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As early as on the eve of March 12, the first excesses against Austria’s Jewish population occurred: SA-men, Hitler Youth-members, and men, who wore as their only sign of authority a swastika armband or an NS-badge, arrested, beat, humiliated, and forced Jews to clean house walls and sidewalks with mops and toothbrushes. Hatred, the presumption to belong to the master race, envy, and a »respectable« anti-Semitism erupted into a Jew-baiting remindful of the Middle Ages. During the first weeks following the »Anschluss«, the Austrian Jews were brutally looted. Under the pretense of having to carry out house searches, uniformed party members as well as civilians »seized« money, jewelry, and other assets from apartments of Jews. These spontaneous, pogrom-like excesses would not have been possible, had they not been a well-calculated and as such welcome factor of the National Socialist system of rule and terror. In 1938 the NS-regime’s goal had still been to force as many Austrian Jews as possible to emigrate. The terror exercised by the Gestapo, SS, etc. as well as that »from below,« that is, from local National Socialists and their followers, was meant to accelerate the expulsion.
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