1939–1945: The Holocaust

The systematic genocide of Jews in Nazi Germany's  sphere of influence, initiated and organised by the Germans and Austrians and implemented with their Europe-wide allies and collaborators during the Second World War, is referred to as Shoah or Holocaust. A total of approximately 6 million people fell victim to it. The Nazi perpetrators themselves spoke of a “Final Solution to the Jewish Problem” and used euphemisms such as “special treatment” (Sonderbehandlung), “resettlement” (Umsiedlung), “deportation” (Deportation) or “evacuation” (Evakuierung).

Already after the Nazi invasion of Poland, the Jewish population was ghettoised and subjected to mass shootings, which then continued systematically and expanded following the attack on the Soviet Union. Finally, Western and Southern European Jews were deported to Eastern Europe where killings were carried out on a virtually industrial scale with gas in specially constructed extermination camps. At the end of the war, survivors from the concentration-, extermination- and work-camps were sent on so-called death marches.

Parallel to this, many Soviet prisoners of war, Slavic civilians, Sinti and Roma (“Gypsies”), people with disabilities and homosexuals fell victim to Nazi racial-biological ideology. Political opponents and Jehovah’s Witnesses were also systematically persecuted.

The background of the Holocaust includes the long history of hostility toward the Jews, the history of racist antisemitism since the end of the 19th century as well as the brief history of antisemitic discrimination, robbery and expulsion measures of the Nazi regime starting in 1933, which, in the course of the “Anschluss” (“annexation”) in 1938, were then also carried out in Austria.

From approximately 200,000 Austrian Jews prior to 1938, approximately 65,000 were murdered. The remainder was able to flee following the “Anschluss” or after the start of the war.