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Emigration, U S A

I. Forced emigration from Austria

Between March 1938 and November 1941 the National Socialists, through discriminatory edicts, laws and undisguised terror, drove more than 130 000 mainly Jewish Austrian men and women into exile or emigration. The figures quoted for those who had been driven out of Austria by Austro-fascism and National Socialism since February 1934 vary between 100 000 and 200 000.

About 15 000 Austrians fell back into German hands during the course of the war and were sent to extermination camps.

The majority of those driven out were "Jews" as defined by the National Socialist "Nuremberg Law" of 1935. They were driven out on so-called "racial" grounds, and might for the most part be seen as belonging to the middle classes. Furthermore, the Jews and non-Jews who were forced to flee or, if they happened to be out of the country in March 1938, forced to stay where they were, included in particular politically active people, who refused to get involved with the National Socialist regime, as well as non-conformist intellectuals working in predominantly scientific and cultural fields who wanted to avoid losing their spiritual and moral identity or prevent their creativity from atrophying.

Austrian Jews fled because their homes were reallocated to "National Comrades", because they were prohibited from studying or carrying out their profession, because they were sent "on leave or into temporary retirement", because they were threatened with the prospect of imprisonment and death. The Trapp family and Robert Stolz chose to flee because they were not prepared to exchange "our spiritual outlook ..., our beliefs and our honor", the exercise of the democratic rights of freedom, for the honors to be obtained from the National Socialist regime. Rudolf Ekstein is an example of an Austrian scientist who emigrated to the USA, driven out on three counts simultaneously: "as
a Jew, as a socialist and as a psychoanalyst".

The National Socialists achieved the expulsion of the Jewish population, which was their intention initially notwithstanding the serious harassment which accompanied this, by means of psychological as well as physical compulsory measures, and made a considerable amount of money in the process ("Aryanizations", taxes on those fleeing the Reich, etc.). From August 1938 the "Center for Jewish emigration in Vienna", run by the Viennese expert on Jews from the SS Security Service, Adolf Eichmann, ostensibly to simplify emigration procedures, served to speed up the "emigration" and helped the aim of State-led "blood-letting" of those driven out. In October 1941 however all emigration was forbidden by a directive from Himmler, after the highest NS leaders had decided to exterminate the Jews, and on November 2,1941 "the last group of emigrants left Vienna via Portugal".

[...]

Document 26. From: Article by Gerhard Botz (Salzburg) about the "Stages by which the Jews were excluded from Society", 1987.

Zeitgeschichte (Contemporary History), Volume 14, issue 9/10, June/July 1987

[...] Through the activities of the Vienna Center [for Jewish emigration] the forced emigration of the Jews was considerably accelerated, reaching its high point with almost 10 000 emigrants as early as the month after the Center was established, in September 1938. From the "Anschluß" until the end of July 1938 a total of
18 000 Jews had left Vienna as emigrants. But in the three months to October 1938 alone, 32 000 Jews emigrated, and by July of the following year another
54 000 had followed them. On 30 November 1939 the number of Jews who had emigrated was finally fixed at 126 445, a figure which, even later, was not to be increased to any great extent. From this deportation of the Jews the German Reich, quite apart from the profits from "Aryanizations", made up to the end of November 1939 over 1.6 million dollars, raised as foreign currency from Jewish emigrants' relief organizations. After the beginning of the war the Jewish emigration came to an abrupt standstill. Even so another 23 500 Viennese Jews managed to emigrate during the Second World War.

[...]

II. Entry and immigration into the USA

In the period from March 1938 to the moment when the USA joined the war in December 1941 more than 30 000 Austrians probably fled to the USA, mainly from France, Spain and Portugal. At least eighty per cent of them were either Jewish themselves or of Jewish origin. In literature we often find the statement, clearly traceable to the emigration lists of the Israelite religious community of Vienna, that between March 13, 1938 and the middle of November 1941, 28 615 Austrian Jews fled to the USA; an OSS "Memorandum on Austrian Immigration in the USA" dated November 1941 opens with the observation "There are about 40 000 Austrians in the USA who have immigrated since 1938".

More satisfactory figures relating to Austrians who fled to the USA in the face of National Socialism are not available. This is due to the lack of reliable statistics relating to refugees who were Jewish in origin although it was not their own religion, and due to the fact that Austrians entered the USA as part of the German/Austrian quota or, if they were accepted outside the limits of the quota legislation, were generally registered as German.

[...] The majority of the Austrians who fled to the USA did not get there by a direct route, but rather following their release from a National Socialist concentration camp, or after they had been pushed from state to state and from authority to authority as emigrants devoid of any rights, or had been driven on from one country to the next during the course of Hitler's war of conquest.

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