"Saxa loquuntur"

After the Nazi Party rose to power in 1933, Jewish newspapers found it increasingly difficult to operate. Because the Third Reich was an authoritarian dictatorship that persecuted Jews and did not tolerate criticism in the press, Jewish newspapers found themselves in a precarious position after 1933.

Nazi propaganda often attacked the so-called "Jewish press," spreading the antisemitic myth that a worldwide Jewish conspiracy controlled the media and planted false anti-German stories. After rising to power, the Nazi regime forced Jewish journalists and editors out of their jobs and stripped newspapers from Jewish owners.

The Nazi regime also targeted the actual Jewish press—newletters, journals, and newspapers published specifically for Jewish readers. The Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith)—the largest German Jewish organization—distributed its weekly paper to hundreds of thousands of Jews in Germany. Much of its pre-1933 reporting alerted its readers to Nazi antisemitism and related issues, but the newspaper had to tone down this coverage in order to continue its run into the Nazi period. Despite the threat of regime censorship and intervention, the paper still tried to provide information and news that was useful to its readers.

The Kristallnacht pogroms in November 1938 changed this radically. After Kristallnacht, the regime banned all Jewish newspapers and seized their assets. Simultaneously, the Nazi Propaganda Ministry ordered the creation of a single, Nazi-controlled Jewish information sheet called Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt ("The Jewish news journal"). This was to be published by the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland. The organization was set up and tightly controlled by Himmler's experts on anti-Jewish policy, and since September 1939 was part of the SS Reich Main Security Office.¹ This "Jewish" newspaper would have a wholly different function than the pre-Kristallnacht Jewish press. The new, Nazi-controlled publication was designed to convey the key points of Nazi policy and restrictions placed upon the Jews.

Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt offered news of the tightening Nazi regulations and orders pertaining to Jews in Germany, as well as reports and articles following current Nazi policy. Between 1938 and 1941, this meant Jewish emigration from Germany, and much space in the journal was devoted to information about the possibilities of emigration and related matters. The newspaper also featured a busy section of advertisements and notices, which testified to the dire situation in which Jews found themselves. Doctors unable to practice medicine sold their medical instuments and tools; single men and women looked for potential spouses who had visas and exit permits; and people leaving the country sold entire households for next to nothing.

The Nachrichtenblatt was published in Berlin under the supervision of the Propaganda Ministry, which approved all articles and print items in advance of publication. In two former capitals of countries swallowed up by the Reich—Vienna and Prague—other Nazi agencies supervised the publication of two "local" issues along the same lines and with largely similar content. Over time, the consequences of emigration, deportation, and genocide shrunk the numbers of German Jews in the Reich. By mid-1943, the publication of Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt ceased.²

A strange article in the very last issue of the Vienna Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt published in February 1943 stands as a sad testament to the Jews of Vienna. Both a literal and a metaphorical walk among Jewish graves, the article describes the personal and communal tragedies and achievements of Jews in Vienna. The anonymous author of the article, titled in Latin "The [tomb] stones speak," describes the mass arrival of Jews in Vienna in the latter part of the 19th century. The article recalls the high and low points of Jewish life in the capital of the Habsburg empire.

The mood of the article coincides with the destruction of Jewish life in Nazi Vienna. By 1943, the Germans had deported most of the last remaining Viennese Jews to their deaths in occupied Poland. Only Jews in hiding remained in the city.³

For more on the Reichsvereinigung, see Beate Meyer, A Fatal Balancing Act: The Dilemma of the Reich Association of Jews in Germany, 1939-1945 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013).

For more details on the history of the newspaper, see Clemens Maier, "The Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt, 1938-43" in Beate Meyer, Hermann Simon, and Chana Schütz, eds., Jews in Nazi Berlin: From Kristallnacht to Liberation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 100-21.

For some aspects of Holocaust history in Vienna (albeit focusing on Eichmann and the machinery of destruction), see Hans Safrian, Eichmann's Men (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); and Doron Rabinovici, Eichmann's Jews: The Jewish Administration of Holocaust Vienna, 1938-1945 (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2011).

Today Mikulov in the Czech Republic.

Today Bratislava in Slovakia.

Hebrew, wedding canopy.

Saxa loquuntur

If stones could speak, they would sometimes have interesting things to tell us; it only comes down to listening to them properly. Whoever, for example, reads the inscriptions in old Jewish cemeteries with attentive eyes, will often be surprised by how, alongside many standard formulas, there are many biographical and culturally and historically intereresting details to be gleaned. Diverse are the fates of those who found their resting place in the Währinger Cemetery in Vienna. We are not only interested in the affluence of blessed financiers, whose monuments attest to now-faded glory, but also those who lived their lives in another fashion. The case of the Broda family is certainly a good example. In 1830, the head of this family, Isaias Broda from Nikolsburg,¹ was found murdered at the age of 34, in the then-suburb of Wieden. Hardship and misfortune followed his surviving family and a few months later, a son was born named after the father, only to die three years later. The widow pulled herself through and raised their oldest son Baruch, who also died at the age of 23, and burdened by many tragedies, his mother followed, only 49 years old. Her tombstone shows, through beautiful Hebrew verses, the courage and soulfulness with which this woman took on the struggle until it laid her down.

As the victims of the battle against overpowering circumstances of the new and fast-paced life in the big city, one can find here a pretty high number of suicide cases, whose tombstone inscriptions differ from the others mostly only through the slightly greater brevity and through the particularly pronounced wish that the deceased will be forgiven for their sins. Many of these victims also, naturally, went through the crisis of the [eighteen] seventies.

Interesting from an entirely different perspective are many wanderers, such as, for example, a man from the Steiermark region, by the name of Georg Abraham A., who was a haberdashery merchant and died in Vienna at the age 45, or the Jewish wife of a well-known Viennese chimney sweep, who was born in Burgenland. The Jewish martyrs of [the revolution of] March 1848 were not buried in the Währinger cemetery, but the graves of many victims of the street battles of October 1848 can be found here, along with those of a number of soldiers who died in the wars of the fifties and sixties. There are also a number of researchers and world travelers in this graveyard, for example the scholar Salomon Reinmann, who lived for many years in Cochinchina [French Vietnam] and carried out language studies with the natives there, or Captain Benjamin Solomon Spitzer, who as a child of the Pressburg² Ghetto traveled at a young age to the new world and became a ship captain, in which capacity he sailed several times around the globe. During a visit to the old homeland, he died in Vienna. A third representative of this type was the doctor of the frigate "Novara," Dr. Eduard Schwarz, who took part in the well-known around-the-world sail and led the medical research part of the research mission.

The most shocking case is the fate of the father, who on the wedding day of his only daughter, while the guests were gathering under the chuppah³ at his Döblinger Villa, collapsed from a stroke. Something similar happened to a woman, who died suddenly beside the cradle of her grandchild, and on whose tombstone is proclaimed:

Called upon from afar, from motherly love, from faith in God,

she came with a joyous heart to see the child of her child;

but that long-awaited joy was not granted to her.

The child saw the light, and she parted to eternal peace.

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