Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
however, he fled to England. The 20th century's most innovative classical composer,
Arnold Schönberg (1874-1951), lost his job as a lecturer in Berlin in 1933 and went to
the US. They were just two of many prominent Austrian Jews forced into exile.
Others were not as fortunate. The Holocaust (or Schoa), Hitler's attempt to wipe out
European Jewry, was a brutal and systematic act that saw some 65,000 Austrian Jews
perish in concentration camps throughout Europe. It ruptured Jewish history in Austria
dating back to the early Middle Ages, and even today it's not really possible to talk about
a 'recovery' of Jewish culture in the country.
Because of atrocities perpetrated on the Jewish population by the Nazis, today the Jew-
ish community is only a fraction of its former size. About 8000 religiously affiliated Jews
live in Austria, and there are about another 3000 to 5000 who are not affiliated with a
community. The number was boosted by the arrival of Jews from the former Soviet
Union in the 1990s, and increasingly Jews from Hungary, where anti-Semitism is on the
rise, are moving to Vienna.
Resistance & Liberation
With the annexation of Austria in 1938, opposition turned to resistance. As elsewhere,
whenever Hitler's troops crossed a border, resistance from within was extremely difficult.
Interestingly, Tyrolean resistance leaders often rallied opposition to Nazism by recalling
the revolt of Andreas Hofer in 1809 when Tyrol's innkeeper led his rebellion for inde-
pendence. An Österreichisches Freiheitsbataillon (Austrian Freedom Battalion) fought
alongside the Yugoslav People's Liberation Army, and partisan groups in Styria and Car-
inthia maintained links with other partisans across the Yugoslavian border. Tellingly, un-
like other countries, Austria had no government in exile.
Resistance increased once the war looked lost for Hitler. The Austrian Robert Bernard-
is (1908-44) was involved in the assassination attempt on Hitler by high-ranking officers
on 20 July 1944 and was then executed by the Nazis. Another involved in that plot, Carl
Szokoll (1915-2004), survived undetected. The most famous resistance group, however,
was called 05, whose members included Austria's president from 1957 to 1965, Adolf
Schärf (1890-1965).
With the Red Army approaching Vienna in 1945, the resistance group 05 worked
closely with Carl Szokoll and other military figures in Operation Radetzky to liberate Vi-
enna in the last days of the war. Although they were able to establish contact with the
Red Army as it rolled towards the city, they were betrayed at the last moment and several
