Flight, Emigration and Death
Serbia
Next to the SS it was the German army who played a central role in the murder of Jews in Serbia, which at the time was under German military administration. Many Austrians were co-responsible for war crimes in Serbia as well as in other areas of former Yugoslavia; some as Generals, like Franz Böhme, Lothar Rendulic or Alexander Löhr; some also in the lower ranks of the army. The relatively high participation of Austrians was no coincidence: since the Habsburgs and the First World War, Austrians were thought of as experts for the Balkans.
About 80,000 Jews lived in Yugoslavia (of these 23,000 in Serbia), approximately 60,000 to 65,000 of whom were murdered. The exact number of Jews from Austria who lost their lives in Serbia at the time of occupation by the German army is difficult to establish. Jonny Moser estimates their number in the whole area of the former Yugoslavia to about 1,660. Only the victims of the so-called Kladovo-Transport, all in all about 920, are known by name. Over 1,200 Jews from Vienna, Berlin, Danzig and former Czechoslovakia tried in 1939 to reach Palestine from Bratislava via the Danube. Their trip ended in the Serbian Danube-port of Kladovo due to organizational difficulties. From here the refugees where relocated to the internment camp at Sabac in July of 1941. From August 1941, Sabac served also as concentration camp for Jews from Serbia and the Banat. As "atonement" for a partisan attack, all Jewish men from camp Sabac - overwhelmingly Austrian men from the Kladovo transport (about 400) - were murdered by units of the army on October 12/13, 1941. The remaining 750 to 800 Jewish women and children were taken to the newly erected concentration camp of Sajmiste, a suburb of Belgrade, where the Jews from Belgrade were also interned. Commander of the camp was the Austrian SS-Untersturmführer Herbert Andorfer who was responsible for the murder in gas vans of approximately 7,500 Jewish prisoners, mostly women, up to May 1942. Andorfer was sentenced in January 1962 in West Germany to two-and-a-half year's imprisonment.
Karl ("Kari") Kriss at the bank of the Danube (Kladovo). Born on June 26, 1922, in Vienna, the son of a Bourgeois family, he was shot in 1941.
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