The Veterinary School of Vienna during the "Third Reich"

In the early 1940s, Elias Canetti wrote that history talks too little about animals. He was aware that the new animal protection law of Nazi Germany was the most comprehensive legislation of any currently in force to prevent cruelty to animals. 1936 new veterinary laws were passed: the Reichstierärzteordnung clearly defined veterinarians duties in conformity with the animal protection law of 1933: The German veterinarian () is entrusted with a political mission and leadership, responsibilities that go far beyond the purview of his occupation. That there was not only a connection between the Nazis animal protection laws and their reordering of society, but that there could also have been a close interrelationship between veterinary medicine as a scientific discipline, institution and profession and National Socialisms racist objectives, went unexamined by scholars for decades. While considerable work has meanwhile been done in Germany since the late 90s, this field of contemporary history remained entirely unexplored in Austria. The proposed qualitative study will thus represent pioneering work. Focusing on Vetmeduni Vienna we will examine a broad spectrum of source material to assess the various protagonists and their behavioral latitude within the context of National Socialism. The project will deal with the period from 1933 to 1955, with particular emphasis on the Nazi period, which represents the point of departure and the focus of all considerations. Three major thematic complexes will be investigated: 1.) Institutional, scientific, historical and biographical issues in the context of personnel (dis-)continuities as well as the caesura years 1933, 1938 and 1945. 2.) Military involvement of the universitys personnel in conjunction with their wartime service in specially created veterinary companies or in units of the Wehrmacht or SS. 3.) Postwar history of the university in a legal and sociopolitical context with a special focus on denazification and judicial proceedings that involved faculty and staff members. The primary aim of this project is to gather, for the first time, detailed and comprehensive knowledge about the Vetmeduni Vienna during and after the Nazi era and to produce a source-based, scientific publication that would represent an innovative elaboration on this institution and its personnel as well as on issues in the fields of social science, the history of science, jurisprudence, political science and history. As this project includes intensely focused biographical research on university personnel and can be expected to yield findings and insights into the perpetrators, bystanders and victims of Nazi crimes, it could make a significant public statement in the context of Holocaust commemoration and dealings with the history of National Socialism in academia.

Austrian veterinaries have had a great impact on the actual political events in Austria. They fought for National Socialism, sacrificed a lot and we count a large number of victims, David Wirth enthusiastically claimed on the occasion of Austrias Anschluss to the German Reich in the Viennese Monthly Veterinary Journal in March 1938: The years of an undignified, so- called independence are over!, concluded Wirth head of the Institute of Internal Medicine at Viennas Vet School, twice rector and at this very time secretary of the National Socialist Dozentenbund. With this conclusion Wirth himself contradicted a major thesis that had been cultivated as historical discourse at Viennas University of Veterinary Medicine for more than 80 decades: The thesis of a supposedly apolitical scientific discipline and non-political veterinarians. According to this predominant assumption Viennas Vet School had just experienced some Gleichschaltung by the Nazis, who were interpreted as external force that had apparently nothing to do with Viennas Vet School, its personnel or its students. In our broadly designed research project in the field of contemporary history we examined several aspects of this hitherto unexplored Austrian university history. The starting point was a first and systematically surveyed collection of different sources in several archives, among them the Archive of the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, the Austrian State Archives, the Federal Archives of Berlin and Viennas City and State Archive. Finally, we tackled the central issues in two main publications. On the one hand we decided to examine the lives and fates of Jewish students. Under the title Jüdische Studierende und Absolventen der Wiener Tierärztlichen Hochschule 1930-1947. Wege Spuren Schicksale we created a voluminous monograph of 360 pages that lightens 42 individual Jewish biographies across Europe. By reconstructing their fates we could, for the first time, not only reveal the anti- semitic atmosphere at Viennas Vet School, but we also proved wrong the long valid assumption that there existed only a few Jewish vet students. On the other hand we also traced the National Socialist actors of Viennas Vet School on their way to Austrias Anschluss in March 1938. The questions involved led to our second publication Die Wiener Tierärztliche Hochschule und der Nationalsozialismus. Eine Universitätsgeschichte zwischen dynamischer Antizipation und willfähriger Anpassung (Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2019). Here we could show a dynamic anticipation of National Socialist policy, long before National Socialism was established as political system in March 1938. In this context our investigation made clear that the students in particular played a prominent role as political actors. Organizedwithin theNationalSocialistGerman StudentsAssociation (Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund), democratically legitimated and, at Viennas Vet School even endowed with an absolute majority since elections 1931, we were able to show that on the academic level vet students in significant agreement with their teachers and the personnel of Viennas Vet School clearly belonged to the political pioneers and forerunners of the Anschluss. Having analysed a major amount of data we could create a new historical narrative, where central events and important personalities of Viennas Vet School are critically revisited in regard to their policies before and after March 1938.