target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_fdc2c01f-ae9f-5e8e-85cb-ae6938234942">25 As with much anti-Semitic violence, it had as much to do with jealousy and theft as intolerance. As the National Assembly voted for the Anschluss, gangs of storm troopers and vigilantes emerged to settle accounts with Hitler’s opponents, both real and imagined, including Jews, communists and socialists. Leading Nazi Heinrich Himmler arrived with forty thousand police in tow, and the Gestapo techniques of rounding up and arresting political opponents proceeded to channel at least twenty thousand into concentration camps to uncertain fates.
Resistance
Anti-fascist resistance became less prominent and the workers movement had been weakened, badly affected by mass unemployment (a third of the population was jobless) and the rise in the cost of living. Following the February uprising, left-wing activists had gone ‘underground’ and the far right absorbed some of the socialists’ votes. By the summer of 1938, shortages were affecting morale and Vienna saw much ‘lawlessness accompanied by violence, perpetrated by marauding Nazi malcontents’ in Jewish areas.26 Also, Austrian Nazis were being usurped by their more efficient German counterparts. Although active resistance was slight, workers still dissented: the communist underground paper Rote Fahne reported that workers had gone on strike for better wages and that there was unrest throughout industry. In Vienna in 1939, dissatisfaction was widespread and anti-German sentiment was expressed as the communist underground spread further, distributing propaganda and encouraging sabotage.27 The Nazis responded with more surveillance and arrests and ordered the police to arrest ‘all persons of Marxist persuasion—Communists, Revolutionary Socialists and so forth—who might be suspected of undermining the leadership of the National Socialist state’.28 The communists still maintained cells in industry and propaganda activities whilst ‘socialist railwaymen solicited contributions, set up safe houses, and established links with like-minded groups in Bavaria’.29 It was not without risk, and 250 Salzburg railway workers were arrested by the Gestapo alone.
Schlurfs: Youth Against Fascism
The most prominent resistance came from the youth with ‘a growing number of scuffles between teenage gangs of Schlurfs and the Hitler Youth.… [The Schlurfs were] composed largely of working-class boys’.30 Their numbers were increased by other disenfranchised young people, ‘apprentices, armament workers…“some misfits” and cripples’.31 They modelled loud suits, quiffs and arrogance, listening and dancing to jazz in bars with girls, or Schlurf Kittens, and ‘they directed their hostility against the Hitler Youth, whose formations they ridiculed for compulsory drills, senseless discipline, and mindless conformity’.32 Himmler ordered a clampdown, and the police attacked the Schlurfs in their bars and forcibly cut their hair. This did not deter their ‘anti-social’ activities and ‘over the course of the years clashes between Schlurfs and Hitler Youth escalated sharply. There were rumbles in Wienar-Atzgerdorf, muggings in the Prater, and stone throwing attacks on various Hitler Youth neighbourhood quarters.’33 They also smashed up a Hitler Youth dormitory and, despite the punitive measures against sexual liaisons, a Nazi reported that one women entertained several wayward youths at home where ‘they make noise and howl, play the gramophone, dance or play music until two in the morning.… Mrs G [was] sitting stark naked on the toilet with the door wide open!’34 In these small ways did people resist.
War fatigue, shortages, low wages and general dissatisfaction continued throughout the early 1940s. Anti-German sentiment was expressed at football matches in ‘a series of soccer riots that culminated in a wild melee.… Young toughs stoned and pummelled Gauleiter Schirach’s limousine, shattering its windows and slashing its tires,’35 which was comparatively mild hooliganism given later UK standards. Over two thousand per month were arrested for a variety of offences, including ‘insubordination, disruptive behaviour, or refusal to work’.36 There was ‘an upsurge of Communist violence in Salzburg and in railway yards in Styria and Carthinia’,37 and by 1943, ‘there were “daily executions of ten to fifteen anti-Nazis” in Josefstadt’.38 By 1944, communists, socialists, and moderate conservatives joined with O5, the resistance movement who, by the time the war was over, could claim 100,000 members. For others, an era of collective amnesia began.
The violence in Austria was not as prominent as in Germany; during the entire conflict between the left and the fascists, the attempted socialist uprising in 1934 and the subsequent failed Nazi coup, 567 people died—significantly less than in Germany. The far-right militia operated in an anti-working-class capacity, something that was repeated many times in many countries, and anti-fascists were moved towards militancy through provocation by the Heimwehr. The relatively small communist party, the moderation of the SD, the inherent conservatism of the Austrian people and the acceptance of an authoritarian government did not create the climate for militant anti-fascism. After the Anschluss, communists and more radical workers maintained propaganda work and communication with the outside world, in particular the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS). The Gestapo arrested many workers, who met uncertain though no-doubt horrific fates. That the Schlurfs dissented and physically attacked the Hitler Youth is reassuring. As the war progressed, ordinary Austrians, having faced hardship, shortages and external pressures, saw through the Nazi programme—but this in no way explains the barbarity of certain right-wing Austrians and their violent anti-Semitism.
Endnotes:
1 F.L. Carsten, Fascist Movements in Austria (London: Sage, 1977), 12–16.
2 Ibid., 20.
3 Martin Kitchen, The Coming of Austrian Fascism (London: Croom Helm, 1980), 3.
4 Carsten, Fascist Movements in Austria, 47.
5 Ibid., 66.
6 Ibid., 107.
7 Payne, A History of Fascism, 246.
8 Philip Morgan, Fascism in Europe, 1919–1945 (London: Routledge, 2003), 16.
9 Bruce F. Pauley, From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 113.
10 Ibid., 266.
11 Ibid., 248.
