Austria's turn

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Dan
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Austria's turn

#1

Post by Dan » 20 Jul 2002, 16:22

Austria Explores Reparations for Jews
Posted: July 19, 2002
By Kenneth R. Timmerman

Austria always will have a special place in the life and near extermination of European Jewry. It was here in Vienna that the notion of a Jewish homeland was born in 1896 when journalist Theodor Herzl published his historic booklet, The Jewish State. And it was here in March 1938 that Adolf Hitler first expanded the Third Reich beyond Germany's borders by marching triumphantly into Vienna to broad public acclaim.

The first act of Hitler's Anschluss (the union of Austria and Germany) was to strip Austria's 200,000 Jews of their citizenship, jobs and property. More than 65,000 Austrian Jews perished in German death camps and ghettoes. The rest were expelled. Sixty-four years later, Austria has just 7,000 Jews. To this day, most never have received compensation nor even recognition of the horrors they suffered under the Third Reich.

The failure of postwar Austrian governments to acknowledge the country's complicity in the Holocaust prompted the president of the Austrian Jewish Community, Dr. Ariel Muzicant, to press the government to establish a "Historical Commission" to re-examine Austria's past. "It is important that Austria finally tries to live up to its past, not just what happened from 1938-1945, which is pretty well known, but to what didn't happen after 1945, and the enormous amount of Jewish property that was never returned or compensated," Muzicant tells Insight in Vienna.

On July 4, that commission released a damning preliminary report. Despite no fewer than seven laws passed since 1945 that called for limited restitution of property stolen from Austria's Jews, it determined that very little ever was returned. The main reason, commission spokeswoman Eva Blimlinger tells Insight, was simple and far-reaching: "Austria did not want to admit any wrongdoing during the war." Postwar governments portrayed Austria as a "victim" of Nazi evil, not as the willing partner that it was, but actively discouraged exiled Jews from returning. So did the World Jewish Committee, which was convinced anti-Semitism remained rank in Austria even after the war.

Now the Historical Commission is attempting to set the record straight. It will issue a final report this autumn that will include a full inventory of "Aryanized" property (that is, property belonging to Jews stolen by the Nazis) that for the first time will place a monetary value on the theft. "Our own historians estimate the total amount of property seized from Austria's Jews at roughly $14 billion, of which 60 percent was never returned and never compensated," Muzicant says. "This estimate includes businesses, homes, money, shares, insurance policies, leases, household goods, art, silver and gold, jewelry, books. We're talking about 25 different categories."

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Benoit Douville
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#2

Post by Benoit Douville » 07 Feb 2006, 04:00

I was reading during the weekend the fact that Austria was really involved in the extermination of the Jews. I was shocked to learn that the Austrians who were a minority in the Nazi hierarchy, that their percentage in the killing machinery was disproportionately large. Some Commandants of the extermination camps were Austrians, among them well known figures such as:

-Odilo Globocnik, Hans Hoefle, and Ernst Lerch, the leaders of the "Action Reinhard", responsible for the killing of 1.8 Million Jews in the death camps in Eastern Poland in 1942 and 1943.

-Franz Stangl, Commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp :

-Siegfried Seidl, Commandant of the Theresienstadt ghetto in Bohemia.

Source: Historian Winfried R. Garscha & Claudia Kuretsidis-Haider, Conference of the German Studies Association in Washington, September (25th- 28th 1997)

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David Thompson
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#3

Post by David Thompson » 07 Feb 2006, 08:24

Dan -- I think this statement by Dr. Muzicant is overbroad:
The failure of postwar Austrian governments to acknowledge the country's complicity in the Holocaust prompted the president of the Austrian Jewish Community, Dr. Ariel Muzicant, to press the government to establish a "Historical Commission" to re-examine Austria's past. "It is important that Austria finally tries to live up to its past, not just what happened from 1938-1945, which is pretty well known, but to what didn't happen after 1945, and the enormous amount of Jewish property that was never returned or compensated," Muzicant tells Insight in Vienna.
I think, at least in part, that Dr. Muzicant's suggestion that Austria somehow failed "to live up to its past" is misplaced. There were a large number of war crimes trials held by the Austrian Peoples' Courts between 1945 and 1955. A few years ago the Austrian Research Center for Post-War Trials established a website and began to post information on them.
http://www.nachkriegsjustiz.at/

The English version of the website can be seen at:
http://www.nachkriegsjustiz.at/english/index.htm

There's a little more detail on the claims of Dr. Muzicant in an article from Insight magazine published in 2002, with a cached version available at:

http://64.233.179.104/search?q=cache:qj ... clnk&cd=20

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