A Berlin dispatch by the Associated Press reported today that all Viennese Jews have been ordered to leave for the projected “Jewish reservation” in the Lublin area of Poland before March 1, 1940.
Four thousand Jews have already been deported from Vienna to Nazi Poland in the last two weeks, the dispatch said, being permitted to take with them only 110 pounds of luggage each and 300 marks worth of tools and machinery “if not too bulky and in so far as there was room for them.” Similar deportations have taken place from Maehrisch-Ostrau.
According to the dispatch, the Jews were ordered to move and settle “somewhere near the new western frontier of Soviet Russia between the San and Vistula rivers in former Polish territory with Lublin as the center.”
The first contingent of 2,000 men between the ages of 18 and 50 were reported to have left Vienna Oct. 18. They were followed last Friday by 2,000 more, mostly men, but also many women and children. The deportees turned the keys to their homes over to the Jewish Community which will either administer them or sell them, with the proceeds “devoted to social purposes.”
“In other words,” the dispatch adds, “whatever the deported Jews could not take with them apparently was confiscated. At least there was no intimation that the Jewish owners themselves would receive any proceeds or benefits.”
Jews in Berlin and other Reich cities were described as fearing they would be the next to be ordered to the reservation.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
