The Vienna Modell of Radicalization: Austria and the Shoah

In 1941, the Nazis began with the systematic deportations of the Jewish population in Nazi Germany. The first deportation as part of this Reich-wide policy was a transport of 1,000 Jews that left Vienna’s Aspang train station for the Litzmannstadt/Łódź ghetto on 15 October 1941. By October 1942, a further 39 transports had departed from Vienna.

The exhibition “The Vienna Model of Radicalisation. Austria and the Shoah” highlights Vienna’s role as the motor driving the radicalisation of antisemitic policy in the Nazi state. In 1941 the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, which had been set up by Adolf Eichmann in 1938, developed an organizational model for deporting the Jewish population to ghettos, extermination camps and killing sites. But the exhibition also explores Jewish self-help and acts of resistance by courageous individuals. Moreover, it illuminates the silence around the Shoah in postwar Austria, a silence from which the perpetrators benefitted.

The exhibition also makes it clear that today’s society is charged with remembering the Shoah both now and in the future – and that the fight against antisemitism and racism remains as timely as ever.