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Austria
is still refusing to return Nazi loot
By JONATHAN
POWER
August 23, 2000
LONDON - Finally, the Swiss banks are off the hook
on the Holocaust. Their offerof a $b1.25 settlement with
Holocaust survivors and their heirs has been accepted by
an American court. Yet, as the judge observed, the banks
fought all the way. At the outset the banks said there
were only 8,000 accounts with links to Holocaust victims.
The truer figure turned out to be over 50,000.
Fifty-five years after the liberation of the
concentration camps Germany still stands out head and
shoulders above the other countries that collaborated
with Hitler as the one that made the earliest and
swiftest attempt at restitution. And 55 years later it is
still Austria, Hitler's birthplace, that has done the
least to square the past. It still half believes- or at
least it gives the appearance that half the country
believes- that Austria was Hitler's victim rather than
his willing ally.
One case now on its way to the courts for lack of
political progress graphically points up all that is
wrong with Austria's attitude to the past - the refusal
of the government to restore Austria's second largest
private bank to its rightful owner. In March 1938 the
National Socialists stormed into the house of banker
Alphonse Thorsch, threw him out, and confiscated his
house and bank and all his precious paintings, furniture,
jewels and carpets.
Since then the family has fought through three
generations to regain what was stolen. As cabinet papers
have revealed, earlier post war governments decided in
favour of "dragging this matter out".
Now that the Freedom Party, led by the Jorg Haider,
has entered government the political way seems blocked
once again. Not only has Haider exhibited pronounced
political sympathy towards the Nazi past he also has a
personal stake in fighting restitution, as much of his
own wealth is derived from the compulsory knock-down sale
of Jewish property to his parents.
What is clear from a new book, "Guilty Victim",
written by Hella Pick, the former distinguished
diplomatic editor of the London "Guardian", is that this
prevarication is still deeply embedded in the Austrian
soul. She argues persuasively that one of the central
themes running through Austrian history is the "big lie",
the " National Luge", "the self-deception that has
prompted so many Austrians to assert that the country
could not be held responsible for the Nazi persecution of
Austrian Jews because Austria itself became Hitler's
first victim."
Only as late as 1991 was this discarded as official
doctrine. Still today it lives on, if no longer a sacred
text, as a practice.
Since Haider's rise to power earlier this year the
European Union has decided to crack the whip. Austria is
now formally a semi-outcast from the central
deliberations of the European Union. Yet this begs the
question why didn't the European heavyweights act
earlier? Both Britain and France were co-conspirators
with the U.S. and the Soviet Union in signing the 1943
Moscow Declaration which incorporated the idea that
Austria had been Hitler's "first victim".
Indeed, they repeated the decision to incorporate the
victim-hood concept in the writing of Austria's State
Treaty in 1955, when the allies finally withdrew from
Austria. In fact they went even further, yielding to
Austria's last minute demand to scrap the Moscow's
Declaration injunction that Austria had to be held
responsible for its part in the Second World War
alongside Germany.
If it hadn't been for the furor kicked up by the Kurt
Waldheim affair in which the former Secretary-General of
the United Nations, in the course of his successful
campaign for the Austrian presidency, was exposed as
having participated in what was probably a war-crime,
Austria would perhaps have never begun its slow journey
to confront its past.
It was Chancellor Franz Vranitzsky who realised that
the Waldheim crisis should be used to prize open the
collective amnesia of Austria's part in the Nazi era. In
1991 he made his path-breaking statement to parliament in
which for the first time Austria's guilt was publicly
acknowledged, admitting that many Austrians had supported
Hitler and been instrumental in Nazi crimes. It was
tantamount to changing the official doctrine of Austria
as a victim state.
Nine years later where is Austria? Two years ago
Austria began to return the artwork looted by the Nazis.
This autumn a Holocaust memorial will be unveiled in
Vienna. There is the on-going, government-financed,
International Commission of Experts charged with
producing a definitive, closely documented, account of
Nazi crimes in Austria. Simon Wiesenthal, the world
famous Nazi hunter, once reviled at home, has been heaped
with honours. Even the conservative hierarchy of the
Catholic Church, which stood aloof for so long, has now
urged believers to come to terms with their recent
history.
Yet Haider startling electoral success, gaining 27% of
the vote in the 1999 federal election, reminds us that
all is still not well in Austria and there is still too
much of an undercurrent of dragging things out, as the
Thorsch bank issue reminds us. Moreover, much of the
looted art has still not been returned to its rightful
owners. Nazi slave labourers have still not been
compensated and one could go on...The pressure from the
European Union has to continue. It is too early to talk
of lifting diplomatic sanctions. Pressure and outside
scrutiny is the only thing that has ever produced results
in Austria and, wish it as one may, it is too early to
call a halt.
I can be reached by phone +44
385 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2000 By
JONATHAN POWER
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