“The Austrians Got Away with Murder”: The Difference between Germany and Austria in Dealing with their Past

• In Event: Restorative Justice?

Abstract

Austrians participated alongside Germans in the deportation and murder of Jews and the plunder of their property. Austria ceased to exist on March 13, 1938 but the territory (renamed Ostmark) and its citizens remained. Austrians filled key positions in the Holocaust’s command structure. Within one year, 126,445 of a total of 200,000 Jews had gone into exile after being stripped of their property. In the years 1941 to 1944, 65,000 Jews were deported to ghettoes and death camps in Eastern Europe. Only three percent survived the war in Austria.

At the end of the war, the newly created Austrian government clarified its position on Jewish claims to restore their property. In a Cabinet council meeting held on May 10, 1945 on "Aryanised" property, Karl Renner who was subsequently elected president of reborn Austria said that a law would be passed on restitution. He added that compensation of "every little Jewish merchant or peddler for his loss was inconceivable."

Survivors who reclaimed their property encountered restitution laws that discriminated against Jews and administrators who favored former perpetrators over victims. Moreover, exiled victims did not receive any compensation for their persecution until the establishment of the National Fund in 1995. In Austria, as in West Germany, a delegation of Jewish organizations created by the Claims Conference demanded the restitution of Jewish property, compensation for victims and a solution to the issue of heirless and unclaimed assets. The negotiations were protracted and produced very meager results.

Legal and historical tools of analysis expose the Austrian approach to dealing with its past. The sources are Austrian legislation, archives of the Claims Conference and other primary and secondary texts. Existing literature tends to attribute the refusal to grant adequate remedies to survivors to the vital lie concerning the first victim status of Austria. This approach would not have succeeded without international support. The object of this paper is to present a broader range of reasons for the divergence between the Austrian and West German models of restorative justice.

Author

• Rachel Blumenthal, The Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry