When Mistrust and Betrayal Permeated Neighborhood Life

Der Standard, November 9, 2025

Gudrun Springer

German original: https://www.derstandard.at/story/3000000295311/als-misstrauen-und-verrat-das-nachbarschaftliche-leben-durchdrangen

Thousands of Jews were denounced, arrested, and deported in November 1938. Historians are researching how these events radically changed a neighborhood in Vienna's Neubau district.

Josef Hugel ran a guesthouse at Kaiserstrasse 32 in Vienna's Neubau district. The local Nazi scene was already networking there when the NSDAP was still banned. “Business was good nonetheless, or perhaps precisely because of that,” explains historian Regina Fritz from the Institute of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna. But soon the outsider would become a profiteer of the Nazi regime.

Regina Fritz, together with historian Philipp Rohrbach from the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute (VWI), is researching what happened in the neighborhood between Kaiserstrasse and Urban-Loritz-Platz at the time of the “Anschluss” in 1938 and afterwards. The two gave the STANDARD an insight into their research, which they intend to continue and which shows what it meant for victims and perpetrators to live next door to each other.

After Austria's “Anschluss” to the German Reich in March, Jews experienced a wave of violence. Non-Jews were involved and some denounced their neighbors. “Neighborhoods, places of everyday coexistence, became places of fear, mistrust, and violence,” Fritz summarizes the developments.

A particular wave of violence erupted on the night of November 9-10, 1938. The Nazi leadership staged this as a “spontaneous” outbreak of violence in response to an assassination attempt on German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by a 17-year-old Polish Jew. Herschel Grynszpan wanted to take revenge for the humiliation and mistreatment of his parents and relatives. The diplomat died two days later, which the Nazis used as an excuse to carry out pogroms against Jews.

Thousands of Arrests

In Vienna, all synagogues were destroyed or vandalized. Jewish shops were demolished and looted, as were around 2,000 apartments. More than 6,500 Jewish men were arrested in Vienna alone, and more than half of them were deported to the Dachau concentration camp. Over 20 Jews were murdered in Vienna, including at least five people near the temporary collection point set up in the former school building at Kenyongasse 4.

This brings us back to the neighborhood in Vienna's Neubau district. The school building had been converted into a temporary detention center where arrested Jews were held due to a lack of space in conventional prisons. The brutality of the conditions there is reflected in the words of Emanuel Fuchs, a man who was imprisoned there for several days: "I was sent to Dachau. Compared to Kenyongasse, Dachau was a vacation home," the eyewitness later said in an interview that can be read in the Austrian Heritage Archive. Fuchs describes, for example, how prisoners had to do gymnastics exercises at night and were beaten and humiliated in the process, or how two men were forced to set fire to a fellow prisoner's beard.

From Outsider to Block Warden

Gasthaus operator Hugel was very active in Neubau and often involved in denouncing Jews. He had already been a member of the NSDAP for six years when the Anschluss took place. The man, who was almost 50 years old at the time, did not hold a high rank, but as a simple member he played an important role at the local level: “Since the days of the Anschluss, he had held the position of block leader,” explains Philipp Rohrbach.

Block wardens had various tasks. They were responsible for collecting contributions and spreading Nazi propaganda, but they were also “the eyes and ears of the regime, who in many cases actively supported the persecution of opponents of the regime and Jews through denunciations,” explains Rohrbach. Fritz and Rohrbach were able to reconstruct what this man's involvement meant in concrete terms for people in the neighborhood based on trial records and other contemporary documents.

According to these documents, in November 1938, Hugel and other Nazis broke into the paper goods factory owned by the Wolf family—Hugel's landlady Olga and her son Friedrich—at Seidengasse 33 and stole money. They then robbed the Wolfs' apartment of cash, jewelry, and securities. When the court ruled on the attacks on the family in 1947, the trial records stated that it was proven “that assets had been confiscated. However, it cannot be proven what ultimately happened to these assets,” which was apparently considered a mitigating factor. According to the files, it could theoretically have been the case that the assets were used to pay taxes or settle debts.

The Wolf family was deported to Łódź on October 15, 1941. Friedrich, who had converted to Catholicism in 1925, was murdered in Litzmannstadt on April 4, 1942, and Olga died on May 22, 1942.

Robbery and Deportation

Near the Wolfs' paper goods factory at Seidengasse 38, Moritz Kubin ran a linen and knitwear shop, above which he also lived with his wife Therese. In the summer of 1938, they were required to pay ten percent “Jewish property tax” on the business; shortly thereafter, Moritz Kubin died. His wife Therese then requested that the tax be reduced because the warehouse had been robbed—and Hugel's name appears again in connection with the robbery.

But not only there: Paul Husserl, who lived at Kaiserstrasse 34, stated during questioning before the People's Court in 1947 that Hugel and another Nazi had rung the doorbell of the apartment on the morning of November 10, 1938. They had demanded the apartment key from the father and told the seriously ill mother to leave her bed and the apartment. The defendant said, “Just wait, you Jews, now you'll get what's coming to you.” The family had to move to another apartment, where about 15 Jews from the neighborhood were already waiting. They had to remain there for 36 hours without food or drink. Paul Husserl's parents were murdered in a concentration camp.

In the spring of 1945, shortly before the end of the war, Hugel was assigned to Mauthausen as a member of the fire department to guard the concentration camp. Two years later, a trial was opened against him, but his role in Mauthausen was not mentioned. Husserl was the only Jewish witness who could testify against Hugel. A guilty verdict was also handed down. “All the other persecuted people from the small neighborhood in Neubau whose fates were discussed in the trial against Hugel either did not return from the camps,” Fritz summarizes, “or died shortly after their return home as a result of the abuse.”

(Gudrun Springer, November 9, 2025)