decisions to file papers resulted from social pressure, ideological differences, or Nazi persecution.87 For example, a company manager brought charges against his Jewish wife only after he had been expelled from an exclusive hunting club and subjected to incessant harassment by neighbors.88 Similarly, the wife of a retired bank official testified that her ethnic-Jewish partner had married her in 1921 because she was a widow with a small child. The union turned sour, Valerie Hellwig claimed, when her son joined the “illegal” Austrian SA. Her Lutheran husband then reacted with such scorn that he drove the son to drink, thus precipitating a rift in the marriage that included an affair with another woman, and in 1936 a formal separation. Whatever the real reasons for seeking divorce, the court granted Valerie’s petition on grounds of desertion alone. It also held the husband culpable of “immoral behavior.”89 Margarethe Hertzka sought a matrimonial “repeal” by filing a writ of error. This meant, she testified, that the Nazi takeover had so disrupted 84 85 86 87 88

89

WSLA, Lg Z, 3 Cg. 193/43, Box 87d WSLA, Lg Z, 5 Cg. 442/38, Box 136. WSLA, Lg Z, 5 Cg. 164/39 A point stressed by Beate Myer in her study of Hamburg. See Meyer, “Mixed Marriage,” 73. Hanisch, Männlichkeit, 184–5. Although ostracized by colleagues and friends, Josef Hejduk initially stood by his his wife of twenty-four years. Because the building manager of his apartment complex, Josefine Wirl, incessantly tormented Hejduk’s wife, Frieda, calling her a “Jewish sow” and spitting in her face, the couple eventually succumbed to intense social pressure and separated. Reading between the lines, it appears that the two agreed to divorce in order to enable Frieda to emigrate to Budapest and sit out the war. But before departure, she was swept up by the SS and perished in the Holocaust. In 1946, an Austrian court sentenced Josfine Wirl to three years at hard labor. See WSLA, Lg Z, 2 Cg. 137/42. WSLA, Lg Z, 5 Cg. 471/38, Box 136.

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her husband’s family, that for a year she had been compelled to manage his upholstery business alone. In the absence of her half-Jewish spouse she had listened intensely to the radio and read Mein Kampf. This learning process, she contended, made her aware of the dreadful consequences of miscegenation. Her story failed to convince the court. By deposing three witnesses, Judge Karl Kuch determined that the plaintiff had fallen in love with another man, whom she was seeing on a regular basis. Nevertheless, he granted her petition on grounds of a “serious matrimonial error, which according to § 49 makes it unlikely that a true marital relationship between the partners can be reestablished.” 90 As in Hamburg, many “German-blooded” partners who sought to terminate marital ties on grounds of abandonment or judicial separation had been unable or unwilling to follow their spouses into exile. Yet each case was distinctive and difficult to categorize. On 1 April 1939, Anna Thenen petitioned the court to grant a divorce from a partner from whom she had been separated since 1912. In a hard-hearted affidavit, she expressed anger that her estranged husband, Dr. Salvator Thenen, had turned to her in desperation after the Anschluß. She agreed to take him in on condition that he leave Austria as soon as possible. Once Dr. Thenen had obtained an English visa, his wife helped him on his way by filing divorce papers; on 10 June 1939 the court granted her request.91 A much more complex suit was filed by a Jewish wife who also had found refuge in the United Kingdom. According to the testimony of both parties, Julie Anna Hengelmüller had been fired by her employer shortly after the Nazi takeover. On 30 June 1938, her “Aryan” husband, Josef, left home for work as usual. Then, upon reaching his office, he telephoned his sister to explain that he intended to seek a matrimonial “repeal” according § 37 of the Marriage Law. The court, however, rejected the charge of racial aversion, ruling that Hengelmüller’s real intention was to retain his managerial position and to “evade the social stigma of marriage to a Jewish wife.” Upon learning of the verdict, Julie begged her husband to return. When he refused, she emigrated – penniless – to Great Britain. Filing suit from the German Consulate in Southampton, she contended that although her husband had no desire to bring children into the world, “racial differences” had never marred their marriage. On 20 July 1939, the Viennese court granted a divorce on grounds of 90 91



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irretrievable breakdown. It is noteworthy that Judge Straniak castigated Josef Hegelmüller for “dishonorable behavior,” and named him the guilty party for abandoning his wife.92 One particularly touching case involved a prosperous couple, Marie and Ignaz Herz. Within months of fleeing to London, Ignaz fell in love with another woman, a Jewess. In a handwritten letter to Marie, he offered no excuses, but sought to explain that abusive treatment by her parents had impelled him to reconsider their relationship. The response, as might be expected, was a suit filed on grounds of adultery and desertion. The judicial authorities discovered, however, that Marie had not stood by her man, as she contended. In his absence she had sought to salvage the family business by seeking a matrimonial “repeal.” For that reason, the case had been dismissed. By the time her second suit made its way to the Higher Regional Court, the outbreak of war had rendered the dispute impossible to resolve. Otherwise, a Nazi official gloated, a “wellthought-out chess move by an intelligent and clever woman would have succeeded.” The real reasons for Marie Herz’s attempt to disband her marriage are difficult to discern. Was she initially motivated by a desire to save her husband’s assets, only to be betrayed by him in exile? Or did she and her Gentile parents conspire, as the Nazi authorities surmised, to seize them for herself?93 Among the other non-Jewish wives who sought to terminate their “mixed” marriage on grounds of abandonment or desertion was an impoverished washerwoman. In her deposition she emphasized her devotion to National Socialism. Close reading of her testimony, however, suggests that she simply lacked the means to follow her husband to Belgium. By the time her suit made its way to court, the unfortunate husband had already perished in Auschwitz. In another case, a “German-blooded” spouse seemed utterly bemused that her husband had escaped to Britain. Undeterred, she obtained a divorce on grounds of irretrievable breakdown.94 A third woman argued that as the wife of a Jew imprisoned for theft and financial impropriety, she could no longer maintain her lease on a tavern.95 Finally, there was a suit filed by a “German-blooded” wife, who presented evidence of economic, personal, and political desperation. After 92

93 94 95

WSLA, Lg Z, 5 Cg. 164/39, Box 140. After World War II, Julie Hengelmüller appears to have returned to Vienna, where she obtained copies of her divorce decree. WSLA, Lg Z, 5 Cg. 244/39, Box 141. WSLA, Lg Z, 3 Cg. 75/40, Box 65. WSLA, Lg Z, 3 Cg. 253/40, Box 70.

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taking vows in a Roman Catholic ceremony in 1920, Marie Hopp later contended that the onset of the Depression severely disrupted what had been a happy marriage. Unable to find work, her husband Josef gradually drifted apart from a wife he could no longer support. She also claimed that the Anschluß had aroused hopes of a better future until mandatory registration uncovered evidence of Josef’s Jewish ancestry. This was a finding he refused to accept. Instead, Marie testified, Josef refused to sleep with her, started distributing rationed food to Jewish relatives, and became increasingly violent. Fearful of being confined to a “Jew house,” she filed for divorce on 11 September 1940. Five months later Judge Straniak ruled in her favor, holding her husband culpable for the irretrievable breakdown of their marriage, and not least for concealing his identity as a “full-Jew.”96

The Impact of Deportations to the East Straniak’s decision to grant this divorce on hard-line racial grounds exemplified the resumption of a stepped-up assault on the Jews in incorporated Austria and subsequently throughout the Greater German Reich. Between 15 February and 12 March 1941, for example, Gauleiter Baldur von Schirach dispatched 5,000 Viennese Jews to ghettos in Opole and Kielce in Poland. This initial attempt to liquidate the municipal community was brought to a halt by transportation bottlenecks, but the deportations intensified widespread feelings of fear and desperation. Among other measures taken were a cut in food rations, the conscription of Jewish women – including some living in mixed marriages – to work in northern Germany, and a ban on the use of public telephones. Meanwhile, on 22 June, Hitler’s armies invaded the Soviet Union, thus initiating the mass slaughter of European Jewry. As already discussed, Joseph Goebbels and Alfred Rosenberg began to agitate for the expulsion of all Jews still living in Greater Germany. Although officials of RSHA, the Party chancellery, and the Office of Racial Politics lobbied to include “non-Aryans” living in mixed marriages, as well as their offspring, in the Final Solution, Hitler initially wavered. Nevertheless, soon after issuing the Star Decree on 15 September, Nazi officials informed Jewish leaders to prepare lists of names of coreligionists for “resettlement” near Łodź. The information was to be kept confidential. But in both Berlin and Vienna, 96

WSLA, Lg Z, 5 Cg. 243/40, Box 153.


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Gestapo agents viciously interrupted Yom Kippur services to announce the deportation of all “racial Jews” to the East.97 For Austrian intermarried couples and their children, the onset of the Nazi program to “cleanse” the Reich of Jews once and for all intensified feelings of fear, confusion, and uncertainty. Jewish partners living in “privileged mixed marriages” may have even breathed a sigh of relief.98 They were not obliged to wear the Star of David, move into “Jew houses,” or suffer a cut in food rations. For the most part, they were free to come and go as fellow citizens. Some even managed to lead a relatively normal existence. For example, Günther Nenning, a prominent journalist in the Second Republic, recalled that his Jewish mother was left in peace, both at home and in public, while his father continued to run the family textile business.99 On the other hand, even “privileged” families experienced feelings of anguish, heartache, and guilt as they observed Jewish relatives, uprooted from their homes, tormented by the Gestapo and “evacuated” to Poland.100 The plight of “nonprivileged” families was more precarious, exactly as the Nazis intended.101 This group consisted of childless couples with Jewish husbands or families whose members practiced the Jewish religion (“Geltungsjuden”). The principal breadwinners in “nonprivileged” families were “German-blooded” women, whose destitute husbands 97

98

99 100 101

Hans Safrian, Die Eichmann–Männer (Vienna, 1993), 96–8; Doron Rabinovici, Instanzen der Ohnmacht, 223–35 ff.; Wolf Gruner, Zwangsarbeiter und Verfolgung,194 passim; Leni Yahil, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry (Oxford, 1987), 288–97; Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart, 150–63 ff.; Gerlach, “Wannsee Conference,” 777–9. Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart, 155. On 12 February 1942, high-ranking members of the Viennese City Council and the SS held a top-secret meeting at the Ballhausplatz. After much discussion, it was agreed to put pressure on women living in “nonprivileged mixed marriages” to divorce their Jewish husbands, but to spare all intermarried households headed by “German-blooded” men from the deportation process. Brigitte Bailer-Galanda, Eva Bliminger, Susanne Kowarc, “‘Arisierung’ und Rückstellung von Wohnungen in Wien: Die Vertreibung der jüdischen Mieter und Mieterinnen aus ihren Wohnungen und das verhindeter Wohnungsrückstellungsgesetz,” in Österreichische Historikerkommission, “Arisierung” und Rückstellung von Wohnungen in Wien (Vienna and Munich, 2004). Nenning, “Schwalbenglück,” 203–9. Büttner, “The Persecution of Christian-Jewish Families,” 287. As will be explained in the following chapter, government ministers came close to mandating the dissolution of Jewish-Gentile marriages, but backed off for fear of stirring up the sort of public unrest provoked by Hitler’s euthanasia program. Nevertheless, in early 1942 pressure intensified on “German-blooded” partners to file papers. Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart, 172–4.

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were compelled to work clearing streets, collecting garbage, or chopping wood.102 Some sought charitable support from the hard-pressed Jewish Religious Community, but according to one survivor were turned away as nonbelievers.103 Others shuddered in fear as their husbands were hauled out of bed late at night to be interrogated or mistreated by high-ranking SS officers.104 Widows or divorcees of “Aryan” husbands with children found themselves in a particularly anomalous position. Although exempt from immediate deportation, “nonprivileged” Jewish mothers were compelled to wear the Star of David, reside in segregated housing, and support their households on reduced rations. Friedensreich Hundertwasser, the famous artist, recalled how he fended off SS officers as a smartly dressed member of the Hitler Youth while his widowed mother proceeded through the market stalls as a pariah. “I didn’t realize the perversity of the whole thing,” he later wrote. “While my mother went shopping with a Yellow Star, I ran around with a swastika.”105 Court Proceedings, 1941–1945 Fear and pressure from the Gestapo appear to have figured ever more prominently during the second half of the Anschluß era in the motivation of intermarried spouses who sued for divorce.106 As already noted, there was a significant upsurge in 1941–2; however, in contrast to Hamburg, there was a tapering off the following year. For some wives in “nonprivileged” marriages, divorce became the only means of survival. Nevertheless, the proportion of women filing papers (59.5 percent) was only slightly higher than that of men, except in 1942.107 Furthermore, acrimonious 102 103

104 105

106

107

Gruner, Zwangsarbeit, 221–3 ff. Recollections of Otto Horn in Klamper, “Zwischen ‘Ariern’ und ‘Nichtariern’,” 329. On 1 November 1942 the Gestapo dissolved the Jewish Religious Community (Israelitische Kultusgemeinde), replacing it with the more pliant Jewish Council of Elders to which all “racial Jews” in Austria were required to belong. Rabinovici, Instanzen der Ohnmacht, 241. Testimony of Dr. Martin Vogel, in Jüdische Schicksale, 297. Friedensreich Hundertwasser, “Zwischen ‘HJ’ und Judenstern,” in Markus, Mein Elternhaus, 231–37. The daughter of a “nonprivileged” couple later recalled the incessant Gestapo and SS harassment of her “German-blooded” mother to “get rid of the Jew,” that is, the daughter’s father. Elizabeth Welt Trahan, “Role Models of Sorts: A Study of Influences and Contrasts,” in Zygmund Mazur et al. (eds.) The Legacy of the Holocaust: Children and the Holocaust (Krakow, 2002), 87. In one unusual case, the Higher Regional Court unilaterally annulled the marriage of Osias and Maria Hofstötter on grounds of “racial defilement.” As the couple had taken


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marital quarrels continued to have impelled a number of partners to go to court. In one case, however, an unhappy couple separated but refused to divorce until the collapse of the Nazi regime.108 Of those petitioners filing papers, thirty-eight were granted a divorce, three were dismissed, and eight were withdrawn or went unresolved. Many of the court decisions appeared to be “nonpolitical” in the sense that a number of couples had lived apart for three years, allowing the judges to issue a routine ruling that the marriages were indeed irretrievably broken. As in Hamburg, however, separation was usually the consequence of Nazi persecution.109 Hence, nineteen of the petitioners sued partners in exile, eleven took out papers against spouses deported to the “East,” and one filed charges against a husband in police custody. There was also a case of a husband who had gone missing, a wife who refused to accompany her partner to Poland, and a woman who persuaded the Gestapo to deport her husband to Auschwitz in order to file papers on grounds of abandonment. Suits Filed on Charges of Desertion Although external pressure played an obvious role in motivating some partners to sue for divorce on grounds of desertion, the available evidence makes it difficult to discern an overall pattern. Nor, as mentioned previously, was there a noticeable difference in gender. On 5 December 1938, for example, Karl Höchtl, a county official in Hartberg, filed papers on grounds of “verbal abuse” against his half-Jewish wife upon her emigration to Sussex. As the case did not make it to chambers until after the outbreak of the Second World War, the court suspended proceedings for the duration of hostilities. Höchtl initially accepted this ruling, but after serving on the Western Front, tried again to disband his marriage under § 55. On 19 February 1941, the Higher Regional Court refused to cancel the lower court’s original wartime postponement and dismissed Höchtl’s second suit, ruling that a petitioner’s desire to remarry constituted insufficient grounds for divorce.110 In glaring contrast, the same bench overturned the decision of a lower court to grant a petition filed from New York City by a Jewish emigrant, Dr. Fritz Nassau. The court accepted

108 109 110

their vows in Belgium after the Anschluß, the judges ruled the marriage invalid. WSLA, Lg, 5 Cg. 258/43, Box 168e. WSLA, Lg Z, 5 Cg. 52/45, Box 1573. Meyer, “Mixed Marriage,” 73. WSLA, Lg Z, 5 Cg. 1/41, Box 155.

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Nassau’s contention that the impossibility of maintaining a household on two separate continents proved the irretrievable breakdown of his marriage.111 Two other cases also involved Jewish partners driven by topsy-turvy Nazi policies to seek divorce. In the first instance, twenty-five-yearold Rosa Kraus filed papers from German-occupied Belgium against her “German-blooded” husband, Otto, a corporal serving in a Panzer regiment. The couple had wed in 1936 in a Lutheran ceremony and produced two children. In separate depositions, both parties concurred that their union had been less than harmonious, that the “March days” had provoked shouting arguments resulting in smashed furniture, and that Otto had taken both toddlers to live with his parents. Shortly thereafter, Rosa had fled to Brussels, and Otto was called to military duty. Three years later, Corporal Otto Kraus admitted to military authorities in the field that on 31 August 1940, he had married another woman on the assumption that his previous marital ties had been dissolved. Unable to produce written evidence, he was reprimanded for libel and bigamy by the Army’s Judicial Branch (Heeresjustizinspektor), which forwarded the information to the Viennese Court of Civil Affairs . Hence, on 21 May 1942 the municipal judge granted Rosa Kraus’s petition, ruling that her marriage was “irretrievably broken without hope of reconciliation, not least because the petitioner is a Jew and the respondent an Aryan.”112 In the second case, both separation and desperation impelled a Jewish spouse, Alfred Hirschorn, to file papers against his “German-blooded” wife, Leopoldine. The couple had wed in 1929 in a synagogue, but shortly after the Anschluß, reaffirmed their vows in a Roman Catholic ceremony. Both parties concurred that they had enjoyed a happy relationship and were devoted to their eleven-year-old daughter Eva. In November of 1938, the family fled to Prague, apparently in the wake of Kristallnacht. From there they proceeded to Bratislava where, after the breakup of Czechoslovakia, Alfred found employment as a clerk in the Slovakian capital. Living in exile a short distance from Vienna, however, exacted a heavy toll on his erstwhile loyal wife. Over the Christmas holidays in 1940, she took her daughter to Vienna, moved in with her mother, and refused to return. After numerous pleas for reconciliation, Alfred sued for divorce on grounds of desertion. The case made its way slowly through the 111 112



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legal system, but on 30 January 1943, the court ruled in favor of the petitioner, making only passing reference to his “Jewishness.” Furthermore, it found Leopoldine guilty of a “severe matrimonial offense,” and ordered her to pay court costs of RM 181.51 within fourteen days.113 While it is generally true that divorce proceedings should not be viewed as a portrait of a marriage, the Hirschorn case suggests that in less turbulent times the couple would most likely have remained together.114 In at least two cases, and presumably others, a record of previous political activity added to growing public and private pressure to seek divorce. On 28 February 1941, Angela Horowitz filed papers against her Jewish husband, Siegfried, who in November 1938 had fled to the Soviet Union. In her deposition she claimed that the Anschluß had “awakened” a racial sensibility, but in a subsequent letter to the Higher Regional Court, appealed to the authorities to expedite her case so as to better provide for herself and daughter. Implied in her testimony was a sense of fear stemming from a Communist past. Under such circumstances, it was fortunate that the court moved quickly to grant her petition.115 More dramatic was a suit filed from a Viennese prison by a “Red Spaniard,” Dr. Heinrich Dürmeyer. Although married in 1934 in a Roman Catholic ceremony, he and his Jewish partner, Renate, were political activists. After imprisonment in the Wöllersdorf detention center, Dürmeyer made his way to Spain where he joined his partner to fight in the International Brigades. There, on the battlefields of Catalonia, combat fatigue and wartime infidelities combined to drive the couple apart. While Renate worked as a pharmacist in Albacete, her husband continued to fight against Franco until the collapse of the Republican regime. Thereafter, he was interned in France only to be remanded to a Viennese prison following the German conquest of Western Europe. From jail he petitioned for divorce on grounds of desertion. On 31 July 1941, the Viennese Court of Civil Affairs concurred that his marriage was irretrievably broken and granted his request.116 The decision freed Dürmeyer from the chains of wedlock but not, as he may have hoped, from those of the Nazi state. Incarcerated in various concentration camps, he eventually wound up in Auschwitz, where he played a controversial role in a Communist resistance group but managed to 113 114

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WSLA, Lg Z, 3 Cg. 2/42, Box 80. On 30 November 1944, the SS deported Alfred Hirschorn to Sered and from there to Buchenwald. He survived the winter to be liberated by the Americans. DÖW: Projekt Namentliche Erfassung der österreichischen Holocaustopfer. Fast nur Mischehen. WSLA, Lg Z, 5 Cg. 50/41, Box 155. WSLA, Lg Z, 3 Cg. 131/41, Box 75.

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survive the war to return to Vienna. Between 1945 and 1947, he headed a division of the Austrian state police.117 Exile Divorce Among those non-Jews seeking to dissolve their marital ties after 1941 were a substantial number of individuals – mostly women – who had refused or had been unable to follow their spouses into exile. As the mandatory three-year period of separation had elapsed, relatively little official attention was paid to “racial” motivation in the proceedings. For that reason, the surviving depositions and testimony in such cases tend to be relatively uniform, although nuances and complexities abound. On 3 September 1941, a twenty-four-year-old office clerk, Irma Tennenbaum, filed papers against her husband Ernst, who had fled to London after incarceration in Dachau and Buchenwald. According to the petitioner’s testimony, she simply had no desire to move to Britain with an illegitimate child from a previous affair, a plea the court accepted as legal grounds for divorce.118 By contrast, Marie Krausz had corresponded regularly with her husband, Otto, long after he had found employment in Geneva. In June of 1941, however, she received a letter explaining that he had fallen in love with another woman and encouraging her to divorce. Her petition was granted as a routine matter.119 In a similar, although different case, Anna Dünmann claimed that incessant feuding with her husband of thirteen years, Otto, had intensified following the Anschluß, especially after Otto had been manhandled on Kristallnacht and dispatched to Dachau. Upon release, he had “disappeared,” emigrating to Milan where he wrote a farewell letter entreating her not to follow him into exile. On 18 September 1942, the Viennese Court of Civil Affairs granted Anna a divorce on grounds of abandonment and separation.120 Within this sample, the records of over a half-dozen “Germanblooded” women who divorced husbands in exile after 1941 tend to be more homologous and undifferentiated. Only rarely, as Meyer points out in her study of Hamburg, is it possible to perceive the real reasons for

117

118 119 120

Dürmayer’s former spouse, Renate, was incarcerated in Vichy France. After liberation by the Americans, she made her way back to Vienna, where she edited a feminist periodical, Stimme der Frau. Cf. Hermann Langbein, People in Auschwitz (Chapel Hill, 2004), 249–50, 437 and Hans Landauer (with Erich Hackl), Lexikon der österreichischen Spanienkämpfer 1936–1939 (Vienna, 2003). WSLA, Lg Z, 5 Cg. 214/41, Box 160. WSLA, Lg Z, 3 Cg. 161/41, Box 75. WSLA, Lg Z, 3 Cg. 158/42, Box 84.


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filing papers.121 In one case, the petitioner simply reported that her husband had fled to Hungary on the eve of the Anschluß, leaving her in need of public assistance. This version of events fell on sympathetic ears, so that a decree was granted within weeks.122 In another petition, Elfriede Holzbauer contended that in moving abroad, her husband had not only pressured her to “abandon the German people,” but also neglected her sexual needs.123 This plea was accepted by the court without comment, as was that of forty-seven-year-old Charlotte Mittler, who poignantly faulted her partner, Dr. Stefan Mittler, for not urging her to accompany him to Great Britain.124 In yet another case, Karoline Tedesco, a woman who had clearly “married up,” won her suit against her elderly partner after he had mysteriously “disappeared” in the streets of the Second District.125 Boilerplate testimony in other cases was sometimes less innocuous and more revealing. Hedwig Krakauer, for example, brought suit against her husband Jakob on grounds of willful desertion. In October 1939, she contended, he had simply walked out the door, abandoning her and their two daughters. Because “racial differences” had already driven them apart, Hedwig’s sister had finally persuaded her to seek divorce. Shortly before Christmas of 1942, the court granted her petition. Five years later, however, Hedwig requested a revocation of the decree, happily explaining that Jakob had returned from exile and resumed family life.126 In a similar case, Anna Horowitz was more forthcoming. Filing papers in January of 1943, she testified that economic conditions had prevented her from accompanying her Jewish partner, Benzion, abroad. After his departure in July of 1939, she had been able to scrape by as a salesgirl, but suffered incessant abuse at the hands of employers and union bosses. “Treated as Jewess,” she complained, “I have been berated by the German Labor Front and compelled three times to change homes.” The court granted her petition within days, emphasizing that “as a Jew the respondent has no chance of pursuing an existence in the German Reich.” To what extent this divorce decree brought relief to Anna Horowitz is unknown. On 17 December 1945, she, too, formally applied for a revocation, notifying the judicial authorities that she intended to join her husband in the United 121 122 123 124 125 126

Meyer, “Mixed Marriage,” 73. WSLA, Lg Z, 3 Cg. 53/42, Box 81. WSLA, Lg Z, 5 Cg. 90/42, Box 164. WSLA, Lg Z, 3 Cg. 199/42, Box 85. WSLA, Lg Z, 5 Cg. 180/42, Box 166. WSLA, Lg Z, 3 Cg. 208/42, Box 85.

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Kingdom. Because the German Marriage Law remained in force in the Second Republic, however, both requests were denied.127 Among the handful of “German-blooded” husbands who divorced Jewish partners in exile after 1941, career and job pressure figured prominently as motivating factors. In September of that year Ferdinand Teich filed papers against his wife, Regina, whom he had wed three decades before in a Jewish ceremony. The surviving documentation reveals no suggestion of matrimonial discord other than that precipitated by the Anschluß. Reading between the lines it is clear that the Nazi takeover provoked a family crisis, as Regina and her daughters were categorized as Jews (“Geltungsjuden”), for which reason they left Vienna in September of 1938. In granting the petition the court bluntly ruled that only a divorce decree would enable Ferdinand to maintain his position as a hack driver.128 In a more egregious case, the Regional Economic Office (Gauwirtschaftsamt) forced Paul Hornig, the owner and manager of an engineering firm, to sue his wife Klara, a 1939 emigrant to Birmingham. As Hornig’s enterprise was considered essential to the war effort, he was given no other choice. His papers never made it to court, however. Less than two months after the collapse of the Third Reich he withdrew his suit. Whether or not he subsequently managed to rejoin his wife remains unknown.129 Suits against Deportees More complex and disturbing are the cases of intermarried spouses who sought to dissolve their marital ties with husbands or wives who had been incarcerated or deported. While various decrees and regulations exempted mixed couples from “evacuation,” Nazi zealots nevertheless sought to separate families and to transport Jewish partners to Theresienstadt or to extermination centers in the East. In Dresden, for example, Jewish spouses were deported regularly for politically suspect conversations, contact with Soviet prisoners of war, or simple gossip; among those who perished was a housewife guilty of storing a forbidden fish in her refrigerator and another for riding a tram to work.130 Unsurprisingly, conditions in Vienna may have been even worse.131 Alois and Anton Brunner, the SS officers 127 128 129 130

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WSLA, Lg Z, 5 Cg. 272/42, Box 168. WSLA, Lg Z, 5 Cg. 227/41, Box 160. WSLA, Lg Z, 5 Cg. 30/45, Box 1449. Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart, 197, Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness, II, 190, 205–9, 212–18, 226–9. On 29 December 1942, Klemperer recorded in his diary: “A younger sister of Glaser’s wife, Aryan and married to an Aryan resident of Vienna was visiting. She said: Schirach


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orchestrating the deportation of the city’s remaining 53,000 Jews, swept up numerous intermarried individuals and their children in their net.132 As mentioned previously, at least 327 intermarried Viennese Jews were deported from the city, mostly in 1941–2, but also in 1939 and toward the end of the war. As for those “Aryan” partners left behind, Gestapo agents, attorneys, or other officials persuaded an unknown number to file papers by making mendacious promises of protection for deported partners. As an example, an employee of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration recalled that SS officials frequently assured “German-blooded” wives that divorce would secure the release of their husbands from Theresienstadt, when in fact filing papers led to their partners’ murder.133 Even so, the surviving testimony suggests a wide variety of motives ranging from job and status anxiety to sheer callousness. On 3 August 1942, Dr. Ernst Hold, a fifty-three-year-old civil servant, brought charges against his much younger wife, whom he had married nine years earlier. Obviously seeking to recover the position he had lost in 1938, Hold contended that his philosophical obsession with “abstract problems” had left him little time to ponder political affairs and blinded him to “racial matters,” not least within his own immediate family. His wife’s continued association with Jewish relatives and friends, however, had provoked the master of the house to call in the Gestapo, thus leading to his arrest and her incarceration. Under these circumstances, Hold argued, he had no choice but to sue for divorce on grounds of separation. This petition never made it to the bench. On 28 December 1942, an SS communiqué informed the court that Gertrud “Sara” Hold had perished in Auschwitz.134 Less pretentious was a similar suit filed by a lathe operator, who in October of 1938 had been sacked by the Kapsch munitions plant. Shortly thereafter, Johann Hittl left his Jewish wife Emma, but nevertheless appears to have had difficulty making ends meet. Upon learning that in February of 1942 his erstwhile partner had been

132

133 134

in Vienna was perpetrating far greater brutalities against the Jews than Mutschmann against us here. The city is now being completely rid of Jews.” Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness, II, 180. Eva Holpfer, “ ‘Ich war nichts anders als ein kleiner Sacharbeiter von Eichmann’: Die justizielle Ahndung von Deportationsverbrechen in Österreich,” in Thomas Albrich, Winfried R. Garscha, and Martin F. Polaschek (eds.) Holocaust und Kriegsverbrechen vor Gericht: Der Fall Österreich (Innsbruck, Vienna, Bozen, 2006), 151–59 ff. On Alois Brunner’s subsequent career in Berlin see also Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart, 183–6. Jüdische Schicksale, 215. WSLA, Lg Z, 5 Cg. 158/42, Box 166. Gertrud Hold’s date of death was listed as 10 October 1942.

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deported, he filed for divorce and public assistance. The court granted his petition in February of the following year, apparently unaware that Emma had fallen prey to SS killers on 27 April 1942.135 Other cases were even more dolorous. On 5 June 1942, Bertha Hitzky, a forty-six-year-old waitress, filed papers shortly after her husband’s deportation to Izbica. In her deposition she charged that Rudolf, her partner of twenty-two years, had been an abusive alcoholic and hooligan. Although contested by a Jewish-appointed trustee, her accusations found support in the testimony of neighbors who characterized her husband as “rabid.” Early in October, the court dissolved the marriage, finding the respondent culpable of chronic alcoholism, black marketeering, and outrageous behavior. The decree added that as the husband “has been deported to the General Government, there is no prospect that he will ever return.” This was a sound judgment. Rudolf Hitzky was already dead, gassed at Majdanek two months before the Viennese Court of Civil Affairs had reached its decision.136 In a comparable suit, Marie Hirschl had sought to disband her marriage to her husband, Karl on at least three occasions since 1938. Because he vigorously contested the suit, the court was unable or unwilling to grant her petition until 17 December 1942, exactly six months after his death in Izbica at the hands of the SS.137 Even more grotesque was the case of the seamstress Marie Hirsch, whose husband Oskar had been deported to Nisko shortly after the outbreak of the war. On 28 July 1942, she filed papers on grounds of “desertion” and “failure to communicate.” After a bizarre correspondence with SS authorities in Lemberg, the court granted Marie’s petition on 6 February 1943, clearly unaware that Oskar had perished in October 1939.138 Exactly why Josefine Teumann, a waitress, chose to divorce her Jewish husband, Heinrich, in mid-1942 is difficult to discern, not least because of the disingenuous way she proceeded. According to an affidavit taken on 25 July, the couple had taken their vows seven years before, nearly two months after the birth of their first child. That Heinrich turned out to be a “full-blooded Jew,” she contended, came as a shock once mandatory

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136 137 138

WSLA, Lg Z, 3 Cg. 252/42, Box 87; DÖW, Namenliste Erfassung der österreichischen Holocaust Opfer. In an even more remarkable proceeding Anna Horowitz managed to secure a divorce in March 1943, three years after her husband’s death at Nisko. WSLA, Lg Z, 5 Cg. 20/43, Box 168. WSLA, Lg Z, 3 Cg.115/42, Box 83. WSLA, Lg Z, 3 Cg. 223/42, Box 486. WSLA, Lg Z, 3 Cg. 89/41, A2, Box 34; DÖW, Namensliste der österreichischen Holocaust Opfer.


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registration in 1938 revealed his racial identity. Although Josefine gave birth to a daughter the following year, her partner allegedly lost interest in the family. She charged that he accused her of hoarding, beat her on occasion, and abused both children, particularly seven-year-old Alfred. After a particularly nasty incident in March of 1942, she contended, he urged her to file papers. Several days later, however, Heinrich was picked up by the Gestapo and deported to Poland. Josefine then seized the opportunity to sue for divorce. In reaching a decision, Judge Straniak solicited information from the Central Office for Jewish Emigration. He received a response that “the Jew in question was evacuated on 9 April 1942 at the request of his wife.” Straniak then proceeded to grant the plaintiff’s petition on 11 November 1942. But he found her culpable and ordered the payment of RM 115.64 within a fortnight. Although Josefine Teumann’s reaction to this decision may never be known, she managed to ensure that neither she nor her children would ever see her estranged husband again. Like most others deported to Izbica, he had been killed upon arrival.139 While much of the evidence examined in our sample tends to be veiled, cryptic, or simply feigned, the documentation in at least one proceeding provides stomach-wrenching details on the breakup of one mixed marriage that led to deportation and divorce. On 1 August 1942, Anna Tilles filed papers against Gustav, her husband of twenty-two years, charging infidelity and irreconcilable differences. Although her deposition claimed that he had been stepping out with other women since 1924, she was unable to provide concrete evidence of extramarital affairs, nor could she offer proof that he had made threats or subjected her to verbal abuse. What does seem clear, however, is that the Nazi takeover had cost Gustav Tilles his career as an engineer and, like other Jews in “nonprivileged” marriages, eventually compelled him and Anna to give up their home. According to Carl Werner Georg, an Aryan witness and presumably former colleague and family friend, serious matrimonial differences arose only after Nazi housing authorities served notice that the childless couple had to vacate their apartment, even though it belonged to Anna’s seventyyear-old mother. This proved to be the real breaking point. Tilles reached the fatal conclusion that he could carve out a new life for himself and family through “resettlement” in Poland. Understandably distraught, Anna protested that it was imperative to remain in Vienna in order to care for 139

WSLA, Lg Z, 5 Cg. 147/42, Box 165; DÖW, Namenliste der österreichischen Holocaust Opfer.

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her mother and other family members. She also exclaimed, according to Georg, that she had “never expressed a single word of anger or resentment over their plight.” Tilles refused to be moved. He volunteered for “evacuation” to Poland, but was “resettled” in Theresienstadt where he perished. Meanwhile, Anna Tilles received notice that Judge Straniak had granted her divorce. Whether her marriage had been as unhappy as she claimed in her petition is unknown. The exiguous evidence suggests that she had stood by her man until he had voluntarily left Vienna in a cattle car. Whether she had also managed to save her home and livelihood is also unclear.140 Two other cases involving deportations warrant consideration. In mid1943, Franz Holzinger, a fifty-year-old master mechanic, filed a boilerplate petition. He made the formulaic argument that until the “National Socialist Revolution” had lifted the scales from his eyes on racial matters, his marriage of twenty-two years had a been harmonious one, marred only by occasional religious squabbles. That he continued to live with his partner, Elisabeth, he claimed, was due to a pusillanimous reluctance to throw her out on the street. Once the authorities dispatched her to Theresienstadt in November of 1942, however, he found himself “pressed by state and party offices to disband marital ties with the accused.”141 In considering Holzinger’s petition, the judicial authorities contacted his incarcerated wife. Not only did Elisabeth contest the divorce, but also contended that until her arrest she had shared the same bed with her spouse. On 3 April 1944, the court arbitrarily ruled in favor of the petitioner. It acknowledged numerous inconsistencies in the testimony of both parties and various witnesses. Nevertheless, Judge Straniak granted the divorce, ruling that that the respondent’s deportation, wartime exigencies, and Franz Holzinger’s desire to marry another woman had sundered the marriage; he also held the petitioner culpable and ordered him to pay RM 345.87 in attorneys’ fees. In divorcing his Jewish wife, Holzinger managed to save his small machine shop and marry another woman. However, Elisabeth survived Theresienstadt and in 1948 petitioned the court to revoke the decree. Although the court denied her request, she appears to have won some form of public assistance resembling alimony.142

140

141 142

WSLA, Lg Z, 5 Cg. 156/42, Box 164. DÖW, Namenliste der österreichischen Holocaust Opfer. WSLA, Lg Z, 5 Cg. 1919/43–14, Box 168. Ibid.


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If external pressure, marital disenchantment, and Gestapo persecution combined to shatter the Holzinger marriage, a similar constellation helped undermine the matrimonial ties of a much younger couple. According to papers filed by Paul Höss in late 1944, his marriage had gone sour shortly after the birth of the couple’s daughter in January of 1941. Because his wife Ilona was a Jew, he contended, her “bossy and obstinate behavior provoked numerous disputes,” in which she regularly insulted him as a “thug” and “whoremonger.” Furthermore, she refused to stay away from his tailor shop, as required by Nazi directives. After the Gestapo had deported Ilona and her infant daughter to Theresienstadt on 28 June 1944, Höss filed suit on grounds of separation. His case never made to court, however. Shortly after the collapse of the Third Reich, he was taken into custody by the Austrian government as a Nazi informer.143 All the same, his wife, who had survived internment, petitioned the Viennese Court of Civil Affairs to dismiss the suit. The ultimate disposition of this bizarre case is not revealed in the documentary record.144 Other Cases Not every intermarried spouse seeking to disband a marriage in Vienna during the Holocaust was influenced by Nazi values or Gestapo pressure. As in the prewar period, emotional and material factors continued to motivate an unknown number of persons to go to court. On 25 February 1941, Wenzel Kral, a waiter, brought charges against his Jewish wife on grounds of verbal abuse and refusal to fulfill her conjugal obligations. Paula, his partner, sharply contested the suit, pointing out that while recovering from abdominal surgery she had had to resist her drunken husband’s advances from a hospital bed. Furthermore, as he had then taken to consorting with prostitutes, she prudently refused sexual intercourse for fear bringing a syphilitic or retarded child into the world. According to testimony by neighbors and witnesses, both marriage partners regularly hurled insults at each other: Paula called Wenzel a “shyster,” “scoundrel,” and “whoremonger.” He labeled her a “hooker” or “whore.” Whatever the underlying reasons, agreement existed that their marriage was decaying and that their five-year-old daughter stood at risk. On 14 May the court ruled in favor of the petitioner, but granted what amounted to a conjoint divorce. The decision held that while Paula 143

144

Höss also faced charges of fraud and theft. See L G Wien, Vg 2d Vr 628/45: http:www. nachkriegsjustiz.at/service/kvg4.php. WSLA, Lg Z, 5 Cg. 273/44, Box 1449.

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Kral’s outrageous and insulting behavior had contributed to the collapse of nuptial bonds, her partner’s matrimonial offenses “outweighed” hers. Further, the court justified Paula’s decision to terminate sexual relations, albeit along racial lines, “because as a full-blooded Jewess she recoiled at the danger of a new pregnancy, so as to avoid the fate of her daughter, Edith, who has been counted as a Jew by the Regional Office of Ancestral Research.” The judge concluded that because both parties shared responsibility for the breakdown of their marriage, neither could be held culpable under the law.145 Most remarkable was the case of a middle-aged Jewish mother, who persuaded Nazi judicial authorities to dismiss a divorce suit filed by her “German-blooded” spouse. In May of 1941, Anton Micik, a simple locksmith, brought charges of alienation of affection against his wife of twenty years, contending that she had driven him to drink and destroyed his family life. That she was a Jewess, he claimed, made her aggressive, insulting, and utterly devoid of affection. In contesting these accusations, Helene Micik responded that her partner was an abusive drinker who had been confined in 1940–1 at the psychiatric hospital Am Steinhof for chronic alcoholism. To support her case she produced medical records as well as the testimony of attending physicians. The court was duly impressed. On 8 December 1941, the judge dismissed the suit, ruling that while it was understandable that the petitioner no longer wished to live with a “non-Aryan,” he had failed to produce evidence of matrimonial offences on the part of his wife. Five months later, the Higher Regional Court upheld this judgment, adding that the petitioner’s long record of substance abuse undermined the credibility of his testimony.146 That this decision was handed down as most of Vienna’s remaining Jews were being deported to the gas chambers in Poland and the mentally and physical handicapped being killed at Am Steinhof is not without irony. At least three other cases of intermarried divorce warrant consideration, not because they occurred during the Anschluß era, but because they were filed by Jewish partners immediately after the war. True, the petitioners had come to loathe their Gentile partners, but they refrained from disbanding marital ties until the collapse of the Nazi regime. Furthermore, the charges they levied were traditional ones of adultery, abuse, or abandonment. The charges were drawn up, however, according to the clauses of the Marriage Law of 1938. In this sense they adumbrated 145 146



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the foundation of contemporary Austrian family law, which has been characterized as “a fusion of the principles of divorce by matrimonial fault and divorce by marital breakdown.”147 On 28 May 1945, Olga Hodosi brought charges against her husband Franz, whom she had wed in a shotgun marriage in May 1934. After the birth of their son, Eugen, six months later, the couple’s marital ties began to unravel. The husband, who made his living as a musician, usually arrived home inebriated and made no secret of numerous infidelities. In 1939, he took advantage of Nazi racial law to drive Olga from their home and make an unsuccessful attempt to seek divorce. Four years later there was an attempted reconciliation in Budapest. However, Franz soon took up with another woman, and Olga and her son made their way to Oldenburg where they managed to survive the war. In the confusion of the postwar period, the court did not reach a decision until shortly after Christmas 1945. The judge granted a consensual divorce, ruling that under § 55, the marriage was irretrievably broken, “especially since both partners have gone their separate ways and the petitioner has become pregnant by another man.”148 In a second case, Sucher Horowitz sought to divorce his wife of twentyone years on the dubious grounds of “refusal to procreate,” that is, denial to engage in sexual intercourse, for a period of four years. Both parties agreed that they had enjoyed a harmonious relationship for an unspecified period of time and that tensions arose only after the respondent rejected her husband’s conjugal advances. Because Horowitz began sleeping with other women, they agreed that the marriage existed in name only. On 29 September 1945, the court granted a conjoint divorce, alluding only elliptically to the respondent’s “stubborn” sexual abstinence. What seems inexplicable in this instance is why a Gentile wife would suddenly turn against her Jewish husband having remained stoically by his side in an acrimonious relationship until the end of the war. Her loyalty in the face of Nazi persecution raises profound questions about identity within a marital framework. The final case in this overall sample provides a nuanced example of a mixed marriage beset by personal, political, and economic troubles throughout its duration. On 23 March 1929, Josef and Hermine Hofmann had taken their vows in a civil ceremony. Shortly after the birth of a daughter in 1932, Josef left his Gentile wife for another woman. For 147 148

Haller, “Austria,” 213. WSLA, Lg Z, 5 Cg. 52/45, Box 1573.

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reasons not revealed in the public record he regretted what he called a rash divorce and begged forgiveness from his former spouse. In 1936, the two were reunited in wedlock. Both parties concurred that their union remained firm even after the Nazi takeover. However, once their daughter began to experience mistreatment at school, Hermine lashed out at her partner, blaming his Jewish identity for the child’s suffering. Nevertheless, she stood by him, continuing to support the entire household, including her mother, by working as a seamstress. In November of 1944 the family home was severely damaged by Allied bombs, impelling Hermine to accept a position as a concierge in another housing complex. Josef refused to join her, however, fearing that a change in residence would lead to arrest and deportation by the Gestapo. Shortly after the founding of the Second Republic, the Viennese municipal government made Josef a provisional police officer and awarded him a new apartment, presumably for having opposed the Nazi regime.149 When his wife and thirteen-year-old daughter refused to join him, he filed papers on grounds of desertion. The suit did not go uncontested. Hermine denied her husband’s charge of racial slander, provided evidence of his material and emotional support during the Nazi era, and alleged that in the course of a routine visit she had discovered him in the arms of a tart named Poldi. In what may have been the nub of the matter, she accused him of neglect, maintaining that he had failed to provide family support as required by law. On 27 November 1945, the Viennese Court of Civil Affairs dismissed the suit, ruling in a lengthy decision that while tensions existed in the marriage, it was by no means irretrievably broken and that the petitioner was obliged both to seek reconciliation and resume household support. In response, Josef appealed the judgment. While admitting that his wife had not abandoned him to the Gestapo, he contended that after November of 1944 she refused to do his cooking or launder his clothes. After the war, he continued, he had made an offer to resume marital life, but it had encountered stiff opposition from both his partner and motherin-law. He then submitted a letter in which his wife characterized their relationship as an utterly “loveless dog and cat fight.” From today’s perspective, the weight of evidence appears to have been on the petitioner’s side. But before the Higher Regional Court could proceed, Josef Hofmann 149

Police records indicate that in late 1944 Nazi authorities were on the track of a certain Paul Hofmann for desertion. Most likely, this was another individual. See, however, DÖW, doc. 404


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withdrew his appeal, informing the justices that a marital reconciliation had been arranged. Whether this was in fact the truth is doubtful. Most likely, economic hardship perpetuated a marriage that had been driven to the brink of dissolution because of personal and public pressure. Oddly, it was emblematic of so many of the intermarried divorce cases considered in this study. What makes it different or distinctive is that the outcome was no longer determined by racial norms.150

Conclusions By late 1945, the divorce rate in Austria began to soar. The number of proceedings doubled within a year and, by 1948, had reached levels exceeded only by those of Sweden. Those petitioners filing papers tended to be younger than in the past, their marital ties less stable.151 Whether or not intermarried partners joined in the rush will never be known, as magistrates were no longer required to record the “race” of petitioners or respondents. That roughly 90 percent of German and Austrian Jews had survived the Holocaust in mixed marriages must be considered examples of extraordinary marital loyalty, not least because remaining intermarried couples found themselves subjected to further restrictions and abuse once the deportations abated. As we saw in the previous chapter, most intermarried Viennese Jews managed to escape the Gestapo dragnet of 1943, primarily because they were already engaged in menial work or employed in light industry. But thereafter, the rest were driven into some form of forced labor and at least 327 shipped off to the East. In January of 1945, the various discriminatory measures culminated in an order deporting all partial Jews to Theresienstadt. Precisely because over 90 percent of those Jews living in “mixed marriages” survived the Third Reich, the story of the unknown number of those whose marriages collapsed must be considered exceptional. This survey of intermarried divorce in Vienna suggests that while Nazi efforts to entice or compel “German-blooded” partners to seek divorce met with some success, most partners filing papers were motivated by multiple factors that included, more often than not, already existing matrimonial grievances. This is not meant to imply that political, economic, and social pressures were insignificant. Nor is it intended to deny Marion Kaplan’s observation that, in 1938 and afterward, “Nazi intimidation 150 151

WSLA, Lg Z, 5 Cg. 141/45, Box 1574. Haller, “Austria,” 225.

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caused grave tensions and anxieties in these marriages.”152 That most intermarried divorce proceedings took place in two major “spurts,” one immediately following the Anschluß, the other during the deportations of 1941–2 was, in other words, hardly a coincidence. If the Nazi takeover came as what marriage counselors now call a “negative life event,” the evidence examined here makes it abundantly clear that at least half of the “mixed marriages” were already in serious trouble. As we have seen, well over half of those bringing charges had been married for roughly two decades. In the period between the Anschluß and the onset of the Holocaust, twenty-eight of the petitioners sought a marital “repeal” or “annulment” on racial grounds. The principal charges, however, focused on problems with in-laws, sexual misconduct, or other traditional matrimonial offences. While it is true that at least half of the petitioners sought to salvage jobs, assets, or social status, many of their depositions reveal underlying grievances that included infidelity, impotence, and jealousy. Moreover, four of the suits were filed by Jewish partners, two of them from exile in Great Britain. Of the twenty-one parties seeking a conventional divorce during the same period, eleven filed on grounds of irretrievable breakdown (§ 49), six on charges of marital separation (§ 55), and one on accusations of mental derangement. Three others brought charges not specified in the surviving records. Like those seeking a marital “repeal,” individuals petitioning for a conventional divorce usually made reference to racial differences, but also provided persuasive testimony of matrimonial difficulties. At the same time, there were perceptible differences between the two groups in terms of gender and class. Whereas the number of non-Jewish wives applying for a marital “repeal” according to § 37 was only slightly larger than that of “Aryan” husbands, the proportion of those seeking to dissolve their marriage through divorce was much higher. Indeed, over 73 percent of the suits filed according to paragraphs 49 and 55 were brought by women. Furthermore, many of them appear to have come from bourgeois backgrounds. These included wives of a businessman, a bank official, an attorney, a company official, and two former Habsburg officers. There were also petitioners married to an upholsterer, a hack driver, and several commercial employees. Of those petitioning from a working-class milieu, one was a washerwoman married to a domestic servant, another was the wife of a teamster. 152

Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair, 89.


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Although intensified persecution contributed to an upsurge of intermarried divorce in 1941–2, personal and emotional factors continued to figure in the proceedings. Motives tended to be less transparent. Nevertheless, as Meyer discovered in her study of Hamburg, many cases frequently involved matrimonial disputes. Still, it cannot be denied that social, political, and economic pressures drove a number of intermarried partners to the breaking point, including three Jewish partners who filed papers from exile. In Vienna, a combination of economic hardship, social ostracism, and fear of death induced many “German-blooded” wives to disband unions with partners who had fled abroad or had fallen into the hands of the Gestapo. Yet, while some simply wanted to escape the torment of living on short rations in the squalor of a “Jew house,” at least three expressed callous disregard for the fate of their spouses. Two sought to marry another man, and one simply preferred to remain at home with her mother. There were also wives who added charges of alcoholism, impotence, and physical abuse. Of the non-Jewish men who went to court, all but three openly admitted that divorce was the only way to maintain their jobs or situation. As for the other cases, the charges levied included pregnancy by another man, refusal to engage in sexual intercourse, and mental illness. There were also two petitioners who sought to distance themselves from a Communist past. Compared with intermarried spouses seeking divorce prior to 1941, most of the non-Jewish wives filing papers at the height of the Holocaust came from a lower-class milieu. As they and most of the remaining Jewish population had been reduced to penury, this was hardly surprising. The identifiable social profile of female petitioners thus consisted of only four women who had “married up,” one to a bank official, one to an attorney, another to a civil clerk (in Slovakia), and a fourth to an engineer. Three had husbands who were commercial employees, three who were salesmen. The others were married, respectively, to a dental technician, actor, band musician, soldier on active duty, shoemaker, locksmith, lathe operator, truck driver, delivery man, and not least to a waiter. There were also two respondents who made their living as day laborers. In contrast, the male petitioners for whom data are available tended to be slightly more middle class. The non-Jewish husbands included a plant manager, an engineer, an insurance official, a master mechanic, and a police officer. This group also included a waiter and a worker. Scholars investigating the fate of intermarried families in the Third Reich have pondered the motivation of those individuals who chose to divorce their Jewish partners during those harrowing times. Some have

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relied on anecdotal evidence, others on the postwar testimony of a handful of West Germans applying for the revocation of a Nazi decree.153 Probing the “real reasons” for divorce in any society is a daunting if not impossible task. There are difficulties, for example, in resolving the conflicting testimony of contending parties, as well the opposite problem of disproving charges fabricated by couples colluding to ensure the end of an unhappy alliance. Historical research suggests that the most common reasons for the breakup of a marriage involve adultery, physical violence, alcoholism, and mental cruelty. Other findings indicate that wives tend to complain mostly about financial problems, alcoholism, and abuse. Men grumble about in-laws and sexual incompatibility.154 In Austria, as mentioned earlier, the accusations brought before judges prior to the Anschluß usually emphasized alcoholism, physical abuse, and impotence. There can be no doubt that the Nazi takeover had a devastating impact on intermarried couples in Vienna, an impact that drove many into exile and marginalizing others who, for one reason or another, chose to remain in the city. Even couples living in “privileged mixed marriages” did not escape some form of discrimination, ostracism, or emotional anxiety, ranging from the maltreatment of children, to house searches and even midnight interrogations. They also experienced the agony of receiving news of the deportations and deaths of Jewish relatives. Some intermarried Viennese may have even shared Viktor Klemperer’s bizarre notion that his Gentile wife “should unreservedly seek divorce, which could afterwards be challenged as having been forced on us”155 Because political and personal forces were inextricably intertwined in the lives of ordinary Austrians between 1938 and 1945, outside investigators can only make approximate guesses about the motivation of “Aryan” partners who took legal action to terminate their marital ties to Jews. The court records examined in this sample suggest, as we have seen, that a slight majority of those filing papers provided evidence of serious matrimonial disputes that predated the Nazi takeover. Of these, ten petitioners complained of religious and cultural disagreements provoked or exacerbated by the disapproval of in-laws. In this sense, the decision to divorce under the new German law clearly had a political dimension. Of the other thirty-seven cases, the most common charges

153

154 155

Cf. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair, 88–93 and Meyer, “Jüdische Mischlinge,” 86–91. Phillips, Putting Asunder, 314–21 ff. Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness, 168.


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involved drunkenness, abuse, refusal to procreate, adultery, and sexual abstinence or impotence. The motives of the remaining petitioners appear to have been more closely linked to political, economic, social, and related pressures. Seven of them, for example, were Nazi militants, who had sought to break with Jewish partners once their “racial” identity had been revealed by mandatory registration. Fifteen others sought to save personal assets, jobs, or even homes. Two attempted to distance themselves from a Communist past; two others openly expressed fear of violence at the hands of the authorities. The most difficult cases to assess, as emphasized in this study, are those involving spouses who had fled abroad, suffered imprisonment, or been deported to the East. While most of the thirty-four petitioners filed on grounds of separation, there were also charges of alcoholism, verbal abuse, adultery, and, most commonly, the inability to manage a family business or support children and relatives. Even so, most of the testimony was innocuous or in the case of two wives who rejoined their husbands after the war, deliberately disingenuous. As for the seventeen women who divorced partners who had been incarcerated or deported, their motives appear to have been self-indulgent or selfish. Some may have simply been naïve. While the circumstances surrounding these forty-four cases remain varied and vague, the more important issues at stake may concern the reasons for non-Jewish partners failing to accompany their spouses into exile. Some may have considered the separation temporary; others possibly thought it best to care for young children in Vienna; still others probably feared economic insecurity or impoverishment in a foreign country. There are allusions to such thinking in the divorce records examined here, but the available evidence makes it impossible to draw final conclusions. What the record does reveal is that of forty-two Jewish husbands forced into divorce by “German-blooded” wives, at least ten perished in the Holocaust. This, of course, raises the issue of gender. The cases examined here reveal that 61.2 percent of the intermarried partners who filed for divorce during the Anschluß era were women, one of whom was Jewish. This is a proportion considerably smaller than that uncovered by Meyer in her study of Hamburg (79 percent) and apparently less than the ratio of all divorces granted in Vienna between 1939 and 1944 (73 percent).156 The 156

SJSW, 6 (1939–1942), 57, 7 (1943–1945), 36–7. The number of divorces granted to all Viennese women according to paragraphs 47–53 ranged from 58.8 percent in 1939 to

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Marriage Law of 1938, designed to serve the interests of a racial state, indisputably changed the framework of family law in both Germany and Austria. It did not, however, alter existing patterns of divorce in Vienna until after the collapse of Hitler’s regime. This is not to deny that legal statutes and Nazi harassment made it more likely for “German-blooded” wives to divorce their Jewish husbands than the other way around. As one authority has noted, the imposed reversal of traditional gender roles was both painful and at variance with married life. Female partners living in “nonprivileged mixed marriages” suffered loss of status and support. They had to go on prolonged and exhaustive shopping expeditions for food and household necessities, take menial jobs, and live in ill-salubrious “Jew houses” or in apartments demarcated with the Star of David.157 Those who have studied the experiences of mixed families in Nazi Germany have taken pains to emphasize, as we have already seen, that the division of intermarried couples into categories of “privileged” and “nonprivileged” rested initially on an informal decision made by Hitler and Göring in December 1938.158 That the division was later written into the Law of Jewish Tenancies can be seen as “characteristic of the stepby-step destruction process” famously described and analyzed by Raul Hilberg.159 On the other hand, the categories did have a certain foundation in German and Austrian law. As previously discussed, both the Austrian General Civil Code of 1811 and the German Civil Code of 1900 designated the husbands as “head of household” with legal rights to direct family affairs, With that in mind, Hitler and Göring evidently realized that to proceed against a “German-blooded” head of household would provoke not only popular unrest, but also the resistance of judicial authorities who still enjoyed some measure of autonomy, especially in incorporated Austria. In other words, the fact that neither the new regulations nor the marriage legislation of 1938 significantly altered the patriarchal structure of family relations in Greater Germany provides yet another reason why a disproportionate number of Gentile wives chose to divorce their Jewish

157 158

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80 percent in 1943. Although the records do not indicate the sex of the petitioner, they do reveal that between 1939 and 1943 only 19.3 percent of the male respondents were found nonculpable. Between 1939 and 1945 the courts granted 4,937 divorces following three years of marital separation for which according to § 55 neither party was to blame. Meyer, “Mixed Marriage,” 58–9. Büttner, “Persecution of German-Jewish Families,” 284–5; Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, 107–8; Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart, 102–3; idem., “The Limits of Policy,” 124–6. Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, 115.


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husbands. It also explains why a higher ratio of women in the general population also sought to break the legal fetters of matrimonial servitude, even though nearly all were immune to Nazi persecution. While Gentile husbands in mixed marriages generally avoided the full brunt of antisemitic measures, they too were subjected to job discrimination, social ostracism, and occasional harassment. There was less pressure for them to go to court, but within this sample thirty-five husbands filed papers. Compared with female petitioners, the grounds advanced by the men tended to be more straightforward, their motives less opaque. Immediately following the Anschluß, for example, seven men sought divorce in order to pursue careers in the NSDAP. There were also three company officials who made no secret of hoping to keep their jobs by claiming a spontaneous awakening to “racial differences”; they were joined by a handful of private employees, including a Jewish furrier assistant, who echoed their words. Between 1941 and 1945, four men in the sample brought charges against Jewish wives in exile, three against partners deported to the East. Toward the end of the war, nine petitioners openly admitted that economic pressure lay at the root of their suits. If the motives of “German-blooded” men seeking to divorce Jewish wives appear to have been more materialistic than those of “Aryan” women who filed papers against Jewish husbands, there were also individuals who levied charges of sexual incompatibility, adultery, verbal abuse by in-laws, and what today would be called “irreconcilable differences.” Overall, this study of intermarried divorce in Nazi Vienna should put to rest the notion that Gentile men were more inclined to sever their marital ties with Jewish partners than were Gentile women. This may have been the case in Germany prior to the passage of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, as civil servants, army officers, and public employees scrambled to retain their jobs or advance up the career ladder. Until more thorough research of mixed marriages during this period is completed, however, the issue must be regarded as uncertain and left unresolved. After 1938, the opposite was the case: More “Aryan” women divorced Jewish husbands, than “Aryan” men divorced “racially undesirable” women – at least in Hamburg and Vienna. Exactly why the proportion of intermarried non-Jewish women filing papers was so much higher in the Hanseatic city than that in the once-and-future Austrian capital is not altogether clear, although the judiciary in Hitler’s homeland did not undergo the sort of purge that took place in the Old Reich between 1933 and 1937. Furthermore, civil divorce may have been perceived as less stigmatic in Protestant Hamburg than in Catholic Vienna. Even so, it should not be

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forgotten that intermarried divorce in Nazi Germany, including incorporated Austria, was the exception not the rule. Thus, until studies of mixed marriages and divorce in cities containing large Jewish populations such as Berlin, Frankfurt, Breslau, and Leipzig are undertaken the conclusions reached in this investigation may constitute only one piece of a much larger puzzle.

4 Tightening the Noose Arrests, Deportations, and Forced Labor, 1941–1945

Berlin’s Renewed Assault on Intermarried Couples and Their Offspring On Tuesday, 2 June 1942, shortly before sunset, Viktor Klemperer attempted to make sense of a new torrent of anti-Jewish measures. In his now famous diary he wrote, “The choker is being pulled ever tighter; they are wearing us down with ever new tricks.” After enumerating thirty-one new decrees, he bemoaned his diet of “tiny amounts” of spinach and potatoes, adding that while his Aryan wife was still permitted to eat a plate of potatoes at restaurants, she, too, was losing weight. Three weeks later, he noted the deportation of a Jewish widow within weeks of the death of her prominent Aryan husband. On 13 July, Klemperer and his wife spent the afternoon with another intermarried couple who, although “privileged,” had suddenly grown anxious and worried. Subsequent entries recorded intensified squabbles and strains within mixed families, growing pressure on half-Jews, and rumors that “mixed marriages are to be forcibly dissolved.”1 Although unaware of deliberations by decision makers in Berlin, Klemperer appears to have had a preternatural grasp of the endless debates that raged among officials of the Nazi Party, the SS, and the Ministry of the Interior over what it meant to be Jew.2 As we have already seen, Hitler 1 2

Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness, II, 65–6, 91, 99–101 passim. There is now a substantial literature on the wartime tug-of-war between Nazi radicals and ministerial bureaucrats on the issues of dissolving mixed marriages and including partial-Jews in the Final Solution. For this study the most useful works have been: Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, 257–84; Adam, Judenpolitik, 316–33; Noakes, “German-Jewish Mischlinge,” 329–54; Gerlach, “Wannsee Conference,” 759–812;

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himself was of several minds on the issue, partly because of his concern for civilian morale, partly for reasons of his own.3 For example, on 10 April 1941, the dictator refused to reduce the citizenship of quarter-Jews,4 even opining two months later that those still serving in the Wehrmacht should be granted “German-blooded” status at the end of the war. On the other hand, shortly before launching Operation Barbarossa he proposed extending the Nuremberg Laws to ban sexual relations between Aryans and “Mischlinge of the First Degree.”5 This idea gained ready acceptance among officials of the RSHA, notably Reinhard Heydrich, who in August pushed for inclusion of half-Jews in the Final Solution. Heydrich’s proposal already enjoyed the support of hard-liners in the Racial Policy Office, the Party chancellery, and the Four Year Plan who sought to restrict a rising flood of applications for “clemency” or racial reclassification.6 On 10 October Heydrich and Eichmann again brought up the subject, suggesting that “German-blooded” partners refusing to file divorce papers should be shipped to the East with their Jewish wives or husbands.7 Hitler, in the meantime, had been paying close attention to killing operations in the Soviet Union. We have already seen that on 1 September he approved the Star Decree and within weeks authorized the “evacuation” of German, Austrian, and Czech Jews from Greater Germany. All the same, he hesitated to alter the status of half-Jews or to interfere in mixed marriages. On 22 November, for example, the dictator told Goebbels that he wanted to pursue an “energetic policy against the Jews, but one that would not cause needless difficulties … With regard to intermarried couples, especially those involved in the arts, the Führer suggests (empfiehlt) a somewhat reserved approach since he holds that these marriages would die out bit by bit and one should not get gray hair about it.”8

3

4 5 6

7 8

Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart, 151–76 ff.; Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, 116–55 ff.; Cornelia Essner, Die “Nürnberger Gesetze”oder Die Verwaltung des Rassenwahns 1933– 1945 (Paderborn, Munich, Vienna, Zurich, 2002), 384–444. On Hitler’s consistent and yet occasionally ambivalent feelings about Jews see John Lukacs, The Hitler of History (New York, 1997), 120–1. For detailed, perceptive examples see Brigitte Hamann, Hitlers Edeljude: Das Leben des Armenarztes Eduard Bloch (Munich and Zurich, 2008), 80–95, 297–329 ff. Gerlach, “Wannsee Conference,” 779. Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, 133. Adam, Judenpolitik, 319–20; Gerlach, “Wannsee Conference,” 777–80; Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, 268–9. Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart, 171. Ralf Georg Reuth, Joseph Goebbels Tagebücher, Vol. 4, 1709–10. In his account of this meeting Saul Friedländer writes misleadingly Hitler “demanded (sic.) that his minister

Tightening the Noose

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A fortnight later, Hitler again brought up the issue of intermarried families, this time with Himmler. Having already authorized mass slaughter in the Soviet Union as well as the installation of gassing facilities in Belzec and Chelmno, the dictator continued to ruminate about the biogenetic nature of partial-Jews. Later that evening he opined: “It is remarkable that the half-caste Jews, to the second or third generation, has a tendency to start flirting again with pure Jews. But from the seventh generation onwards, it seems the purity of the Aryan blood is remarkably restored. In the long run nature eliminates the noxious elements.”9 Within another fortnight, Hitler informed a gathering of party dignitaries of his decision to liquidate the Jews of Europe.10 There followed a flurry of memos, discussions, and meetings that culminated on 20 January 1942 in the notorious Wannsee Conference. On this occasion, Heydrich along with fourteen representatives of government ministries, the Party chancellery, the Gestapo, and the SS discussed the nuts and bolts of genocide. Those familiar with the protocol of the conference know that after the participants agreed to coordinate their efforts, Heydrich proposed that half-Jews be swept up in the extermination process as well as some quarter-Jews and all Jews in mixed marriages. At this point, the state secretaries raised objections, arguing that inclusion of partialJews would spawn “endless administrative work,” have a deleterious impact on the war economy, and undermine civilian morale. Wilhelm Stuckart, representing the Ministry of the Interior, conceded the necessity of taking “biological factors into account,” but as an alternate approach recommended the compulsory sterilization of half-Jews and study of legal measures to dissolve mixed marriages.11

9 10

11

show restraint regarding mixed marriages.” Saul Friedländer Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945: The Years of Extermination (New York, 2007), 276. H.R Trevor-Roper (ed.), Hitler’s Secret Conversations (New York, 1953), 116. Hitler’s decision for genocide has been the subject of extensive research and debate. The most persuasive concise accounts are Gerlach, “Wannsee Conference,” 759–812, and Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis (New York, 2000), 462–95. For more comprehensive studies see Philippe Burrin, Hitler and the Jews: the Genesis of the Holocaust (London, 1994) and Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942 (Lincoln and Jerusalem, 2004). On the fate of half-Jews discussed at the Wannsee Conference, see Hilberg, Destruction of European Jews, 264–5, 269–70; Gerlach, “Wannsee Conference,” 795–96; Noakes, “German-Jewish Mischlinge,” 341–3; Essner, Die “Nürnberger Gesetze,” 384–410, especially 397–410; Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, 147–9. On the specific problem of mixed marriages see also Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart, 172–4; Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, 274–7; Mark Roseman, The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution: A Reconsideration (New York, 2003), 114–20.

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Although discussion of measures to be taken against partial-Jews and intermarried couples took up two-fifths of the Wannsee meeting, the issues went seemingly unresolved. They were brought up again during a follow-up conference on 6 March and thrashed out at length. There was general agreement on sterilization as a solution to the “Mischling problem,” even though SS and Party officials continued to push for deportation. There was also general concurrence on compulsory divorce until representatives of the Propaganda Ministry warned that such a decree would provoke both social unrest and resistance of the Roman Catholic Church. As happened so frequently in the Third Reich, the deadlocked conferees decided to refer the matter to “the highest authority.” Shortly thereafter, Stuckart circulated a lengthy memorandum reiterating the Interior Ministry’s opposition to changing the status of “Mischlinge of the First Degree” to that of “full Jews.” It concluded that “deporting the half-Jews would mean abandoning that half of the blood which is German.” A month later another civil servant, Franz Schlegelberger, expressed reservations about legislating compulsory divorce, although he diabolically added that the matter might be resolved simply by deporting intermarried Jews, presumably after Hitler’s approval.12 In the months that followed, the dictator’s views of intermarried couples hardened. On 10 May he regretted granting exemptions to mixed breeds to serve in the Wehrmacht, remarking to General Jodl, as mentioned earlier, “experience showed that from Jewish offspring for four, five, or six generations pure Jews kept ‘Mendeling’ out (ausmendeln).”13 Two days later he intoned, “It has been indisputably established that, in the case of Jews, if the physical characteristics of the race are sometimes absent from a generation or two, they will inevitably reappear in the next generation.”14 In the face of petitions from Nazi bigwigs and officials in the Interior Ministry, however, the Führer refrained from issuing a decree on the legal status of Jewish Mischlinge. While such a decree might have ended the deadlock between hard-liners and moderates, it would have required a revision of the Nuremberg Laws. To have passed such a measure in wartime, however, would have provoked the sort of civil unrest Hitler and Goebbels sought to avoid. Hitler’s hands-off policy 12

13 14

For the most comprehensive account of the follow-up conference of 6 March 1942, see Essner, Die “Nürnberger Gesetze,” 410–19. See also Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, 270–3; Adam, Judenpolitik, 322–5; Noakes, “German-Jewish Mischlinge,” 343–5. Noakes, “German-Jewish Mischlinge,” 333. TR, Hitler’s Secret Conversations, 384.


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also worked to the advantage of his executioners. This was because any redefinition of “Jewishness” would have disrupted the Final Solution. As Cornelia Essner sardonically asks, how could mass murder function smoothly if those targeted for extermination were suddenly permitted to raise legal questions about their Jewish status?15 The stalemate over revising the official status of intermarried couples and their partial-Jewish offspring may well have saved the lives of most German and Austrian Jews living in mixed marriages. Even so, the Nuremberg Laws made no exception for intermarried Jews. As Stoltzfus reminds us, the Gestapo specifically ordered that the deportation of Jews married to non-Jews be “temporarily withheld,” not stopped.16 The disputes and hesitations among Nazi officials regarding mixed marriages thus boiled down to a matter of timing and fear of provoking the sort of widespread discontent spawned in 1940–1 by rumors of Hitler’s euthanasia program. Once the regime decided to dispatch all German and Austrian Jews to the East, the most obvious means for the Gestapo to fulfill this mission was to induce non-Jews to divorce their Jewish partners. But for reasons just discussed, the Nazis refrained from compulsory annulment or the inclusion of non-Jewish partners in mass murder. As Richard Bessel puts it, “For a regime which viewed the world in racialist categories and embarked on a self-appointed mission to racially restructure Europe, ‘racially mixed marriages’ should have been the first targets, not the last. The reason [they were not deported] . . . was the Nazi Achilles heel – their fear of popular unrest.”17 Nevertheless, the position of intermarried couples, their children, and other partial-Jews deteriorated sharply after the Wannsee Conference. While Heydrich had failed to force the legal dissolution of mixed marriages or to include half-Jews in the Final Solution, he had emerged as

15 16

17

Essner, Die “Nürnberger Gesetze,” 430. Nathan Stoltzfus, “Historical Evidence and Plausible History: Interpreting the Berlin Gestapo’s Attempted ‘Final Roundup’ of Jews (also known as the ‘Factory Action’),” Central European History, 38, 3 (September 2005), 457. Richard Bessel, “Snatched from the Jaws,” Times Literary Supplement, 16 May 1997. I wish to thank Nathan Stoltzfus for calling my attention to this important article. I am also grateful to him for explaining that Berlin’s inconsistent and “schizophrenic” policies toward intermarried Jews “resulted from the clash of two fundamental principles of Nazi ideology that these families brought into conflict. On the one hand, the power of mass movement politics required a high degree of non-coerced support from the ‘racial people.’ On the other, ‘racial purification’ required eliminating from that people all ‘full Jews’ as identified by the Nuremberg Laws and that included those Jews who were married to non-Jews.” Email to the author, 21 July 2009.

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the supreme commander in the Nazi war against the Jews. From now on, the SS and the police were able to bypass, undermine, or usurp the authority of government and judicial officials to accelerate and complete the program of extermination.18 Hitler made this all too clear in two fiery addresses to the German nation. In the first, delivered on 30 January 1942, he reminded his audience of his 1939 prophecy that the Jews would be annihilated, proclaiming that the hour had struck for “the most evil world-enemy of all time.” In the second, broadcast on 26 April, he assailed the German legal system for “failing to recognize the demands of the hour,” promising to reverse “overly lenient” decisions and to dismiss the judges who made them.19 The dictator’s words were not lost on the Ministry of Justice. Within months, the jurists granted the SS the right to overturn “unsatisfactory” verdicts and on 9 October to transfer all Jews and other undesirable ethnic groups in protective custody to the SS. Four days later, Otto Thierack, the Minister of Justice, entrusted the prosecution of such persons to Himmler. Finally, on 1 July 1943, Thierack decreed a change in the citizenship law that read: “Criminal acts committed by Jews will be prosecuted by the police.”20 The gradual, almost imperceptible transfer of judicial power to the Gestapo and SS manifested itself, Tent points out, in a series of “ominous directives” aimed at intermarried Jews and Mischlinge that “set them on the same downward spiral that had led to the isolation, incarceration, and murder of full Jews.”21 As early as 17 May 1941, officials in the Interior Ministry had proposed closing a loophole in the Nuremberg Laws that prohibited intermarriage between half-Jews and Aryans, but left the issue of dating or cohabitation untouched.22 Three months later a circular from the Racial Policy Office alerted district officials that the racial defilement laws would be extended to include half-Jews, many of whom had returned home from military service and taken up with “German-blooded” women.23 That Heydrich managed to issue such a decree on his own authority within weeks

18

19

20

21 22 23

Ibid., 390 ff.; Roseman, Wannsee Conference, 120–6; Gerlach, “Wannsee Conference,” 795–7. For significant portions of the texts see Max Domarus, Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen 1932–1945, IV, 1826–34, especially 1828–9 and 1871–7, especially 1877. Ingo Müller, Hitler’s, Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 181–2. Tent, In the Shadow of the Holocaust, 146. Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, 133. WSLA, A 1, Box 7, Folder 2: Vellguth to Scharizer, 5 August 1941.


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of the Wannsee Conference is not without significance.24 Other directives from the RSHA forbade Jews in mixed marriages from subscribing to newspapers and periodicals and, as we have seen, ordered the Star of David to be posted on Jewish homes, including intermarried households in which the husband was Jewish.25 In addition to these measures, on 1 March 1942 the Reich chancellery stopped processing applications for marital dispensations as permitted under the First Supplementary Decree for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor. Exactly three months later, the head of the chancellery, Martin Bormann, followed up this virtual stop-order by urging greater severity in considering other exemptions from the Nuremberg Laws, especially judgments in paternity cases and petitions seeking racial reclassification. Finally, on 12 October, Hitler forbade half-Jews from applying for reenlistment in the armed forces.26 There is ample evidence that the systematic deportation of German and Austrian Jews that began – or resumed – in earnest in late 1941 alarmed mixed couples throughout Hitler’s Reich. Depending on the locality, those living in “privileged mixed marriages” had experienced relatively mild discrimination. And while it is true that half-Jews had been discharged from the Wehrmacht, many continued on active duty or managed to find employment upon returning home. Neither they nor quarter-Jews were compelled to wear the six-pointed star; both were even eligible for membership in the German Labor Front (DAF) and the Nazi Welfare Association (NSV).27 In Berlin, what triggered a wave of fear was a decree prohibiting Jewish households from owning pets. As the ordinance included intermarried families, thousands of pet-owners had to take their dogs, cats, and birds to local veterinarians to be put down. One resentful survivor recalled huge columns of Aryan partners pleading in vain for the lives of their animal companions.28 Other decrees affecting Jewish men with non-Jewish wives, Klemperer recorded, included a ban on public transport, the purchase of tobacco, flowers, and “goods in short supply.” There were also new restrictions on haircuts, shopping hours, and freedom of movement.29 As for half-Jews, a series of decrees 24

25 26 27 28 29

For the full text of the decree (Erlass vom 9.4.1942-IV B 4 a- 1 190/40–19) see WSLA, A 1, Box 7, Folder 2: Ebner to Scharizer, 22 June 1942. Walk, Sonderrecht, 364–6. Ibid. 379; Noakes, “German-Jewish Mischlinge,” 332–3. Hillberg, Destruction of the European Jews, 268. Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart, 174–5. Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness, II, 65–6 passim.

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issued in June expelled them from the auxiliary police as well as secondary schools and institutions of higher learning.30

The Situation in Vienna: Local Initiatives and Official Policy To what extent intermarried Jews in Vienna sensed that the stepped-up antisemitic measures following the Star Decree constituted a threat to their own existence is not at all clear. There is indirect evidence of renewed anxiety, but only a handful of recollections or first-person testimonies exist. “Nonprivileged” Jews certainly had every reason to fear for the future. In October of 1939, no fewer than ten intermarried husbands had joined 1,574 other “skilled” Jews dispatched by Eichmann to Nisko in Poland, apparently hoping to carve out a new life on the River San. Upon arrival, they were chased over the German–Soviet demarcation line where they perished in Soviet labor camps. Between 15 February and 12 March 1941, the Gestapo included four intermarried men and one housewife in the first mass deportations from Vienna to the East, a journey from which they never returned. By May of 1941, most Jewish men with non-Jewish wives still residing in Vienna had been confined to cramped quarters or “Jew houses” located in three of the city’s twentytwo districts. During the subsequent winter, they were prohibited from using public transport, borrowing books from public or private libraries, or transferring liquid assets. In addition to the same humiliations visited on the Klemperers in Dresden, “nonprivileged” partners in Vienna were banned from public parks, particularly the Prater and Vienna Woods, their typewriters and phonograph records were confiscated, and several dozen men were summarily arrested and deported by the Gestapo.31 Ironically, the number of Jewish–Gentile couples living in Vienna had risen from 4,443 in 1939 to 5,076 as of 30 June 1941. According to a contemporary Gestapo report, there were also 1,242 half-Jews who practiced the Hebrew faith, as well as fifty-three others married to Jews. The document indicates that 300 to 600 Jews had managed to “conceal” their identity, although it does not explain whether they had Gentile relatives or spouses. In the year between 15 October 1941 and 9 October 1942, over 50,000 Jews were deported from Vienna to Theresienstadt or to killing centers in Poland and the Ukraine. By New Year’s Eve, 30 31

Walk, Sonderrecht, 379. WVW, III, 194–326, especially 251–4, 289–304.


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approximately 8,000 Jews remained in the city, of whom 5,564 survived in mixed marriages, as well as 2,425 Mischlinge who “counted as Jews” (“Geltungsjuden”). There were also 1,000 employees of the former Jewish Religious Community, reconstituted by the Nazis in November of 1942 as the Council of Elders (Ältestenrat). The surviving records indicate that 3,683 of the intermarried couples lived in “privileged mixed marriages,” and 1,881 in “nonprivileged” unions. Over the next two years the number of “privileged marriages” rose to 3,839 by August of 1943, but declined to 3,433 by 28 February 1945. During the same period the number of “nonprivileged” Jews dropped from 1,881 to 1,350, and that of “Geltungsjuden” from 2,425 to 813.32 Overall, these figures suggest that 781 intermarried Jews were swept up in the Holocaust, of whom 250 were “privileged” and 531 “nonprivileged.” Further, no fewer than 1,621 adult “Geltungsjuden” fell prey to the Gestapo. Beyond that it is impossible to generalize, not least because the numbers are undifferentiated; for example, excluding divorced couples but adding foreign Jews to the rolls as of 1 August 1943. What can be said for sure is that no fewer than 249 Viennese intermarried Jews died at the hands of the Nazis and, most likely, many more.33 Very little is known about those intermarried Jews taken into custody, abused by the Gestapo, or deported from Vienna before mid-1942. This is because those caught in the street after curfew or reported by neighbors for listening to foreign radio broadcasts were picked up by the uniformed police (Schutzpolizei), whose arrest records went up in flames in an air raid toward the end of the war. The available evidence is thus spotty and anecdotal. Surviving Jews recall 1940 as a relatively tranquil year. Gershon Evan, returning in early February to his parent’s makeshift home on the Jägerstrasse after 152 days in Buchenwald was astonished to discover that “life on the streets of Vienna had not changed much.” Rationed food was ample, he recalled, and most of the Jewish community had adjusted to their diminished status in a segregated society.34 Although roughly 100,000 Jews had fled the Ostmark, those who remained appear to have struggled from day to day much like African 32 33

34

Moser, Demographie, 54. DÖW, Projekt Namentliche Erfassung der österreichischen Holocaust Opfer: Fast nur Mischehen; Geheime Staatspolizeistelle Wien: Tagesberichete, 26–28 November 1938, 2–8 February 1945. Gershon Evan, Winds of Life: The Destinies of a Young Viennese Jew, 1938–1958, 123 ff. See also Gertrude Schneider, Exile and Destruction: The Fate of Austrian Jews, 1938– 1945 (Westport, 1995), 51–6.

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Americans were doing at the same time in cities of the American South. Within mixed families, the return of discharged soldiers may have strained already threadbare relations, but as mentioned earlier, “privileged” Jews experienced only mild discrimination. Members of “nonprivileged” families, however, were frequently compelled to work as day laborers in back-breaking jobs. Karl Jelinek, who “counted as a Jew” (Geltungsjude), toiled with his Jewish father sixteen hours a day in an enormous recycling center – sorting empty bottles and cans, loading and off-loading river boats, and hauling sacks of potatoes for the Wehrmacht. Both survived the war.35 Of the few intermarried Jews who came to grief prior to the massive roundups of October of 1941, a half dozen appear to have been incarcerated for political reasons, and another died from a ruptured hernia in a work detail. There was also the tragic case of Johanna Nemeth, a thirty-six-year-old housewife arrested on 26 September 1941 for listening to foreign radio broadcasts. Placed in protective custody, she faced what should have been a two year prison sentence for violation of a wartime ordinance. On 1 September 1943, however, the Public Prosecutor handed her over to the Gestapo in compliance with a recent ministerial decree that stipulated “criminal acts committed by Jews will be prosecuted by the police.” Within days Nemeth, was dispatched to Auschwitz where she perished.36 Once the deportations began in earnest, officials in the Viennese Gauleitung set their sites on Jews living in mixed marriages. Whether they acted on their own initiative or followed guidelines from the RSHA is uncertain, although Baldur von Schirach’s role should not be discounted.37 On 12 February 1941, Party, SS, and Gestapo officials gathered in the elegant chambers of the Ballhausplatz to discuss guidelines for the deportation of 7,000 Jews to Poland as a means of solving the city’s chronic housing crisis. Foreshadowing the deliberations of the Wannsee conference eleven months later, the participants dwelt at length on the fate of intermarried couples. The written transcript indicates that they agreed to induce Jewish wives to divorce their husbands by offering them

35 36

37

Jüdische Schicksale, 225–9. DÖW: Fast nur Mischehen; Namensliste der Österreichischen Holocaust Opfer; Wolfgang Form, Wolfgang, Neugebauer, Theo Schiller (eds.) NS-Justiz in Österreich 1938– 1945: Analysen zu den Verfahren vor dem Volksgerichtshof und dem Oberlandesgericht Wien (Munich, 2006) 74–5. Gerhard Botz, Wohnungspolitik und Judendeportation in Wien 1938 bis 1945: Zur Funktion des Antisemitismus als Ersatz nationalsozialistischer Sozialpolitik (Vienna, 1975), 108.


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the baited hook of keeping family assets as a form of bribery.38 As mentioned earlier, at least five intermarried Jews were transported to Poland before Hitler’s build-up to attack the Soviet Union put an end to the project. When the deportations resumed in October, the problem of intermarried couples again resurfaced. On 3 February 1942, SS Obersturmführer Robert Körber filed a formal inquiry as to whether Jewish wives, exempt from wearing the Star of David, were free to socialize in public and attend formal ceremonies. Two weeks later, Dr. Hellmuth Vellguth, who had succeeded Heinrich Wamser as director of the District Racial Policy Office, responded angrily that notwithstanding their “privileged” status, such persons possessed “no rights of any kind,” not least the right to attend Party functions.39 The two men charged with shipping Viennese Jews to the killing centers in Eastern Europe were Alois and Anton Brunner, both officials in the Central Office for Jewish Emigration. Neither was related to the other, although both were frequently mistaken as brothers.40 Alois (Brunner I), who had once been Eichmann’s personal secretary, perfected a system of blackmailing officials of the Jewish Religious Council to prepare deportation lists for the SS. He also resorted to cordoning off entire city blocks and even seizing hapless Jews at random. But it was Anton (Brunner II), a mere functionary, who became obsessed with targeting intermarried Jews, According to postwar testimony, he personally led house searches, dragging off those unable to provide proper identification or caught without a yellow star stitched to their clothes. He also relished separating adopted children from their intermarried parents and tricking non-Jewish partners to file divorce papers as the most effective means of saving loved ones whom he proceeded, however, to deport to the death camps in Poland. Both Brunners also scooped up intermarried couples from the provinces who had been compelled to move to Vienna but were maliciously denied registration papers and food coupons. Forced to live hand to mouth, an unknown number of the provincial unfortunates were rounded up as vagrants and sent to their deaths. There were also instances in which “German-blooded” wives volunteered to accompany their Jewish husbands in cattle cars leaving from the Aspang depot. In another case, Dr. Waldamir Hartlieb appeared before Alois Brunner to plead for the

38 39 40

WVW, III, 290–1. Ibid., 223–4. Mary Felsteiner, “Alois Brunner, ‘Eichmann’s Best Tool,” Simon Wiesenthal Multimedia Center, Annual 3, 1.

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life of the Jewish wife who had divorced him in 1939. The SS officer responded by dictating a deportation order in Hartlieb’s presence to Theresienstadt, where his estranged spouse perished soon after arrival.41 Schirach and his associates clearly intended to rid Vienna of “nonprivileged” Jews once the opportunity arose by compelling them to receive food coupons from the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, even though Aryan partners technically had the right to procure the rations stamps from the civil authorities. On 8 June 1942, an official in the Gauleitung complained that attempts to register “privileged” Jews for deportation had met only partial success. Of 3,618 known individuals, he wrote, few if any could be slated for resettlement. “Most are politically inactive and have completely fallen out with their own people. Others constitute a core of political trouble-makers and are firmly rooted among the [Christian Social] Blacks, especially those who practice the Christian religion.” On the other hand, all intermarried couples were required to report twice a year to the Gestapo, where specially trained agents encouraged them to divorce as the best means of ensuring fair treatment for both spouses.42 That the divorce rate declined after 1942 suggests that most couples remained unconvinced. Beginning in late July of 1942, the Gestapo took over the arrest of Jews from the uniformed police. As the records of the security men survived the war, it is possible to get a clearer picture of the fate of those in mixed marriages caught up in Hitler’s net. Between 27 July 1942 and 24 January 1945, municipal Gestapo agents arrested 139 intermarried partners, of whom eighty-two (59 percent) were men and fifty-seven (41 percent) women. Exactly half of all those taken into custody lived in “privileged mixed marriages,” roughly a third in simple or “nonprivileged” unions, and the rest in an unrecorded matrimonial relationship. Three of the accused were “non-Jewish.” Aside from a handful of individuals, those seized by Nazi plainclothesmen were placed in “protective custody” for two to three months. Upon release they were usually packed off to concentration camps from which few returned.43 That half of the intermarried Jews picked up by the Gestapo in Vienna were “privileged” was by no means a coincidence. In autumn of 41

42

43

For details see Rosenkranz, Verfolgung, 297–303 ff. See also Safrian, Die Eichmann Männer, 175–9. Rosenkranz, Verfolgung, 301–2. See also the recollections of Emil Gottesmann in Jüdische Schicksale, 214–15. DÖW: Geheime Staatspolizei, Stapoleitstelle Wien. Tagesberichte (TB) 27 July 1942–24 January 1945.


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1942, Eichmann and the RSHA had succeeded in developing a plan to deport all intermarried Jews in Greater Germany by arresting them individually on criminal charges, usually for minor infractions. Although cumbersome and inefficient, this approach enabled the regime to transport Jews living in mixed marriages to their deaths without arousing popular unrest. On 9 October 1942, Martin Bormann issued a circular urging party members to report “Jewish offenses” to local group leaders. The Deputy Führer order thus placed previously protected Jews in “grave danger.”44 Gender Differences Wives and Mothers Although the police and Gestapo in Vienna hardly took what might be called a “gendered” approach to seizing Jewish partners in mixed marriages, we have just seen that they apprehended more men than women. Nearly all of the intermarried victims of both sexes violated one or more of the petty rules imposed by Hitler’s regime, most frequently neglecting to acquire Jewish identification papers, to wear the Star of David in public, or to leave Vienna without written authorization. There appear to have been some instances in which Jewish wives simply did not understand or comprehend their status in the Third Reich. In other cases, they chose to take a chance by dining out, watching a popular movie, or meeting friends in recreational facilities believed to be free of police surveillance.45 While the authorities rarely refrained from savagery, they occasionally treated their prey with relative leniency. On 5 November 1942, for example, the Gestapo picked up two middle-aged sisters, Hermine Krasa and Cäcilie Ramhapp, for failing to adopt the middle name “Sara” at the conclusion of a lengthy “ancestral dispute.” As both women were Roman Catholic converts married to “German-blooded” husbands, the authorities released them after three weeks’ detention “out of concern for the children of a mixed marriage.” In a similar case, Maria “Sara” Krahsl, although recently divorced and unregistered as a Jew, was 44

45

Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart, 203–4. For additional details see Leugers, Berlin, Rosenstraße 2–4, 11–17. According to a recent memoir, it was not uncommon for unmarried girls who counted as Jews “Geltungsjüdin” to spend summer afternoons on the banks of the Danubian Canal or in other public places forbidden to Jews. Two even accepted invitations from German officers to dine in a fashionable restaurant on the Rotenturmstraße. Neuwirth, Glockengasse 29, 107–11.

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allowed to go free after twenty-one days in jail in order to take care of her six children.46 These were the exceptions, not the rule. There were a number of intermarried Jewish wives who defied curfew regulations or regularly socialized in public places. Exempt from wearing the star, they seem to have assumed it possible to avoid detection as “Jews.” Once seized by the Gestapo, however, they stood little chance of survival. On 27 July 1942, Hilda “Sara” Frenzl was picked up for socializing with soldiers in a nearby military installation. Because her husband was most likely at the front, the authorities placed her in protective custody for three months. Upon release, they deported her to Auschwitz where she perished on 6 January 1943.47 Shortly after Frenzl’s arrest, Gisela “Sara” Gerber fell prey to the Gestapo for frequenting coffee houses, going to movies, and engaging in conversation with other men in the absence of her husband. “It was even possible,” according to the arrest record, “for her to associate with several Aryan persons from whom she concealed her Jewish identity.” As a consequence, Gerber was dispatched to a concentration camp.48 Among other intermarried wives to suffer a similar fate were Johanna “Sara” Berger for repeatedly refusing to produce Jewish identity papers, Stefanie “Sara” Hoppe for vagrancy, and Edith “Sara” Chinna for attending the theater and consulting an Aryan physician. On the other hand, Herta “Sara” Weiser received a mild threeweek jail sentence for leaving Vienna on a short excursion without her “German-blooded” spouse.49 Overall, comparatively few intermarried Jewish women fell prey to the authorities for failure to produce Jewish identification. Because those living in “privileged” unions were exempt from wearing the star, they were able to shop or move about Vienna with relative impunity. Between January 1943 and the end of the war, only a half dozen wives were arrested on charges of improper identification, four of whom had recently divorced without bothering to acquire new papers. Of the others picked up by the Gestapo, most were charged with subversive slander, leaving the municipality without authorization, hiding Jewish relatives, or black marketeering, particularly in ration coupons. 46 47 48 49

Gestapo TB: 6–9 November 1942; 19–21 October 1943. Ibid., 29–31 July 1942; DÖW, Namensliste. Gestapo, TB: 7–10 August 1942. Gestapo, TB, 1–3 December 1942; 19–22 March 1943; 8–10 December 1942; 23–26 October 1943. Both Chinna and Hoppe later perished in Auschwitz. DÖW, Namensliste.


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On 21 May 1943, the Nazi authorities arrested Emma “Sara” Brauer and Gisela “Sara” Ptuschögl for “repeatedly speaking in derogatory terms about the outcome of the war.” Five months later, another intermarried housewife, thirty-six year old Gisela “Sara” Zuckerhut was placed in protective custody for spreading “annoying, subversive rumors” in various markets and shops.50 In another case, Elisabeth “Sara” Potterman physically assaulted a “German-blooded” woman following a nasty exchange of words, presumably about the deteriorating German fortunes of war.51 Even before Stalingrad, it was not uncommon for Viennese housewives to go on scrounging expeditions in the countryside to purchase foodstuffs. Among them were a number of intermarried Jews, some of whom also sought refuge from persecution or deportation. For those who were apprehended, there was little chance of survival. On 20 November 1942, for example, the police arrested a fifty-year-old housewife, Lili “Sara” Gampl, in Wallsee, a small resort town in the northern Mostviertel. Although married to an Aryan, she had left Vienna without authorization, purchased “restricted goods,” and tried to pass as a “Mischling of the First Degree.” After arraignment and interrogation, the Gestapo placed Gampl in protective custody, subsequently deporting her to Auschwitz, where she perished on 15 August 1943.52 At least two other helpless women experienced a conjoined fate, although under somewhat different circumstances. On 3 February 1943, the recently widowed Olga Maria “Sara” Lange was apprehended in Mariazell, a picturesque town in Styria. Hoping to avoid deportation following the death of her husband, she appears to have been caught shortly after stepping off the train. Within days, she was “evacuated” to Auschwitz. The following year, the thirty-seven-year-old milliner, Hermine “Sara” Hutka, stalked out of her home in the wake of what appears to have been a lengthy marital dispute with her “Germanblooded” husband. Relying on forged identity papers, she settled on a farm where she was soon arrested and dispatched to a concentration camp. In addition to these unfortunates, another intermarried spouse, Frieda “Sara” Hejudik, mentioned in the previous chapter, was to lose her life in Auschwitz for attempting to emigrate illegally to Hungary.53 Meanwhile, as we have already noted, Eichmann and the RSHA were prepared to fulfill Hitler’s wish to deport all Jews from Greater Germany.

50 51 52 53

Gestapo, TB: 22–26 May 1943; 29–31 October 1943. Gestapo, TB: 1–3 April 1944. Gestapo, TB: 20–23 November 1942 DÖW, Mitteilungen, 186 (April, 2008), 1. Gestapo, TB: 2–4 February 1943; 28–31 March 1943.

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Even though the status of intermarried families remained technically unchanged, both the RSHA and Goebbels, as Gauleiter of Berlin, drew up plans during the climactic battle of Stalingrad for a final roundup that would include childless non-Aryans, especially those working in armaments factories where, it was feared, they might engage in sabotage.54 As mentioned previously, only 8,053 Jews were still living in Vienna as of 1 January 1943, of whom 5,564 were in mixed marriages. Because nearly all able-bodied Jewish men and women were employed in scattered light industrial enterprises or forced to slave as garbage collectors, street sweepers, or waste-disposal sorters, no mass Gestapo sweep took place in Vienna as occurred in Berlin during the now famous Fabrikaktion of 27 March 1943. Instead, both the District Labor Office and the Wehrmacht managed to impress all but 10 percent of the entire Viennese Jewish population, including those in mixed marriages, into dangerous and unsanitary work by the end of 1944.55 Under these circumstances it is not surprising that most of the intermarried Jewish women picked up by the Nazi authorities in the last years of the war were apprehended on charges of hiding Jewish relatives, absenteeism, or some form of black marketeering. Nor should it come as a shock that nearly all died in police custody or in a concentration camp. Shortly before Christmas of 1942, Gestapo agents raided the home of Therese Lichtblau, a forty-five-year-old Aryan housewife once married to a Jew. The mother of a daughter and two sons who “counted as Jews” (“Geltungsjuden”), she had managed to conceal a Jewish couple until her eldest son, Kurt, was able to escort the pair to the Swiss border for a fee of RM 100. Equally outrageous, in the view of the security men, was the discovery that all three children had been masquerading as “Mischling of the First Degree” and that Kurt was known to have slept with “German-blooded” women. Needless to say, the entire family was imprisoned immediately and within two months shipped to Auschwitz, where the grown children went into the gas .56 According to Gestapo arrest records, at least three other intermarried women perished in the Holocaust for aiding relatives. These included Lina “Sara” Hawel for sheltering a Czech Jew, Irma “Sara” Hackl for withdrawing RM 14,200 from a Krakow bank account to assist Jewish relatives, and Susanne

54 55

56

Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart, 192–6. Wolf Gruner, Jewish Forced Labor Under the Nazis: Economic Needs and Racial Aims, 1938–1944 (Cambridge, 2006), 133–6. Gestapo, TB: 8–10 December 1942, DÖW, Namensliste.


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Avamesser, a divorced Aryan, apprehended on 24 January 1945 for hiding three Jews in her apartment.57 To the list might also be added the thirty-year old Leonore “Sara” Skokau, jailed for sending food parcels and postal stamps to her imprisoned “German-blooded” husband.58 By early 1943, some 1,126 Viennese Jews had been forced into hard labor; nearly all of them lived in mixed marriages. Because sorting rags, paper, twisted metal, and broken glass at garbage dumps meant filthy, hazardous work, increasing numbers of intermarried middle-age wives fell prey to the Gestapo, as we have seen, for absenteeism or black marketeering.59 These included Charlotte “Sara” Fraihsal and Berta “Sara” Fiegel, picked up on 3 September 1943; Gertrude “Sara” Friedrich, arrested on 24 February 1944; and Elfriede Elizabeth “Sara” Griensteidl, taken into custody on 20 March 1944 for repeated absence from the workplace, as well as “trafficking in restricted rationed goods.” Also arrested were sixty-nine-year-old Betty “Sara” Zotterbeit for stealing bread and milk coupons for her “personal use,” as well as Gisela “Sara” Pokorny for attempting to update her family’s milk coupons by erasing the date of expiration. For this offense against the National Community, Gisela Pokorny was deported to Auschwitz, where she succumbed on 11 January 1945 – a mere eight days before liberation by the Red Army.60 Husbands and Fathers Jewish husbands in mixed marriages usually found themselves in greater peril than intermarried Jewish wives. As “heads of household” (Haushaltsvorstand), they were compelled to live in insalubrious “Jew houses,” to subsist on meager rations, and to adhere to each and every Nazi measure designed to isolate and impoverish German and Austrian Jews. In addition, their Gentile wives were subjected to incessant pressure to divorce, and even Jewish men in “privileged mixed marriages” were required both to wear the Star of David and to post a similar sign on their domiciles. Until the collapse of Hitler’s Reich, in other words, intermarried Jewish husbands could not leave their homes without being targeted as outcasts. It was precisely for that reason that many more of 57

58 59 60

Gestapo, TB, 9–11 February 1943; 14–16 December 1943; 2–8 February 1945. After three months in protective custody, Hawel was deported to Auschwitz, where she perished presumably upon arrival on 22 May 1943. DÖW, Namensliste. Gestapo, TB, 1–6 January 1944. Gruner, Jewish Forced Labor, 135. Gestapo, TB, 3–6 September 1943;18–21, 25–29 February 1944; 24–27 March 1944. DÖW, Namensliste.

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them suffered abuse at the hands of the Gestapo than intermarried Jewish female spouses, who were generally free to move about starless without being perceived as Jews. Between 1938 and 1945, in fact, 242 Jewish husbands in mixed marriages were picked up by the authorities, as compared with forty-five Jewish wives. And for the last two and one-half years of the war, according to Gestapo arrest records, the numbers were eightytwo (59 percent) and fifty-seven (41 percent), respectively.61 Between July 1942 and February 1945 no fewer than 32 intermarried Jewish husbands were apprehended for concealing the Yellow Star or simply neglecting to wear it in public. Of these, eleven are known to have died in Auschwitz, one in Sachsenhausen, and another in Mauthausen. Exactly why these and other starless men risked life and limb defies easy explanation. One eyewitness recalled the father of a friend who “looked quite Jewish,” but retained the self-assurance of the successful attorney he had been prior to 1938. Mistakenly classified as a half-Jew, he retained copies of his original identification, relying on it as he strolled confidently through the streets of Vienna. In another case, a youthful friend, a “Geltungsjude, ‘used to hide his star to and from work, simply to avoid being stared at, bumped, or insulted’.” That he escaped arrest is all the more remarkable, because the police and SS regularly harassed his Gentile mother to abandon his Jewish father.62 The behavior and motivation of those seized by the Gestapo ranged from careless defiance to well-thought-out efforts to maintain a living wage. On 24 November 1942, for example, the Gestapo arrested a garrulous sixty-eight-year-old taxi driver, Karl “Israel” Seling, on two charges: First, that he openly claimed his wife was related to Gauleiter Baldur von Schirach; second, that he had all too frequently neglected to wear the six-pointed star.63 Several months later, the police swept up a half dozen intermarried Jewish men for concealing their racial identities in restaurants, wine bars, and other public places. Among the offenders were Hugo “Israel” Fischer, an erstwhile actor; Karl “Israel” Lichtblau, a onetime head waiter; Julius “Israel” Eitelberg, a former postal official; Friedrich “Israel” Fleissmann, an unemployed sales representative; Lea “Israel” Steiner, a compositor; Markus “Israel” Krakauer, a baker’s

61 62

63

See fn. 30, 39. Elizabeth Welt Trahan, “Role Models of sorts: A Study of Influences and Contrasts,” in Zygmund Mazur et al. (eds.), The Legacy of the Holocaust: Children and the Holocaust (Krakow, 2002), 80–9. Gestapo, TB, 1–3 December 1942.


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assistant; and Friedrich “Israel” Berger, identified only as living in a “childless mixed marriage.”64 Why these middle-aged husbands insouciantly defied regulations is unknown. What the arrest records do reveal is that each of them was packed off to a concentration camp, where at least one, Hugo Fischer, is known to have died at the hands of the SS.65 During the spring and summer months of 1943, the Gestapo arrested a number of other intermarried husbands who had more practical reasons for concealing their Jewish identity. Among these were Friedrich “Israel” Platschek, who had managed to keep his pre-1938 job as a skilled worker; Rudolf “Israel” Weiner who had secured a position as a butcher; and Karl “Israel” Spitz, an elderly baker’s assistant who had managed to become a security guard.66 Also picked up for neglecting to wear the star or taking jobs forbidden to Jews were two brothers, Emil “Israel” Schönberg, a warehouseman, and Arthur “Israel” Schönberg, a munitions worker. Of this group, Emil Schönberg, unblessed by children, is known to have perished in Auschwitz, as did Eduard “Israel” Goldmann, apprehended outside Vienna, where he had been laboring as a farmhand.67 Other intermarried Jewish husbands who ran afoul of the Gestapo were being supported by Gentile wives, who regularly fetched groceries, toiled long hours in shops or factories, and struggled to maintain family households. Some such as Lea “Israel” Steiner simply failed to register with the police; others like Hermann “Israel” Helzer made the mistake of consulting an Aryan physician without revealing his Jewish identity. Yet another, Siegfried “Israel” Weltreich, wound up in protective custody because his “full-German” spouse “continued to maintain cordial relations with Jews.”68 There were also a number of men who sought to supplement food shortages by venturing into the countryside to barter for sausage or produce. Thirty-nine-year-old Wilhelm “Israel” Stier, for example, even made multiple excursions in a hired horse-drawn cab. Once apprehended, he made his way from the Rossauer prison through the Auschwitz system to Flossenbürg, where he perished in the last days of the war.69 More commonly, intermarried Jewish husbands came to grief by trafficking in ration coupons or black marketeering. In some cases, even 64 65 66 67 68 69

Ibid., 23–25 February 1943; 2–4 March 1943. DÖW, Namensliste. Gestapo, TB, 18–20 May 1943; 18 June 1943; 1–5 July 1943. Ibid.,9–12 July 1943; 7–9 August 1943; DÖW, Namensliste. Ibid., 23–25 February 1943; 2–4 March 1943; 16–18 March 1943. Ibid., 20–22 April 1943.

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a minor, arguably questionable misdemeanor had lethal consequences. On 9 December 1942, the Gestapo arrested Heinrich “Israel” Schwann, a cobbler’s assistant, for accepting food coupons from “German-blooded” customers. A few days later, the security men picked up Chaim Heinrich “Israel” Trepler for collecting cigarette butts on the street, an act considered irritating to passersby incensed by such “disgusting appearance and behavior.” Within months of their arrest, both men had died at the hands of the SS – Schwann in Auschwitz, Trepler in Theresienstadt.70 Other intermarried Jews apprehended in violation of food and allowance regulations included Berthold “Israel” Hausner for dealing in unspecified ration coupons; Alfred “Israel” and Hermine Freisinger for trading in meat and sugar stamps; and Johann “Israel” Klein for “bartering and black marketeering.”71 On 6 September 1943, the Gestapo arrested Dr. Hans “Israel” Fischer, a once prominent attorney. The agents conducted a thorough search of his home that revealed pieces of furniture brought back from France, as well as petitions written to foreign dignitaries. Although a partner in a “privileged mixed marriage,” Fischer was indicted for defamation of a public official, thrown into jail, and one month later deported to Auschwitz. Joining him was Karl “Israel” Sussmann, a former draftsman, previously convicted on charges of fraud and theft. This time, the authorities found him guilty of loitering and trafficking in ration coupons. On 26 November, they deported him to Auschwitz and from there to Sachsenhausen, where he eventually perished.72 Toward the end of the war, the Viennese Gestapo stepped-up their house searches of the few surviving Jews, including intermarried families, looking for tobacco products, food stuff reserves, jewelry, or other unauthorized commodities. On 21 January 1944, the security men picked up Viktor “Israel” Schwarzenstein for selling stocks of women’s apparel and children’s clothing.73 Exactly two months later, Gestapo agents raided the home of Alexander “Israel” Schwarz, uncovering “stolen German property” that included twelve boxes of silverware, oil paintings, and numerous pieces of furniture formerly belonging to Jews. They also investigated Rudolf “Israel” Schischa, denounced by a neighbor for “insulting behavior” and refusal to wear the star. In the course of ransacking Schischa’s apartment, the police uncovered belongings entrusted to his wife and family by Jewish relatives and friends.74 70 71 72 73 74

Ibid., 8–10 December 1942; 15–17 December 1942. Ibid., 20–22 April 1943; 1–3 May 1943. Ibid.,7–9 September1943; 17–20 September 1943; DÖW, Namensliste. Gestapo, TB, 25–27 January 1944. Ibid., 21–23 March 1944; 1–4 May 1942.


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As part of a larger campaign to counter hoarding, black marketeering, and defeatism, the Nazi terror apparatus invariably apprehended intermarried Jews for political opposition and subversive behavior. Given the constant surveillance by neighbors and the police – not to mention the wretched conditions of everyday life – it is virtually impossible that those apprehended were engaged in active opposition to the regime. It was their very existence that made them appear a threat. For that reason, possession of forbidden literature or a harmless gesture of defiance could lead to incarceration and death. Shortly before Christmas of 1942, the Gestapo arrested a prominent bank director Willhem Scher and his Jewish wife for possessing a pamphlet lampooning the ideal Aryan woman. In the same sweep, Hitler’s agents picked up sixty-nine-year-old Arnold “Israel” Traggatsch and his “German-blooded” spouse for tearing up tax forms.75 A month later, as mentioned in the previous chapter, they took into custody Frieda “Sara” Hejudak for placing an illegal telephone call to Budapest. Of this group, both Traggatsch and Hejudak went into the gas at Auschwitz.76 Among others arrested for purely “political” offenses were Josef “Israel” Adler, recently divorced from his “full-German” wife. Already at peril, he sealed his fate by writing letters to friends and relatives that revealed considerable knowledge regarding conditions in Therseienstadt, Hitler’s “camp for the elderly,” to which he himself was immediately packed off and then murdered.77 In another instance, the homeless Julius “Israel” Frankl was apprehended for fraud, black marketeering, and Communist agitation. Although several other individuals were cited for previous political activity such as supporting Dollfuss, there was only one intermarried Jewish husband picked up by the authorities who had committed a crime under Nazi law. Otto “Israel” Lauterbach lived in a “privileged mixed marriage” and repaired radios for a living. On 6 December 1943, the Gestapo arrested him for listening to foreign broadcasts, for spreading malicious rumors, and for sporting a traditional Austrian suit (Trachtenanzug) that had become fashionable under the Nazis. While Lauterbach’s fate remains unknown, it is unlikely that he emerged from protective custody alive.78 In considering the arrest records of a final group of intermarried Jews apprehended by the Viennese Gestapo between 1943 and 1945, gender 75 76 77 78

Ibid., 15–17 December 1942. Ibid., 2–4 February 1943; DÖW, Namensliste. Gestapo, TB, 30 March–1 May 1943. DÖW, Namensliste. Gestapo, TB, 7–9 December 1943.

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scarcely seems to have mattered. Several couples were picked up attempting to flee to Hungary, two brothers and a divorced woman for trying to “pass” as “Mischling of the First Degree,”79 and a few individuals of both sexes for fraternizing with Polish workers and French prisoners of war.80 Seven divorced couples were reported by neighbors to have reunited under the same roof, for which they were brought to book for “racial defilement.”81 There were also three cases of individuals – including two Aryans – who fabricated papers or arranged to alter genealogical documents for themselves or loved ones. On 3 June 1944, for example, the police arrested Armin Jakob Isidor Baumann for paying RM 16,000 to produce a Certificate of Ancestry reclassifying his thirteen-year-old daughter as a “Mischling of the Second Degree.” For this offence Baumann was transported to Auschwitz and from there to Mauthausen, where he succumbed just weeks prior to liberation.82 In the Nazi drive to cleanse Vienna of Jews in mixed families, one notably repellent case stands out. On 29 October 1942, the Gestapo arrested sixteen-year-old Maximilian “Israel” Nowak, the adopted son of “German-blooded” parents. Apparently unaware of his non-Aryan ancestry, he had neither worn the Star of David, nor paid much attention to his job as a manual worker. In addition, the Gestapo accused him of “abusing” his mother and cavorting with “German-blooded” girls in “disreputable” hang outs. After Nowak’s arrest for adolescent hi-jinks, the authorities informed his parents that their adopted son was a “full-Jew.” On 5 January 1943, the SS deported him to Theresienstadt, where he survived until 7 February 1945, only to perish on that day in Leitmeriz, a nearby sub camp.83 Shortly before Christmas of 1943, the District Racial Policy Office wrote exultantly that only sixty “star wearers” remained in Vienna.84 Given the survival of 1,405 registered Jews in simple or “nonprivileged” marriages, these figures seem questionable, not least because the Nazis recorded the exact same number of starless Jews still residing in Dresden.85 All the same, the Viennese authorities had good reason to take pride in

79 80 81

82 83 84 85

Ibid., 25–27 January 1944; 18–21 February 1944. Ibid., 21 June 1944. Ibid., 2–4 February 1943; 7–10 May 1943; 26–30 November 1943; 4–7 February 1944; 25 November 1944; 2–8 February 1945. Ibid., 1–3 June 1944, DÖW, Namensliste. Gestapo, TB, 27–29 October 1943, DÖW, Namensliste. WSLA, A 1, Box 7, Folder 2: Loeffler to Frauenfeld, 16 December 1943. Cf. Moser, Demographie, 54 and Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness, 238.


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having harried an unknown number of mixed families out of the land and disrupted or destroyed the lives of countless others. In 1943 alone they had deported over 1,500 adult Geltungsjuden to Theresienstadt or to killing centers in Poland, and rounded up eighty-four intermarried divorcées to be shipped off on 10 March 1944. Between the Anschluß and the fall of Vienna to the Red Army, no fewer than seventy Austrian Jews once married to Aryan partners were deported, of whom sixty-five were men. Of these, sixteen were picked up in Western Europe, five in the Protectorate, and three in Budapest. According to researchers in the Documentation Archives of the Austrian Resistance, only three women survived.86

The Assault on the

MISCHLINGE ,

1942–1943

Long after the Wannsee Conference, officials in the RSHA, the Party chancellery, and the Justice Ministry in Berlin continued to thrash out harsher procedures to be taken against Mischlinge and other partial-Jews. The SS, in keeping with proposals made by Heydrich during the January meeting, sought to strip half-Jews of citizenship rights, to equate them with full-Jews, and to dispatch them to extermination facilities. The state secretaries argued for mass sterilization. Hitler no doubt shared the views of SS and Party hard-liners but, as we have seen, refrained from authorizing such radical measures for fear of stirring up civil unrest. Even so, halfJews gradually came to feel the pressure of new restrictions. On 2 July 1942, the Ministry of Science and Education issued a decree prohibiting “Mischlinge of the First Degree” from attending secondary schools. Three months later, the Armed Forces High Command ordered the discharge of half-Jews still serving in the Wehrmacht; it was followed by a decree signed by Hitler himself forbidding soldiers from marrying women previously wed to Jews. Other measures required government and Party officials from granting “clemency” to partial-Jews except under extraordinary circumstances such as service to the NSDAP or valor on the field of battle. Still others restricted admission to institutions of higher learning and on 20 February 1943 forbade half-Jews from employing female domestics.87 Throughout 1942–3, Party officials and government

86 87

Moser, Demographie, 54; Gestapo, TB, 14–16 March 1944; DÖW, Fast nur Mischehen. Noakes, “German-Jewish Mischlinge,” 335–54; Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, 150–5; Adam, Judenpolitik, 323–33. For the impact of the new restrictions on the local level, especially on schooling and education, see Meyer, “Jüdische Mischlinge,” 194–209.

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ministers persisted in debating schemes to disband mixed households and to reduce further the status of their Mischling offspring.88 These plans did not go unnoticed by the Archdiocese of Vienna. While Cardinal Innitzer never uttered a word against the persecution of the Jews, he had taken steps to protect “non-Aryan Catholics,” of whom an estimated 2,500 were wed to Gentiles. In September of 1941, for example, he protested the application of the Star Decree to Jewish converts and, in quasi-defiance of the Fulda’s Bishop’s Conference, encouraged them to participate fully in nonsegregated religious services.89 Nineteen months later, the primate sent an urgent letter to the Vatican informing Pius XII of pending legislation to dissolve mixed marriages. Such a law, Innitzer wrote, would mean “the evacuation of Jewish partners to the East, the rupture of holy matrimonial bonds, an uncertain future for the mixedbreed children of such marriages, and economic and emotional anxiety for Aryan partners left behind.” He implored the Pontiff to use the powers of the Holy See to prevent such measures, or at the very least to save Catholic marriages from “pending calamity.” On 1 May 1943 Cardinal Secretary of State Luigi Maglioni responded that the Vatican was taking advantage of every means to mitigate the plight of “unfortunates in many states” and would continue to be concerned with the plight of “Catholics and Catholics married to Jews.”90 Whether Nazi officials learned of Innitzer’s exchange with the Holy See is unknown. But because they were well aware of the Vatican’s opposition to the compulsory divorce of intermarried couples, it is possible that interception of Innitzer’s letter impelled them to stay their hand for the moment, not least because the Cardinal’s correspondence occurred within months of the famous Rosenstraße protests in Berlin. Even in antisemitic Vienna, the risk of provoking civil unrest may have been perceived as not worth the effort at a critical stage in the war. In January of 1944, Hitler ruled that further discussion of intermarried Jews and their offspring “should be avoided.” However, his directive seems to have been ignored or taken lightly. On 1 April 1944, an 88 89

90

Noakes, “German-Jewish Mischlinge,” 341–8 ff. Jewish Catholics attending religious services in the Old Reich usually found themselves unwelcome. Furthermore, prominent figures such as Cardinal Adolf Bertram of Breslau and Bishop August Graf von Galen of Münster never uttered a word about the deportation of German Jews, including those who espoused the Christian faith. See Büttner, Die Not der Juden teilen, 46 and Beth A. Greich-Poelle, Bishop von Galen: German Catholicism and National Socialism (New Haven, CT; 2002), 128–9. Erika Weinzierl, Prüfstand: Österreichs Katholiken und der Nationalsozialismus (MÖdling, 1988), 274–5. See also Leitner, “Assimilation,” 502–10.


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order expelled half-Jews from the DAF in effect eliminating them from the workplace. Thereafter, pressure was put on quarter-Jews to dissociate themselves from Aryans of the opposite sex. Finally, in October of 1943, Göring proclaimed the conscription of all half-Jewish men into the Organisation Todt (OT), originally a work-relief program that had evolved into a massive construction force of prisoners of war, concentration camp inmates, and slave laborers. In the following year, half-Jewish women were also drafted into labor battalions.91 While the round up of each and every Mischling in Greater Germany was never complete, Noakes is surely correct in concluding that “had Germany won the war, the Mischlinge-first degree would certainly have shared the fate of the Jews, while the Mischlinge-second degree would probably have been subjected, at least to selective sterilization and further discrimination.”92 Given the virulent Judeophobia prevailing in Vienna, it is hardly surprising that local Nazi officials paid close attention to the large number of mixed breeds surviving in the city. Their concern was shared by the general populace, most of whom resented the special status bestowed on half-Jews by the Nuremberg Laws, as well as the immunity they enjoyed from the harsh measures imposed upon non-Aryan kin. Shortly after the outbreak of war, the District Kinship Office issued an in-house circular requiring Party leaders and members known or suspected to have the slightest trace of Jewish blood to be reported, registered, and expelled from the NSDAP. “We must under all circumstances,” the document stated, “be the trustees of the untarnished shield of National Socialist honor and ensure the total implementation of the Party program.”93 Policing “Interracial” Love Affairs In point of fact, Nazi judicial authorities had been zealously investigating illicit and adulterous mixed relationships ever since the Anschluß. They and the police proceeded under § 2 of the Nuremberg Laws, which criminalized extramarital relations between Jews and “German-blooded” women. The law stipulated that only men could be prosecuted for racial defilement (Rassenschande), but female partners of those tried for cohabitation or

91

92 93

Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, 270–7; Adam, Judenpolitik, 323–31; Noakes, “German-Jewish Mischlinge,” 350; Tent, In the Shadow of the Holocaust, 148–50. Noakes, “German-Jewish Mischlinge,” 354. WSLA, A 1, Box 25: Rundläufer XI (n.d.).

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adultery, especially Jewish women, were usually held in protective custody for months following the legal proceedings or, after September of 1941, deported to ghettos or killing centers in Eastern Europe. The sentences meted out to men convicted of “dishonoring the race” ranged from one to three years of penal servitude as well as the loss of citizenship rights. For most Jewish men conviction also meant death.94 The exact number of Viennese brought to book for “racial” sexual offences during the Anschluß era is not altogether clear. Between 1938 and 1943, at least 160 cases were filed in the Viennese Court for Criminal Offences, but several dozen were dismissed out of hand, abandoned, or never came to trial.95 Of the 135 made available for this study, twentynine were overlaps, ten of which consisted of postwar annulments.96 As more general studies have revealed, both prosecutors and defendants wrestled over issues of racial classification, especially once deportations to the East made the outcome of trials a matter of life and death.97 It is for this reason that scrutiny of thirty-eight cases tried in the Viennese Court for Criminal Offenses between 1941 and 1944 can cast additional light on the fate of members of mixed Jewish families in Vienna. A third of this selected group of Viennese males charged with racial defilement were Jews. Three had been involved in long-term relationships, such as Oskar “Israel” Kiraly, a twenty-six-year-old emigrant arrested with his “German-blooded” fiancée in Luxembourg shortly after the German conquest. While claiming to be the illegitimate son of an Aryan father, Kiraly was returned to Vienna, convicted of “dishonoring the race,” and sentenced to three years of penal servitude. After serving a brief term behind bars he was dispatched to his death in Auschwitz.98 According to surviving court records, the other Jewish defendants were charged with brief affairs or a series of one-night stands. Four of them were Christian converts.99 Another, Josef Stier, made no secret of his Jewish upbringing, but managed to persuade the magistrates that he was a “Germanblooded” foster child, primarily on the basis of a “distinguished” career as an “illegal” Nazi. Thus after serving less than two months in Straubing

94

95 96 97 98 99

See the pioneering study Patricia Szobar, “Telling Sexual Stories in the Nazi Courts of Law: Race Defilement in Germany, 1933 to 1945,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, 11, January/April 2002, 131–63. Dr. Karl Fischer, WSLA, to the author, 29 August 2008. WSLA, Landesgericht für Strafsachen (LG f STRAS) Wien, A 11 – 2. Müller, Hitler’s Justice, 111–19. WSLA, LG f STRAS, II: Vr. 923/41; DÖW, Namensliste. WSLA, LG f STRAS, II: Vr.2172/41; Vr.710/42; Vr. 1934/41; Vr.1210/41.


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penitentiary, he was released on 27 February 1943.100 As for the others, one was acquitted on a technicality, while two elderly defendants, including an intermarried Jew, were convicted of what would today be called sexual harassment, specifically groping Aryan women. Like most of the other Jews convicted of racial defilement both perished in Auschwitz.101 Nearly half of the group tried by the Viennese Court for Criminal Offenses between 1941 and 1944 were Aryans, of whom eleven had become involved in affairs with Jewish women. All but six of these defendants acknowledged awareness of their partners’ “non-Aryan” identities, most notably a forty-three-year-old rag dealer, Franz Grabner, who between 1911 and 1939 had lived with his Jewish partner, Betti Steiner. Even though the couple had six children, both were arrested in August of 1941. Following a pre trial hearing, Steiner was deported to Kowno, where three months later she was shot by the SS. As for Grabner, he was sentenced on 4 August 1942 to a year of penal servitude. The fate of their Mischling offspring is unknown.102 Aside from another exception, the remaining “German-blooded” defendants had fallen in love with a Jewish woman or been caught up in a brief fling. In one notably repellent instance, Heinrich Benkhofer, a thirty-one-year-old technical official, had propositioned Margarethe Trimmel, a fifty-one-year-old Jewish divorcée in an open-air market on the Mariahilferstrasse. After initially resisting his advances, Margarethe Trimmel had agreed to meet him in a nearby hotel room, where on 25 May 1941 the Gestapo caught the couple in flagrante delicto. The case did not come to trial until 3 March 1942, when the judges acquitted the well-connected defendant on the basis of a psychiatric diagnosis of what today would be called combat fatigue or post-traumatic stress syndrome. The court also concurred that Benkhofer had failed to “recognize” Trimmel as a Jewess, not least because of her skill in “concealing” her identity. Although the Reich Supreme Court eventually overturned the verdict, Benkdorfer served only a brief prison sentence. Margarethe Trimmel was less fortunate. On 5 June 1942, she was shipped off to Izbica to die at the hands of the SS.103 Six of the Aryan defendants charged with racial defilement were young or middle-aged men who had taken up with women initially classified as

100 101 102 103

WSLA, LG f STRAS, II: Vr. 70/41. WSLA, LG f STRAS, I: Vr. 1500/41; Vr. 2172/41; II: Vr. 1206/41; DÖW, Namensliste. WSLA, LF f STRAS, II: Vr. 569/42; DÖW, Namensliste. WSLA, LS f STRAS, II: Vr. 910/42; DÖW, Namensliste.

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“Mischlinge of the First Degree,” three of whom even applied for exemptions to wed. Because the paperwork involved in the petition process was time-consuming, it was not until mid-1941 that the applicants, all of whom had become pregnant or given birth, learned that their racial status had been downgraded to that of “counting as Jews” (Geltungsjuden). While each of the accused spent at least a year in prison, the mothers of their children appear to have avoided deportation and death.104 The other three cases were more complex. One involved a minor who was sentenced to reform school in Graz; another was Willy Spalding, a fifty-eight-year-old Reich German film director who had become infatuated with an eighteen-year-old half-Jewish girl reclassified in 1942 as a “Geltungsjüdin.” When Spalding’s case came to trial in January of 1944, he was an emotional wreck, having lost his position as head of the Germania Film Society and had been expelled from the NSDAP.105 As in most legal proceedings involving racial defilement, the prosecutors sought to reconstruct the exact nature of the sexual relationship. This meant, Patricia Szobar writes, the judicial authorities “questioned defendants and female witnesses about the most precise and intimate facts, probing for information on the maneuvers of seduction, the couple’s state of arousal, where and how they touched, what clothing they wore and what they removed, the positions of their bodies, and whether ‘gratification’ was achieved.”106 According to the trial record, the defense managed to convince the court that while Spalding had experienced “satisfaction” through masturbation, full intercourse had never taken place and his young lover had never reached orgasm. The judges sentenced Spalding to eighteen months of penal servitude, extended on 5 March 1945 to four additional years at hard labor. While Spalding survived the Third Reich, the fate of his young mistress is unknown.107 As for the third case of confused identity, it involved a middle-aged retiree who had enjoyed a casual sexual relationship with a half-Jewish piano player in the Seitko Tavern on the Mariahilfe Gürtel. The woman, Betti Fuchs, had been officially designated a “Mischling of the First Degree,” but in late 1941 received word from the Central Office for Jewish Emigration that her maternal grandfather had been born a Jew. Soon thereafter the Gestapo took both partners into custody. For reasons

104 105 106 107

WSLA, LS f STRAS, II: Vr. 429/41; Vr.133/42; I: Vr2424/43; Vr. 710/42. WSLA, LG f STRAS, I: Vr. 2491/43. Szobar, “Race Defilement,” 155. WSLA, LG f STRAS, I: Vr. 249/43.


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not revealed in the surviving documentation, the case never made it to chambers. Betti Fuchs, however, was dispatched to Maly Trostinek on 17 August 1943 where she was killed upon arrival.108 Of the remaining cases of men tried for racial defilement in Vienna between 1941 and 1944, at least seven did not consider themselves Jewish or had been originally classified as “Mischlinge of the First Degree.” As we have already seen, the overworked staff of the District Kinship Office never ceased collecting and processing ancestral documents involving partial-Jews. This meant that years might pass before a half-Jew would unexpectedly receive notice of reclassification as a “Geltungsjude” owing to the discovery of a grandparent’s Jewish birth certificate. If the individual was involved in an extramarital relationship, the notice usually included a court summons on a charge of racial defilement. Dr. Walter Horwitz, for example, was the thirty-two-year-old editor of the Wiener Zeitung at the time of the Anschluß. Although a member of the NSDAP, he found himself classified a “Mischling of the First Degree” following a mandatory biological examination and the submission of a document by his sixty-six-year-old mother affirming the Christian birth and infant baptism of her father. Although sacked as a journalist, Horwitz managed to land a white-collar position at the Messerschmitt works in Wiener Neustadt. He also took up with an eighteen-year-old housekeeper by whom he had two children, a son born in 1940 and a daughter in 1941. Shortly after the daughter’s birth, the District Kinship Office discovered that Horwitz’s mother had falsified documents secured from a local parish. Among them was an affidavit certifying that her own father had been born a Roman Catholic, when in fact he had come into the world as a Jew who proceeded to the baptismal font only as an adult. Within days of notification of this revelation, both parents had hanged themselves and shortly thereafter Horwitz found himself behind bars charged with “dishonoring the race.”109 On 8 September 1942, the Viennese Court for Criminal Offenses found Dr. Walter “Israel” Horwitz guilty of both racial defilement and fraud, sentencing him to three years in prison. His attorney appealed the verdict to the Reich Supreme Court, however, claiming that his client had no knowledge of his mother’s machinations. He also presented evidence that Horwitz had traveled to Drosau, in Bohemia, where parish records substantiated the findings of the District Kinship Office, impelling him to 108 109

WSLA, LG f STRAS, II: Vr. 1779/42; DÖW, Namensliste. WSLA, LG f STRAS, I: Vr. 2454/41.

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cease sexual relations with his “German-blooded” lover. On 8 September 1942, the Supreme Court in Leipzig overturned the defendant’s conviction. Hitler’s judges ruled that while Horowitz may have had good reason to suspect the truth, he had originally presented his ancestral portfolio to the District Kinship Office in good faith, so that his official classification as a “Mischling of the First Degree” shielded him under the law from charges of racial defilement. Although now reclassified as a “full Jew,” Horwitz appears to have survived the Holocaust, most likely due to connections in high places.110 Other cases of partial-Jews tried for racial defilement were equally bizarre and complex. Eugen G. had been born out of wedlock in 1920 to an Aryan mother and a Jewish father subsequently united in matrimony by a rabbi. Like many other Mischlinge enrolled in the Jewish Religious Community, G. had withdrawn his membership several months after the Nazi takeover, naively believing that he would be classified a “Mischling of the First Degree.” Employed as an auto mechanic, he began an affair with an eighteen-year-old girl whom he met in the Prater in 1938. The relationship lasted until January of 1941, but appears to have been a casual affair with little talk of marriage despite later disclaimers to the contrary. The following month G. was picked up by the Gestapo. Because he had been born illegitimate, the magistrates scrupulously followed guidelines requiring a biological examination. On 6 December 1941, Vienna’s foremost racial scientist, Dr. Josef Wastl, reported that Eugen G. evidenced no features characteristic of “Jews, partial-Jews, or Near Eastern peoples.” Wastl’s report should have settled the matter, but on 23 September 1942 the District Court of Criminal Offences sentenced G. to eighteen months penal servitude on the basis of the defendant’s circumcision, which, the judges opined, should have made him aware of his Jewish identity.111 Two other half-Jews arrested and tried for racial defilement were all too aware of their “non-Aryan” ancestry but had managed to finesse or to avoid classification by the District Kinship Office. One, Ernst “Israel” Gu, an eighteen-year-old barber’s assistant, had even managed to “pass” as a quarter-Jew, although surviving case records do not reveal exactly how. What led to Gu.’s arrest and conviction was a report filed by an enraged father, who had been monitoring the comings and goings of his 110 111

Ibid. WSLA, LC f STRAS, I: Vr. 1066/41. Eugen G. survived his ordeal and in 1951 applied for restitution according to the Victim’s Assistance Act of 1947.


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twenty-two-year-old daughter. Investigation by the police revealed that although Gu. had been designated a “Mischling of the First Degree,” he had belonged to the Jewish Religious Community in 1938, thus making him a “Geltungsjude.” In subsequent legal proceedings, both partners admitted prurient details of their sexual activities, which frequently occurred on the floor or in other odd places. On 16 April 1943, the court convicted Ernst “Israel” Gu. and sentenced him to fifteen months in the penitentiary at Stein on the Danube. Like Ernst G. Gu. survived his ordeal and had his “criminal record” expunged after the war.112 A similar, slightly more dramatic case involved Erich N. a plumber’s assistant. He had been born out of wedlock in 1916 to a Gentile mother who had him baptized a Roman Catholic. Soon after the Great War, however, the mother married her Jewish partner and enrolled her fouryear-old toddler in the Jewish Religious Community. In 1937 N. became engaged to a seventeen-year-old girl, who became pregnant, and on 31 July 1938 gave birth to a baby daughter. The couple immediately filed a petition to legalize their relationship through matrimony, but within a few months N. was conscripted into the Wehrmacht. After two years on active duty, he received an honorable discharge as a “Mischling of the First Degree.” Upon returning to Vienna, however, he discovered that the authorities had reclassified him as a “Geltungsjude,” issuing him Jewish identity papers and a six-pointed star. In March of 1941, he again applied for “clemency,” but was instead imprisoned on charges of racial defilement. After a lengthy investigation, N. was convicted of “defiling the race” and sentenced to three years in the penitentiary. According to surviving court and police records, he was incarcerated initially at Stein, but on 7 December 1942 remanded to the Gestapo. Miraculously, he emerged from his ordeal in 1945 and within a year cleared his record of criminal wrongdoing. Whether he subsequently married the mother of his child is unknown.113 Interestingly, four Mischlinge tried before the Viennese Court for Criminal Offenses in Vienna between 1941 and 1944 were acquitted, though in two cases with paradoxically disastrous outcomes. Fritz “Israel” H. born in 1914, had been a medical student prior to the Anschluß. The son of an intermarried couple, he had been classified as “counting as a Jew” (Geltungsjude) and thus expelled from the University of Vienna. He then began a flirtation with a thirty-year-old Aryan receptionist in 112 113

WSLA, LG f STRAS, I: Vr. 1066/41. WSLA, LG f STASA, I: Vr. 2846/41.

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a photo shop, proposing marriage and even offering her an engagement ring. Once brought before the magistrates, however, the State Prosecutor failed to provide convincing evidence that the couple had even held hands. Further, the judges were impressed by the testimony and the “mature deportment” of the receptionist who was five years older than the “immature defendant.” On 25 April, H. was acquitted and released from custody. His subsequent fate is unknown.114 In a rather curious case, the thirty-two-year-old Oskar “Israel” M. was booked by the police on 6 April 1941 for “defiling the race.” During the subsequent trial, M. admitted to have cohabited with Margarethe C. for ten years, a woman who in 1937 had born him a child. His attorney was able to demonstrate, however, that the couple had broken up in early 1938, owing largely to a serious illness contracted by C. who in any case appeared disoriented and inconsistent in her testimony before the judges. On 28 July 1941 the court found M. not guilty and released him from custody. Although still classified as a “Geltungsjude,” he survived the Anschluß years, quite possibly because he had withdrawn from the Jewish Religious Community in 1937. Even so, his record was not expunged until 1951.115 Erich “Israel” Schüller and his brother Rene were young men at the time of the Anschluß – the former born in 1904, Rene three years later. Erich had been an engineer; Rene, an employee of the Steyr-Daimler-Puch Works. Both brothers had supported the Nazi movement, and Rene had even seen combat on the Western Front before his discharge from the Wehrmacht in June 1940. With considerable time on their hands, the two began frequenting brothels and picking up prostitutes in the Prater and on the Kärtnerstraße. On 11 February 1942 they were brought before the District Court on charges of racial defilement. Because the racial identity of prostitutes could not be determined, their attorney argued, the two should be found not guilty. This was an argument the judges accepted both “objectively” and “subjectively,” acquitting the two defendants within less than an hour.116 However, pretrial investigation had determined that both brothers had three Jewish grandparents, thus making them “full Jews” under the Nuremberg Laws. The court thus remanded them to a collection center from which they were deported on 11 May 1942 to their deaths at Maly Trostinek.117 114 115 116 117

WSLA, LG f STRAS, I: Vr.174/41. WSLA, LG f STRAS, I: Vr.1119/41. On this point see Szobar, 153. WSLA, LG f STRAS, I: 2285/41; DÖW, Namensliste.


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Overall, roughly one-third of Viennese men tried for “racial” sexual offences during the Anschluß era were Jews, most of whom met their death at the hands of the Gestapo or SS. Of the thirty-eight individuals to appear before the Viennese Court for Criminal Offenses between 1941 and 1945, eighteen (47 percent) were Aryans, ten (26 percent) Jews, and nine (23 percent) Mischlinge or partial-Jews. Court records and subsequent research by the Documentation Archives of the Austrian Resistance indicates that no fewer than sixteen (42 percent) involved in these illicit liaisons, including Jewish or partial-Jewish partners, perished in the Holocaust, at least twelve of whom were the offspring of mixed marriages. For the entire period of Nazi rule the numbers were surely higher. Dissolving Legal “Mixed” Liaisons Much more irritating to Hitler’s minions, especially in the Party and SS, was the legal status of sexual relationships involving “Mischlinge of the First Degree” and “German-blooded” partners. Although half-Jews were prohibited from taking Aryans in wedlock, a loophole in the Nuremberg laws tolerated dating, extramarital relations, and even cohabitation. As mentioned earlier, the Viennese Racial Policy Office welcomed Berlin’s efforts to close this loophole, but was constrained from taking action until receipt of a special decree issued on 9 April 1942 by Reinhard Heydrich. In it, the dreaded security chief expressed alarm at a perceived upsurge of extramarital relations between half-Jews and “German-blooded girls and women,” liaisons he considered “not only reprehensible but certain to provoke public unrest to the highest degree.” On the basis of a Decree signed by German President Paul von Hindenburg on 28 February 1933, Heydrich both ordered the immediate termination of such relationships and outlawed all future social and sexual contact “not withstanding special circumstances.” In cases of noncompliance, he continued, “Mischlinge of the First Degree” were to be taken into custody, arraigned, and dispatched to concentration camps, those engaged in affairs with soldiers’ wives to be deported straight away. As for adulterous Aryan women, they were to be given a severe official reprimand or in extreme cases subjected to “further measures.”118 On 22 June 1942, Viennese Gestapo chief, Dr. Karl Ebner sent an official copy of Heydrich’s directive to Deputy Gauleiter Karl Scharizer, ordering its distribution to all local group leaders (Ortsgruppenleiter).119 Exactly 118 119

For the full text see WSLA, A 1, Box 7: Ebner to Scharizer, 22 June 1942. Ibid.

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why Ebner waited three months before distributing the security chief’s order remains unclear, although Heydrich’s death on 4 June at the hands of Czech commandos may account for the delay. Scharizer responded with considerable pride that the Racial Policy Office had already prepared a card file of suspects and was prepared to act.120 The following month, the Director of the District Racial Policy Office, Dr. Hermann Vellguth, wrote Berlin that while his office had already conferred with the Viennese Gestapo, the new measures would be much more difficult to carry out than originally conceived. With only three functionaries at work sorting through 300 unsolicited reports, he contended, the process of ferreting out and investigating other instances of “concubinage” within an estimated population of 25,000 Mischlinge would be both long and time-consuming. Further, even though fifty cases had been forwarded to the Gestapo, it was not permissible to take action against half-Jewish women under law still prevailing in the Ostmark.121 The response of the RSHA to Vellguth’s memorandum is unknown. But the Viennese security men either ignored the loophole regarding half-Jewish women or arranged for their legal experts to finesse it. Until the collapse of the Anschluß regime, the Gestapo did not distinguish between half-Jewish men and women engaged in extramarital affairs with “German-blooded persons.” On the other hand, they refrained from dispatching those apprehended to concentration camps. Aside from a handful of tragic cases, the police simply dissolved unmarried relationships and placed both parties under surveillance. They also appear to have turned a blind eye to unwed mothers, at least until the very last days of the war.122 In all likelihood, the Nazi authorities recognized that even in antisemitic Vienna, the draconian provisions of Heydrich’s mandate would arouse popular unrest. On 8 September 1943, for example, District Propaganda Director Eduard Frauenfeld wrote that the “special treatment” of Jewish women in mixed families had provoked widespread anxiety. His letter made no reference to nonmarital relationships involving half-Jews and Aryans, but it does provide evidence of the regime’s sensitivity to civilian morale at a critical stage in the war.123 120 121

122 123

WSLA, A 1, Box 7: Scharizer, an die Kreisleiter, 31 July 1942. WSLA, A 1, Box 7: Vellguth to the RPA, Berlin, 27 August 1942. According to the Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Deutsche Reich, there were only 14,878 half-Jews residing in the Reichsgau Vienna as of 17 May 1939. Statisches Jahrbuch für das Deutsche Reich 1941–42 (Berlin, 1942), 27. See the testimony of Elisabeth Beran in Jüdische Schicksale, 315–18. WSLA, A 1, Box 7: Frauenfeld an das RPA, 8 September 1943.


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Between August of 1942 and February of 1945, the Viennese Gestapo terminated no fewer than 120 liaisons involving half-Jews and Aryans. Of these, ninety-nine of the Mischling partners (82.5 percent) were men, twenty-one (17.5 percent) women. Nearly three-quarters of the total – including “German-blooded” paramours – had been born between 1900 and 1919, only sixteen (13 percent) after 1920. There were also seventeen individuals (14 percent) who had come into the world between 1880 and 1899. According to Gestapo reports forwarded to the District Racial Policy Office, at least fifty-six of those apprehended had been sharing the same household with their Aryan partners for years, in one case since 1930. Nineteen of the unmarried couples had children; another was expecting. Interestingly, only eight of the half-Jews had applied for dispensations to marry and only four had seen military service. One of these, however, had survived the Stalingrad debacle.124 Given the relatively large number of discharged Mischling soldiers in Vienna, it is likely that most of those who were involved with local girls, widows, or even housewives avoided apprehension by the Nazi authorities. The city’s severe housing shortage virtually precluded long-term cohabitation, so that social or sexual relationships were perforce clandestine or confined to short-term encounters. And once the OT actually began conscripting Mischlinge in 1944, the opportunities of continuing or pursuing extramarital affairs with Aryan partners diminished accordingly. It is for these reasons that most of those couples reported to the Gestapo had shared the same household for some time and were thus known to neighbors or Nazi block wardens long before notification of Heydrich’s directive of 8 April 1942.125 In addition, the upsurge of sexual promiscuity among the general population during the war made it next to impossible to detect numerous affairs involving half-Jews and Aryans, especially among the young.126 What else can be said about the 120 unmarried couples brought to book by the Viennese Gestapo? Although the information provided to the Racial Policy Office is spotty, a few observations can be made. First, ten of the half-Jewish men were divorced, one separated, three widowed, and three still married. There was also a divorced half-Jewish woman. Second, eleven of the couples had been cohabiting since before the Anschluß, foremost among them the medical secretary of a prominent 124 125 126

WSLA, A 3: Boxes 1–36. For examples of letters, both signed and unsigned, by informants see WSLA, A3: Box 2. See Bukey, Hitler’s Austria, 194–6.

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physician whose bed she had shared since 1930. There were also two colleagues of the Oriental Institute of the University of Vienna, although the Gestapo admitted that their relationship was most likely social, not sexual.127 By way of contrast, a single half-Jewish woman had taken up with Nazi Commissioner for Labor in Lithuania in 1941, another with an SS officer in 1943. Third, the surviving documentation reveals that sixtyone of the Mischling partners were Roman Catholic, eight Protestant, two “nonaffiliated” (konfessionslos), one Old Catholic, one Gottgläubig, and one atheist. The religious affiliations of the remaining half-Jewish partners do not appear in the paper work. Roughly speaking, the occupational profile of the group appears to have been largely middle class, although the surviving data, it needs to be noted, is exiguous. Among those arrested were two physicians, two attorneys, a design engineer, three accountants, a businessman, a traveling salesman, a pattern maker, four commercial clerks, a postal employee, a musician, a secretary, an electrician, a plumber, a machinist, and a stonemason. Only five of the group had menial jobs: one was a cook, another a doorman, and a third a day-laborer; two of the women took in sewing. While this small sample cannot be regarded as paradigmatic, it is nonetheless suggestive. Little imagination is required to sense or to feel the heartache caused by the dissolution of these unmarried relationships, especially among couples who had in good faith petitioned the Nazi authorities for permission to marry. A number of reports indicate that a handful of half-Jewish partners were remanded to the Gestapo, but nearly all appear to have been subsequently released.128 In one extraordinary case, the police even granted permission for an unmarried father to spend the summer with his son in VÖslau.129 There were, however, at least two exceptions. Antonie (“Toni”) Pasternak, the daughter of a Jewish father and an Aryan mother, had been born on 27 May 1921 in working-class Floridsdorf. At the age of fourteen she had taken up with a certain Gustav Amon, by whom she had two children. While she and her mother had been enrolled in the Jewish Religious Community, both had withdrawn their membership in April 1938, that is, a full month before the implementation of the 127 128 129

See, for example, WSLA, A 3, Box 2: 241/1359 (27 July 1943) See, for example, WSLA, A 3, Box 1: 241/264. WSLA, A 3, Box 29: 241/177 (1 September 1943).


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Nuremberg Laws in the Ostmark. As a consequence, the District Kinship Office classified her a “Mischling of the First Degree.” In the meantime, Amon was conscripted into the Luftwaffe and after the fall of France found himself stationed in occupied Paris. At home, however, the Nazi block warden began filing complaints, claiming that not only had Toni Pasternak misrepresented her identity, but that she and her entire family were Communist agitators hostile to the government. The case then made its made its way to the District Racial Policy Office, which reclassified the young mother a “Geltungsjüdin.” Under these circumstances Lance Corporal Amon was brought before a military tribunal in Munich on charges of “racial defilement.” On 2 January 1942 the court cleared Amon, ruling that because his paramour had withdrawn from the Jewish Religious Community prior to 20 May 1938 she could not be “counted as a Jew.” That should have settled the matter, but some months later the Viennese District Racial Policy Office had the Gestapo take Toni Pasternak into custody and appealed the tribunal’s decision to the Party Chancellery in Munich. On 9 June 1943 the Nazi officials ruled that although Amon had been “subjectively mistaken,” his partner had repeatedly misrepresented her racial identity. In October of 1943, Antonie Pasternak was released from prison but on 2 May 1944 was rearrested in Knittelfeld. Thereafter, she was deported to Auschwitz, but managed to survive the war in Ravensbrück. Information gathered by the researchers of the Documentation Archives of the Austrian Resistance suggests that she subsequently returned to Vienna and married the father of her children.130 In the second case, Friedrich Berger, a forty-seven-year-old stonemason, was apprehended on 15 February 1944, exactly seventeen months after his widowed mother had been deported to Maly Trostinek where she was shot by the SS.131 According to the Gestapo arrest record, Berger had taken up with a war widow shortly after terminating a long-time relationship with a woman who had born him a child in 1942. Immediately following his seizure, Berger was packed off to Auschwitz, but like Pasternak managed to survive the Holocaust at a subcamp near Magdeburg. His subsequent fate is unknown.132

130

131 132

See the thick file on this case at WSLA, A 3, Box 1: 241/238. See also DÖW; Fast nur Mischehe. DÖW, Namensliste. WSLA, A 3, Box 1: 241/693; DÖW, Fast nur Mischehe.

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Resistance? The Viennese League of

MISCHLINGE

To what extent did partial-Jews in Vienna share a sense of solidarity, either as Jews or members of a “third race?” Although this study has focused primarily on the experience of intermarried couples, the fate of their offspring and Jewish or partial-Jewish relatives cannot be ignored. After the outbreak of war, it is likely that a number of the half- and quarter-Jews managed to find a kind of security in the armed forces. This was even more probable for those who were able to remain in the Wehrmacht after Hitler’s discharge order of 1940. As one German combat veteran explained to his father in 1943, “being good isn’t enough. I have to be sharper, tougher, braver . . . than all the others.”133 On the other hand, the foremost authority on “Hitler’s Jewish soldiers” found surviving Viennese Mischling veterans reticent to discuss their wartime experiences. Some wanted to forget the past, others to conceal their Jewish ancestry. As the widow of a survivor of the Eastern Front told her startled son upon learning of his father’s Jewish heritage, “Don’t let your children know. It can only cause them problems.”134 How many of the 6,000 quarter-Jews living in Vienna considered themselves bound together in a “community of fate” is impossible to say. Nearly all must have resented the relatively mild restrictions of the Anschluß regime or, at some point, agonized over the fate of beloved Jewish relatives. Nevertheless, they were free to date or marry Aryan partners and to pursue careers in both the private and public sectors as well as in the armed forces, albeit as second-class citizens. Only toward the end of the war were they were required to work in “war essential” enterprises, as were most Aryans. A Jewish survivor who came to know a fair number of quarter-Jews in the early days of the Second Austrian Republic recalled them as “a different breed – tougher, more self-assured and resourceful.”135 Until further research is undertaken on the experiences of “Mischlinge of the Second Degree” in Nazi Vienna, the story of their everyday lives will lie concealed in the pages of an unwritten book. More is known about the attitudes, behavior, and fate of half-Jews between 1938 and 1945, even though the available evidence is frustratingly scant. Aside from the testimony of those seeking to elevate their racial status discussed earlier in this study, we have only a dozen oral 133 134 135

Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, 39. Ibid., 49. Trahan, Walking with Ghosts, 212.


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histories and interviews. Of these, eight of the individuals had been young adults, the remaining four adolescents. All but one had Jewish fathers. This meant that even though the half-Jewish youngsters belonged to “privileged” families, they felt the brunt of persecution more than others whose fathers had been categorized “German-blooded heads of household.” Only three of the group had been young men or boys.136 At the time of the Anschluß most had some awareness of their Jewish heritage, but were either practicing Roman Catholics or in two cases Protestants. One particularly devout young woman was shocked to discover in 1938 that her father had been born into the Jewish faith, another to find herself categorized a “Mischling of the First Degree,” a term utterly unfamiliar even to her Aryan classmates.137 In contrast, Lisa D. had fled the antisemitic atmosphere of a gymnasium in the Third District in 1935 to study fashion design.138 Immediately following the Nazi takeover, each of the survivors experienced a rapid deterioration in the material conditions of everyday life. Each of their fathers lost his job, one was roughed up by storm troopers, another shipped off to Dachau, and at least two were driven into exile abroad. In one case, an Aryan mother was fired from her position as a school teacher. There were also house searches and a gradual confiscation of family assets. Even worse, as noted previously, well over one thousand “Geltungsjuden” appear to have been shipped off to the East during the first six months of 1943.139 Others were compelled to pack their bags, but were spared at the last minute. Lotte Freiberger, for example, was put on notice by the SS on three separate occasions. Following cancellation of the third deportation order, Lotte’s desperate “German-blooded” mother made an appointment with Dr. Michael Stern, the “privileged” Jewish attorney who acted as interlocutor between the surviving Jewish authorities and the Gestapo. When asked how she could save her daughter from deportation, Stern suggested providing evidence that a non-Jewish lover had fathered her child. Frau Freiberger then inquired what might happen to her husband should she pursue such a course. Upon receiving an evasive answer she stalked out of the room.140 Johanna Sentall experienced seven years of unrelenting anxiety. Thirtysix-years-old in 1938, she was the daughter of a Jewish father and a 136 137 138 139 140

Jüdische Schicksale, 303–39; Trahan, “Role Models of Sorts,” 80–90. Jüdische Schicksale, 317, 309. Ibid., 320. Moser, 54. Interview with Lotte Freiberger by the author, 24 November 2008.

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Figure 7. Marie, Lotte, and Moritz Freiberger on the Kärtnerstrasse, 1939. Courtesy of Lotte Rybarski.

Roman Catholic convert to Judaism. Engaged to be married to an Aryan, she withdrew immediately from the Jewish Religious Community and petitioned the District Kinship Office to change her racial status from “Geltungsjüdin” to “Mischling of the First Degree.” After “failing” a biological examination, she, her mother, and “husband” moved to Mauer, where they initially went unnoticed by the authorities. In the years that followed, her father was shipped to Dachau, her brother arrested as a monarchist, and her fiancée called up by the Wehrmacht. In 1942, her aunt perished in Lodz, her father in Buchenwald. Her brother Karli Sentall was more fortunate. Toward the end of the war he was transferred to Sachsenhausen where he joined the now famous team of counterfeiters who survived the Holocaust by forging British pounds and American dollars. As for Johanna, she subsisted on her mother’s ration coupons, successfully concealed her Jewish identity, and with the assistance of an anti-Nazi municipal official, secured a position as a trolley-car conductor. Shortly before the end of the war, her “fiancée” was mustered out of the Wehrmacht on medical grounds. Both survived the collapse of the Nazi regime and in July 1945 at long last legalized their matrimonial relationship. Even so, Johanna Sentall never recovered from what she called “a fear that would not go away.”141

141

Ibid., 280–3, 676–7.


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Other families endured less harrowing personal hardships. Dr. Doris Baumann, for example, was permitted to complete her Ph.D. in Zoology at the University of Vienna. Although declared ineligible for a professional position as a “half-Jew,” she found a job as a steno-typist. Her husband was dismissed as a municipal official, briefly went into sales, and was then conscripted into the Wehrmacht. After participating in the Polish campaign, he was discharged in 1940 and resumed his job as a sales representative for machine tool firm. The couple subsequently had two children and led relatively normal lives until fleeing to a farm at the end of the war.142 Two of the half-Jews providing oral histories were not as fortunate. One was forced to live in a “Jew house” in Dornbach, another to survive on a shoe string as a single mother. Elisabeth Beran, for example, recounted in gruesome detail the fate of her Jewish mother who was compelled to darn socks and slave as a laundress for the Wehrmacht.143 On the other hand, two of the young women managed to flee to Great Britain. Looking back decades later, the twelve half-Jewish survivors recalled a sense of constant dread. They also concurred that Nazi harassment had bolstered a previously weak or nonextant sense of Jewish identity. After the war, one moved to Israel and five to the United States or Great Britain. The remaining five stayed on in Vienna, in one case primarily to be close to her daughter and to attend the opera as frequently as possible.144 The most remarkable of this small group was a genuine Austrian patriot, Otto Horn (1923–91). Born into a prosperous banking family, he was a Catholic activist at the time of the Anschluß. On 7 October 1938 he joined 8,000 youthful celebrants to participate in the famous “Rosary Festival” at St. Stephen’s cathedral, a spontaneous anti-Nazi rally of Catholic youngsters that enraged the regime. Thereafter, Horn completed his Matura leaving-exam, but as “Mischling of the First Degree” was ineligible to matriculate. Quite by accident, he secured a job as a technician in a munitions factory, where he worked with a fair number of other partial-Jews. One of these, Otto Ernst Andreasch, had been charged by the Central Committee of the illegal Communist Party (KPÖ) to organize a resistance cell among those affected by the Nuremberg Laws. About 200 to 250 Jewish or half-Jewish workers initially expressed interest, but those who considered themselves Zionists 142 143 144

Ibid., 306–12. Ibid., 315. Trahan, 82–3.

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Figure 8. Otto Horn (1923–91), Founder of the “Mischlingliga.” Credit: Dokumentationsarchiv des Österreichischen Widerstandes, Vienna, Austria.

refused to cooperate and even the Jewish Religious Community declined to provide moral support. By late 1942 most of the Jewish cell members had been dispatched to the East. However, the surviving half-Jews, feeling pushed between pillar and post, had developed a keen sense of solidarity as a group “in-between,” many of whom now yearned to restore Austrian independence. Shortly after Stalingrad, Horn and Andreasch succeeded in founding the Viennese League of Mischlinge (Wiener Mischlingsliga), an organization of relatively well-educated young men and women willing to disseminate anti-Nazi propaganda, to engage in sabotage, and to establish contact with Tito partisans in Styria and Carinthia.145 One of the first acts of the Viennese League of Mischlinge was to prepare and distribute two flysheets appealing to the war-weary populace to join in the struggle for a free and independent Austria. Unlike the thousands of mimeographed pamphlets dispensed earlier by the White Rose Society in Munich, the Viennese broadsheets consisted of only two paragraphs, made no specific reference to Nazi atrocities, but in accordance 145

Jüdische Schicksale, 326–32; WVW, III, 351.


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with the Moscow Declaration did call for an armed insurrection to overthrow Hitler’s regime.146 Because most League members were secondary-school graduates, including young women able to remain above suspicion, many possessed the technical knowledge to disrupt production in war industries, to short-circuit communications, and even to assemble radios. According to postwar testimony, the League – which later changed its name to the Antifascist Party of Austria (APÖ) – engaged in at least twenty successful acts of sabotage in 1943–4. These included recalibrating piston pins in aircraft engines, shortcircuiting trolley lines, and supplying both quinine and a radio transmitter to Yugoslav partisans. Although affiliated with the KPÖ, the League consisted of loosely organized cells, whose members knew each other only by alias, so that even Horn and Andreasch were unaware of the identity of those to whom they gave orders. Furthermore, the leadership sought to appeal to as large a social base as possible. When the original group was betrayed to the Gestapo in February of 1944, only thirteen members of a much larger organization were caught in the net. Although charged with high treason as well as aiding and abetting the enemy, the state prosecutor had to modify the indictment for lack of evidence. On 21 September 1944, the Peoples’ Court (Volksgerichtshof – VGH) found Horn and Andreasch guilty of “attempted treason,” for which there was no proof, sentencing each to six years in the penitentiary. The judges also sentenced a minor, Kurt Schulhof, to a year in a juvenile detention center, but acquitted the other ten defendants. In retrospect, the lax, amorphous organization of the Viennese League of Mischlinge saved its leaders from the guillotine, primarily because they themselves were only partially aware of the full scope of their network’s subversive activities, an arrangement that today might be characterized as one of “plausible deniability.”147

Viennese

MISCHLINGE

before the Nazi Bench

Between 1938 and 1945, some 6,336 Austrians were tried for high treason, subversion, or violation of various wartime statutes and political crimes. Of these, 833 were sentenced to death and 4,499 to long terms of imprisonment. Aside from Horn’s small group of half-Jewish 146 147

WVW, III, 350. Ibid., 348–50; Jüdische Schicksale, 326–32. See also Radomir Luza, The Resistance in Austria, 1938–1945 (Minneapolis, 1984), 168.

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resistance fighters, however, only nineteen other Mischlinge came before the People’s Court or the Higher Regional Court in Vienna.148 Three of the accused went to the guillotine: Otto Steglitz for making homosexual advances to an SS recruit; Otto Beck for undermining the war effort (Wehrkraftzersetzung)149; and Rudolf Hillmayer for ridiculing the regime’s claim to persevere to the end (Durchhaltewille). Tellingly, the red-robed judges made no reference to the defendants’ Jewish ancestry, except in the case of Hillmayer, an Aryan who had briefly converted to Judaism.150 They also refrained from antisemitic discourse in handing out three other milder sentences, except to note that ancestry played no role in the motivation or intent of the accused. In yet another case, that of Gertrude Fischer, the magistrates went so far as to consider her partialJewish status a mitigating factor. According to the trial transcript, the judges considered the defendant a harmless adolescent who had unwittingly listened to foreign radio broadcasts in the company of other young people. “And as a half-Jewess,” they noted, “she [would have] had every reason to exercise particular restraint and caution.” Although sentencing Fischer to two years in prison, the patriarchal magistrates clearly saw no reason to take the life of a “silly girl” who represented no threat to the National Community.151 Of those Viennese Mischlinge brought to book for high treason and political crimes, the case of Ida Neumark stands out as one of the most remarkable. Born in 1892, the daughter of a Jewish couple, she had married a Christian whom she divorced in 1928. Shortly after the Anschluß, she not only persuaded the District Kinship Office to reclassify her a “Mischling of the Second Degree,” but also filed papers against her second husband, a Jew. On 1 November 1942, Frau Neumark was taken into custody by the Gestapo as a “Jewish enemy of the people.” According to the official indictment, the defendant made no secret of her hostility to the Nazi regime, applauding the assassination of Heydrich and openly blaming Hitler for the war and its terrible human toll. In addition, she had continued living with her former spouse. Given the gravity of these charges, the Reich Supreme Justice (Oberreichsanwalt) transferred 148 149

150 151

Form et al. NS-Justiz, 1, 332, 476, 520–4, 554, 644–5, 655, 663–5. As the owner of a radio shop, Beck regularly listened to foreign broadcasts. On 21 September 1943, he was sentenced to death by the People’s Court for suggesting to a woman who had joined the DAF that she was prolonging the war. Hilberg, Destruction of European Jews, 274, n. 62. Ibid., 523–4. Ibid., 644–5.


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jurisdiction of the case from the Higher Regional Court to a summary tribunal of the People’s Court. On 3 September 1943, Hitler’s judicial authorities presented the formal bill of arraignment, ordering proceedings to commence on 23 November.152 In the meantime, Neumark’s attorney, Dr. Blosch, and his client agreed to an ingenious, high-stakes defense. On the opening day of the trial, Blosch rose to offer evidence that his client had mistakenly been classified a “Mischling of the Second Degree” and was in fact a “full Jew.” He then challenged the jurisdiction of the Fourth Senate of the People’s Court, pointing out that the Minister of Justice had ruled on 1 July 1943 that criminal acts involving Jews were to be prosecuted by the police. The justices accepted Blosch’s motion without hesitation. They suspended proceedings and referred the case to an ancestral panel to determine the defendant’s racial status. Owing to a shortage of trained personnel and a heavy workload, Frau Neumark’s case went unresolved. On 5 April 1945 she emerged from the municipal detention center a free woman.153 Exactly why only a handful of Austrian Mischlinge found themselves dragged before Hitler’s judges is difficult to explain, particularly in light of the regime’s obsession with the Jewish enemy. As mentioned earlier, officials in the Gauleiting considered mixed breeds to be the main source of “malicious gossip” gleaned from foreign radio broadcasts. Exhaustive scholarship has determined that Nazi justices paid close attention to the impact of the defendants’ activities or remarks on civilian morale, especially the home front’s will to resist. For that reason those affiliated with political movements such as the KPÖ, the Revolutionary Socialists, or various monarchist groups were treated more harshly than single individuals, especially young women, considered to have little influence beyond their own households.154 It is possible that other partial-Jews were tried in lower courts for lesser political crimes, or that after 1943 the regime believed the Gestapo and its informers had most mixed families under tight control, both at home and in the workplace. Until further research is undertaken, however, the puzzle must remain unsolved. 152

153 154

Ibid., 554–7. In designating Neumark a “Mischling of the Second Degree” the official indictment surely erred, since Neumark’s racial status was based on her claim to be the illegitimate child of a “German-blooded” father and Jewish mother. In all likelihood, the document contained a typographical error. Ibid., 555. Ibid., 656–748, especially the conclusions reached by Albrecht Kirschner in 743–8.

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Conscription and Compulsory Labor, 1943–1945 Hitler’s defeat at Stalingrad impelled labor authorities in private enterprises, municipalities, and government agencies throughout Greater Germany to reconsider the loss of Jewish workers through deportation. As Wolf Gruner has demonstrated, many unwittingly closed ranks to protect surviving non-Aryan employees and workers considered essential to the war effort.155 Simultaneously, Nazi officials in the RSHA and the Party chancellery proposed drafting half-Jews and men married to Jews, especially those employed in armaments plants, into labor battalions and work details. After extended discussion and turmoil, these various schemes coalesced in October of 1943 when, as we have already seen, Göring announced the conscription of all half-Jews into the OT. Several days later, Franz Sauckel, the Plenipotentiary for Labor, issued a follow-up decree that included the impressment of “German-blooded” men married to Jews.156 In Vienna, Nazi authorities reacted to Berlin’s recruitment orders with an odd mixture of satisfaction, confusion, and frustration. Ever since the Anschluß, officials in the District Racial Policy Office had demanded harsher treatment for intermarried couples and their partial-Jewish offspring. They proposed a thorough purge of the armed forces, an end to “clemency” petitions, and the suspension of trials challenging ancestral decisions made by the Viennese branch of the Reich Kinship Office. There was also a red thread of discontent focused on the overlapping authorities of other agencies, especially within the Wehrmacht.157 In an undated directive to the Kreisleiter in the Danubian metropolis, Deputy Gauleiter Scharizer forbade Party members to lend support of any kind to Mischlinge, no matter how worthy their case might appear.158 On 8 September 1943, District Propaganda Chief Eduard Frauenfeld, apparently at the behest of Goebbels, ordered the registration of all intermarried couples and halfJews, who in his opinion constituted the main source of rumors spread by foreign radio broadcasts.159 However, when official registration orders arrived from Berlin, the District Propaganda Office threw up its hands, ruefully admitting that no data on the mixed population existed other

155 156 157 158 159

Gruner, Jewish Forced Labor Under the Nazis, especially 3–105. Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, 156–60 ff. See the extensive correspondence in WSLA, A1, Box 7, Folder 2. WSLA, A 1, Box 7, Folder 2: Scharizer an alle Kreisleiter, n.d. WSLA, A 1, Box 7, Folder 2: Frauenfeld an die Gauleitung Wien, 8 September 1943.


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than census figures tabulated in 1939.160 Not to be dissuaded, the RSHA issued a decree shortly before Christmas that all divorced and widowed Jewish partners in mixed marriages as well as Mischlinge who “counted as Jews” be dispatched immediately to Theresienstadt.161 Subsequent attempts to locate and register the remaining Viennese half-Jews and intermarried Aryan spouses for recruitment into the OT met with only partial success. On 14 December 1943, the Racial Policy Office received a six-page list from the Viennese Military District containing the names of 184 intermarried Jews and Mischlinge employed by the Wehrmacht, as well as those of ten half-Jews still on active duty. Two months later, a similar list identified sixty-six half-Jewish men liable to be sent to forced labor camps, as well as 116 Aryans married to Jews or Mischlinge of the Second Degree.162 At approximately the same time, figures calculated from reports submitted by eleven Ortsgruppen totaled 415 Jews, 643 halfJews, and 499 Aryans wed to Jews or to half-Jews.163 In April of 1944 the regional Armaments Procurement Board (RüKo) estimated that no fewer than 5,000 Viennese Mischlinge and intermarried Aryans were available for conscription into the OT, but managed to register only 2,600 individuals.164 Of these, exactly how many were called up to toil at Todt construction sites is unknown, although the number was virtually negligible compared to the thousands rounded up by labor offices in the Altreich.165 Why did most intermarried Viennese Jews and half-Jews manage to evade compulsory labor in the OT? There were two main reasons. First, the Lord Mayor of Vienna, Hanns Blaschke, had persuaded the head of the RSHA, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, to import 12,000 Hungarian Jews in July 1944 to slave in sawmills, quarries, and toxic industrial enterprises in Lower Danube. Of these, 8,000 men, women, and children were billeted behind barbed wire in Vienna under the murderous supervision of the Gestapo and SS. The others were forced to work in projects such as underground rocket factories or the construction of fortifications where Viennese conscripts might otherwise have been deployed. By the end of the war, well over half of the Hungarian Jews had been killed or worked to death.166 160 161 162 163 164 165 166

WSLA, A 1, Box 7, Folder 2, Loeffler to Frauenfeld, 16 December 1943. Leitner, “Assimilation, Anitsemitismus und NS-Verfolgung,” 492. WSLA, A 1, Box 7, Folder 2. WSLA, A 3, Box 3, Folder 6: “Erfasste Juden und Judenmischlinge: Statistik.” Gruner, Zwangsarbeit und Verfolgung, 282. Gruner, Jewish Forced Labor, 135–7. Rosenkranz, Verfolgung und Selbstbehauptung, 308–9.

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Second, and more importantly, nearly all the Viennese Mischlinge and family members slated for conscription by the OT were already at work as forced laborers in a municipal program that had evolved over the years. Many had been compelled to become street cleaners, junk sorters, and garbage workers, as we have already seen. But others were employed in chemical plants, light manufacturing, and foundries considered absolutely essential to the war economy. Since the outbreak of war, the labor administration had pursued a policy of ruthless conscription that had gradually forced 90 percent of the surviving Jewish population, including those in mixed marriages, into involuntary servitude. And because most were producing goods and services at substandard wages for the armed forces, the regional military authorities had no intention of letting them go. On 5 January 1945, the procurement officer of Seventh Military District reported to his superiors that the transfer of 5,000 Mischlinge and Jewish relatives, especially the numerous skilled workers, to the Todt Organization would be both disruptive and counterproductive, not least because their “assignment to less significant jobs” would hamper those responsible for arms production.167 There were, of course, exceptions. A few Viennese half-Jews were dispatched to France to work on the Atlantic Wall. Among them were Kurt Kratochwill and Erich Hirschfeld, both of whom survived the war at barely twenty-one years of age.168 It is possible that others were employed in building Vienna’s four massive flak towers, although most of the dangerous excavation and construction work had been completed in early 1944 by Yugoslavs, Greeks, and Italian internees.169 The Nazis also forced some intermarried Viennese Jews and half-Jews to clear rubble after Allied air raids, although the numbers appear to have been minimal. In fact, it was not until 13 November 1944 that Himmler ordered the conscription of all male half-Jews and intermarried Aryan husbands into the OT. The experience of eighteen-year-old Karl Jelinek, mentioned earlier in this study, seems to have been paradigmatic. In early 1945 he was released from the dangerous recycling dump, where he had been laboring since 1941. Conscripted into the Todt Organization to construct the Southeast Wall against the advancing Red Army, he was snatched up by the owner of a paint-roller factory

167 168 169

Gruner, Zwangsarbeit, 282. DÖW, Nur fast Mischehe. Michael Foedrowitz, The Flak Towers in Berlin, Hamburg and Vienna 1940–1950 (Altgen, Pennsylvania, 1998), 38.


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to work with older employees in cutting and stamping rubber templates for the duration of the war.170 On 15 January 1945, the RSHA decreed that “all members of mixed families and stateless Jews” be rounded up and sent to Theresienstadt as forced laborers. However, it took another month for the formal deportation orders to arrive, by which time the transportation network stood on the brink of collapse and the available rolling stock was being used to support Hitler’s last offensive in Hungary. The Gestapo ordered the conscripts to report to assembly centers on 19 February, but then proceeded to postpone the departure by a week and to release those categorized as “Mischlinge.”171 Over the course of the next month, somewhere between two dozen to one thousand persons were shipped to Theresienstadt, nearly all of whom survived.172 According to Gertrude Schneider, 1,270 Viennese Jews eventually made their way back to the Austrian capital, although all but a handful were late middle-aged or elderly persons long resident in the camp.173 170 171 172

173

Gruner, Zwangsarbeit, 280–4; Jüdische Schicksale, 229. Gruner, Zwangsarbeit, 283–4. For wildly conflicting estimates see Gruner, Jewish Forced Labor Under the Nazis, 134 and Moser, Demographie, 83. Schneider, Exile and Destruction, 176–94.

5 Epilogue and Conclusions

Exactly how many intermarried Jews, their Mischling offspring, and others of “mixed blood” outlived the Anschluß years in Vienna will never be known. Estimates of survivors classified as “Jews” under the Nuremberg Laws ranged from 2,000 to over 6,000. In mid-April 1945, Emil Tuchman, director of the Rothschild hospital, estimated the number at 4,100, of whom 96 percent lived in mixed marriages, a figure approximating that of 98 percent for both Germany and Austria based on official statistics gathered in September of 1944. According to the meticulous calculations of Jonny Moser, the number of surviving Jews in Austria stood at 5,512 a month after Soviet liberation.1 Estimates indicating that well over 90 percent of those Jews who survived the Holocaust in Greater Germany were married to Gentiles are probably correct. Yet the numbers are impossible to prove, primarily because few Jewish partners practiced the Hebrew faith. Gertrude Schneider’s observation in June of 1945 that 5,000 intermarried Viennese reverted to their respective Christian denominations and disappeared into the municipal population supports this argument – at least for Austria.2 As for the 14,858 half-Jews and 5,955 quarter-Jews registered in the municipal census of 1939, their numbers at the end of the war are even more difficult to determine, because even the Nazis had no idea how many Mischlinge resided in the Danubian city. On the other hand, the records reveal that the number of those “counting as Jews” shrank from 2,425 on New Year’s Eve 1942–3 to 813 on 28 February 1945. Further, it is by no means clear exactly how many of those intermarried Jews who 1 2

Adunka, Die vierte Gemeinde, 18; Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart, xvii. Schneider, Exile and Destruction, 157.

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191

survived the massive deportations of 1942 remained alive in 1945. As mentioned previously, 250 “privileged” Jews had disappeared, as well as 531 individuals classified as “nonprivileged.” Of these, no fewer than 327 were deported without judicial process or legal warrant. Whether all of the 781 Jews married to Aryans who did not withstand the Anschluß era perished in the Holocaust, in work camps, or under American bombs and Soviet artillery fire is unfathomable. What seems reasonably certain is that 5 to 7 percent divorced and that 6 percent died at the hands of the Nazis.3 Overall, the figures suggest that roughly 85 to 87 percent of Vienna’s intermarried Jews did survive the Holocaust. A handful of privileged non-Aryans even managed to pursue relatively normal lives between 1938 and 1945. Nevertheless, the evidence examined in this study reveals that no fewer than 139 Mischlinge were picked up by the Gestapo and that a majority of intermarried couples and partial-Jews experienced some degree of social ostracism, persecution, intense anxiety, and sorrow. To what extent these survivors managed to resume a normal existence in the latent antisemitic atmosphere of postwar Austria lies beyond the purview of this study; indeed, their story may never be told. What is known is that Jewish returnees from concentration camps encountered near universal scorn. Gertude Schneider recalled, “there were no kind words; [only] the typical explanation . . .‘you people always come back.’ When we tried to reclaim what had been ours, all we got were insults.”4 In contrast, Jonny Moser, a half-Jew who had survived as an errand boy for Raul Wallenberg in Budapest, was greeted with open arms by a cousin, who helped him and his family find an apartment on the LÖwengasse – although not without resistance from the municipal housing office.5 As for Elizabeth Welt, a “full-Jew” who had evaded deportation, she and her father simply moved back to their empty flat on the Strudlhofgasse on 8 May, the day of the German surrender.6 Within several years, Schneider and Welt emigrated to the United States, whereas Moser remained in the Danubian city, earned a doctorate, and eventually became a distinguished historian. Other partial-Jews mentioned in this study also pursued successful careers. Otto Horn became a writer; Günter Nenning an editor, publisher, and popular TV talk host; and Friedensreich Hundertwasser a world-famous artist and sculptor known for his vivid use of color and

3 4 5 6

Calculated form Moser, Demographie, 54 and DÖW, Fast nur Mischehe. Schneider, Exile and Destruction, 159. Moser, Wallenberg’s Laufbursche, 348–50. Trahan, Walking with Ghosts, 214.

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distinctive “biomorphic” style.7 Among Elisabeth Welt’s partial-Jewish friends, one took over her father’s business, endured an unhappy marriage, and although active in volunteer work, remained lonely and depressed. Another had to cope with the suicide of her non-Jewish mother in 1946, but later married, became an attorney, and stated that “though she would prefer to live in Israel,” considered herself a “realist” who enjoyed “a satisfying life in Vienna.”8 Without drawing cosmic conclusions, the experience of one intermarried survivor provides a glimpse of the legal and attitudinal landscape prevailing in the immediate postwar period. At the time of the Anschluß, a forty-one-year-old Jewish housewife, Emilie Erben, had been living in a mixed marriage with Lieutenant Johann Robert Erben, an eighteen-year veteran of the Viennese police force. Together the couple had a son and owned a single family house in Klosterneuburg. On 1 May 1938, the husband, an “illegal” member of the Austrian NSDAP, resigned his position in what had become the Gestapo to assist his superior in “aryanizing” a well-known Jewish firm, Bunzl und Biach. As one of the new managers, he began an affair with a younger employee, Hilde Czermak, an ardent Nazi. She, in turn, helped drive Erben’s Jewish wife into a “Jew house,” collaborated with an associate, Dr. Adolf von Popelka in preparing divorce papers, and eventually moved into her lover’s home in Klosterneuburg. On 1 May 1944, Emilie turned up to visit her only child. Her estranged husband responded by summoning the SS to denounce his Jewish wife as a threat to their son. Shortly after the arrest, Hilde Czermak sought to expedite divorce proceedings by telephoning Gestapo headquarters to make sure that Emilie Erben had been deported. A positive answer from the official on the other end of the line led to a formal dissolution of marital ties, thus permitting Hilde Czermak and Johann Erben to marry under the law.9 Emilie Erben managed to survive the Holocaust as a nurse in Theresienstadt. Returning to Vienna, she regained custody of her son and in December of 1946 submitted a petition to the People’s Court of the Second Republic. In it she beseeched the justices to arrest her husband and to return to her the house in Klosterneuburg, a home originally 7 8 9

Jüdische Schicksale, 332; Markus, Mein Elternhaus, 203–9, 231–7. Trahan, “Role Models of Sorts,” 80–90. National Archives (NA), College Park, Maryland, Record Group 260, Legal Division, Box 38, Folder 0321L: Oesterreichische Zeitung, 12 April 1947; Der Neue Weg, May 1947; Klosterneuburger Nachrichten, 12 July 1947. One may question the inflammatory language used by the Austrian press, but the overall account remains consistent with the facts presented in the courtroom.


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purchased with her own assets. What followed was a bizarre travesty of justice. First, in the preliminaries to the trial, Frau Erben was addressed by magistrates of the Higher Regional Court as Emilie “Sara” Erben – as if Nazi legislation enacted on 17 August 1938 still remained in force. Second, she was informed that the law did not recognize Theresienstadt as a concentration camp, but rather a facility run by the Swiss Red Cross. Finally, once proceedings got under way, the justices refused to allow Josefine Leber, a Jewish survivor, to testify about Popelka’s well-known activities in adjudicating the dissolution of mixed marriages.10 On 11 April 1947, the People’s Court handed down its verdict. The judges found Erben guilty of denunciation and sentenced him to a year in prison. They acquitted him and Hilde Czermak of charges of “misuse of power,” but declared their marriage “invalid.” On the surface that seemed to settle the matter. However, the justices also annulled the wartime Nazi divorce, which meant that under the General Civil Code of 1811 Johann Erben retained, or more precisely reacquired “the exclusive legal right [as head of household] to oversee and direct household affairs,” in effect gaining control of his Jewish wife’s property rights. Outraged by this ruling, the plaintiff’s brother, a naturalized American citizen, appealed to the American Element of the occupying powers in Vienna to petition the Ministry of Justice for restitution. On 20 January 1948, the Federal Chancellery responded that “the People’s Court desisted from declaring the property of Johann Erben as forfeited because by this the rights of Mrs. Emilie Erben would have been impaired.” Following this Kafakaesque explanation, the government conceded the validity of the couple’s “landed property” dispute, but added, “for this . . . the Federal Ministry of Justice has no influence.” 11 Whether Emilie Erben recovered her home or received compensation from a government that refused to accept liability for the rapacious theft of the Nazis is unknown, not least because the restitution files of the Higher Regional Court from 1947 to 1955 had been shredded. If she remained in Vienna, it is possible that she or her son eventually received some form of recompense, though only if she managed to re-divorce her husband.12 Her family story is admittedly extreme and by no means paradigmatic. It

10 11

12

NA, Oesterreichische Zeitung, 12 April 1947. NA: Max to War Crimes Commission, 11 October 1947; Bundeskanzleramt an das Hauptquartier USFA, G-2, 20 January 1948 (English translation, 20 January 1948). For an introductory summary on the problem of restitution in the Second Austrian Republic, see Brigitte Bailer-Galanda, “Rückstellung und Entschädigung,” in Dieter

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does, however, provide one example of the many hardships endured by numerous intermarried Jews during the Anschluß era. To put it another way, this study should put to rest forever the prevailing notion that Jewish–Gentile families suffered minimal abuse at the hands of the Nazis. While no work of historical scholarship will ever surpass Viktor Klemperer’s harrowing account of his experience as an intermarried Jew in Dresden, the hundreds of petitions, ancestral documents, and court records examined here make it unmistakably clear that between 1938 and 1945 mixed families in Vienna lived in a state of everpresent confusion and anxiety. Archival evidence and memoirs reveal that nearly all intermarried couples experienced some form of ostracism or discrimination, many worrying that a Jewish partner or child might be deported. Even those in “privileged” marriages remained apprehensive, because many witnessed the maltreatment or expulsion of non-Aryan relatives or friends. The evidence also corroborates the findings of others that a majority of mixed family members “suffered alone” for the simple reason that, aside from an unknown number of devout Catholics and observant Jews, most considered themselves nondenominational. Furthermore, their sense of isolation raised new questions of religious and ethnic identity within a society that had been wrestling with such problems ever since 1866. As in other cities of the Greater German Reich, “privileged” intermarried couples in Vienna enjoyed certain rights not accorded to those living in “nonprivileged” unions. Their children were permitted – at least initially – to remain in public schools and to matriculate at the University of Vienna. They were allowed to join the Hitler Youth, the League of German Girls, and the Reich Labor Service. Until 1940 their sons were required to serve in the Wehrmacht. And while it is true that half-Jews and soldiers married to Jews were discharged on 6 April of that year, a fair number continued to remain on active duty throughout the war. When the Star Decree went into force on 15 September 1941, moreover, intermarried Jewish wives were not required to wear the yellow badge; they could move about at will, and were even permitted to keep their belongings and to use public facilities prohibited to other Jews. On the other hand, their “German-blooded” husbands could not pursue a career in the civil service, serve in the armed forces, or practice a profession. But those employed in the private sector, such as Günter Nenning’s father, Stiefel (ed.), Die politische Ökonomie des Holocaust: Zur wirtschaftlichen Logik von Verfolgung und “Wiedergutmachung” (Munich, 2001), 57–75.


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were virtually immune to persecution, especially if they worked in an enterprise considered essential to the war effort. The fate of “nonprivileged” couples was considerably more complex. If a Jewish husband and his Gentile spouse had children who did not “count as Jews,” they might enjoy a technically privileged status. But once a grown child was discharged from the Wehrmacht or the Reich Labor Service, the parents could be forced out of their home into segregated housing.13 Klemperer’s diaries as well as a handful of scholarly studies suggest that the plight of childless intermarried couples was little different from that of “full-Jews.” As we have seen, they were compelled to move into “Jew houses,” subject to incessant harassment, and forced to subsist on reduced rations. In Nazi Vienna, however, it was clearly the parents of children who “counted as Jews” (Geltungsjuden) who suffered the most. Not only were they treated as “full-Jews,” but they were also compelled to live in constant dread that a son or daughter might be picked up by the Gestapo. It was surely no coincidence that nearly half of the petitions for “racial reclassification” processed by the District Kinship Office or the Viennese Court of Civil Affairs were filed by the parents of “Geltungsjuden.” And as recollections of survivors such as Lotte Freiberger and Vilma Neuwirth reveal, their parents had every reason to fear the worst. This was because between January and July of 1943, well over one thousand “Geltungsjuden” left Vienna in cattle cars. How many of them were minors or adolescents, however, is difficult to say. The experience of Jewish mixed marriages in Nazi Vienna also demonstrates that disproportionately more intermarried Jewish men suffered at the hands of the regime than did intermarried Jewish women. This not to suggest that “non-Aryan” wives escaped unscathed. Between 1938 and 1945, at least forty-five of those in mixed marriages were arrested by the Gestapo, and no fewer than eighty-five intermarried divorcees were deported to their death. Nor should it be forgotten that German and Austrian law made housewives subordinate to their husbands, and that Hitler considered women “very weak individuals, without wills of their own.”14 Even so, no fewer than 242 intermarried Jewish husbands fell victim to the Gestapo, and at least 11 percent of the men divorced by Gentile wives perished in the Holocaust. As we have seen, it was Jewish men in mixed marriages who bore the brunt of Nazi discriminatory measures. Following the Anschluß, most of 13 14

Büttner, “Persecution of Christian-Jewish Families,” 287. Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart, 103

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them lost their positions, forfeited their assets, and received Jewish identity papers. During the November pogrom, many wound up in concentration camps, while the rest were forced to pay an “atonement tax” and, in 1939, to move into “Jew houses.” With the outbreak of war, intermarried Jewish husbands were issued subsistent ration coupons, were allowed to shop only at certain hours, and were compelled to adhere to a night-time curfew. Like Klemperer in Dresden, they had to take jobs that ranged from segregated factory work, to sorting junk, and shoveling snow. After 15 September 1941 they were required to wear the six-pointed yellow star and to post a similar star on the door posts of their households, thus stigmatizing their Gentile wives as social pariahs. As one scholar has noted, “German [-blooded] women were sometimes more vulnerable to persecution than Jewish women married to Germans.”15 The enormous social, economic, and political pressures placed on non-Jewish wives in mixed marriages help to explain why nearly twothirds of the intermarried partners who filed for divorce in Nazi Vienna were women, not men. The proportion was smaller than in Hamburg but significant in its own right. The division of intermarried couples into “privileged” and “nonprivileged” categories no doubt enticed hard-pressed Gentile wives in both cities to seek the end to an unhappy marriage. But equally important was the marriage legislation of 1938, enabling them to break free of an unhappy relationship that permitted their “non-Aryan” husbands to remain head of household. Even so, 93 percent of intermarried Gentile women stood by their Jewish men, leaving an inspiring legacy of marital fidelity barely comprehensible to a younger generation in the twenty-first century. Among the hundreds of partial-Jews who contested their racial classification or sought an exemption from the Nuremberg Laws to marry an Aryan, for example, there is ample evidence of confused identity and inherent fear. Many engaged couples who found themselves banned from the altar, for example, continued housekeeping together, which in a number of cases resulted in imprisonment or even death on charges of “racial defilement.” Particularly touching are the petitions of those who sought to escape the stigma of “counting as Jews,” not least those filed by distraught parents and single mothers. That an astonishing 84 percent succeeded in elevating their racial status can be attributed to a number of factors that included political connections, military service, and quite possibly a monetary settlement such as that negotiated by Paul Wittgenstein. 15

Ibid., 104.


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Also significant were the reports of Viennese anthropologists and physicians who were called upon to undertake biological examinations of the applicants. Although couched in scientific terms, their opinions tended to be based primarily on appearance and photographic evidence. For those filing paternity suits, § 7 of the First Supplementary Decree of the Reich Citizenship Law worked, ironically, to the advantage of petitioners whose “German-blooded” mothers provided testimony of infidelity, which was accepted almost without question by the courts. All in all, however, threefourths of the favorable rulings made by the administrative and judicial authorities in Vienna were founded on the basis of solid documentary evidence consisting primarily of genealogical and medical records, sworn affidavits, and even municipal registration certificates. That most of the decisions involving “racial identity” in Hitler’s Vienna appeared to follow established legal procedures suggests that the civil magistrates and judges adhered to the rule of law. However, the record also indicates that the authorities had trouble agreeing on a legal definition of “race,” which despite the best efforts of Nazi jurisprudence remained a vague, amorphous concept.16 This explains why so many judgments took into consideration subjective factors such as demeanor and appearance, which in sixty-six cases had disastrous consequences for the petitioners or accused. Within the District Kinship Office genealogists, researchers, and officials devoted enormous time and energy in assessing the portfolios of those questioning a finding of “racial incompatibility.” But as Party members, they also were obliged to “work towards the Führer,” seeking to divine what pleased Hitler. In a similar way, some justices may have rationalized their deliberations by following the Roman maxim: Quod principi placuit legis vigorem habet, that is, what pleases the prince has the force of law.17 On the other hand, court records reveal that certain judges such as Dr. Julius Straniak scrupulously weighed the evidence in domestic disputes, evidently unaware that granting a divorce might have lethal consequences for the Jewish partner in a mixed marriage. Even more remarkable was the behavior of Dr. Wintersperger, Court President of the Viennese Court of Civil Affairs. Although a fanatical National Socialist, the court president was also an experienced justice who pored over with meticulous care the appeals presented before his bench. Upon reading a medical report substantiating the non-Jewish paternity claims of Otto 16 17

For a thorough analysis of this problem see Müller, Hitler’s Justice, 98–119. For this suggestion I am indebted to John Lukacs.

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Himler, an impoverished salesman awaiting deportation to Auschwitz, Wintersperger picked up his telephone on a cold December day to ensure Himler’s release. The odd combination of rational and irrational procedures pursued by Hitler’s officials in regulating the lives of Jewish mixed families in Vienna suggests that National Socialist rule in incorporated Austria fits Ernst Fraenkel’s pattern of the “dual state,” at least in the administrative–legal realm.18 This is not to discount the multidimensional, polycratic nature of the Anschluß system in which Austrian Gauleiter ruled their districts as feudal barons, competing ruthlessly with each other as well as with economic elites, the Wehrmacht, and even the SS. Nor is it to deny that Hitler made significant inroads in establishing Party supremacy by liquidating Austrian ministries, throttling the power of the Roman Church, and subordinating the Viennese bureaucracy to the Brown House in Munich. But in the accelerated run-up to war, the dictator felt compelled to uphold non-Jewish property rights, to refrain from an all-out purge of the judiciary, and to leave the General Civil Code of 1811 in place. This meant that although district and municipal institutions were dominated by the NSDAP, they were subordinate to the Reich Ministries of the Interior and Justice, particularly in domestic and civil disputes. It also meant that aside from legislation passed after 12 March 1938, two parallel legal systems existed in the Ostmark. The competitive coexistence of prerogative and legal structures in Vienna tended to work to the advantage of Jews in mixed families who appealed a finding of “racial incompatibility.” While officials in the District Kinship Office and Racial Policy Office rejected the petitions of over half of the candidates seeking improvement in their “racial status,” all but a handful of these “prerogative” decisions were overturned by the Reich Ministry of the Interior in Berlin. The rule of law, such as it was, also applied to those filing paternity suits because plaintiffs enjoyed protection from arrest until their cases came to trial, much as it did regarding individuals involved in matrimonial disputes. In the most dramatic case considered in this study, the Fourth Senate of the People’s Court suspended proceedings against Ida Neumark for subversion and wartime offenses until an ancestral panel could determine her “racial status.” That said, many of the decisions handed down by bureaucrats and justices involving Jewish mixed family members were indisputably 18

Ernst Fraenkel, The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship (New York, 1941).


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arbitrary and capricious. And, after 1 July 1943, all criminal cases involving Jews, including those in mixed marriages, were to be handled by the Gestapo, not the courts. Ironically, it was this prerogative decree that saved the life of Ida Neumark. The fate of Jewish–Gentile couples and their families in Vienna during the Anschluß era thus resembled that of a people standing “in between,” an ill-defined group whose fluctuating status caused almost as much confusion for the Nazis as it did for the intermarried partners themselves. The unresolved issue remained one of identity, a problem that continued to bedevil the larger population as well. In this respect, the attitudes of mixed families in the Ostmark may have differed from those in the more tightly integrated Altreich. Nevertheless, Hitler’s virulent Judeophobia gradually overcame feelings of ambiguity, most notably after Stalingrad. Yet even before his defeat on the Volga, radicals in the Party chancellery and RSHA had been authorized, or at least not been discouraged, to consider plans for the extermination of intermarried Jews and their Mischling offspring. That most of Vienna’s surviving intermarried Jews avoided deportation and death can be attributed primarily to concern for civilian morale, although in several cases factors such as employment in war-essential enterprises seem to have come into play. There were also at least 138 half-Jewish Mischlinge who owed their lives to reclassification decisions made by bureaucrats in Berlin. The unfortunate few Jewish spouses swept up in the Holocaust were widowed, divorced, or considered guilty of subversive activities or criminal offenses. As for mixed couples with children and Jewish relatives, the increasingly harsh measures intensified feelings of uncertainty and fear for both husbands and wives. Among family members with close ties to Judaism, particularly the Geltungsjuden, Nazi persecution awakened or reinforced a sense of Jewish identity. This explains why a number of them emigrated to Israel or the United States after the war. The others appear to have devoted themselves to rebuilding their lives in the Second Austrian Republic, quietly keeping their counsel, occasionally seeking restitution, and, in the privacy of their homes, grieving for family members who had fallen as soldiers of the German Wehrmacht, lost their lives to Allied bombardment, or perished in the Holocaust.

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Index

Academy of German Law, 89 Adler, Anna, 44 Adler, Josef, 161 Alt, Wilhelm, 73 Alteration and Amendment of Regulations Pertaining to Family Law, 29 Altmann, Ernst, 39 Am Steinhof, 112, 130 Amersin, Leopoldine, 48 Amon, Gustav, 176 Ancestral Decision Abstammungsbescheid, 26 Ancestral Passport Ahnenpass, 25 Andreasch, Otto Ernst, 181 Anschluß, 3–4, 9–10, 12–13, 17, 20, 23–4, 29, 32, 40–3, 48–9, 56, 59, 61, 63–4, 66–7, 74, 77–9, 101–2, 104–7, 109–10, 114, 116, 118–24, 130, 134, 136–7, 139, 163, 165–6, 169, 171–5, 178–9, 181, 184, 186, 190, 192, 194–5, 198–9 Anthropological Institute, 35, 44, 57, 66, 76 Antifascist Party of Austria (APÖ), 183 Atonement Tax (Sühenleisting), 19 Aue, Gilbert, 66 Auschwitz, 2, 60, 78, 98, 100, 115, 119, 121, 125, 150, 154–62, 166, 177, 198 Austrian People’s Court, 193 Avamesser, Susanne, 157 Bader, Alfred, 44, 65

Bader, Elisabeth, 44 Bader, Leopold, 65 Barber, Arno Erich, 44–5 Barber, Josefa, 44–5 Bardach, Edwin, 63 Bardach, Gertrude, 63 Bardach, Ruth Marie, 63 Bardach, Sophie, 63 Bauer, Franz, 57–8 Bauman, Richard, 73 Baumann, Armin, 162 Baumann, Dora, 18, 181 Baumert, Joseph, 64 Beck Otto, 184 Behounek, Helene, 69–70 Belzec, 51, 143 Bendek, Friedricke, 70 Benkhofer, Heinrich, 167 Beran, Elisabeth, 181 Berger, Friedrich, 159, 177 Berger, Johanna, 68, 154, 177 Berger, Josef, 67 Berghammer, Friedrich, 75 Berlin, 5, 7–9, 13, 17, 24, 26–8, 32, 35–6, 40–1, 45–6, 52, 57–9, 78, 81, 84, 116, 140–1, 147, 156, 163–4, 173–4, 186, 188, 198–9 Bernges, Ilse, 48 Bernhuber, Margarethe, 37 Bessel, Richard, 145 Biological examinations, 33, 35–6, 49, 51, 58, 62, 70, 79, 197 Birnbaum, Adolf, 53

209

210

Index

Blaschke, Hans, 187 Blosch, Dr., 185 Bormann, Martin, 147, 153 Bösendorfer, Ludwig, 8 Bratislava, 120 Brauer, Emma, 155 Britain United Kingdom, 20–1, 66, 68, 114–15, 122–3, 134, 181 Broch, Hermann, 7 Brunner, Alois, 37, 124, 151 Brunner, Anton, 151 Budapest, 12, 99, 108, 131, 161, 163, 191 Bürckel, Josef, 10, 37 Central Office for Jewish Emigration, 10, 127, 151–2 Certificate of Acceptability Unbedenklichkeitsbescheid, 25 Chelmno, 143 Chinna, Edith, 154 Christian converts, 5, 9, 166 Christian Social Party, 87 Civil Code of 1900 (Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch), 84 C., Margarethe, 172 Cogalniceanu, Constantin, 76 Cohen, Emil, 43 Concordat of 1855, 198 Council of Elders (Ältestenrat), 149 Court of Appeals, 31 Czermak, Hilde, 192 Czernowitz, 76 Dachau, 104, 122, 179–80 Dachsberger, Theresia, 65 Decree for the Reorganization of the Austrian Civil Service, 11, 37 Decree on the Declaration of Jewish Assets, 10–11 deportation of intermarried Jews, 128, 168–9, 174–86, 195 Direntaka, Olga von, 77 dispensation marriages, 87 District Court for Criminal Offences, 166 Dollfuss-Schuschnigg regime, 37 Dresden, 1, 3–4, 22, 84, 124, 148, 162, 194, 196 Dünmann, Anna, 122 Dünmann, Otto, 122 Dürmeyer, Heinrich 121

Dürmeyer, Renate 121 Dux, Fanny, 37–8 Ecclesiastical Ordinariate of Vienna, 91 Ehrenreich, Eric, 50, 61, 81 Eichmann, Adolf, 10, 20, 88, 142, 148, 151–3, 155 Englisch, Theodor, 69 Erben, Emilie, 192–3 Erben, Johann Robert, 192–3 Essner, Cornelia, 145 Evan, Gerschon, 149 Exel, Anna, 75–6 Faber, Birgit, 48 Family Law Committee, 89 Fante, Anna, 64 son, 64 Feigel, Margarete, 56 Feldscher, Werner, 39 Fiegel, Berta, 157 Firmian zu Krometz und Meggel, Count Karl, 43 First Supplementary Decree of the Reich Citizenship Law, 17, 22, 37–8, 40, 48, 56, 197 Fischer, Gertrude, 184 Fischer, Hans, 160 Fischer, Hugo, 158 Fischer, Oskar, 69 Fischer, Theresia, 55–6 Fleissmann, Friedrich, 158 Forster, Anna, 54 Fraenkel, Ernst, 198 Fraihsal, Charlotte, 157 Frankfurt am Main, 5 Frankl, Julius, 161 Frasser, Herbert, 47 Frauenfeld, Eduard, 174 Freiberger, Lotte, 13–14, 179–80, 195 Freimuth, Josef, 64 Freimuth, Stephanie, 64 Frenzl, Hilda, 154 Freund, Lukas, 47 Fried, Eleanore, 65 Fried, Gustav, 65 Friedländer, Johann, 72, 77 Friedrich, Gertrud, 157 Frisch, Liselotte, 43 Frisch, Paul, 43 Fuchs, Betti, 168 Fulda’s Bishop’s Conference, 164

Index Gampl, Lili, 155 Gansel, Siegfried, 60 Gau Kinship Office (GSA) District Kinship Office, 25 Geltungsjuden, 13, 15, 20, 29–30, 36, 41–2, 46, 48, 62, 68, 117, 124, 149, 156, 163, 168, 179, 195, 199 General Civil Code of 1811, 138, 194, 198 Georg, Carl Werner, 127 Gerber, Gisela, 154 Geringer, Ernst, 40–1 German Census of 17 May 1939, 5 German Civil Code of 1900, 138 German Labor Front (DAF), 12, 123, 147, 165 German Nationalists, 87 Geschandter, Leopold, 74 Gestapo, 10, 22, 27, 30, 37, 39, 59–60, 68, 74, 78, 81–4, 92, 94, 104, 112, 117–19, 125, 127, 129, 132–3, 135, 143, 145–6, 148–50, 152–63, 167–8, 170–1, 173–7, 179, 183–5, 187, 189, 191–2, 195, 199 Giebisch, Valerie, 72 Glüxmann, Alfred, 42 Glüxmann, Cilli, 42 Goebbels, Paul Joseph, 2, 27, 40, 116, 142, 144, 156, 186 Goldmann Eduard, 159 Goldschmidt, Adalbert, 8 Göring, Hermann, 10, 19, 38, 60, 94, 138, 165 Grabner, Franz, 167 G., Eugen, 170 Griensteidl, Elisabeth, 157 Gross, Walter, 23, 46 Guardianship Authority Vormundschaftsamt, 43, 53, 55, 65–6 Gütig, Maria, 74 Gu., Ernst, 170 Habsburg Monarchy, 40, 76, 79, 87 Hack, Friedrich, 63–4 Hacker, Adolf, 55 Hacker, Gertrude, 55 Hackl, Irma, 156 Hamburg, 3–5, 8, 41, 62, 69, 83–4, 94, 96–8, 100, 104, 108, 113–14, 118–19, 122, 135, 137, 139, 196

211

Haml, Irene, 54 Hardegg-Eisfaldy, Count Johann Alois von, 44 Hartl, Josef, 67 Hartlieb, Waldamir, 151 H., Fritz, 171 Hausner, Berthold, 160 Havas, Maria, 57 Hawel, Lina, 156 Hecht, Johann, 59 Hecht, Margarethe, 59 Hechter, Katherina, 44 Heiligenbrunner, Flora, 43 Heinrich, Edith, 35, 57–8, 126–7, 151 Heinrich, Julius, 35, 57–8, 126–7, 151 Hejudik, Frieda, 155 Hekler, Alois, 112 Heller, Rudolf, 100 Heller, Stefanie, 100 Hellwig, Valerie, 113 Helzer, Hermann, 159 Henblum, Valentine, 111 Hengel, Josef, 65 Hengelmüller, Josef, 114–15 Hengelmüller, Julie, 114–15 Hertzka, Margarethe, 113 Herz, Ignaz, 115 Herz, Marie, 115 Hess, Rudolf, 24 Hessina, Christine, 107 Hessina, Karl, 107 Hetzel, Rudolf, 113 Heydrich, Reinhard, 81, 142–3, 145–6, 163, 173–5, 184 Higher Regional Court Oberlandesgericht, 35, 101, 106–8, 112, 115, 119, 121, 130, 132, 184–5, 193 Hilberg, Raul, 138 Hiller, Franziska, 43 Hillmayer, Rudolf, 184 Himler, Otto, 77–8, 197–8 Himmler, Heinrich, 2, 143, 146, 188 Hindenburg, Paul von, 173 Hirsch, Helena, 104, 112, 126 Hirsch, Karl, 104, 112, 126 Hirschfeld, Erich, 188 Hirschorn, Alfred, 120–1 Hirschorn, Leopoldine, 120–1 Hitler Youth, 3, 35, 39, 118, 194

212

Index

Hitler, Adolf, 9–10, 12, 14–15, 17, 22, 28, 47, 60, 84, 91, 138, 146, 163, 184, 195 on concern for civilian morale, 2, 19, 47, 141, 144 on concern for civilian unrest, 138 on decision to liquidate European Jews, 143 on discharge of half-Jews and Gentiles married to Jews from the Wehrmacht, 47 on Mischlinge, 1, 80, 141–4, 147 views on intermarried Jews, 14, 29, 141, 143–4, 163–4 Hittl, Emma, 125 Hittl, Johann, 125 Hitzky, Bertha, 126 Hitzky, Rudolf, 126 Höchtl, Karl, 119 Hoffenberg, Theresa, 106 Hofmann, Arnold, 69 Hofmann, Hermine, 131 Hofmann, Josef, 131 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 6 Hold, Ernst, 125 Hold, Gertrud, 125 Höllander, Dezo, 99 Holländer, Josef, 111 Höllander, Margarethe, 99 Holocaust, 1, 13–14, 27, 60, 95, 112, 129, 133–5, 137, 149, 156, 170, 173, 177, 180, 190, 192, 195, 199 Holzbauer, Elfriede, 123 Holzinger, Elisabeth, 128 Holzinger, Franz, 128 Hönig, Rudolf, 71 Hönig, Anton, 99 Hönig, Olga, 99 Hopp, Josef, 116 Hopp, Marie, 116 Hoppe, Stefanie, 154 Horn, Otto, 181–3, 191 Horna, Emmanuel, 56 Horna, Walter, 56, 57 Hornig, Klara, 124 Hornig, Paul, 124 Horowitz, Anna, 121, 123, 131 Horowitz, Siegfried, 121, 123, 131 Horthy, Nikolaus, 19 Horwitz, Walter, 169 Howarth, Josef, 71 Hundertwasser, Friedensreich, 118, 191

Hungarian Jews, 187 Hutka, Hermine, 155 Hutschikowsky, Maria, 65 Innitzer, Theodor Cardinal, 85, 164 irretrievable breakdown, 108, 110–11, 114–15 Jaffé, Max, 8 Jelinek, Karl, 150, 188 Jew Houses, 19, 29, 138, 148, 157 Jewish Religious Community, 10, 13, 15, 17, 19, 21, 39, 42, 48–9, 63–4, 73–4, 118, 149, 170–2, 176–7, 182 Jewish Religious Community (Israelitsche Kultusgemeinde), 5 Jodl, Alfred, 144 Jokl, Adolf, 75 Joseph II, 85 Judex, Alexander, 64, 67, 101 Kahlich, Doris Maria, 51, 81 Kalmus, Leopoldine, 7 Kaltenbrunner, Ernst, 187 Kaplan, Marion, 12, 83, 95, 133 Karplus, Hermann, 48 Kautsky, Karl, 8 Keitel, Wilhelm, 46 Kessler, Alfred, 21 Kiefer, Herbert, 38 Kielce, 116 Kiraly, Oskar, 166 Kitzinger, Eduard, 76 Klagsbrunn, Bruno, 77 Klein, Annelies, 60 Klein, Johann, 160 Klemperer, Viktor, 1 Klepper, 1 Kohn, Ignaz, 56, 112 Kohn, Oskar, 112–13 Kohn, Maria, 112 Königsberger, Margarete, 57 Körber, Robert, 151 Kowno, 167 KPÖ, 181, 183, 185 Krahsl, Maria, 153 Krakauer, Hedwig, 123, 158 Krakauer, Jakob, 123, 158 Krakow, 156 Krasa, Hermine, 153 Kratochwill, Kurt, 188

Index Kraus, Rosa, 120 Kraus, Otto, 120 Krauss, Viktor, 69 Krausz, Marie, 122 Krausz, Otto, 122 Kretschmer, Anna, 55 Krips, Josef, 6, 12 Kristallnacht, 9, 13, 19, 29, 83, 94, 106, 120, 122 Kryschanitsch, Maria, 43 Kuch, Karl, 36–7, 101, 114 Kundraditz-Worzikowsky, Karl, 37 Kuryvall, Johann, 69 Kutscher, Simon, 65–6 Landsteiner, Karl, 50 Lang, Marha, 60 Lange, Maria, 155 Large Ancestral Certificate Grosser Abstammungsnachweis, 26 Lauterbach,Otto, 161 Law of Jewish Tenancies, 19, 29, 138 League of German Girls (Bund Deutscher Mädchen – BDM), 48 Lefford, Viktor, 40 Lehar, Franz, 6, 12, 70 Lehotzky, Anna, 46 Lehotzky, Karl, 46 Lehotzky, Rosa, 46 Lichtblau, Karl, 158 Lichtblau, Therese, 156 Lingen, Theo, 12 Loewenfeld, Felix, 53–4 Loewenfeld, Gabriele, 53–4 Loewenfeld-Russ, Viktor, 53 Loos, Adolf, 8 Lösener, Bernhard, 24, 32, 42, 60 Löwinger, Livia, 72 Maglioni, Luigi, 164 Mahler, Alma, 6–7 Mahler, Gustav, 7 Major, Witold von, 73 Maly Trostinek, 60, 169, 177 Mauthausen, 158 M., Oskar, 172 Mayer, Walter, 23 Menter, Sofie Wlhelmine, 8 Meyer, Beate, 62, 69, 83–4, 94, 98, 113, 122, 135, 137 Mikoletzky, Hanns Leo, 13

213

Milch, Clara, 60–1 Milch, Erhard, 60–1 Mildner, Adele, 74 Ministry of Justice, 61, 88, 146, 193 Ministry of the Interior, 11–12, 15, 17, 24, 30, 37, 42, 68, 78–9, 81, 100, 141, 143–4, 198 Mischling of the First Degree, 46, 53, 57–8, 75, 78 Mischlinge of the Second Degree, 15, 39, 178, 187 Mittler, Charlotte, 123 Mittler, Stefan, 123 Morawec, Maria, 43 Moser, Hans, 12, 95, 191 Moser, Jonny, 190–1 Moser, Koloman, 6, 95 Mühlvenzel, Hermann, 101 Musil, Robert, 6 Muthentaler, Franz, 43 N., Erich, 171 Nassau, Willy, 67, 119–20 Nazi Welfare Association (NSV), 147 Nemeth, Johanna, 150 Nenning, Guenter, 117, 191, 194 Neumark, Ida, 184–5, 198–9 Neurath, Wilhelm, 6 Neuwirth, Vilma, 195 Nichtenhauser, Anna, 67 Nichtenhauser, Alfre, 67 Nichtenhauser, Elisabeth, 67 Nichtenhauser, Hans, 67 Nisko, 66, 126, 148 Noakes, Jeremy, 15, 165 nonprivileged mixed marriages, 19, 29–30, 84, 94, 117, 127, 138, 149–50, 152, 162, 191, 194–6 Notzivilehe, 6, 86 Nowak, Maximilian, 162 NSDAP National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazi Party), 4, 15, 17, 22–4, 35–7, 39–40, 101, 105–8, 139, 163, 165, 168–9, 192, 198 Nuremberg Laws, 4–5, 10, 15–16, 18, 23, 26, 29, 41, 46, 48–9, 58, 80, 83, 89, 105, 139, 142, 144–6, 165, 172, 177, 181, 190, 196 as applied in Austria, 18, 49, 196 definition of “racial” categories, 15

214

Index

Oelinger, Michael, 74 Office of Ancestral Research, 88, 130 Office of the Deputy Führer, 17, 23, 37 on Mischlinge, 116 Opole, 116 Ostmark incorporated Austria, 27, 48–9, 54, 88, 90–1, 105, 149, 174, 177, 198–9 Paragraph 37, repeal of a marriage Aufhebung der Ehe, 17, 90, 100, 110–11, 134, 182 Paragraph 49 irretrievable breakdown of a marriage, 90, 110–11, 134 Paragraph 55 separation or desertion, 90–1, 98, 110–11, 119, 131, 134 Party Chancellery (Nazi), 17, 60, 80, 143, 177 Pasternak, Antonie (“Toni”), 176 paternity suits, 33, 51, 60, 62, 65, 67, 69, 74, 78, 197–8 Payer, Julius von, 8 Pegelow, Thomas, 54, 61 Pelikan, Robert, 64 Pendl, Werner, 51 People’s Court Nazi Volksgerichtshof, 184–5, 192–3, 198 Peskar, Melitta, 44 Pius XII, 164 Platschek, Friedrich, 159 Pochtliker, Wilhelmine Fischer, 55 Pokorny, Gisela, 157 Poland, 28–30, 47, 51, 116–17, 119, 127, 130, 148, 150–1, 163 Pölzl, Franz, 69 Popelka, Adolf von, 192–3 Popper, David, 8 Potterman, Elisabeth, 155 Prileszky, Baron Elemer, 70 Prince George of Waldeck and Pyrmont, 27 privileged mixed marriages, 19–20, 22, 29–30, 64, 84, 95, 117–18, 136, 138, 141, 147–52, 154, 157, 160–1, 179, 191, 194–6 Property Transfer Office (Vermögensverkehrstelle), 11 Ptuschögl, Gisela, 155

racial defilement Rassenschande, 59, 73, 146, 162, 165–72, 177, 196 Racial Policy Office Rassenpolitisches Amt, 23, 33, 35, 39, 46, 48, 58–9, 61, 80, 142, 146, 151, 162, 173–5, 177, 186–7, 198 Radhammer, Michael, 71 Raismann, Emil, 112 Ramhapp, Caecilie, 153 Ratay, Franziska, 48 Reich Committee for Marriage Dispensations, 17 Reich Kinship Office, 4, 23–4, 26–9, 32, 38, 43–4, 46–8, 50, 53–4, 56–60, 63, 78, 80, 107, 186 Reich Marriage Law, 90, 94, 100–1 Reich Office for Kinship Research, 23 Reinhardt, Max, 6 Roman Catholic Church, 6, 21, 85, 91, 144, 198 Rosenberg, Alfred, 116 Rosenstrasse, 2 RSHA (Reich Security Main Office) Reichssicherheitshauptamt, 116, 142, 147, 150, 153, 155–6, 163, 174, 186–7, 189, 199 Rubinstein, Anton, 8 Ruckendorfer, Giesela, 43 Rühl, Gustav, 46 SA, 35, 39, 101, 113 Sachsenhausen, 158 Salzer, Helene, 27 Salzer, Franz, 66 Sandor, Kurt, 38 Sauckel, Franz, 186 Scharizer, Karl, 47, 173–4 Scher,Wilhelm, 161 Schick, Ernestine, 56–7 Schick, Friedrich, 56–7 Schirach, Baldur von, 25, 42, 116, 150, 152, 158 Schischa, Rudolf, 160 Schlegelberger, Franz, 144 Schneider, Gertrude, 189–91 Schönberg, Arthur, 159 Schönberg, Emil, 159 Schulhof, Karl, 183 Schüller, Erich, 172 Schüller, Rene, 172

Index Schultze-Naumburg, Arthur, 24–5, 35, 54 Schuschnigg, Kurt, 3, 87 Schwann, Heinrich, 160 Schwarz, Alexander, 160 Schwarzenstein,Viktor, 160 SD Security Police (Sicherheitsdienst), 37 Seling, Karl, 158 Sentall, Johanna, 179 Sentall, Karli, 179 Seranyi, Countess Elisabeth, 44, 57 Singer, Giesela Hansler, 53 Skokau, Leonore, 157 Small Ancestral Certificate Kleiner Abstammungsnachweis, 25 Sobotka, Colonel Camillo, 38 Sobotka, Ruth, 38–9 Social Democrats, 87 Soviet Union, 116, 121, 142–3, 151 Spalding, Willy, 168 Spandang, Herbert, 65 Spitz, Karl, 159 SS, 198 Schutzstaffel, 10, 13, 22, 25, 38, 48, 59–60, 66, 68, 74, 78, 80–1, 107, 118, 121, 124–6, 141, 143–4, 146, 150–2, 158–60, 162–3, 167, 173, 176–7, 179, 184, 187, 192 Stalingrad Battle of, 155–6, 175, 182, 186, 199 Star Decree 15 September 1941 30, 116, 142, 148, 164, 194 Star of David, 117–18, 138, 147, 151, 153, 157, 162 Stark, Anna, 66 Stark, Eduard Friedrich, 66 Steglitz, Otto, 184 Steiner, Betti, 167 Steiner, Lea, 159 Steiner, Samuel, 43, 158 Stern, Ludwig, 70 Stern, Michael, 22, 179 Stetter, Friedrich, 53 Stibbe, Matthew, 110 Stier, Josef, 73, 166 Stier,Wilhelm, 159 Stöger, Franz, 64 Stoltzfus, Nathan, 94, 145, 190 Stonborough, Gretl, 27

215

Straniak, Julius, 101, 104, 107–8, 110–11, 116, 127–8, 197 Strauss, Johann Jr., 8, 26–7 Stuckart, Wilhelm, 24, 42, 49, 143–4 S., Helen Maria, 59 Sussmann, Karl, 160 Switzerland, 20, 27 Szobar, Patricia, 168 Taufmann, Franz, 65 Tedesco, Karoline, 123 Teich, Ferdinand, 124 Teich, Regina, 124 Teltscher, Franz, 107–8 Tengler, Richard, 106 Tennenbaum, Ernst, 122 Tennenbaum, Irma, 122 Tent, James, 14, 146 Teumann, Heinrich, 126–7 Teumann, Josefine, 126–7 Thenen, Anna, 114 Thenen, Salvator, 114 Theresienstadt, 13, 75, 192 Thierack, Otto, 146 Todt Organization, 188 Tögl, Josef, 78 Traggatsch, Arnold, 161 Trebitsch, Oskar, 108, 110 Trebitsch, Viktoria, 108, 110 Trepler, Chaim Heinrich, 160 Treu, Ludwig, 111 Treu, Maria, 111 Trimmel, Margarethe, 167 Tuchman, Emil, 190 Tugendhut, Viktor, 56 Tuppa, Karl, 51, 70 Ukraine, 30, 148 Ullmann, Friedrich, 56 uniformed police (Schutzpolizei), 149 University of Vienna, 10, 19, 35, 51, 53, 57, 67, 76, 78, 101, 171, 176, 181, 194 Vatican, 85, 87, 91, 164 Vellguth, Hermann, 39, 151, 174 Viennese Court for Criminal Offences, 169–71, 173 Viennese Court of Civil Affairs, 28, 51, 60–1, 63, 66, 68, 70, 78, 95, 101–2, 105, 107, 110, 112, 120–2, 132, 197

216

Index

Viennese League of Mischlinge (Wiener Mischlingsliga), 182 Wagner, Karl, 69 Wamser, Heinrich Edmund, 35, 38–40, 45–6, 48, 58–9, 63, 151 Wannsee Conference, 2, 81, 143, 145, 147, 163 Wastl, Josef, 51–2, 56, 59–60, 72, 81, 170 Wehrmacht, 3, 19, 35, 46–7, 60, 72, 80, 144, 147, 150, 156, 163, 171–2, 178, 180–1, 186–7, 194–5, 198–9 Weinberger, Karl, 20 Weiner, Rudolf, 159 Weiser, Herta, 154 Welt, Elisabeth, 191–2 Weltreich, Siegfried, 159 Werfel, Franz, 6 Werner, Adolfine, 54 White Rose Society, 182

Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv, 28, 61 Wildner, Marie, 65 Wildner, Rosa, 76 Wintersperger, Anton, 44, 71–2, 75, 78, 101, 197–8 Wittels, Gustav, 70 Wittels, Gusti, 70 Wittels, Otto, 70 Wittgenstein, Hermann, 27 Wittgenstein, Hermine, 27 Wittgenstein, Karl, 7 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 6 Wittgenstein, Paul, 6, 27, 196 W., Herbert, 67 writ of error (Irrtum), 90 Zotterbeit, Betty, 157 Zuckerhut, Gisela, 155 Zwach, Karoline, 56 Zweig, Stefan, 6

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