by Lisa Silverman

Contents

  1. Historical context of the source
  2. Source
  3. Discussion of the source
  4. Questions for discussion
  5. Selected bibliography
  6. Farther reading

ane. Historical context of the source

The elimination of the civil rights and liberties of Jews that began after the Nazis came to power in Federal republic of germany in 1933 included the gradual but systematic plundering of Jewish real estate, businesses, and other property for the enrichment of non-Jews. What began every bit increasing pressure to sell their homes and businesses in preparation for emigration soon turned into forcible 'sales', for which German Jewish owners received little or no proceeds. The racial nature of these transactions, in which 'Arier' (Aryans) were legally entitled to take over property from Jews, is reflected in the term 'Arisierung' (Aryanization.) The process of aryanizing Jewish property was also implemented in other countries occupied by Nazi Frg. Research on this topic shows that the transfer of Jewish property to non-Jewish ownership involved a complicated mix of economic, political, and social factors that varied not but co-ordinate to land, but likewise according to region.

Equally the get-go land annexed past Nazi Frg on 12 March 1938, Austria set the stage for the implementation of Aryanizations in other territories that Germany would later occupy. Unlike the gradual procedure of Aryanization in Germany, the confiscation of Jewish property in Austria began immediately following the annexation. Already during the offset weeks subsequently this date, eager Austrians began ransacking and plundering Jewish property, despite the fact that the Nazis had issued explicit regulations against uncontrolled looting. During these unsanctioned Aryanizations, Jews were also publicly degraded and humiliated, suggesting that property confiscations were closely tied to the stripping of Jews' identity not only as Austrians, simply also as human being beings. During the grade of these events, thousands were arrested, and other Jews were forced to wash the streets with brushes aslope cheering onlookers. Many Austrian Jews also took their own lives at this time. (Witek and Safrian 2008)

By May 1938, Nazi functionaries systematised the confiscation of belongings in Austria through an agency chosen the 'Vermögensverkehrstelle' (Assets Transfer Role) and the Austrian system – spearheaded by Nazi functionary Adolf Eichmann – became a model for a functioning, efficient mechanism designed to strip property from Jews in other occupied countries. According to the Decree on the Registration of Jewish property passed in April, 1938, Jews were required to register assets of more RM 5000, and also forced to pay hefty taxes. Jews were forced to etch detailed property declarations of all avails. Not just existent manor, but too art, furniture, and household objects were plundered and in many cases after auctioned for sale. Some non-Jewish Austrians denounced their Jewish neighbors and terminated their leases. At that time, roughly 200,000 Jews lived in Austria, well-nigh of them in Vienna. However, Jewish property was also Aryanized in smaller towns throughout Austria, even those in which few Jews lived.

Like the Aryanizations themselves, the history of the restitution of Jewish-owned property later the stop of Earth State of war II also varies past country. In the case of Austria, the political decisions of the Allied forces about how to deal with Austria played a significant office. In the Moscow Declaration of 30 October 1943, the The states, U.k., and USSR declared that Austria should be referred to every bit a victim of Nazi aggression, rather than equally a collaborator with Nazi Germany. This annunciation made information technology easy for Austrians to ignore their function in aiding in the persecution of Jews, including Aryanizing their belongings. At the Potsdam Conference of July, 1945, the US, UK, and USSR decided not to demand reparations from Austria. Thereafter, the Austrian government was free to implement an incomplete process of restituting Jewish holding, passing 7 laws between 1946 and 1949. Despite some resistance from the general population and from the institutions ordered to implement the laws, a few Jews were able to reclaim their holding. Many more were unable to exercise so.

Austria remained under the occupation of the Allied Forces until 1955, when information technology became a fully independent country. However, it was not until decades later on that the Austrian government officially recognized the limitations of its early on restitution laws and offered boosted opportunities for Jews to reclaim their holding, or to receive compensation for information technology. In 2001, the Austrian regime ratified an agreement with the US authorities, international and national Jewish groups, as well as representatives for Austrian companies and lawyers for plaintiffs of Nazi victims, that was intended to settle remaining Nazi era restitution claims. (Sucharipa 2000).

In 2003, a Historikerkommission (commission of Historians) that had been set by the Austrian government 5 years earlier to investigate the plunder of property under the Nazi regime and its postwar restitution made its final report available to the public. Its lengthy narrative covers a wide spectrum of themes connected with the confiscation of holding from Jews and other victims of Nazi persecution, too as the issue of Austrian programs for bounty and restitution after the end of the war. In all, the committee issued 53 reports (totaling approximately fourteen,000 pages) encompassing 47 separate projects, on which 160 researchers had spent v years working. The full general conclusions fatigued past the committee in their reports were grim: Jews and other victims suffered massive financial losses at the hands of their Austrian neighbors, who benefited financially from their crimes. After 1945, the restitution programs in Republic of austria that were eventually set hardly began to comprehend the extent of the losses, and were often just carried out halfheartedly, or partially.

2. Source

In 1939, Anna Kallmus, who had been built-in to Jewish parents in Vienna in 1878, wrote a alphabetic character to her younger sister Dora, who was by that time a well-known photographer living in Paris. In her letter of the alphabet, Anna discusses the need to pack up and sell their house (which they chosen 'Haus Doranna') in Frohnleiten, Austria, every bit a consequence of the implementation of Nazi Aryanization laws afterwards March 1938. Although the sisters oftentimes wrote to each other in German, this letter was written in English language, possibly to avoid censorship. The alphabetic character beneath from Anna to Dora is dated 26 April 1939:

D.M., thanks for your letters, one with your funny photos, I think you don't look ill . . . Of course I know, that the visa affair will last a long time . . I am sitting in the verandah, the only identify all over the house, where one finds a chair and a tabular array. This morning we had all the furniture sent off to Graz, where information technology will have to wait for the permission to go off. So it only took united states iii and a half solar day to pull all down, what has been raised with much pain dear and money in 20 years, such is life. . . . . [on packing clothes] Tonight or tomorrow morning I shall say adept bye to our mayor, who was particularly friendly to me he is the true son of his female parent, for whose loss he often cried hither, when he was working at papering the rooms or laying carpets and linoleums. Tomorrow at 2pm we leave, on my starting time twenty-four hour period in Vienna y'all shall become a letter . . .

(Papers of Dora Kallmus, Preus Photography Museum, Horten, Norway)

iii. Discussion of the source

Anna had bought 'Haus Doranna' in 1919 and moved in immediately, while Dora maintained her flat and photography studio in Vienna. In 1923, Dora moved to Paris, a city she preferred for its cosmopolitan flair and gustation. In 1931 Anna transferred ownership of ane half of the field adjacent to the Firm to Dora, suggesting that the two, neither of whom had married, eventually planned to live there together. Simply subsequently the Nazis marched into Austria in 1938, Anna was forced to deal with new regulations designed to expropriate Jews' avails and strength emigration. Similar many others, the sisters were caught up in this vexing process. Many of the messages exchanged betwixt the two at this time discussed the increasing danger to which they were exposed and suggest the depth of the sisters' emotional investment in the firm.

In 1939, as the letter reveals, Anna was finally forced to sell Haus Doranna to the town of Frohnleiten and move to Vienna. The placid tone and ironic language of the letter belie Anna'southward hurting and humiliation as she is non just forced to strip the dwelling of its effects, but likewise make polite conversation with the Aryanizer, who, if we read between the lines, is a real 'son of a bowwow' who cries for his own losses as he 'redecorates' the house he has forced them to sell. At that time, the mayor of the boondocks was Karl Gollesch, an upholsterer past profession who had taken over the leadership of Frohnleiten in Apr, 1939 according to the laws implemented by Nazi authorities to establish power structures in Austria.

Anna'south final letter of the alphabet to Dora was dated 25 October 1941. She wrote to her from Vienna, informing Dora that she was taking a trip and pleading with her to find a prophylactic hiding place for herself. On Nov vii, 1941, friends in Vienna wrote to Dora that Anna had been deported to Lodz ten days before. From in that location, she was likely deported to Auschwitz and murdered. Dora, too, faced dangers of her own. After 1939, she was forced to sell her studio in Paris and live confined to her flat, a deeply lonely feel. In August 1942, she managed to escape to a hiding place in the village in the Ardèche in the south of France, where she remained until afterwards the war was over.

Although Dora is known to many as Madame d'Ora, the photographer famous for her outstanding fashion photographs and portraits of fin-de-siècle cultural luminaries, few people know that her sister was murdered in Auschwitz, or that in

1948, Dora was ane of a few one-time Austrians who managed to repossess Aryanized holding when she won a protracted legal battle for the return of Haus Doranna. She kickoff filed a merits for its render on 4 October 1946. Although she faced meaning hurdles in obtaining its return, with the assist of a local lawyer she managed to obtain its restitution in 1948.

Not many people know about the restitution of the house considering the recovery of fabric avails later on the Holocaust is typically seen as a footnote to the supposedly more than meaningful events in the life of a victim of Nazi persecution. Tangible property that remain after a person'due south death seemingly carry little weight when it comes to the deeper and more permanent loss of life. But material belongings is not an empty signifier of value: it as well represents a relationship betwixt owner and what is owned, meaning that both its loss and its render tin exist painful, traumatic experiences. Thus, the restitution of property after the Holocaust engages a complicated gear up of emotions for its original owners – specially when, as in the example of Madame d'Ora, its return relates to the fate of two sisters, one who was murdered and 1 who survived.

Laws establishing restitution in kind for expropriated Jewish property later the Holocaust were designed for restorative justice: to put things 'back to normal' by returning property to its rightful possessor. As such, they were absolutely necessary in gild to ensure that the Jews' murderers did not too inherit the spoils from their victims. But the return of original objects tin can also force the possessor to revisit the trauma of its loss, a rupture in ownership that – on the surface – appears healed once the original object is returned. Although she fought for the return of Haus Doranna, Madame d'Ora resisted returning to live in Frohnleiten until 1962, after she was profoundly incapacitated and unable to work. Her render must accept been both comforting and painful. She died in Frohnleiten in 1963, leaving no heirs. She left Haus Doranna to a friend.

4. Questions for word

  1. Beyond material gain, what were the goals of those who sought to Aryanize the property of Jewish victims of Nazi persecution?
  2.  How does knowing the historical context of the Aryanization of Jewish property in Austria help us interpret the letter Anna wrote to Dora in 1939?
  3.  What happened to Aryanized property in Austria afterwards the stop of the Holocaust?
  4.  Why didn't Dora Kallmus return earlier to her and her sister's home in Frohnleiten?
  5.  What happened to Dora Kallmus's business firm afterwards her death? What should happen to holding taken from Jewish Nazi victims afterward their deaths?

v.Selected Bibliography

  • Adunka, Evelyn. (2000) Die vierte Gemeinde. Dice Geschichte der Wiener Juden von 1945 bis heute. Geschichte der Juden in Wien, vol. 6. Institut für Geschichte der Juden in Österreich. Berlin: Philo.
  • Bailer-Galanda, Brigitte. (1993) Wiedergutmachung – kein Thema. Österreich und die Opfer des Nationalsozialismus. Vienna: Löcker.
  • Botz, Gerhard. (1992) 'The Dynamics of Persecution in Austria, 1938-45.' In Austrians and Jews in the Twentieth Century: from Franz Joseph to Waldheim, edited past Robert S. Wistrich, pp. 199-219. New York: St. Martin's Press.
  • Knight, Robert. (1988). 'Ich bin dafür, die Sache in die Länge zu ziehen': Wortprotokolle der österreichischen Bundesregierung von 1945-1952 über die Entschädigung der Juden. Frankfurt: Athenäum.
  • Sucharipa, Ernst. (2000) 'Austria'south Measures of Restitution and Compensation for Holocaust Victims: Contempo Negotiations and their Background.' Österreichisches Jahrbuch für internationale Politik. 17: 75-95.
  • Walzer, Tina and Stephan Templ. (2001) Unser Wien: 'Arisierung' auf österreichisch. Berlin: Aufbau.
  • Witek, Hans, and Hans Safrian. (2008) Und keiner war dabei. Dokumente des alltäglichen Antisemitismus in Wien 1938. Vienna: Picus.

6. Suggestions for Farther Reading

  • Beckermann, Ruth. (2005) Unzugehörig. Österreicher und Juden nach 1945. Vienna: Löcker.
  • Dean, Martin. Robbing the Jews: The Confiscation of Jewish Property in the Holocaust, 1933-1945. (2008) New York: Cambridge.
  • Dean, Martin, et. al. (2007) Robbery and Restitution: The Conflict over Jewish Belongings in Europe. New York: Berghahn.
  • Diner, Dan and Gotthard Wunberg. (2007) Restitution and Retention: Textile Restitution in Europe. New York: Berghahn.
  • Embacher, Helga. (1995) Neubeginn ohne Illusion. Juden in Österreich nach 1945. Vienna: Picus.
  • Lehrman, Hal. 'Republic of austria and the Jews: Struggle for Restitution.' (Oct 1954) Commentary eighteen: 308-318.
  • Marrus, Michael R. (2009) Some Measure of Justice: The Holocaust Era Restitution Campaign of the 1990s. Madison: Academy of Wisconsin Press.
  • Silverman, Lisa. (2003) 'Repossessing the Past? Holding, Retentiveness, and Austrian Jewish Narrative Histories.'Austrian Studies 11: 138-53.
  • Vansant, Jacqueline. (2001) Reclaiming Heimat: Trauma and Mourning in Memoirs past Jewish Austrian Reémigrés. Detroit, MI: Wayne Land University Printing.
  • Wilder-Okladek, F. (1969) The Return Movement of Jews to Austria later on the 2nd World War. The Haugue: Martinus Nijhoff.

vii. Useful Spider web Resources

http://www.ns-quellen.at

Provides links to inquiry on the aryanization, restitution and bounty of property in Austria confiscated during the Holocaust.

eight. Images

Photo of Haus Doranna (copyright 2014 Lisa Silverman)