Austria

Austria had three roles within the context of the Holocaust:

1. Perpetrator
2. Crime Scene
3. Victim

With a few postwar Holocaust trials, it also had a minor role as a propagandist, which will not be covered here. However, see the last section in the entry on Auschwitz Trials in this regard.

Perpetrator

If one were to consider Austria as not being a part of Germany, then the main perpetrator of the Holocaust, Adolf Hitler, was originally Austrian, not German. It has also been observed that a higher number of Austrian nationals have been involved in the operation of the so-called extermination camps than would be expected from their share among all ethnic Germans.

Crime Scene

Only one of the camps that is said to have seen minor extermination activities was located on Austrian soil: Mauthausen. (See that entry for details, but also the entry on the Gusen Camp.)

Victim

Austrian citizens of Jewish faith or descent (who in 1938 became German citizens until after the war) fell victim to the persecutorial measures of the German authorities during the war. On the details, see the section on demography below.

Demography

SS statistician Richard Korherr reported in his 1943 report that, by the end of 1942, 149,124 Austrian Jews had emigrated. When any further emigration was prohibited in late October 1941, some 50,000 to 60,000 were still present. Some 5,000 to 9,000 remained after the war.

The fate of the Austrian Jews between October 1941 and the end of the war was similar to that of the German Jews. For details, see the section on demography of the entry on Germany.