Vienna, 1939: the Gestapo Urges Denunciation

An ordinary Viennese household living next to a Jewish family

In the summer of 1939, a year and a half after the Anschluss, Vienna lives under administrative terror. The Gestapo, whose Vienna Leitstelle would become the largest regional office in the Reich, methodically persecutes the Jewish population. In apartment buildings, relations between neighbors grow tense; searches and arrests have become commonplace.

A couple of Austrian office workers with no particular political commitment live above a Jewish family. A neighbor suggests to them that one can "get into the authorities' good graces" — and sometimes earn a few marks — by reporting the visitors received on the floor below. The proposition confronts this ordinary household with an immediate moral choice, in a city where informing has become an almost ordinary act.