External links are disabled on the kiosk. Please visit archive links from desktop or mobile devices.

The following organizations have offered their materials for inclusion in the 1938 Projekt:
 
About Partners Education Contributors
Advanced Search

The Leo Baeck Institute – New York | Berlin presents the year 1938 through the eyes of Jews, whose personal documents detail their experiences and the hardships they suffered as well as the growing tensions in Europe and diminishing hope for Jews in Germany and Austria.

BACK TO TIMELINE

7

TUESDAY

7

Unbearable despair

Jewish Telegraphic Agency publishes list of recent suicides

“4 Deaths Announced Among Arrested Jews in Vienna; Family of 4 Committs suicide”

Vienna

The Anschluss, Austria’s annexation by Nazi Germany in March 1938, precipitated a wave of anti-Jewish violence. Emboldened by their new status and by the utter defenselessness of the Jewish population, Nazis and their sympathizers entered Jewish homes and seized whatever property they liked. Jewish-run businesses were ransacked or destroyed, and Jews of all ages were forced to carry out the demeaning task of scrubbing streets to remove political slogans under the eyes of jeering onlookers. With no protection to be expected from police, a feeling of utter abandonment and hopelessness drove many Jews to take their own lives. In the first two months after the Anschluss, 218 Jews escaped the state-sanctioned cruelty by taking their own lives. The JTA’s June 7 dispatch lists the most recent suicides—including that of a family of four—and deaths at the Dachau concentration camp.

TAGS: Anschluss, antisemitism, Concentration Camps, Dachau, economic persecution, family, Jewish property, Journalism, JTA, June 7, media coverage, Vienna, violence

SOURCE

Institution:

Jewish Telegraphic Agency

Collection:

“4 Deaths Announced Among Arrested Jews in Vienna; Family of 4 Commits Suicide”

Source available in English

3

FRIDAY

3

Left in the dark

No information for the families of thousands of incarcerated Jews

“Whether all or a few of the several thousand arrested have been sent to Dachau or to Styria or whether they will soon be released is a matter of frightening uncertainty. The events of the past few days will never be erased from the minds of thousands of women here.”

VIENNA

Nobody saw fit to inform the worried wives of thousands of Jewish men arrested by the Nazis about their spouses’ whereabouts and the expected period of imprisonment. Many of them decided to go to the Rossauer Lände detention facility and the central police station in order to get information on the whereabouts of their loved ones. According to this June 3 report from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the detainees had been taken away in overcrowded railroad cars, many of them forced to remain in uncomfortable positions for up to five hours before departure. While there were intimations that those sent to the Dachau concentration camp in Germany would be exploited as construction workers in order to enlarge the camp and subsequently be released, many had no idea where their husbands were. The author of the report sees the “extraordinary callousness with which police have withheld information” as “one of the most terrifying aspects of the situation.”

TAGS: Anschluss, antisemitism, commentary, Concentration Camps, Dachau, family, family separation, imprisonment, Journalism, JTA, June 3, media coverage, Vienna, violence

SOURCE

Institution:

Jewish Telegraphic Agency

Collection:

“Nazis to Use Jewish Prisoners to Enlarge Dachau”

Source available in English

25

WEDNESDAY

25

More conflict in Palestine

Six dead, Jews and Arabs

“This morning a Jewish bus en route to Jerusalem was shot at near Lifta. A police escort returned the fire, reportedly inflicting several casualties.”

Jerusalem

Time and again, unsettling news about sectarian violence in Palestine reached Jewish readers in the diaspora. On May 25, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, a prime source of information on the situation of the Jews under the Nazis and of developments in the Yishuv, reports under the headline “6 Deaths Added to Terror Toll in Palestine.” It writes about the latest victims in Jerusalem, Haifa and Tiberias—both Jews and Arabs—and the circumstances of their deaths.

TAGS: Jerusalem, Journalism, JTA, May 25, media coverage, Palestine, violence

SOURCE

Institution:

Jewish Telegraphic Agency

Collection:

“6 Deaths Added to Terror Toll in Palestine.”

Source available in English

19

THURSDAY

19

Conflict in Palestine

Away from national socialism, but violence remains

"There were no casualties.”

Jerusalem

Nothing in this May 19 Jewish Telegraphic Agency report from its Jerusalem correspondent could provide German or Austrian Jews eager to leave for safer shores with the hope that life in Palestine would grant them peace and quiet. Between Arab attacks on Jewish workers or Jewish-built infrastructure and labor unrest among unemployed Jews, the only reassuring aspect of Palestine was its distance from the epicenter of Nazi activity. Since the beginning of the Great Revolt, Arabs, British, and Jews in Palestine had been embroiled in an often violent conflict—scarcely an attraction for weary Central-European Jews eager for peace.

TAGS: emigration, Jerusalem, Journalism, JTA, May 19, media coverage, Palestine, violence

SOURCE

Institution:

Jewish Telegraphic Agency

Collection:

“Arabs Attack Jews Erecting Border Barricade”

Source available in English

10

TUESDAY

10

Stuck in No Man’s Land

League of Nations intervenes for 56 expellees

Belgrade

The annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in March 1938 had brought an abrupt end to 1,000 years of Jewish life in the Burgenland region, Austria’s easternmost state. The expulsion of the small Jewish population, carried out by the SS, local Nazi officials, and civilian collaborators, commenced immediately. This article by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports on the League of Nations’ intervention on behalf of 56 expellees who had ended up in “no man’s land” in the border area between Austria and Yugoslavia. The League’s High Commissioner for German Refugees requested the temporary accommodation of the displaced persons by Yugoslavia, to be followed by permanent resettlement elsewhere.

TAGS: Anschluss, antisemitism, Belgrade, Burgenland Jews, displacement, dispossession, expulsion, Journalism, JTA, League of Nations, May 10, media coverage, Nazi policies, refugees, violence

SOURCE

Institution:

Jewish Telegraphic Agency

Collection:

“Yugoslavia Gives Haven to 56 Refugees on League’s Request”

Source available in English

29

FRIDAY

29

The best revenge

Paul Steiner dreams of Jewish self-determination in his diary

“The ‘civilized‘ world does evince indignation about the barbarity of the Germans, who truly do not deal with us very gently. But what do they do for hundreds of Burgenland Jews, who, for example, are making a tugboat in the middle of the Danube their shelter, or a patch of land between Germany and Yugoslavia?”

Vienna

A month and a half after the “Anschluss,” Paul Steiner is still incredulous. Everything seems so unbelievable, he writes in his diary, that “even ones own words are becoming astonishing and dubious.” He wonders what the outside world is doing for the Jews in light of German barbarity, especially for the Burgenland Jews, who were brutally expelled right after the “Anschluss” and ended up stranded in totally inadequate shelters while their belongings were appropriated by their former neighbors. Steiner also imagines the “revenge” that Jews will exact, shaming the world with their achievements once they are given the right to self-determination.

TAGS: Anschluss, April 29, Burgenland Jews, commentary, diary, displacement, expulsion, Vienna, violence

SOURCE

Institution:

Leo Baeck Institute – New York | Berlin

Original:

Paul Steiner Collection, AR 25208; Box 1, folder 7

23

SATURDAY

23

The Prater amusement park

Site of humiliation and torture

Vienna

This advertising brochure shows the Prater, a large public garden and popular amusement park in Vienna’s central 2nd district, in the 1930s. Here, on Saturday, April 23, hundreds of Viennese Jews were rounded up and subjected to beatings and maltreatment in front of jeering onlookers. Some were forced to eat grass. Jews of both sexes, regardless of age and health, were made to run in circles until they collapsed. Many of those thus humiliated suffered heart attacks, some died.

TAGS: advertisement, Anschluss, antisemitism, April 23, public sphere, Vienna, violence

SOURCE

Institution:

North Carolina State University

Collection:

Booklet on the Riesenrad at the Prater in Vienna, Austria, circa 1937.

30

WEDNESDAY

30

No coming back

Polish parliament passes a new bill against Jewish returnees

“The law will affect thousands of Jews living in Austria, Germany, Palestine and elsewhere.”

Warsaw

In the wake of Austria’s annexation by Nazi Germany, the Polish parliament (“Sejm”), fearing the return of up to 20,000 Polish citizens from Austria, passed a bill according to which Poles who had lived abroad for more than five years were to lose their citizenship. The situation of the Jews had improved somewhat under the Piłsudski government (1926–1935), but after the marshal’s death, especially in the atmosphere created by the “Camp of National Unity” (from 1937 onward), antisemitism was resurgent. Universities applied quotas to Jewish students and introduced “ghetto benches” for them, Jews were held responsible for the Great Depression, Jewish business were boycotted and looted, and hundreds of Jews were physically harmed, some killed.

TAGS: Anschluss, antisemitism, economic persecution, Great Depression, Journalism, JTA, March 30, media coverage, Polenaktion, Polish-born Jews, politics, public sphere, violence, warsaw, Zbaszyn

SOURCE

Institution:

Jewish Telegraphic Agency

Collection:

“Poland Enacts Law Denationalizing Thousands Living Abroad”

Source available in English

13

SUNDAY

13

Discrimination and arrests

One day after the Anschluss, hostility against Austrian Jews escalates

Vienna

After their triumphant entry into Austria, the Nazis lost no time in intimidating the country’s Jews and forcing them out of positions of influence and out of society at large. Prominent bankers and businessmen were arrested, other Jews—especially those employed in fields that were considered “Jewish,” such as the theater and the press—removed from office and replaced by “Aryans.” At the same time that the atmosphere in Austria became unbearably hostile towards Jews, organizations aiming to facilitate Jewish emigration to Palestine were raided and it was announced that the passports of “certain people” would be voided. It bears mentioning that the number of Jews in Austria in March 1938 was about 206,000—no more than 3% of the total population.

TAGS: Anschluss, antisemitism, Aryanization, emigration, imprisonment, Journalism, JTA, March 13, media coverage, Palestine, persecution of Jewish professionals, prominent people, Vienna, violence

SOURCE

Institution:

Jewish Telegraphic Agency

Collection:

“Drive Launched to Reduce Jews to Reich Status”

Source available in English

7

MONDAY

7

Stateless and defenseless

Antisemitism in Romania

“Charles A. Davila, former Rumanian Minister to the United States, sailing yesterday on the Conte di Savoia, said the current antisemitic campaign was ‘just a passing phase.’ No program based on intolerance can bring a solution of the minority problem, he said.”

Iași

Already under the short-lived Goga-Cuza government, half of the Jews living in Romania had been condemned to statelessness by having their citizenship revoked. The city of Iași, where in 1855 Romania’s first Yiddish newspaper had been printed and in which Yiddish theater saw its beginnings with the opening of Goldfaden’s theater in 1876, had an especially high percentage of Jewish inhabitants. In February 1938, George Gedye, a reporter dispatched by the New York Times, reports on excesses against Jewish citizens by “a brutal and unscrupulous minority.”

TAGS: antisemitism, February 7, Iași, Journalism, JTA, media coverage, New York, politics, Romanian Jews, violence

SOURCE

Institution:

Jewish Telegraphic Agency

Collection:

„Jassy Scene of Outrages, Observer Finds“

Source available in English

18

TUESDAY

18

Nowhere safe to go

Dramatic events in Palestine

Last Sunday in a Jerusalem suburb, one Jewish auxiliary police man, Samuel Levi, was killed and another injured. In front of a Jewish workers' restaurant on Ben Yehuda Street, a bomb was dropped, exploding without doing damage.

Jerusalem

When German Jews considered the various emigration options in January 1938, Palestine might have seemed a dangerous destination. As the Jüdische Rundschau reported, in the same month, attacks against Jewish inhabitants and clashes between Jews and Arabs occurred in numerous places in Palestine. Apart from local resistance, the paper mentioned Syrian terrorists, the smuggling of weapons from Libya, and the refusal of the Egyptian government to conduct direct Arab-Jewish negotiations. In light of these facts, emigrating to Palestine could appear to the prospective emigrants like jumping from the frying pan into the fire rather than finding a safe refuge.

TAGS: emigration, January 18, Jerusalem, Journalism, media coverage, Palestine, politics, press article, violence

SOURCE

Institution:

Compact Memory, Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main

Collection:

"Das Neuste in Kürze." Jüdische Rundschau (Berlin)

Original:

Vol. 43, no. 5: 4

BACK TO TOP

Curated by Leo Baeck Institute – New York | Berlin © 2018 Leo Baeck Institute

Website and exhibition design by C&G Partners