Austria's Jews paid their own way to death camps

Austrian Jews had to pay for their own deportation and subsequent extermination in Nazi death camps, historians said today.

A new report marked the first time the alpine country has confronted its wartime complicity in a significant way.

Thousands of Jews – including those sent to Holocaust concentration camps outside German borders – were forced to pay a special flight tax and a Jewish property levy to leave the Third Reich, the report said.

The financial dispossession of Jews before their deportation was described by Angelika Shoshana Jensen, one of 160 researchers commissioned by the Austrian government four years ago to investigate Nazi-era wrongdoing and efforts to provide restitution to victims and their survivors.

The commission’s 14,000 page report criticised Austria’s post-war governments for their obvious reluctance to indemnify Nazi victims, saying the republic acted “often half-heartedly and hesitantly.”

It said attempts at restitution, hampered by a series of often ambiguous laws and regulations, “were all too often made on the basis of outside pressure, especially from the Western allies.”

However, the report rejected assertions that Austria had done nothing “to return property values and to lessen suffering.”

At the root of the problem was the “abuse of the victim theory,” which held that Austria had been “assaulted” by Nazi Germany in 1938 and that it was not responsible for the crimes that occurred under the Nazi regime, the commission said.

The denial of a shared responsibility by Austrians led to a situation where there was a lack of requisite “candid generosity” toward the Nazis’ victims, it said.

According to historical records, of the roughly 200,000 Jews living in Austria before the country was annexed by the Nazis in 1938, some 65,000 perished in the Holocaust, mostly in Nazi concentration camps. Most of the rest were forced to leave or fled to escape certain death.

At the end of the war, only about 1,000 Jews had survived.

Jewish homes and properties were systematically looted by the authorities, Nazi party factions and private citizens, and at least 59,000 Jewish tenants were driven from their homes, the report said.

Unlike Germany, which has engaged in deep and public soul-searching for decades, Austria has been slow to come to grips with its complicity and to admit any responsibility for Nazi-era crimes.

Reliable historical records show that a disproportionately high number of Austrians were identified as having played leading roles in the Nazi death machine, and that thousands of Austrians enriched themselves by stealing or otherwise forcibly taking Jewish property.

Adolf Eichmann, dubbed the Nazi’s “station master of death” for his central role in the extermination of Jews, was an Austrian. He was captured by the Israelis in Latin America, tried and sentenced to death, and hanged in Israel in 1962.