Flight, Emigration and Death

France

After the "Anschluss" in March 1938, many Jews and politically persecuted people fled to France. The exile organisations of the Austrian Social Democrats and the Communists were also transferred from Czechoslovakia to Paris in 1938. Furthermore, in the spring of 1939 after the end of the Spanish Civil War, tens of thousands of volunteers who had fought on the side of the Spanish republic, arrived in France, among them hundreds of Austrians, who were then interned by the Franch authorities together with the Germans in camps, as for example Le Vernet, St. Cyprien, Gurs, and Argelès.

When the war broke out, the situation for the refugees grew worse. On September 4, 1939, all male "hostile foreigners" were ordered to be detained in make-shift assembly camps. Most "not politically suspect persons" were released again in January 1940. The French authorities offered the refugees to join the Foreign Legion or the military labor service ("Service Préstataire"), and thousands of Austrians took advantage of this offer.
After the war had broken out in the west and Belgium had been occupied by the German army in May 1940, a fresh wave of internment followed, so that when France collapsed a month later a great number of refugees fell into the hands of the German occupying forces.

First acts of persecution by the German occupying powers in the occupied territories were mainly directed against stateless or foreign Jews. In the year 1941, up to 8,000 men were arrested and interned in camps in Pithiviers, Beaune le Rolande, Compiègne and Drancy. On March 27, 1942, a proportion of these internees was deported from Compiègne to Auschwitz as a "retaliatory measure" for acts by the Résistance.

Further transports from the above mentioned camps followed in June 1942. At this point the plans of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) for the deportation of Jews from France were already well advanced. In an agreement between the Vichy Prime Minister, Pierre Laval, and the commanding officer of the Security police and the SD in France, Helmut Knochen, it was agreed that the French police would arrest 22,000 stateless Jews in the occupied zone, and Vichy would hand over the stateless Jews from the unoccupied zone. From the middle of July 1942 until mid-November 1942, 40 deportation transports bound for Auschwitz with more than 42,000 people on board left France, mostly from the assembly camp at Drancy. A further escalation of the deportation measures planned by the RSHA at the end of August, failed, however, because of the increasingly uncooperative attitude of the Vichy government. Even the occupation of southern France (the "free zone") by the German "Reich" and Italy in November 1942 changed nothing in the faltering support from the French administration. During the two following years a further 32,000 Jews were deported from France, mostly to Auschwitz. The organisation of those deportations was now taken over by the French "Milice" and a "Sonderkommando" under Alois Brunner, who had been sent to France by Adolf Eichmann.

Altogether about 75,000, mostly stateless or foreign Jews were deported from France, including more than 3,500 Austrians. Of these about 200 are known to have survived.

Georg Halpern (born on October 30, 1935, in Vienna) lived as an "U-Boot" in a hospital in Perpignan. In 1944, he and other children were discovered and deported to Auschwitz on April 13, 1944. Georg Halpern was murdered in Auschwitz.




Berthold Linder (born on November 16, 1911) und Gisella Spira (born on December 25, 1921) got married on December 6, 1941, in Sallelles d'Aud, southern France. Their son, Roland, was born on December 25, 1942. In the fall of 1943, all three of them were arrested in Italy, interned in Borgo San Dalmazzo and deported to Auschwitz via Drancy on December 7, 1943. Gisella Linder and her one-year-old son were murdered in Auschwitz immediately upon arrival. Berthold Linder lived to see the liberation in Buchenwald.




Frieda Kornweitz (born on October 27, 1912) and her daughter, Karin (born on October 14, 1936) were arrested in the fall of 1943 in Italy, interned in Borgo San Dalmazzo and deported to Auschwitz via Drancy on December 7, 1943. According to the brother of Frieda Kornweitz, Berthold Linder, who was on the same transport, both were murdered immediately after their arrival in Auschwitz.




Poet of the worker's movement, Adolf Unger (born on November 11, 1904) lived with his wife, Sobel (born on März 1, 1905) and his daugther, Annie (born on Jänner 29, 1935), at Stuwerstraße 19/7 in the second district. Whereas Annie succeeded in escaping on a Kindertransport, her parents were caught in France. On September 11, 1942, Sobel and Adolf Unger were deported form Drancy to Auschwitz and murdered shortly upon their arrival.


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