The fate of 'protected' groups during the last years of the war: Deportations from Vienna's Nordbahnhof -a largely unknown site of the Shoah

After the end of mass deportations in Austria in October of 1942, the
Jewish Community in Vienna was officially dissolved by Nazi authorities and reorganized
as the so-called Council of Elders, who was put in charge of all remaining
people defined as Jewish by Nazi racial laws, independent of their denomination.
The majority of the people left behind were protected from
deportation because they were members of an intermarried family with a non-
Jewish spouse or parent. A small fragment of the Jewish population was able
to remain in Vienna as employees of the Council, working as doctors, nurses,
cooks, caregivers, cleaning staff, or clerical workers in the remaining institutions
of the former Jewish Community. In addition, a tiny fraction of the remaining
Jewish population was protected by foreign citizenship. The protection of this
heterogeneous group was often temporary, since diplomatic considerations regarding
foreign citizenship were subject to changes and the number of Council
employees was continuously reduced by orders of the authorities. This article focuses
on the deportations of previously protected groups from Vienna’s Nordbahnhof
– until recently a largely unknown site of deportations.