Austrian railways and their role in the Holocaust

A new Tel Aviv exhibition is the most recent attempt of Austria to face up to the past and acknowledge its active contribution to the Nazi mass murder and those who defied the fascist regime.

By BARRY DAVIS
Auschwitz (photo credit: REUTERS)
Auschwitz
(photo credit: REUTERS)
Seventy-two years ago today, Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi concentration and death camp, was liberated by Soviet troops.
As International Holocaust Remembrance Day takes place across the world today, people of all nationalities will pay tribute to the estimated six million Jews, two million Romani people, 250,000 mentally and physically disabled, and 9,000 homosexual men murdered by the Nazi regime and its collaborators.
Of course, we have our own national Holocaust Remembrance Day. That normally takes place on 27 Nisan (around late April-early May), but the United Nations-sanctioned global event will also be marked here by a number of events, including an intriguing exhibition called “Suppressed Years – Railway and National Socialism in Austria between 1938 and 1945.”
The exhibition opens at the Elias Sourasky Central Library of Tel Aviv University on January 31, and will run until March 17.
More than 70 years after the end of World War II, numerous research works, including ongoing projects, are adding to our knowledge of the time, and new facts and aspects of the darkest period in the history of the Jewish people are still coming to light. The harrowing iconic image of the railway tracks leading to Auschwitz and the camp gates with the chillingly deceptive words Arbeit macht frei (“work liberates”) – arched over the top is a universal and unforgettable presence.
A Nazi propaganda poster: ‘Trains must go ahead for the victory’ (photo credit: COLLECTION ALFRED KLEIN-WISENBERG)
A Nazi propaganda poster: ‘Trains must go ahead for the victory’ (photo credit: COLLECTION ALFRED KLEIN-WISENBERG)
My own uncle and aunt, who were very little, walked through those gates, never to return. My grandmother may also have died at the camp, although the lack of documentation of her alighting from the inhumanely packed cattle car may mean she did not survive the trip.
The concept of “Suppressed Years” was nurtured by Milli Segal, from Vienna, who was also instrumental in the creation of the Kindertransport Museum in the Austrian capital in 2014.
“The railway system was a very important part of the Nazi war machine,” she notes when we meet in Tel Aviv a few days before the opening.
About the Austrians in particular, she says that they were “willing collaborators.”
She explains: “You only have to look at the number of employees the Austrian railway system had – 57,000 in 1937 and by 1945 they had 104,000. And there were all these illegal Nazis in Austria, who were already members of the Nazi Party, and after the Anschluss they told the Germans ‘we supported you from the beginning, now give us a job.’” The Austrian company was also very keen to get on board the German Nazis’ efforts to persecute the Jews.
“It took only five days for the Austrian railways to join the German company,” Segal notes.
THE IDEA for researching the company’s past was hatched by current Austrian Chancellor Christian Kern, who, prior to taking on national office, served as CEO of the state-owned Austrian Federal Railways (ÖBB) for six years.
Kern is fervent about letting the world know about the train company’s dark past, as well as the rare beacon of anti-Hitler light shone by some of its employees.
“Although the railway played a central role during the era of National Socialism, it has hitherto remained virtually unresearched and blanked out in recounting the history of Austrian Federal Railways,” says Kern.
Austrian Chancellor Christian Kern (photo credit: REUTERS)
Austrian Chancellor Christian Kern (photo credit: REUTERS)
“Without the railway as a means of transport, the German Wehrmacht’s wartime logistics would not have been feasible. Without the railway, the war of aggression in Europe could not have been conducted.”
More pertinently, it was the trains that took millions of Jews and other “racially undesirable elements” to death camps in Germany, Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Latvia and France.
“Without the logistics capacity of the rail, the systematic murder of European Jews, of Sinti and Romanies, the deportation of Slovenes, of homosexuals, of Jehovah’s Witnesses and political dissidents would not have been possible,” Kern continues.
“During the Second World War, three million people from almost the whole of Europe were transported by train to the extermination camps of the Nazi regime.”
IT TOOK Austria quite some time, after the end of the war, to alter its stance on the Holocaust and the country’s pivotal and highly active part in it. In 1991, then-chancellor of Austria Franz Vranitzky made a speech in the Austrian Parliament in which, for the first time, a national leader officially acknowledged that the Austrians had played a part in the Holocaust.
This was a historic break from the hitherto official portrayal of Austria as the first victim of German Nazism.
Then-25-year-old Kern was moved by the admission.
“It was a speech that impressed me a lot and has shaped me,” he says.
The chancellor talks about his maternal grandmother, who, before the Holocaust, worked as a housekeeper for a Jewish couple. Apparently, the couple hid in an attic for some time during World War II, and Kern relates how his mother, who was a child at the time, “brought them something to eat and drink.” The Gestapo eventually discovered the hideaway, he relates, and the couple was never heard of again.
Kern learned of this from his mother, so he was aware of the Holocaust in his childhood.
“Later on, during my youth, I met with Holocaust survivors, read a lot about it, visited Mauthausen [concentration camp in Upper Austria] and, in fact, probably was part of the first generation that had a clear perspective on Austria’s role in the Holocaust. Therefore, it was important to me that the exhibition would be a contribution to the commemoration also in the future.”
The current CEO of ÖBB, Andreas Matthä, is just as keen to spread the word about the train company’s Holocaust past, and to move forward.
“The railway with its logistical capabilities made a horrific contribution to industrialized mass murder and the war of extermination,” he says. “What happened back than was the cruelest form of abuse of the railway system imaginable. We have to accept this dark chapter as a part of our company history. We will learn from it for the future and commemorate its victims.” Matthä notes that the current company employees are made aware of the company’s nefarious past, and talks about how the “permanent exhibition at our ÖBB education center in St. Pölten [in Lower Austria], and the opening up of discourse to the general public, are important elements in a broad knowledge and remembrance process.”
THE TEL AVIV University exhibition follows a number of other showings around Austria in recent years. The accompanying catalogue contains a lot of detailed information, charting the railway company’s history, including then-BBÖ’s incorporation into the German national train company, Deutsche Reichsbahn, following the Anschluss in 1938.
The German train authorities required that all company employees take a “new oath of allegiance to Hitler,” and employees were screened with regard to their political leanings.
Police and SS, including Adolf Eichmann (see arrow), gather in a courtyard before the start of the round-up of the Jewish community in Vienna on March 18, 1938 (photo credit: DOCUMENTATION CENTER OF AUSTRIAN RESISTANCE)
Police and SS, including Adolf Eichmann (see arrow), gather in a courtyard before the start of the round-up of the Jewish community in Vienna on March 18, 1938 (photo credit: DOCUMENTATION CENTER OF AUSTRIAN RESISTANCE)
Hundreds of former BBÖ employees were deprived of their right to work on “racial,” political and other grounds.
The exhibition catalogue, which was painstakingly compiled by Traude Kogoj, diversity manager for the ÖBB Group and project manager of the History Project, also notes that racial purges had been in progress prior to the merger of the companies, too.
“According to current research, because of the latent antisemitism existing in state-owned companies prior to 1938, there were relatively few Jewish railway employees,” it says.
Exact figures on how many officials were dismissed or forced into retirement from the Deutsche Reichsbahn, following the introduction of various antisemitic procedures, are not available. The Vermögensanmeldungen (Declarations of Property) record dating from April 27, 1938, includes the names of 368 Jews as well as 11 Versippte or “clan-related” employees who were dispensed with.
Segal says she had to dig deep through archival documents to find the requisite written and photographic material and other documents, but has managed to put together a comprehensive, evocative and emotive offering.
The enlarged panel exhibits include a map of Europe, showing the tentacle offshoots of the Austrian railway network.
“I wanted to show the routes on which Jews and other people were taken to the death camps,” she says. “The map is a big one, with Austria in the middle, because it concerns Austria, with all the ghettos and all the concentration camps where Austrian Jews or Slovenes or Gypsies were put.”
The map also shows the routes taken by Jewish Austrian children who, mostly, escaped to Britain via the Kindertransport operation.
The trains also provided a means of escape for Austrians who managed to get out in time, although many were later caught by the Nazi death apparatus, when the Germans invaded other countries around the continent.
One of the most famous escapees, who did not perish in the Holocaust, was Sigmund Freud. After a protracted and extortionate process of negotiations with the Nazi authorities, the worldfamous psychoanalyst made it to London, where he spent the last year of his life.
The Tel Aviv exhibition follows previous airings of the material around Austria, although not with exactly the same format.
“I adapted the material to the different regions,” explains Segal.
Next week’s showing includes a reconstructed cattle car, which visitors can enter. That may prove to be an emotionally trying experience for some, which, of course, is partly the point – to convey the experiences of Holocaust victims in as palpable and enlightening a manner as possible.
“When we had the exhibition in Salzburg, it was in a really big hangar, so I had a real cattle car there,” says the curator. If the idea was to look to generate a sense of discomfort, Segal certainly managed that.
She adds that the map and the cattle car got the message across loud and clear and duly evoked unease.
“These two things were very delicate.
I live in Austria, and people in Austria don’t like confronting that past. But I knew that either they allow me to make the exhibition the way I want, or I don’t do it.”
For the project to go ahead, Segal needed Kern’s blessing and that she received.
“I made a presentation to him, and it happened to be on Purim. I brought hamentashen and put them in front of him. I started doing the presentation, and suddenly Mr. Kern asked me if I believed in God. I said yes, but I didn’t understand why that had anything to do with the exhibition.”
Maybe it was Segal’s faith in the Lord or, possibly, the tasty pastries, or Kern’s desire to educate Austrians and others about the railway company’s Holocaust-related history, but, together, it did the trick: “‘Okay, Mrs.
Segal,” she describes Kern’s reaction, “‘I can see you want to make a big thing out of this. Do what you want.’” Segal has endeavored to cover as many Austrian railway bases as possible, including some surprising items.
Despite the ever-stricter constraints placed on the railway company employees, and the draconian demands for higher rates of efficiency, for pledges of allegiance to the Nazi cause and continuing racial purges, it seems there were some Austrians who did their best to defy the all-powerful Nazi regime. These included members of the railway company staff. Between 1938 and 1945, 2,700 Austrian men and women were sentenced to death and executed on political grounds.
Of them, 154 company workers were sentenced to death and executed, 1,438 were sent to concentration camps, and 135 railway officials died in prisons and concentration camps. Their bravery is noted in the exhibition.
The punitive circle spread over time.
Not only were disloyal railway employees severely punished, their families also bore the brunt of the blame and had their food stamps stopped. This, naturally, made survival very challenging, but some were supported by friends and neighbors who provided them with lifesaving items of food from their own meager rations.
Segal says she met a woman whose father was caught giving food to the family of a Nazi-defying train company worker and was summarily executed.
The exhibition catalogue stretches to almost 60 pages, and beefs up the “Suppressed Years” layout with an abundance of insightful historical information. Clearly, Segal wants to leave us with food for thought.
“I want people to sit at home and read about it all,” she says, “and to think about what happened there.”