5 - Epilogue and Conclusions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 February 2011
Summary
Exactly how many intermarried Jews, their Mischling offspring, and others of “mixed blood” outlived the Anschluß years in Vienna will never be known. Estimates of survivors classified as “Jews” under the Nuremberg Laws ranged from 2,000 to over 6,000. In mid-April 1945, Emil Tuchman, director of the Rothschild hospital, estimated the number at 4,100, of whom 96 percent lived in mixed marriages, a figure approximating that of 98 percent for both Germany and Austria based on official statistics gathered in September of 1944. According to the meticulous calculations of Jonny Moser, the number of surviving Jews in Austria stood at 5,512 a month after Soviet liberation. Estimates indicating that well over 90 percent of those Jews who survived the Holocaust in Greater Germany were married to Gentiles are probably correct. Yet the numbers are impossible to prove, primarily because few Jewish partners practiced the Hebrew faith. Gertrude Schneider's observation in June of 1945 that 5,000 intermarried Viennese reverted to their respective Christian denominations and disappeared into the municipal population supports this argument – at least for Austria. As for the 14,858 half-Jews and 5,955 quarter-Jews registered in the municipal census of 1939, their numbers at the end of the war are even more difficult to determine, because even the Nazis had no idea how many Mischlinge resided in the Danubian city. On the other hand, the records reveal that the number of those “counting as Jews” shrank from 2,425 on New Year's Eve 1942–3 to 813 on 28 February 1945.
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- Jews and Intermarriage in Nazi Austria , pp. 190 - 200Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010