Hungarian Jews in Austria 1944/45

Research project P 13683 Hungarian Jews in Austria 1944/45 Erika WEINZIERL 28.06.1999 Between March 1944 and March 1945, more than 100,000 Hungarian Jews, in several subsequent contingents, were deported to Austria. The earliest deportation started immediately after German Army units had entered Hungary. At this time, to break down Hungarian resistance, anti-fascist intellectuals, politicians, and key people in trade and commerce were arrested and confined in camps in Hungary, but also in Vienna and Lower Austria, as well as in the KZ Mauthausen. Among these prisoners were numerous Jews. In May 1944, due to the general shortage of labor, deportation trains, originally on their way to Auschwitz, were rerouted to Gänserndorf, where about 3,000 Jewish men and women were `selected` for forced labor in agricultural, trade, and industrial enterprises in the "Gau Niederdonau". For most of those selected, this period of forced slave lasted until they were deported anew and sent to Mauthausen and Theresienstadt in February and March of 1945. In the end of June 1944, there followed 15,000 Jews from the Ghettos of Szolnok and Debrecen. They, too, were intended to bolster the labor force in the "Gaus" Vienna and Lower Austria, yet at the same time they represented a bargaining pawn for the SS in their negotiations for a separate peace with the Westen Allies. Administratively, these people, together with those taken to Austria in May, formed one unit within the responsibility on the Vienna "Außenkommando" [Vienna Branch Command] of the SS-"Sondereinsatzkommando Eichmann" [Special Action Commando Eichmann], which had its headquarters in Budapest. These workers were assigned to their jobs by the regional employment offices, while their wages went to the SS. For political reasons, the SS was interested in keeping the majority of this group of deportees alive. At the end of the harvest, in November of 1944, some convoys of now unemployed slave laborers were dispatched to the Bergen-Belsen Special Camp. In spring of 1945, when the Red Army was approaching the Austrian border, the workers were supposed to be taken to Theresienstadt. Since, however, the rail lines from Strasshof to Theresienstadt eventually had been disrupted by Allied air raids, the remaining workers were deported to Mauthausen and Gunskirchen in so-called "Death Marches". The largest group of Hungarian Jews was taken to the Hungarian-Austrian border after the Nyilas coup in the auumn and winter 1944/45. There, they were pressed into service to build and re-inforce the fortifications of the Eastern Border the Nazis called "SAdostwall". For them, conditions of work and living were so poor that a major part of these forced laborers died from cold, hunger, exhaustion, and epidemics. At the end of March in 1945, Heinrich Himmler issued orders to evacuate the Jewish forced labor contingents to Mauthausen. Since adequate means of transport were no longer available, the greater part of the totally exhausted male and female workers had to cover the distance to Mauthausen - at least partially - on foot. Their guards, supplied by the " Volkssturm" [Territorial Army], Hitlerjugend [Hitler Youth], constabulary, and the SS, were under orders to shoot all those no longer able to walk. After the War, up into the sixties, trials for capital crimes committed against Jews were held before Austrian courts oflaw. Court records of these trials not only are an important source for this research project; they are being scrutinized, as well, as documentation for the setting up of a democratic judiciary system in Austria after 1945. The trials held in Austria similar trials held after the War in other countries.