Jews and Intermarriage in Nazi Austria

This study explores the experience of couples with Jewish and non-Jewish partners and their children in Vienna after Germany's seizure of Austria in 1938.

Evan Burr Bukey (Author)

9781107002852, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 31 December 2010

234 pages, 8 b/w illus. 9 tables
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.52 kg

'Singlehandedly, Professor Bukey has produced the definitive history of persecution of Austrians of Jewish heritage from Anschluss in 1938 to 1945. After all, Vienna was home to the second largest concentration of Jews and 'mixed marriages' in all of Hitler's Gross Deutsches Reich. Bukey's meticulous archival research and probing analyses present in detail how the Nazis imperiled the lives and marriages of hundreds of thousands of citizens while at the same time showing how sometimes individuals within that bureaucracy could blunt the worst of Nazi intentions. What Beate Meyer and Wolf Gruner have achieved in exposing Nazi persecution of intermarriages in Germany, Evan Bukey has matched with his exemplary history of intermarriages in Austria.' James F. Tent, University of Alabama, Birmingham

Evan Burr Bukey explores the experience of intermarried couples - marriages with Jewish and non-Jewish partners - and their children in Vienna after Germany's seizure of Austria in 1938. These families coped with changing regulations that disrupted family life, pitted relatives against each other, and raised profound questions about religious, ethnic, and national identity. Bukey finds that although intermarried couples lived in a state of fear and anxiety, many managed to mitigate, delay, or even escape Nazi sanctions. Drawing on extensive archival research, his study reveals how hundreds of them pursued ingenious strategies to preserve their assets, to improve their 'racial' status, and above all to safeguard the position of their children. It also analyzes cases of intermarried partners who chose divorce as well as persons involved in illicit liaisons with non-Jews. Jews and Intermarriage in Nazi Austria concludes that although most of Vienna's intermarried Jews survived the Holocaust, several hundred Jewish partners were deported to their deaths and children of such couples were frequently subjected to Gestapo harassment.

1. Prologue: Jews and intermarriage in Austria
2. Contesting racial status: successes and failures
3. Intermarried divorce, 1938–45
4. Tightening the noose: arrests, deportations, and forced labor, 1941–5
5. Epilogue and conclusions.

Subject Areas: Jewish studies [JFSR1], The Holocaust [HBTZ1], 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], European history [HBJD]