Opening each box was extremely exciting, said
Lothar Hölbling, the chief archivist and one
of the discoverers. Eight hundred
excitements. Tuesday, June 5, 2007
Vienna cache is
one of largest Holocaust archives By Marjorie Backman
The New York
Times WHEN Israelitische
Kultusgemeinde Wien, or Jewish Community Vienna,
decided to sell a vacant building in the summer of
2000, two employees were sent to look for any
archival material that might have been left behind.
 David
Irving comments: SEVEN YEARS ago? The
year 2000? And these are the people who
have whined that the rest of the world is
sitting on its Holocaust materials and not
making them available to historians?
I forgot: some
exceptions apply.
As I wrote somewhere --
in my prison
memoirs I believe, because they and
the Dokumentationsarchiv des
Widerstands were the gentleman who
secretly demanded my arrest back in 1989
-- the name Israelitische Kultusgemeine
Wien, the Israelite Cultural
Community, reminds me inexorably of the
Coalition for Human Dignity in Oregon: the
mob-spitters run by a petty crook called
Jonathan Mozzochi, one of Professor
Deborah Lipstadt's star witnesses
until
I pointed to his criminal record; he
was in turn employed by, uh, you
know whom, to spit on people,
literally spit, who were arriving to hear
me speak on the West Coast. 'Most Holocaust scholarship has been
written based on the documentary record
created by the perpetrators of the
Holocaust," says Shapiro -- i.e. by
the Nazis.
Now, how does that gel with
the vicious criticism of me by
Professor Richard "Skunky" Evans in
the lucrative* expert evidence he provided
for Lipstadt, for using the statistics
given by the Nazi chief of police, Kurt
Daluege, in an internal lecture on
Jewish criminality in pre-Nazi Berlin?
Incidentally the card
indices discovered within the Vienna
apartment and "produced by the community's
emigration office" in 1938 and 1939 were
perhaps the work of the Eichmann agency of
that name set up in the city; more "Nazi
records", Evans would shriek.
INCIDENTALLY too: "Also found in
Vienna: the lists for 45 deportations,
each naming about 1,000 Jews scheduled for
transport in 1941 and 1942 to destinations
like Auschwitz, Theresienstadt, Lodz and
Minsk. Some of these locations were known
then as Jewish ghettos. Not as widely
known, however, was the fact that after a
certain time, they became transfer points
to death camps."
Uh, I see. The above is
a neat little circumlocution, the second
sentence excusing the first: why would the
lists be in the Jewish community's files?
Because they foolishly, or even
lucratively, collaborated with the Nazis
in drawing them up. Perhaps the
restitution claims should be against the
Kultusgemeinde.
Let's have a little Real
History here. *
Evans was paid a quarter of a million
dollar fee. In addition -- although there
is no suggestion that he anticipated this
at the time he drew up his neutral
evidence -- Lipstadt's co-defendant
Penguin Books Ltd., part of the
billion-dollar Pearson Group, signed a one
million pound book contract with him after
their trial victory which his unbiased
expert evidence had so obviously
procured. |
What they found exceeded any historian's dream:
Stacked floor to ceiling in two rooms of one
apartment sat more than 800 dusty boxes containing,
among other things, about half a million pages of
detailed records of the community during the
Holocaust - archives not known to have
survived.'Opening each box was extremely exciting,' said
Lothar Hölbling, the chief archivist
and one of the discoverers. 'Eight hundred
excitements.' Now, after seven years of
quiet work reordering, preserving and
microfilming the archives - a joint project of
Jewish Community Vienna and the U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museum in Washington - the documents are
about to be officially unveiled with a presentation
at the museum on Thursday, followed by an
exhibition, opening on July 3, [2007] at
the Jewish Museum Vienna. When combined with community records stretching
back to the 17th century that had been shipped to
Israel in the 1950s, the Vienna cache makes up one
of the largest Holocaust archives of any Jewish
community, some two million pages. With it
historians will be better able to understand how
the Holocaust unfolded and provide a window into
the daily life of Vienna's Jews. The archives of
Jewish Community Vienna, the representative body of
the city's Jews, will also be of great help to
families in uncovering exactly what happened to
their relatives. 'For most of the last six decades, people
believed that one could not study the action of
Jews in the Holocaust period because the Nazis
systematically destroyed the records of Jewish
communities and organizations,' said Paul
Shapiro, director of the Holocaust museum's
Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies.
'Most Holocaust scholarship
has been written based on the documentary record
created by the perpetrators of the
Holocaust.' The Vienna archives, in their entirety, are
believed to be the largest collection of material
about a Jewish community in the German-speaking
world, Ingo Zechner, director of the Vienna
group's Holocaust Victims' Information and Support
Center, said. Indeed, Vienna once had the
third-largest Jewish population in Europe. A survey of Vienna's pre-Holocaust records
illustrates the community's diversity: Jewish
cultural organizations, welfare societies, chess
clubs, groups of Jewish soldiers from World War I,
Zionist groups -- even monarchist clubs are
represented, Zechner said. A 1927 letter from Sigmund Freud declared
his 1926 income of 50,000 Austrian schillings and
the tax he expected to pay the group. 
Some of Vienna's Holocaust-era files can already be
viewed on microfilm at the Holocaust museum in
Washington and at the Central Archives for the
History of the Jewish People in Israel. And,
according to plans arranged with Simon
Wiesenthal before his death, a proposed Vienna
Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies will
unite under one roof Wiesenthal's Nazi-hunting
files with the Jewish Community files and will
serve as a research institute for visiting scholars
and a showcase for themed exhibitions.
After the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938, they
began disbanding virtually all Jewish groups. Two
months later the Nazis reinstated Jewish Community
Vienna, Zechner said, enlisting it to help carry
out their initial plan, which was for Jews to
depart Austria after paying fees and leaving behind
most of their property. Discovered within the Vienna apartment were card
indexes, produced by the community's emigration
office, with the names of 118,000 Jews from
families that had sought its assistance to emigrate
in 1938 and 1939. These indexes were the key to
sorting through thousands of emigration
questionnaires already stored in Jerusalem. The questionnaire, filled out by the head of a
household, solicited four pages of detail about
family and economic status, references and contacts
abroad - pertinent information for those seeking
visas. 'A Jewish community official would make a house
visit and describe the living conditions,'
Anatol Steck of the Holocaust museum said.
In many cases it is now possible to trace every
administrative step, from someone's first contact
at the emigration office to when the family boarded
a train or a ship, Zechner said. The archive also contains thousands of letters,
many related to emigration issues. 'They would
assist families in working through the bureaucratic
maze of getting out of the country,' Shapiro said.
'They also made a calculation of which families
needed cash.' Jewish Community Vienna encouraged Jews to learn
new skills, like farming and mechanics, so they
could be placed abroad, Steck said. When the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, the
founder of existential analysis, filled out an
emigration questionnaire in 1938, Frankl wrote by
hand in German: 'I'm living with my father, a
federal retiree. My income from my medical practice
is so little, I will have to close my medical
office.' Asked if he had been trained in a new
profession, he wrote, 'I'm about to learn the craft
of house painting.' Frankl received an immigration visa to the
United States but forfeited it so as not to leave
his parents behind. He, his wife and his parents
were deported in 1942 to concentration camps; only
Frankl survived, writing of his Auschwitz
experiences in 'Man's Search for Meaning.' For Jews who perished, Steck said, 'the
questionnaires are like the last testament of the
victims.' Ultimately,
two-thirds of Vienna's Jewish
community survived the Holocaust, but more
than 65,000 Austrian Jews were murdered. Also found in Vienna:
the lists for 45 deportations, each naming about
1,000 Jews scheduled for transport in 1941 and
1942 to destinations like Auschwitz,
Theresienstadt, Lodz and Minsk. Some of these
locations were known then as Jewish ghettos. Not
as widely known, however, was the fact that
after a certain time, they became transfer
points to death camps. The records found in Vienna are also being used
to help families file restitution claims. The
Holocaust Victims' Support Center was founded in
1999, the year after Austria began serious
discussions about compensation for looted artwork,
slave labor and stolen property.
-- AAP
 Holocaust
survivors say archives ignored
U.S. HOLOCAUST survivors expressed dismay on
Thursday [June 7, 2007] that documents
found in Vienna were not used to help settle
insurance claims by descendants of Jews whose
families had property seized by the Nazis. Part of
the document cache -- which includes World War
II-era deportation lists, emigration documents,
letters and photos found in Vienna in 2000 -- will
be included in an exhibition that opens in the
Austrian capital next month. " [read
on] commentary here:
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