Vicious Jew-baiting became a chief activity for Austria’s veteran and newly-confirmed Nazis tonight after a day of arrests and violence featured by the suicide, among others, of former Vice-Chancellor Emil Fey, his wife and their 19-year-old son.
Vienna’s police force of 7,500, pledged today to “remove any animosities between the people and the State,” did little or nothing to curb the anti-Semitic wrath so dramatically unleashed in this “second capital” of Germany by Chancellor Hitler’s Anschluss coup.
Nazi youth brigades, their arms swathed with swastikas, swirled through Vienna’s Kaertnerstrasse crying “Death to the Jews!” All in their path showing the slightest hint of “tainted blood” were easy prey.
There were others who followed Ma or Fey and his family into death, preferring to take their own lives rather than face arrest which became a dread reality tonight for an unestimated number of citizens who once stood high among the country’s banking, industrial and artistic circles.
Most of the hapless victims were Jews, almost invariably charged with attempting to smuggle their fortunes out of a country which has now become but a state in the Nazi Reich. A few of the many taken into custody were subsequently released.
The Kaertnerstrasse, Vienna’s most important shopping section, was the scene of anti-Semitic activities which gave promise of incidents rivaling the Kurfuerstendamm riots in Berlin three years ago. There was more than a suspicion that many of those who suddenly appeared as the most ardent Jew-baiters were keenly anxious to show themselves to authorities and the public as 100-percent Nazis.
A “suicide pact” between Friedrich Reitling, head of the Jensbacher Steel Works and one of those scheduled for arrest with his daughter, was reported by the newspaper Telegraf. Prof. Gustave Bayer, 69-year-old Innsbruck doctor, and his daughter committed suicide by gas after drugging themselves, the same newspaper said.
Baron Louis de Rothschild, head of the Vienna branch of the famous banking family and several times host to the Duke of Windsor, was among those arrested. The four Schiffman brothers, owners of one of the capital’s largest department stores, also figured in the list.
(Sigmund Freud, 82-year-old “father of psychoanalysis,” was reported arrested by Paris-Soir.)
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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.
