Roamer: Many tried to escape Austria’s holocaust but were rejected
A job creation scheme made Northern Ireland a much-coveted haven for persecuted Jews before WWII. A lucky few were granted entry, but many more were murdered in the Holocaust, revealed in a new book by journalist and radio/TV producer Noel Russell.
When a short news item appeared in a Jewish newspaper in Vienna in August 1938, hundreds responded. The report detailed a Northern Ireland government scheme to reduce the chronically high unemployment of over 100,000.
It was aimed at creating jobs, not helping Europe’s persecuted Jews, but the Stormont government was open to applications from employers, workers and highly skilled trainers who could provide work for local people.
Replies came from people in many professions and occupations including the textile and clothing industry, leather workers, musicians, photographers and fancy goods makers. The vast majority were highly qualified and skilled men and women. Over 300 PRONI files contain the names of more than 700 applicants, mostly from Vienna.
Behind those named in the letters were hundreds, if not thousands, of unnamed employees, relatives, and colleagues. The applicants had been victims of intense persecution for the previous six months.
On 11 March 1938 the German army invaded Austria, and immediately the SS and thousands of Austrian Nazi anti-Semites took part in a vicious campaign against the country’s 185,000 Jews, of whom 175,000 lived in Vienna.
Across Austria, Jews were attacked on the streets, in their homes and workplaces, and robbed of money, possessions and property. So destructive was this ‘wild’, unofficial terror that even the SS was forced to threaten legal action against their fellow Nazis unless it stopped. The Nazi dictatorship immediately began official persecution, sending thousands of Jews, political opponents and officials to concentration camps.
They evicted Vienna’s Jews from their homes, sacked them from their jobs and confiscated their businesses. All this was aimed at forcing Jews to emigrate while filling the coffers of the Hitler regime.
After Warsaw and Budapest, Vienna had the third largest Jewish population in Europe, making outstanding contributions to science, mathematics, philosophy, literature, economics, psychology, music, painting, sculpture and architecture.
It was the city of Freud, Mahler, and Klimt, among so many others. Jewish business people and skilled workers played a significant role in building up the Austrian economy, and Jews were ubiquitous in the medical, legal, and artistic professions too. But thousands of Jewish men and women also worked in low paid jobs.
Along with its cultural achievements, Vienna was also a breeding ground for anti-Semitism so virulent that the measures developed there in a few months in 1938, the so-called ‘Vienna Model’, became the blueprint for Nazi persecution and ultimately for Nazi genocide throughout occupied Europe. When Austria was badly hit by the depressions of the 1930s, its Jews were blamed and victimised, though they had played a key role in building up the economy.
Stormont’s civil servants appraised and rejected most of the Viennese applicants, who were simply told they had been refused. Some didn’t even receive a reply. A reasonable estimate is that up to 100 were granted entry under the scheme. Several of these created significant employment, particularly after WWII started in September 1939, and in many cases for several decades afterwards.
Of the people named in the letters and refused entry by the NI Ministry of Commerce, at least 125 Viennese, men, women, and children were killed in the extermination camps and ghettoes of Eastern Europe, and the concentration camps of Germany and Austria. One third of Vienna’s Jewish population, 65,000 men, women and children, were murdered in the Holocaust. Some people know of the farm at Millisle, County Down, where 300 children were taken from July 1939 onwards, and where some stayed for a time after the war, but few know about this story. The book explains how Stormont faced the challenge of helping Vienna’s beleaguered Jewish population. The Irish Government response to the crisis was similarly limited.
Based on extensive archival research, unpublished family memoirs and letters, and interviews with Holocaust survivors and their descendants, it highlights the tireless work done by committed Northern Irish people to rescue Jews.
It also explores how the small numbers of Jewish refugees admitted to NI made a major contribution to its economic, social, and cultural life that continues to this day.
l ‘The Saved and the Spurned: Northern Ireland, Vienna and the Holocaust’, by Noel Russell, is published by New Island Books.