When the past isn't even past

Silbertal Bürgermeister Willi Säly

Eric Geiger makes an interesting report on a small town in western Austria in Austrian village faces down its Nazi past San Francisco Chronicle 02/17/08, which appeared on the front page of the Sunday print edition.

It's an interesting story in itself, though I'm struck by how the story seems to be shaped by an outdated "conventional wisdom" about Austria. Bürgermeister (Mayor) Willi Säly of Silbertal has set up a "history workshop", which sponsors education events on the history of the Third Reich in their region. More specifically:

Mayor Willi Saly is intent on finding out whether there's anything in the historical record that would provide a clue to what drove a village farmer named Josef Vallaster to become one of the most brutal concentration camp guards of World War II. The records, which surfaced last summer, show that Vallaster was a mass murderer. The data say he participated in the deaths of 250,000 Jews at the Sobibor and Belzec death camps in Poland, and of 20,000 mentally and physically disabled persons at a clinic in Nartheim, Austria.

I'm someone who enjoys learning about history, though "enjoyable" isn't quite the right word for this kind of history. And I even still persuade myself to hope that people can learn something constructive from doing so, despite much empirical evidence to the contrary.

Säly is a member of the Austrian conservative, Christian-Democratic Party, the Österreichische Volkspartei (ÖVP) [People's Party]. This is not surprising, but it's notable, because he's is not some leftwing outlier from the Green Party or something.

Josef Vallaster served as an "Oberbrenner" in Nartheim, where he operated machinery, a task that included piping gas into gas chambers to kill inmates". Geiger reports that Vallaster joined "the local chapter of the Nazi party in 1933, and [traveled] to Germany to join a paramilitary force especially organized for Austrian Nazis." This means that Vallaster was a hardcore Austrian Nazi, not some poor shlub who was drafted into the Wehrmacht and required to participate in questionable activities.

Members of the Civil Guard, a party militia of the ruling Fatherland Front, mobilizes to oppose the German-backed Nazi coup of 1934 - the Fatherland Front was essentially a Mussolini-style fascist party, but they were preferable to the Nazis in 1934 by almost any measure

In an incident that is little remembered in US accounts of the Third Reich, Germany sent that group of Nazis into Austria in 1934 in a coup attempt that failed, although the Austrian Standestaat (Corporate State) dictator Engelbert Dollfuss was murdered during the attempt. At that time, Mussolini's Italy was an ally of Austria, and Mussolini threatened to intervene to support Austria against German aggression, a threat that was far more credible in 1934 than it would have been after several more years of German rearmament. Germany had to back off, and Hitler's first attempt at international aggression was defeated.

Vallaster at some point joined the SS and became an SS-Scharführer (company leader). He served in his SS role in the death camps Belzec und Sobibór, where he performed a similar function as at Nartheim. There was a famous uprising of the prisoners at Sobibór in October 1943, in which Vallaster was killed.

This article on Säly's project is presumably the one to which Geiger refers in his article as one in "the leading daily in Silbertal's province of Vorarlberg", Silbertal arbeitet NS-Zeit Vorarlberger Nachrichten 28.07.2007.

This article is from Der Standard (presumably also the one to which Geiger refers) on the story, Ein Dorf mit Erinnerungskultur: Silbertal zeichnet Weg eines Einwohners zum KZ-Schergen nach von Jutta Berger 14.10.07. Berger quotes Säly as saying that he's not only undertaking this project because of his Bürgermeister role, but also as someone "mit mehr oder weniger belasteten familiären Erinnerungen" (with more-or-less guilty family memories). Säly is 62, so he would have been born at the earliest in the final months of the Second World War. He is one of the generation who would be asking, "What did you do in the war, Daddy?"

Berger reports that Vallaster's son, Klaus Vallaster, has actively cooperated with Säly's project. Geiger quotes Vallaster's 80-year-old sister, Elizabeth Stemer, "A lot of filthy lies are being spread about Josef. ... I knew Josef as a very decent man who just did his duty as a soldier and died for his country."

Josef Vallaster, mass murderer

One may have some sympathy for the elderly Stemer's affection for the memory of her long-dead brother. But her defense of him is, to use the technical term, bulls**t. The guy joined the NSDAP (Nazi Party) in 1933, and took part in an attack on his own country from Germany under the direction of the Germans, an attack which was plain treason in any normal sense of the word. Also, the guy was an SS member. You got into the SS by volunteering for it. This was an NSDAP Party organization, not a part of the Wehrmacht. You joined the SS because you were volunteering to be a killer on behalf of the Nazi Party. (There is a partial exception to this in the case of the Waffen-SS, which late in the war did include some Wehrmacht draftees who were assigned to fight in Waffen-SS units. But the Waffen-SS as such was not the group that acted as concentration camp guards and executioners.)

Austria and its Vergangenheit

It does strike me that the framing of Geiger's article reflects an outdated conventional wisdom about what I would call the quality of historical memory in Austria generally. Austrians and Germans tend to refer to this as die Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit (the working out of the past).

I won't try to rehash the long and complicated history about how Germany and Austria have collectively remembered the Third Reich period. In any case, the notion of the "Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit" is not something that can be precisely measured. It's a matter of judgment, though not totally subjective, by any means. Generalization like "national memory" are only metophors, in any case. The specifics include everything from official state positions to how the historical profession treats matters to how schoolbooks present issues to things like Herr Bürgermeister Säly's project.

The question of how well Austria has handled its "Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit" was much discussed in the United States around the 1986 campaign of Kurt Waldheim for the Austrian Presidency. Information became public about Waldheim's possible involvement in war crimes during his career as a Wehrmacht officer during the Second World War. I posted several times about Waldheim on the occasion of that awful man's death last year: Kurt Waldheim 06/15/07; Waldheim's posthumous plea for "Versöhnung" (reconciliation) 06/15/07; Kurt Waldheim, the "all-powerful lobby" and contemporary anti-Semitism 06/17/07.

The notion quickly became conventional wisdom in the US and elsewhere that, compared to Germany, Austria had insufficiently come to grips with the role that Austrians played in the Third Reich. And that was a reasonable and accurate judgment at the time. Austrian accounts of the Third Reich tended to stress Austria as the "first victim" of Hitler's aggression, which it was. The Allies in the Second World War officially regarded Austria as a nation "occupied" by Germany, and therefore the military taking of Austria was officially termed "liberation" by the Allies, as opposed to the official term of "conquest" applied to Germany in its 1937 borders. This was not just a semantic distinction. It had definite legal implications on how Austria would be governed under occupation. It was probably inevitable that Austria's postwar status as a "liberated" nation would encourage both official and unofficial accounts to draw a sharp distinction between Germany proper and the "Ostmark" (the name assigned to Austria when it became a province of the German Reich in 1938).

In any case, I do tend to think that those like Hubertus Czernin, who was publisher of the newsweekly Profil for years, and the researchers of the Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichische Widerstands (DöW) were right in the years since 1986 in stressing the need for a more complete public understanding of the real history of those years.

But the state of Austria's "Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit" is hardly the same in 2008 as in 1986. The very fact that a small-town Bürgermeister like Willi Säly - from Waldheim's own party - is promoting a project like that and getting national attention for it is one sign of that. Plus, since a very significant percentage of what I know about the Third Reich and how it has been interpreted in Austria comes from Austrian newspapers, periodicals and books, it's hard to see how anyone today could say that Austrians in general have a drastically deficient understanding of what happened in their country in 1934-1945.

Also, Waldheim wasn't the last controversial politician in Austria. A guy named Jörg Haider, who became head of the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ) in 1986, made it a key part of his schtick to appeal to old Nazis and younger rightwingers by making favorable references to the Third Reich, ususally in a nudge-nudge, wink-wink way. The FPÖ captured a significant bloc of swing voters during the 1990s and eventually in 2000 became part of the national coalition government when it briefly achieved second place ahead the ÖVP and behind the Social Democrats (SPÖ) in the national election of 1999.

Haider himself turned out to be more of a narcissist who loved seeing himself on TV than he was a Mussolini wannabe. But his constant promotion of Nazi symbolism in various ways in itself produced a great deal of discussion in the press about the historical background of that period. And, in general, the end of the Cold War in itself provoked new interest in the Second World War period in Austria like elsewhere, because the fall of Communist rule in eastern Europe was in a real sense the end of the postwar alignment of power in Europe.

So it strikes me that Geiger's article employs an outdated framework of how well the "Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit" is going in Austria. For instance, he writes:

For Saly, 62, who has been mayor of this picturesque ski resort of 900 residents for 23 years, it makes no difference that Vallaster died 65 years ago or that the Austrian media has ignored his efforts.

Most observers say Saly's mission is unique in a country that has long been reluctant to acknowledge its Nazi past. Unlike most European countries occupied by the Third Reich, many Austrians welcomed Germany's annexation in 1938, seeing integration as a remedy to soaring domestic unemployment, and a solution to the fractious politics that had caused a 1934 civil war between socialists and rightists. ...

To date, only two newspapers have covered the landmark project - Vienna's Der Standard and the leading daily in Silbertal's province of Vorarlberg. (my emphasis)

Now, it's true that most Austrians seemed to welcome annexation by Germany in 1938, though there it certainly wasn't accomplished by democratic vote. The late Simon Wiesenthal once remarked that the only thing that slowed the German army down as it was entering Austria was the large number of women bearing bundles of flowers for the German troops.

But then, 1938 was even longer ago than 1986. And Austria paid very dearly for their incorporation into the Third Reich. The number of Austrians today who would want to be annexed to Germany or who would approve the 1938 annexation is tiny. Even Haider repudiated the German-nationalists who supported him at one point.

But the fact that Der Standard and the Vorarlberger Nachrichten (which must be the Vorarlberg paper Geiger references) is hardly any sign of Austria being "reluctant to acknowledge its Nazi past". Der Standard is the country's best newspaper (the tabloid Krönen Zeitung is the most popular). And the Vorarlberger Nachrichten, which is a sister paper to the Salzburger Nachrichten and the Oberöesterreichische Nachricten, is also an excellent and respected newspaper. That they both covered which is essentially a local history project in a small town shows quite a bit of interest, I would say.

This page at the Web site of Gemeinde Montafon, the district (county, more-or-less, in American terms) of which the town of Silbertal is a part, has an article on this project, Gemeinde Silbertal zu NS-Verbrecher Vallaster (n.d.).

Then there's this puzzling passage in Geiger's article:

But if the Austrian media has ignored Silbertal's history project, historians and Holocaust survivors have not.

"Thanks to Saly, Silbertal is far more open and honest now about a native who became a Nazi mass murderer than many other Austrian communities," [historian Werner] Bundschuh said in an apparent dig at Braunau, the Austrian village where Hitler was born in 1889.

The Braunau reference is cryptic to me. Braunau is the town where Hitler was born, though he actually grew up in the city of Linz. Braunau has always been cautious about making any big deal out of Hitler's birth house for fear it would become a pilgramage site for rightwing extremists, something they have actively discouraged. Something may have been lost in the editing there.

Memorial at Hitler's birth house, Braunau-am-Inn (The inscription says, For peace, freedom and democracy/Never again fascism/Remember the millions dead)

At the end of the online article is a section called "Austria starting to come to grips with the past" which appears as a sidebar in the print edition. "Starting"? Not to put too much emphasis on the headline, but it also encourages the outdated framework from 1986. Only in the last four paragraphs does it present cases in which actions are presented which supposedly represent adequate ways of "starting to come to grips with the past".

Since I have an interest in this (obvious from the length of this post), I'm going to look at the incidents that come off in the sidebar as insufficient "starting to come to grips with the past". This one is especially puzzling:

In 2006, the ruling Social Democratic party released a 333-page study that detailed how postwar party officials courted many of the 700,000 Austrians who had become members of Adolf Hitler's National Socialist German Workers Party to work in industry, the judicial system and state health services rather than allowing repatriated Jews to have the jobs.

I'm sorry to say that I haven't read the SPÖ's report. But as a contemporary case of "Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit", that is clearly a positive thing. Although the FPÖ was the favored party home for ex-Nazis in the immediate postwar period, both the SPÖ and ÖVP also had lots of former Party members. The SPÖ report was done to make that record explicit, a kind of self-criticism in which political parties are inherently reluctant to engage.

Another negative example from the sidebar:

Since the end of World War II, Austria has been slow to atone for its Nazi past, even electing Kurt Waldheim, the former secretary-general of the United Nations, as head of state from 1986 to 1992 despite revelations that he had been a Nazi officer in a unit implicated in war crimes.

Now, I'm no fan of Kurt Waldheim. The historical record convinces me that he did willingly participate in war crimes in the Wehrmacht during the Second World War. You can check the links above to see other unfriendly comments of mine about the nasty old guy. And while there was sufficient evidence in the public record at the time to show voters he had been involved in war crimes, the charges were highly contested. Not only Waldheim himself steadfastly denied them, but his fellow ÖVP member Simon Wiesenthal, the legendary "Nazi hunter", defended Waldheim (though he later became convinced Waldheim had lied about his wartime past). In any case, as I've explained above, there's a lot of water under the bridge since 1986 when it comes to the "Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit".

This is also odd to me:

With few exceptions, postwar governments have neither restored nor given compensation to Austrian Jews. After Germany annexed Austria in 1938, about 120,000 of Vienna's 190,000 Jews were expelled or forced to flee. More than 65,000 were killed, many of them at the Auschwitz and Treblinka death camps.

While there's validity to this criticism, it's also the case that Austria in recent years has made substantial compensations, including returning stolen works of art that wound up in Austrian state-owned museums. And this does involve some tangled legal issues, getting back to Austria's official postwar status as a "liberated" country, i.e., to what degree can Austria's postwar democratic Second Republic be considered a legal or moral successor to the Third Reich. Because, after all, Austria was taken over by Germany and aborbed into that country.

Finally, there's this:

Despite demands by a small Jewish community and some politicians, the city of Salzburg has yet to rename streets bearing the names of Josef Thorak, Hitler's favorite sculptor, and Heinrich Damisch, the editor of a Nazi hate sheet.

Okay, I would agree that those street names should be changed, depending in Thorak's case on what he actually did in support of the Nazi state. But, hey, come on. Who the heck knows who streets are named after? I don't recall ever having heard of Thorak or Damisch before. This is a trivial example compared to things like the SPÖ's report.

There are tourist videos of Silbertal available, like this one, on this Silbertal Tourismus Web site.

A pleasant side of Silbertal

Tags: austria, drittes reich, engelbert dollfuss, eric geiger, josef vallaster, silbertal, third reich, willi säly