About 1,000 Jews Still Remain in Vienna; Gestapo Claims 5,000 Masquerading As Non-jews

There are still about 1,000 Jews living in Vienna, the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter reported today. They are composed of persons over seventy years of age and of orphans under fourteen.

The paper states that the affairs of these remnants of Austrian Jewry are being cared for by a Jewish communal body which has its offices on Seitenstetten Street. Its activities are devoted chiefly to emigration. This body, the paper reports, has a staff of twenty-five which includes a number of doctors.

“The Gestapo,” the Swedish newspaper continues, “claims that in addition to these 1,000 Jews, there are between 5,000 and 7,000 more Jews in Austria, all of them living there illegally on documents showing that they are either air-raid victims from Germany or Fascists from the southern part of the Tyrol. The Gestapo says that it cannot take any measures against them because their documents are all in order.”

The correspondent of the Swedish newspaper estimates that 30,000 Nazis are living in houses of deported Vienna Jews and that several thousand Germans from various parts of the Reich are operating business enterprises which were taken from the Jews. He says that the so-called ” half Jews” in Vienna were mobilized on June 1 for war service and that Jewish men and women who are married to “Aryans” are doing forced labor in the city. They receive food rations lower than those given the general population but higher than the ones assigned to Jews.

The Nazi press in Vienna is conducting a campaign for destruction of all Jewish cemeteries from which the tombstones have not yet been removed. The slogan of their campaign is: “The Jew has disappeared from from Germany – everything else recalling him must also disappear.”