Shards of Kristallnacht Still Cut Deep

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Shards of Kristallnacht still cut deep

by Adam LeBor

Seventy years on, the memories have not faded. Kitty Suschny was a terrified schoolgirl of 13 when the Nazis unleashed a night of violence against Vienna’s Jews on November 9, 1938.

“I saw the brown shirts marching from our window but my mother pulled me inside. I heard them shouting ‘Jews go to hell’. There was screaming, shouting, the synagogues were set on fire. Many people committed suicide,” recalled Mrs Suschny, who was evacuated to Britain but returned to Vienna where she lives with her husband, Otto.

Thousands of Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps on Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, a harbinger of the destruction to come.

The dazzling era of Jewish Vienna, that brought the world the psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, the writer Arthur Schnitzler and the composer Gusztav Mahler, soon evaporated in the crematoria of the Nazi concentration camps. Of the city’s 185,000 Jews, one third perished in the Holocaust and the remainder emigrated.

Pogroms erupted across the Third Reich that night but the onslaught against Vienna’s Jews was especially ferocious. Annexed by Nazi Germany in March 1938, Hitler’s homeland was his most devoted disciple. Vienna was a “laboratory for anti-Jewish violence”, writes the historian Mark Mazower, in Hitler’s Empire.

This weekend Austria and its neighbours commemorate the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht.

But behind the diplomatic dinners and sombre speeches lies a darker reality: of a nation much of whose post-war prosperity was built on looted Jewish assets, numerous members of whose elite were personally enriched by the Holocaust, and which has only just started to face the darkest chapter in its history.

“The financial prosperity of much of the Austrian establishment today is based on money and property stolen 70 years ago,” said Stefan Templ, co-author with the historian Tina Walzer of Unser Wien, or Our Vienna, a guide book listing more than 500 properties in the city forcibly “Aryanised” or expropriated by non-Jews .

The list includes many of the sites of Vienna’s present-day tourist itinerary such as Café Mozart, the hotels Bristol and Imperial and the Ferris wheel made famous in the film The Third Man.

Eduard Steiner, the owner of the Ferris wheel, died in Auschwitz in 1944. Samuel Schallinger, who part-owned the hotels Bristol and Imperial, died in Theresienstadt in 1942.

“There was compensation paid for some places that are now tourist sites, but that doesn’t mean there was justice,” Mr Templ said.

The family of Jorg Haider, the far-right populist who recently died in a car crash, owns a substantial estate in Carinthia which they bought for a fraction of its value from an Italian Jewish family.

Lothar Furth, Mr Templ’s grandfather, owned a prestigious sanatorium and maternity hospital. He was forced by the Nazis to scrub the street in front of the building on his hands and knees and he and his wife committed suicide in shame.

After an eight-year legal battle, the Austrian state has agreed to return the former Furth sanatorium to his descendants.

After 1945 Austria passed several restitution laws dealing with Jewish properties. No reliable figures exist as to how many properties were either Aryanised or returned, but Jewish organisations say only a fraction were restored to their Jewish owners.

In the 1980s the majority of files dealing with Jewish properties now in private ownership were destroyed, making it almost impossible for claimants to make a verifiable claim.

Under intense pressure from the United States and Jewish organisations, the Austrian government signed the Washington Agreement on Aryanised property and welfare payments for Holocaust survivors in 2001.

By the end of last month 2,130 restitution applications had been received and 432 were substantiated. In the past seven years only 11 properties have either been returned or had compensation paid for them.

But the Washington Agreement does not cover Aryanised property that is now privately owned.

Erika Jakubovitz, executive director of the Vienna Jewish Community, told The Times: “It’s very difficult, because many buildings will not be returned. We have no idea how much was held and where they are now.

“They are gone and we cannot open that issue.”

Austria may be unwilling to return much of its looted wealth, but the younger generation at least is coming to terms with the country’s dark past. The government has donated €1 million to Centropa.org, a digital archive of Jewish history in central Europe, which works with schools and youth organisations and records the stories of Vienna’s Jews such as Kitty Suschny.

For many survivors and their relatives, compensation is not just about money, says Erika Jakubovitz. “It’s about recognition, that Austria did this to them and has stolen their property from them.”

Night of shame

— Kristallnacht occurred on November 9, 1938. The Berlin Wall came down exactly 51 years later

— Berlin, one of the world’s 10 largest Jewish centres before Kristallnacht, had a population of 160,000 Jews. By the end of the Second World War, 1,400 were left

— In the aftermath of Kristallnacht, SS leader Reinhard Haydrich reported 91 Jews killed, 7,500 businesses destroyed, and 267 synagogues burned

— Between 25,000 and 30,000 were arrested and deported to concentration camps

— A dumping site the size of four football pitches was discovered last month in Brandenburg. It contains the remains of Jewish property that was looted during Kristallnacht

Adam LeBor is co-author with Roger Boyes, of Surviving Hitler: Choice, Corruption and Compromise in The Third Reich

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