The Jewish Lawyer of Vienna Facing Exile
After the Anschluss of March 1938, the Nazi authorities methodically push Jews out of the liberal professions in Austria. The regulation of 31 March 1938 allows Jewish lawyers to have their licences revoked; from 3 April onward, the Ministry of Justice can strike them from the bar at will. The disbarment becomes general by late 1938: by 31 December 1938 at the latest, lawyers classified as Jewish under the Nuremberg Laws lose the right to practise. Of the 2,541 members of the bar at the time of the Anschluss, only 771 remain at the end of the year.
In the spring of 1939, a Viennese lawyer in his fifties, struck from the bar and deprived of any income, must decide his family's future. The doors to emigration are closing one by one: visas, quotas, the Reich Flight Tax, the queues outside the consulates.
To stay is to hope for an unlikely improvement in a city where the persecution is only worsening. To leave is to abandon everything — practice, possessions, language, homeland — for an uncertain destination. The choice puts the survival of the entire family at stake.
Stripped of his right to practise, should the Jewish Viennese lawyer attempt to emigrate or stay?
Documented answer: B. Those who still could in 1939 sought to emigrate, and the Viennese Jewish community threw itself into the effort on a massive scale. Under the pressure of expropriation and violence — the "Reich Flight Tax," the confiscation of property, the arrests following the Night of Broken Glass in November 1938 — roughly two-thirds of the some 185,000 to 200,000 Austrian Jews managed to flee before legal emigration was banned in October/November 1941. The destinations were the United States, Great Britain, Mandatory Palestine, Shanghai, or Latin America, often at the cost of families being torn apart. Those who stayed — for lack of a visa, of money, or out of attachment — were almost all deported: around 65,000 Austrian Jews were murdered in the Shoah. Exile saved lives but destroyed a world — that of the brilliant Viennese Jewish bourgeoisie.
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