On one of the busy streets of downtown Vienna about two years ago, a young student walked up and down, collection box in hand, parading two placards: “Please spare something for Franz Novak! Donations urgently needed! Contribute to gift parcels for Franz Novak in prison!” The three sweaters he was wearing were meant to protect him not only from the bitter cold—but from bruises. For the young man was pretending to be collecting funds for Eichmann’s transportation officer, whose trial had recently dominated the headlines of the Austrian papers, and precaution against the attacks of angry passersby thus seemed advisable.

The young student’s fears, however, proved groundless. “In roughly twenty minutes,” he later reported, “I collected around 160 shillings [over six dollars] and a Nazi leaflet. About 45 per cent of the people contributed not even knowing for whom they donated, whereas 45 per cent contributed because they knew. With about 10 per cent I came up against opposition, but this was not persistent—let alone violent. On the contrary, during those twenty minutes a lot of people smiled at me; the Viennese are friendly people. The expected scuffle did not take place. I did not need the three sweaters as protection against bruises. But against the chill I felt for a long time afterward, not even ten sweaters could have protected me.”

An exaggerated generalization on the basis of chance encounters? A distorted picture of the mentality of seven million Austrians? Such reactions, following the publication of the student’s account, suggested that he had touched on an issue most delicate for the Austrians—their attitude toward the “murderers in our midst.” Even today, the case of Franz Novak provides an ideal starting point for a review of Austria’s postwar record in dealing with “old” Nazis and the manifold manifestations of neo-Nazism.

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Novak’s career as a Nazi dates back to 1929, when he joined the Hitler youth. In 1934, he participated in the abortive Nazi putsch against the Austrian government which culminated in the assassination of Chancellor Dollfuss. Subsequently, he became a member of the “Austrian Legion” which was trained in Germany as an elite unit for the eventual showdown with the authoritarian, but patriotic, Austrian regime. After the Anschluss in 1938, Novak returned to Vienna and there, as Eichmann’s transportation officer, he played a key role in the execution of the “final solution.” In full awareness of what he was doing, Novak shipped 1.7 million Jews to their death. After the war, he lived in Vienna under the assumed name of Dolak until 1957, by which date he no longer found it necessary to conceal his identity. His newly flourishing career as assistant manager of a printing plant and functionary of Kameradschaft IV—an organization of veterans of the Waffen SS—was not interrupted until 1960 when the German Chief Prosecutor in Frankfurt issued a warrant for his arrest.

Stimulated into action by this warrant, the Austrians themselves finally brought Novak to trial. In December 1964, an eight-man jury—splitting its vote 5 to 3—found him guilty of “public violence.” He was sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment, four of which he had already served while waiting to be tried. Novak’s counsel promptly appealed the verdict.

The case thereupon went to the Austrian Supreme Court’s court of appeals, whose president, Dr. Hans Sabaditsch, was a former member of the Nazi party and had, in consequence of his activiities during the Hitler years, been barred from the bench between 1946-1949. The task of presenting Novak’s case to his fellow judges fell to Dr. Konrad Zachar, also a former member of the Nazi party. While Novak had been shipping Jews to the gas chambers, Dr. Zachar, a public prosecutor, had become notorious for demanding maximum penalties for minor political offenses. For example, in 1943, Zachar obtained the death sentence in the case of one Leopold Strasser, a railroad worker who had given 30 marks to the wives of two imprisoned fellow workers. In 1946, he was pensioned by the “ungrateful” authorities, but the rediscovery of his juridical gifts led to his reinstatement in 1949. His presence on the bench in the Novak case caused the Furche, Austria’s most distinguished Catholic periodical, to question “the moral legitimacy of a judge proclaiming the law in the name of the very republic whose advocates he had sent to the gallows . . .”

The Supreme Court annulled the lower’s court’s verdict on technical grounds and ordered a retrial before another jury. On October 6, 1966 Novak was again found guilty, but the three judges on the case nevertheless acquitted him on the ground that he had only been “obeying superior orders.” (Several Austrian newspapers pointed out that Novak himself had never used this argument; instead, he had pleaded that he had not known of the fate awaiting the Jews he was deporting.) Thus it was as a free man that Novak emerged from the court building in which, during the Nazi era, twelve-hundred Austrian patriots had been hanged.

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The case history of Franz Novak reflects some important facets of the Austrian way of life—the ingrained tendency to skirt decisions, the persistent failure to pass the test of historic responsibility, the love of compromise, the horror of initiative, the passivity, and the fatalism. The unique blend of these characteristics in a country which radiates beauty, history, and pleasure provides the basis for the famous Gemütlichkeit, but also the breeding ground for complacency and opportunism. To negate the noteworthy achievements of the democratic, independent, and neutral postwar regime of Austria would be as misleading and unwise as to overlook its failure in coming to grips with the past. The overall balance-sheet of the postwar period, like so much in Austria’s thousand-year history, is paradoxical.

Though there is no disputing the dreary record of acquittals and fantastically lenient sentences meted out to major war criminals, there is no basis for the opinion that the overwhelming majority of Austrians today are sympathetic to neo-Nazism or to violence in any form. The postwar record of peaceful industrial growth and the election results between 1945 and 1966 show clearly that extreme views, whether of the Left or of the Right, have become fringe views. There is every reason for concern about the “dangerous Austrian mentality” (the phrase used by Cardinal Koenig of Vienna in condemning the acquittal of Novak)—a state of mind that manifests itself in the evasion of the truth about the Nazi era, public eagerness to forget an ambiguous past, and the proverbial Austrian dislike of “unpleasantness”; there is, however, no reason to equate this state of affairs with a wide-scale resurgence of neo-Nazi influences representing an immediate or serious threat. This point must be made at the outset because it is precisely the over-simplified criticism from abroad which provides facesaving formulas for the Austrian politicans engaged in elaborate attempts at whitewashing the situation.

The distressing evidence of Austria’s failure to weed out the remnants of the Nazi past must be seen against the country’s complex historical and racial background. Since the 1918 collapse of the old multi-racial Austro-Hungarian Empire—which was ruled by the Austrians even though they constituted less than 25 per cent of its population of 51 million—the violent vicissitudes in the life of the German-speaking Austrians have been related to a perennial conflict between their allegiance to the Austrian state and their loyalty to the German Volk. The seeds of this agonizing dilemma were already evident in the old Empire after the defeat of Koniggratz in 1866 and Austria’s subsequent expulsion from the German Federation. In the wake of this defeat, and more than two generations before Hitler’s rise to power, George von Schonerer formulated an ideology combining radical pan-Germanism with virulent anti-Semitism. Many of his arguments were to reappear in Mein Kampf, and even in present-day Austria, one finds highly active devotees of Schonerer’s teachings in strictly “Aryan” student fraternities, in school and university circles, and in the Turnvereine (gymnastic societies).

Nothing more clearly demonstrates the central paradox of Austrian politics than the fact that even today the adjective “national” implies membership in a “Greater Germany” and the passionate rejection of the notion of an independent Austrian nationhood. To be sure, the majority of Austrians during the past century have been Christian Socialists or Social Democrats rather than pan-German, but both of these voter-blocs have contributed to Austria’s current problems. The founding father of Austrian Christian Socialism and mayor of Vienna was Karl Lueger (1844-1910), whose anti-Semitism was as pronounced as von Schonerer’s though his party’s allegiance to Catholicism and the Hapsburg monarchy constituted a sharp dividing line from the pan-Germans. Nevertheless, the Christian socialists could never forge a clear sense of national identity for Austria; nor could the Social Democrats, who tended to be psychologically dominated by Germany. For example, one of their leaders, the late Chancellor Renner, was almost as enthusiastic in his public support of the Anschluss in 1938 as was the Archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Innitzer.

By and large, the Anschluss—the bloodless annexation to Germany—met with popular approval; one has only to remember the cheering crowd of 200,000 who filled Vienna’s historic Heldenplatz on the occasion of Hitler’s triumphal entry into the city, the jubilant eruption of pent-up anti-Semitic feelings in the capital, and the rush of self-seekers to grab the “aryanized” property of the Jews. In trying to understand, though not to condone, this response one should remember the sheer weariness of a population which in two decades of political strife and economic hardship had lived through a civil war and two abortive putsches. In addition, one has to take into account the racial kinship felt toward the Germans, the long pre-history of Austrian anti-Semitism, the total diplomatic isolation of the government in 1938, and the critical level of unemployment at the time (400,000 to 600,000 out of a population of 6½ million). All these factors help to explain the ease and speed with which the annexation was effected. The republic in which “most of the patriots were not democrats while most of the democrats were not patriots . . . had not enough will to resist by itself because it had not enough will to live by itself.”¹

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While postwar Austria owes its very existence to the allied powers, it had to survive the grueling test of a ten-year occupation, and Soviet domination over half of the country, before it attained independence. During this period, Austria’s political leaders—many of whom had spent the seven years of Nazi rule in the same concentration camp—showed that they had learned something from the tragic consequences of their prewar fratricidal strife. Their political shrewdness was already evident in the first declaration of the provisional government, in April 1945, to the effect that Austria had been the first free country to fall victim to Hitler’s aggression. Moreover, in the State Treaty of 1955, establishing the Second Republic, they took care to proclaim the thesis that the Austrian state had ceased to exist as an independent entity from the moment of the Anschluss, that the country had therefore been forced to participate in the war, and that consequently it had been liberated, not conquered, by the allied forces. There is much to be said for this “victim theory.” Its political usefulness is beyond question, and it even reflects a measure of historical accuracy. Though the Austrian resistance movement hardly matched that of most other occupied countries in Europe, there was growing opposition to the Nazi regime from 1938 on. It would be unjust to forget that 35,000 Austrian patriots—Catholic priests, socialist workers, army officers, intellectuals, Communist youth, Christian-Socialist public servants—were executed because of their active resistance or their anti-Nazi convictions.

Nevertheless, it is impossible to regard the majority of Austrians as “victims,” or to condone the present use of the “victim theory” as an excuse for granting legal amnesty, and even moral absolution, to the innumerable Austrian accomplices in Nazi crimes. By extending the “victim theory” to the population as a whole, the Austrians render themselves incapable of coming to grips with the realities of their past. These realities run almost exactly counter to the frequent assertion by Austrians that a relatively small number of their countrymen had been Nazis and that their participation in atrocities had been extremely limited.

The fact is that there were 567,000 registered Austrian members of the Nazi party. About 80,000 of them had been so called “illegal Nazis” even before the Anschluss. Over 60,000 Austrians belonged to the SA; 22,000 were members of the SS. According to the best available evidence, 65,500 Austrian Jews were murdered between 1938 and 1945, their property confiscated, their synagogues and cemeteries desecrated or destroyed.

Moreover, Austrian Nazis also bear a heavy responsibility for the mass murder of Polish, Hungarian, Yugoslav, Dutch, and Russian Jews, as well as gypsies and forced laborers. While accounting for only 8½ per cent of the total population of the Third Reich, Austrian war criminals, according to Simon Wiesenthal, can be held accountable for the massacre of about three million Jews.

This estimate was part of Mr. Wiesenthal’s lengthy memorandum about “crime and punishment of Austrian war criminals” which he submitted to the Federal Chancellor, Dr. Joseph Klaus, in October 1966. Wiesenthal mentions two factors which may help to account for Austria’s heavy involvement in the “final solution.” First, there was the fact that Eichmann—who had grown up in Austria—began the operations of his “center for Jewish emigration” in Vienna, and drew heavily on Austrian Nazis for help. Secondly, in those areas of Poland which had once been a part of the Hapsburg empire, the Germans found some tactical advantage in employing Austrian occupation forces.

Wiesenthal’s memorandum proceeds to cite chapter and verse of Austrian participation in Nazi atrocities. On the Russian front as well as in other occupied areas, there were special “police” battalions, composed entirely of Austrians, whose task it was to round up and murder Jews. The killing of two million Jews at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka—a project called Aktion Reinhard—was planned and executed predominantly by Austrian Nazis. Moreover, the Austrians were specifically responsible for the murder of 110,000 Dutch Jews, and Austrians served as ghetto commanders in, among other cities, Warsaw, Vilna, and Riga.

The Wiesenthal memorandum was prompted by his impression that even the competent authorities were largely ignorant of the extent of the Austrian involvement in Nazi war crimes. Almost a year has passed since the submission of the Wiesenthal memorandum, yet no official action has as yet been taken.

The guilt-ridden silence of the authorities becomes comprehensible when one contemplates their sorry record in the matter of investigating and prosecuting the “murderers in our midst.” Here too, however, one must beware of oversimplifcations. Between 1945 and 1949, the first postwar governments did engage in serious efforts to punish the war criminals. Under the War Criminals Law enacted in 1945, special people’s courts sentenced 13,000 Nazis, about 10 per cent of those who had been subject to investigation. The courts pronounced forty-two death sentences, of which thirty were executed. It must be remembered that at the beginning of the postwar period, there was still a paucity of evidence as to the full extent of the crimes of the accused, so that they were tried not for mass murder, but for offenses such as treason, perpetrating executions of civilians, and denouncing their fellow citizens. As a result, however, most of the Austrian participants in Aktion Reinhard and in the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units in the East, remained, according to Wiesenthal, “virtually untouched.”

By 1949 the Austrian government, with the approval of the allied occupation powers, had come to the conclusion that the process of denazification had been successfully completed. Between 1945 and 1949 half a million Nazi “smallfry” had been forbidden to vote; they were now restored to full citizenship.

This “reintegration” of “small-fry” Nazis fades into insignificance when one considers what happened in 1955. At that time, the newly independent Austria received into its custody about a hundred Nazi criminals who had been imprisoned in Russia, and who were released under the express condition that they be brought to trial in their home country. Most of these men were immediately pardoned by Austria’s Federal President. To be sure, some of those who had committed especially horrible atrocities received sentences ranging from twenty years to life, but even these were quietly released a year or two later.

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Austria’s record since 1955 has earned the country its reputation as a “haven for war criminals.” Between 1961 and 1966, eighteen war-crimes trials were held; eight of these ended in acquittal. The War Criminals Law having been formally terminated in 1957 because of a prevalent though obviously untenable opinion in government circles that no further cases would come to light, the accused were tried before regular juries, consisting of eight laymen drawn by lot, and reaching their verdict by majority vote. In case of a tie the benefit of the doubt goes to the defendant.

In a number of cases, the jurors have shown that they regard war crimes as no crimes at all, or at best as minor offenses. The acquittal of Franz Murer, in June 1963, was the first of the recent verdicts to provoke strong protests both in Austria and abroad. During the Hitler era, Murer was known as “the hangman of Vilna.” After the war, the British extradited him to the Russians, who sentenced him to twenty-five years imprisonment. Upon his return to Austria from the Soviet Union, in accordance with the provisions of the 1955 State Treaty, Murer started “a new life” and even managed to get elected president of the Farmers’ Chamber in the Styrian town of Liezen. Brought to trial at last, he was declared innocent, despite the testimony of fifty witnesses concerning the atrocities he had perpetrated in Vilna. The verdict was applauded by the onlookers. After the trial, Murer was met by his close friend, Richard Hochrainer, presented with flowers, and driven home in a Mercedes. In 1961, Hochrainer had been sentenced to seven years for the murder of nine Jewish forced laborers after the war, but the court of appeal subsequently cleared him of the charge.

The reluctance of juries to punish Nazi leaders for their deeds was also evident in the case of Eichmann’s friend, Erich Rajakowitsch, who, as head of the Department of Jewish Affairs in occupied Holland, had signed the deportation orders for Dutch Jews. In 1965, he was sentenced to thirty months for “malicious damage and intentional endangering of human lives.” Since he had already served two years while awaiting trial, Rajakowitsch was soon a free man; indeed, at the end of the year he was an interested spectator at the much-publicized trial of Robert Jan Verbelen.

During the war, Verbelen had been an SS general in Belgium. In 1947, the Belgians sentenced him to death, in absentia, for his numerous acts of terrorism and for the murder of 101 Belgian patriots and resistance fighters. After the war, Verbelen managed to escape to Austria. There, under the cover name of “Herbert” he worked first for the CIC (American counter-intelligence) and, after the occupation ended, for the Austrian political police. As a reward for his labors, Verbelen was granted Austrian citizenship in 1959 under his real name. Three years later, the International Organization of Resistance Fighters discovered that a frequent contributor to obscure neo-Nazi publications, a certain Jean Marais, was none other than Verbelen. Since he was by now an Austrian citizen, Verbelen had to be tried in Austria. The jury acquitted him on the ground that he had killed “under duress of orders.” As the Neues Osterreich, a now defunct Vienna daily, put it: “No court in the world would have recognized the validity of the argument of superior orders in the case of a high-ranking SS officer. A Viennese jury can claim the sad credit for passing a verdict under which even an Eichmann would have been let off.” Neither storms of official and public protests in Belgium, nor the demonstrations in Austria itself, were enough at first to rouse the Austrian authorities from their lethargy and indifference. This past May, however, after eighteen months, the Austrian Supreme Court quashed the acquittal and ordered a new trial. Verbelen himself went on to write his autobiography—Mister Inkognito—which was duly brought out by an Austrian publisher.

Two months after the Verbelen trial, a Salzburg jury demonstrated its indifference to the fact that murderers were still at large in Austria. Two Polish-born brothers, Johann and Wilhelm Mauer, both naturalized Austrian citizens, were on trial for their participation in the massacres that took place in the Polish city of Stanislaw, a bloodbath during which 12,000 Jews were killed. After the war, both occupied high positions in the Evangelical charity organizations of Salzburg, and both were regarded as highly respected citizens. During the trial, horror was piled on horror as some forty witnesses, including those whose families had been killed by the two brothers, testified to the atrocities that had been performed by the accused. Many of the onlookers broke out in scornful laughter while these witnesses were on the stand, and the reference of the defense to the accused as “victims of a conspiracy of world Jewry” was greeted with roaring applause and shouts of “Bravo!” The jury, headed by a former SA man and registered ex-Nazi, did not disappoint the expectations of the spectators; in a verdict that referred to “superior orders,” it acquitted the two brothers. The Kleine Zeitung, a Catholic daily in Graz, commented: “The verdict is a scandal. Forty witnesses have heavily incriminated the accused. The jurors, however, did not believe the witnesses because these witnesses were Jews. And that is what we mean when we speak of a scandal.” The Communist paper, Volksstimme, drew the understandable conclusion that “murder is not a crime when committed against Jews and anti-Fascists.”

The judge overthrew the verdict, and thus a second Mauer trial took place at the end of 1966, only a few weeks after the unexpected acquittal of Franz Novak. The passionate protests stirred up by the Novak case seemed to have an influence on the trial and to confirm the impression that Austrian juries are not immune to the pressures of domestic and international opinion. In any event, the two brothers were sentenced to twelve and eight years respectively, after the jury rejected the thesis of “superior orders” and found them guilty of participation in eight mass executions. The sentences may well be considered excessively mild, especially if one takes into account that Austrian juries are given to dealing as harshly as possible with “normal” capital crimes; but considering the context, they are a hopeful sign.

There are, however, few other hopeful signs, as becomes clear when one turns to the undisputed facts cited in the Wiesenthal memorandum about the present state of the investigation and prosecution of war crimes. The Austrian courts have in their possession the names of sixty Austrians who worked in the death camps of Belzec, Treblinka, and Sobibor, but only one of these men is now in prison. Among the war criminals still at large, there are also 150 Austrians who were implicated in murder while serving in mobile killing units, forty guards from Auschwitz, including an aide to the commander, and more than a hundred guards and officials from other death camps. About a hundred of these men are not only free; they serve in the police and gendarmerie of the Second Republic. Even those public officials who, fearing self-incrimination, refused to appear as witnesses at trials in Germany (despite the promise of safe-conduct) have not been suspended from their positions.

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Far from ferreting out Nazi criminals, the legal department concerned with war crimes is so understaffed that it is unable even to deal properly with information routinely supplied by Germany. Austria’s equivalent to Germany’s Central Agency of Investigation at Ludwigsburg is Department 18 of the Ministry of the Interior. But the staff of the German agency has recently been tripled while the staff of Department 18 has been reduced from ten men to six.

Yet even if the courts and the government were prosecuting the war-criminals with a maximum of zeal and efficiency, they would not completely succeed in cleansing the Austrian atmosphere of its complacent insensitivity toward the past. At the heart of the problem lies the attitude of the Austrian people. Die Presse, one of Vienna’s leading newspapers, recently ran a letter which concluded, “I can assure you that the Austrian public has had more than enough of these trials.” The letter, a typical one, accurately reflected a substantial segment of public opinion, including the views of innumerable young people who were not even alive during the Nazi era.

To understand the prevalence of this attitude, one must see it in its historical context. After the end of World War II, the Austrians endured ten years of Communist pressure; they lived, so to speak, in the shadow of the Red Army. The new danger of a take-over by yet another totalitarian dictatorship gradually began to overshadow the task of coming to grips with the Nazi past. During the ten year-struggle for the independence of a united country, the Austrian leaders therefore began to sanction the absolution of hundreds of thousands of Nazi self-seekers and opportunists, who learned to think of themselves as “victims,” while extreme right-wing politicians began to hail them as seasoned “fighters against Bolshevism.”

As for the average Austrian, he wanted only to be left alone and to enjoy the fruits of an amazing economic recovery, stimulated by 1.5 billion dollars of Marshall Plan aid. Nothing in the postwar politics of the country has been conducive to an effort at individual soul-searching or dissociation from the racial and religious prejudices which are so deep-seated among the Austrians.

What the Austrian people needed was a comprehensive program of moral and political reeducation; what they were given was a halfhearted and incomplete program of denazification. It is, of course, true that if the government had been overly sensitive about employing people with a compromising past, it might not have been able to fill all the necessary administrative positions. Moreover, the primary reason for the pollution of Austria’s political atmosphere is not the amnesty granted to the Nazi small-fry, but the unprincipled appeal for their votes since the franchise was restored to them in 1949. Throughout the entire postwar period, the two major parties—the People’s Party and the Socialists—have been so evenly balanced that Nazi and pan-German voters and sympathizers (between 300,000 and 400,000) have been in a position to tip the scales. Thus, in 1949, the late Socialist Minister of the Interior, Oscar Helmer, authorized the founding of the League of Independents to thwart the People’s Party’s bid for an absolute majority in Parliament. A motley collection of ex-Nazis who appealed to pan-German, anti-Catholic, and anti-Semitic sentiments, the League of Independents received almost half a million votes in the first election it contested. Though the voting strength of its successor, the Austrian Freedom Party, had been halved by the time of the last general elections in March 1966, a new right-wing splinter group, headed by Franz Olah, managed to attract almost 150,000 votes, partly by exploiting anti-Jewish prejudices. Olah’s appearance on the political scene, coupled with the internal dissensions among the Socialists, sufficed to cause what is by Austrian standards an “earthquake in politics.” By winning four additional seats in Parliament, the People’s Party secured an absolute majority, thus terminating the twenty-year-old coalition system.

One need not mourn the death of this rigid coalition system, under which all jobs—from ministers and directors of nationalized companies to theater ushers and cashiers—were neatly distributed between the “Blacks” and the “Reds.” It may have provided the necessary political stability for Austria, but at the same time it was responsible for an all-pervasive mood of lethargy and apathy which has had a profound impact on the thinking of the younger generation. Instead of nurturing the impulses to master an ambiguous past, both major parties have appointed or tolerated men in public office whose careers had flourished under the Hitler regime.

Thus the defense counsels of accused war criminals can always score an important point by referring to the eleven ex-Nazis who still hold key positions in the Austrian judiciary system. In making these and other appointments, the leaders of the coalition system paid much less attention to a man’s past record than to his present party affiliation. It is, of course, true that some of the ex-Naxi appointees were genuinely repentant. But even if one assumes that all of them have by now been transformed from unscrupulous opportunists into decent citizens of the democratic Second Republic, one must understand that their “rehabilitation” gave aid and comfort to the incorrigibles who subscribed to Nazi doctrines.

These doctrines are sometimes still taught at the universities, as can be seen from the case of the notorious Professor Taras Borodajkewycz, which sparked off Austria’s greatest postwar political scandal, Borodajkewycz’s pro-Nazi, anti-Austrian, and anti-Semitic utterances were a matter of public knowledge as early as 1956. Nine years elapsed, however, before the Socialists in the Parliament began to demand the dismissal of this shadowy figure who instructed hundreds of students in a racial ideology. Matters came to a head when Catholic and Socialist students joined resistance fighters and Communists in a protest demonstration against Borodajkewycz. The demonstrators were attacked by right-wing students, one of whom inflicted a fatal injury on an old pensioner. The pensioner’s funeral provided the occasion for one of the most remarkable and moving anti-Nazi demonstrations seen in Austria since the war, and was attended by most members of the government. Nevertheless, it took another year of massive protests and court verdicts against Borodajkewycz before he was placed “in permanent retirement.”

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Borodajkewycz was hard to budge from his position because he enjoyed the protection of the People’s Party, which as early as 1949 had used him as a liaison-man for establishing contact with former Nazis. Nor is this the only blot on the record of the People’s Party, which has been notorious for exploiting anti-Semitic prejudices on the eve of presidential and parliamentary elections. At an election meeting in 1966, for example, one of the party’s leaders in Lower Austria called the Socialist Foreign Minister, Bruno Kreisky, a “dirty Jew.” Only after the election was over—and won—did the party leadership dissociate itself from this outburst of one of its deputies—who was then chosen as a member of the leading caucus of his party’s parliamentary group.

Since the Borodajkewycz affair, the Socialists have waged an uncompromising battle against anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi manifestations, both in Parliament and in their own press. Their credibility would be greater, however, if in 1963 they had not attempted to outflank their coalition partner by threatening to form an alliance with the Freedom Party; they went so far as to subsidize this party to the tune of $40,000, notwithstanding the fact that its chairman had been an officer of the Waffen SS and its eight (now six) deputies were well known for their pan-German sympathies. Moreover, the Socialists to this day have failed to purge the ex-Nazis from their own midst.

In short, then, all parties have compromised themselves and thus lost the moral authority to launch an onslaught against the complacency which prevents the Austrians from erasing the residues of the Nazi era. Numerically, to be sure, the Nazis are only an insignificant minority in contemporary Austria; most of the twenty-odd crypto-Nazi organizations and groups active today are not even worthy of a detailed investigation. Nevertheless, they could represent a latent threat to Austria in the case of a sudden economic slump or an unexpected—and at present unlikely—political upheaval.

Even now there are areas of Austrian life in which right-wing extremists, abetted by the apathy and indifference of the majority, exercise an influence out of all proportion to their numbers. For example, the events during the Borodajkewycz scandal demonstrated the influence of the extreme right-wing student organization, Ring Freiheitlicher Studenten (RFS), which in the student elections early this year increased its share of the vote from 26 per cent to almost 30 per cent. Most of the terrorist outrages in Italy’s South Tyrol, where 250,000 German-speaking people live, were committed by members of the RFS. Their attitude toward the Austrian state and their notion of Austrian patriotism can be gleaned from the posters they carried during a recent demonstration in the city of Leoben: “Austrian nation?—No!”

Their thinking betrays the influence of Borodajkewycz as well as teachers like Professor Halfried Pfeifer of Vienna or Assistant Professor Nikolaus von Preradovic of Graz, both of whom make it clear that their loyalty belongs to Germany rather than Austria. They have another source of inspiration in Professor Walter Heinrich, who still requires students to read an old textbook of his studded with references to “the liquidation of dangerous and unproductive races.” Of course, most of the professors encountered by RFS members and other Austrian students are not pan-German, let alone pro-Nazi, but their thinking is likely to be staunchly conservative and dangerously provincial.

A second source of potential danger is the Osterreichischer Turnenbund, the parent organization of over 250 gymnastic societies with 45,000 members. While most of these members are concerned only with getting physical exercise, they are inevitably influenced by a strongly pan-German and ultra-nationalist leadership which regards the Austrian resistance fighters as “the scum of mankind” and which declares that “It is high time to liquidate the spiritual damages of the occupation . . . when the will of the foreign victors was supreme law.” Such statements abound in the official publication of the Turnenbund, the Bundesturnzeitung (which, however, has a circulation of less than 5,000).

Yet another source of potential danger is the Kameradschaftsbund, the Austrian veterans’ organization, many of whose functionaries avow that it is their aim to glorify World War II—in which 380,000 Austrians were killed. Here again, many of the rank-and-file members eschew extremist politics; they attend meetings for social reasons. Many of their leaders, however, use every conceivable opportunity to idolize the exploits of the Wehrmacht during the war and to slander the allied powers.

The extremist organizations of Austria are in close contact with one another, and with their counterparts in Western Germany. However, they are to be feared not because of any possible conspiracy against the Second Republic, but rather because they contribute to the infection of a public opinion which has traditionally been prone to racial and religious prejudices. The record of the newspapers in combatting this infection leaves something to be desired. Few of them can be accused of racial or pan-German bias, but most of them have failed to rouse their readers out of their indifference toward the more distressing realities of Austria’s life. There are, to be sure, some notable exceptions: the Furche and the Volksbote, Catholic weeklies of high quality and low circulation; the Kurier, Austria’s largest newspaper; and, since the Borodajkewycz scandal, the Arbeiter Zeitung, a Socialist party daily. But the benign influence of these publications is countered by the extremist views of, among others, the Neue Front, the organ of the Freedom party, and the Wiener Montag, one of Austria’s biggest weeklies (circulation 180,000).

The quality of the Wiener Montag’s journalism can be judged from an editorial it published in 1966, when a commission of American Jewish organizations visited Austria to investigate the extent of racial prejudice in the country: “If, twenty-one years after the fall of the Third Reich, someone has the cheek to assert that there is anti-Semitism in Austria, then he should also have the courage to ask about its causes. For over two decades, the Austrian people have been officially influenced [by propaganda] in a pacifist, non-nationalistic and pro-Jewish vein. If, after all this, there should in fact be anti-Semitic manifestations in Austria, then these must be a reaction to the immediate present.”

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But then, the denial of the facts about anti-Semitism in Austria is not limited to extremist publications. Last year, in an interview given to a network of three hundred American radio stations, Austria’s foreign minister, Lujo Toncic-Sorinj declared: “The Americans have a wrong picture if they believe that there is ani-Semitism in Austria. In Austria there is no rising anti-Semitism and hardly any anti-Semitism at all. This has completely disappeared since 1945.”

The evidence is to the contrary. Austrian anti-Semitism has survived the virtual disappearance of Austrian Jewry. (Today there are fewer than 11,000 Jews in Austria, constituting less than two-tenths of one per cent of the total population.) On this point an incident which occurred a few years ago in the city of Innsbruck in the Tyrol is illuminating. In 1938, three-hundred-fifty Jews lived in the Tyrol; after the war, only fifty. Nevertheless, when the police arrested a young student who had desecrated the city’s Jewish cemetery, they found in his possession a “poem” which declared: “The only foe whom it is worthwhile to hate, and even possibly to gas, is the eternal Jew, who today as before cheats the stupid but honest people. . . .”

When the situation calls for it, the anti-Semites feel free to “promote” non-Jews to the status of Jews. For example, during last year’s elections anti-Socialist leaflets appeared in lower Austria, accusing “the Jews in the Socialist party of reaching for power.” Four Socialist leaders were mentioned; three of them were not Jewish. The Socialists themselves are not immune from this sort of thing. In an opinion survey taken among Socialist functionaries after the expulsion of Franz Olah from the party, 16 per cent of the respondents claimed that Olah had fallen victim to the “intrigues of a Jewish and Marxist clique” within the party. In point of fact, not a single one of his principal adversaries was Jewish.

Austrian politicians are likely to characterize such manifestations of anti-Semitism as “isolated incidents”; they tend always to minimize or conceal the extent of racial and religious prejudice in the country. One of the results of this refusal to face the facts had been, of course, uncertainty about the nature of the facts. The first empirical study of Austrian anti-Semitism was not undertaken until October of last year, when the Neues Forum, a monthly publication, surveyed the opinions of twelve-hundred Austrians selected from different age groups, professions, and political allegiances. (The Austrian Ministry of Education subsidized this path-breaking project—to the extent of two-hundred dollars.)

The respondents were asked to check one of five answers to a question about the wartime murder of the Jews. An introductory statement referred to an imaginary debate on the subject in which the participants had discussed “whether the Americans and Russians are justified in reproaching the Germans for their acts against the Jews, when Negroes are suppressed in the U.S. and when there are concentration camps in the Soviet Union.” The five possible answers to the question included an unequivocal condemnation of anti-Semitism to the effect that “the massacre of the Jews was the greatest shame of our century.” Moderate anti-Semities who did not wish to associate themselves with Nazi crimes were given the chance to respond that “the Russians and the Americans are no better than the Germans,” and militant anti-Semites could reply that “the Jews themselves caused their own misfortunes.”

The results of this survey, published under the apt title, “The Austrian and His Shame,” belied the official statements about the absence of anti-Semitism in Austria. While 39 per cent of the respondents did opt for the first and “democratic” answer, 10 per cent blamed the Jews themselves for the Holocaust, and no less than 26 per cent absolved the Germans by claiming that the Russians and Americans were just as guilty.

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It is clear, then, that Austrian anti-Semitism represents a more serious phenomenon than a mere collection of “isolated incidents.” At the same time, it is a less dangerous phenomenon than some foreign observers are wont to believe. For one thing, the Catholic Church of Austria, under the leadership of Cardinal Koenig of Vienna, has been above reproach in condemning anti-Semitism: as a result, active Catholics in Austria are more immune to prejudice than the rest of the population. The staunchly liberal and tolerant attitude of the Church hierarchy in a predominantly Catholic country bodes well for the future of Austrian democracy. Then, too, it must be remembered that since the war the advocates of bigotry and extremism have continuously been defeated at the polls.

What remains to be done is to defeat bigotry and extremism in the minds of many Austrians; the task of “psychic” denazification has yet to be completed. There is no danger of the neo-Nazis gaining significant (or serious) political influence in Austria; the danger, rather, is that complacency and indifference will prevent the Austrians from coming to terms with their past and will thus also prevent them from creating a truly new Austria.

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¹ Gordon Brook-Shepherd, The Rape of Austria, Macmillan, London, 1963.