In 1938, amidst the terrors brought on by Nazis, hundreds of Austrian Jews sought refuge under a scheme rolled out by the government of Northern Ireland. Interestingly, this project was not inherently altruistic but aimed at resolving the perennial problem of unemployment in the North. The act named ‘New Industries (Development)’ offered financial incentives to employers willing to generate jobs for the 91,000 jobless individuals – the highest unemployment figure since the formation of Northern Ireland in 1921. Amidst lukewarm interest from locals, they opened the scheme to outsiders.
A pivot in this historical chronicle is a man named Alfred Neumann. An Austrian Jew, often compared to Oskar Schindler, Neumann managed to save 70 of his fellow Jews from Nazi-ruled Vienna. Unfortunate irony had it that just two years later, he was classified as an ‘alien enemy’ by the British and was deported, only to die in a U-boat attack.
In August 1938, Neumann set up a small factory in Newtownards, County Down, recruiting six professional individuals from Vienna. A few weeks on, news about the government scheme in Stormont was reported in a Jewish newspaper in Vienna which led to hundreds of Jewish individuals from Vienna applying for the scheme, hoping for an escape route from the horrific persecution since the Anschluss – the Nazi invasion that occurred in March 1938.
The SS along with Austrian Nazis had instigated a series of violent attacks on the 180,000-strong Jewish community. Jews were publicly humiliated, attacked on the streets of Vienna, forced out of their jobs, and displaced from their homes. Crowded apartments in a ghetto became their only abode. The ruthless transportation of 5000 Jews to Dachau between May 2nd and June 20th, 1938, was a clear testament to this persecution. Such was the severity of this brutality, 12 Jews lost their lives before the journey’s end.
Alfred Neumann initially had a successful entrepreneurship venture in Northern Ireland alongside a local businessman from Derry named David Gilfillan. Together, they inaugurated their second manufacturing facility in the city in the late 1938. Unfortunately, not long after opening, Neumann faced a falling out with his employees at Newtownards and his funding was cut off by the beginning of 1939.
By December of 1939, amidst accusations of being an enemy alien, Neumann found himself interned. With France’s fall in June 1940 and the looming possibility of a German invasion, Britain commenced deportations of foreigners chiefly to Canada and Australia. Alfred Neumann was amongst the Austrians, Italians, and Germans sailing onboard the Arandora Star, a former opulent cruise liner, which was destined for Canada in early July 1940. Tragically, a German submarine strike sank the ship approximately 125 miles away from Ireland’s northwest coast. This incident resulted in 800 fatalities, including Neumann, whose body was never recovered.
The Ministry of Commerce in Belfast received 300 files of letters mentioning 730 individuals, out of which at least 600 were dismissed, with 125 ultimately becoming casualties of the Nazis. The “Vienna Model,” formulated with the extermination of 65,000 Vienna Jews – that made up a third of the city’s Jewish demographic – became the blueprint for the oppression and eradication of Jews across Nazi occupied Europe.
Neumann had attempted to relocate 11 Viennese Jews to Derry to join 16 relatives who were employees at the factory he shared with Gilfillan. Within this group was Willy Ehrenstein, a 25-year-old eager to join his bride-to-be, Lily Weinstein. Regrettably, Ehrenstein was unable to escape from Vienna, resulting in his forced relocation to the Leopoldstadt ghetto. He was later deported in 1942 to Theresienstadt, a former Habsburg military town within Czechoslovakia.
Housing 140,000 Jews in squalid, overcrowded conditions, the territory served as a ghetto that was particularly lethal for the elderly population. The ghetto lived under the lurking fear of being sent to Nazi extermination camps, as well as recurrent outbreaks of diseases like typhoid, which claimed thousands of lives. Ehrenstein, one of the ghetto inhabitants, was transferred to Auschwitz in September 1944 and was moved to Dachau after barely eleven days.
In the new year of 1945, Ehrenstein was among the 835 Jews moved to Leitmeritz, a mere five kilometres away from Theresienstadt. This place, opened by the SS in March 1944 to manufacture tank engines, hosted unbearable living conditions in its subterranean caverns. So severe were the conditions that it earned the grim moniker “the death factory” among the inmates. Of the 18,000 prisoners that endured the camp, 4,500 perished due to disease, malnutrition, and unforeseen incidents. His traumatic journey through concentration camps came to an end when Ehrenstein passed away merely a month post his arrival, on February 6th, 1945.
In sharp contrast, Lily Weinstein, Willy’s betrothed, led a divergent life. She walked down the aisle in London in June 1940, and soon welcomed a daughter into their family. They relocated to the United States a mere three months after welcoming their baby.
There, the brutal genocide of the Holocaust claimed two-thirds of the Jewish inhabitants of Vienna, approximately 65,000 people, whose deaths were a result of techniques that became the model for the systematic annihilation and persecution of Jews across occupied Europe.
Walter Weiniger, a businessman from Vienna, managed to escape and collaborated with Alfred and Jacob Utitz, two Czech brothers, to oversee a tannery at Shrigley, Co Down, providing employment to 400 workers at its zenith. He was joined by his wife, Mary, and their two children in 1939. However, his parents, Salomon and Gisela, along with his brother Ernst and his partner Grete were unable to leave Vienna.
In a desperate attempt to evacuate his family, Ernst got in touch with a certain Fried to make an overseas money transfer, hoping this would assist in obtaining the much-needed visas. Fried, unfortunately, was apprehended by the dreaded Gestapo, who promptly pursued Ernst. One fateful day, two Gestapo agents visited his home whilst he was away. He returned later to rescue his parents, only to be held in Moabit Prison in Berlin, accused of the capital offence of treason, and of flouting currency regulations.
He endured torment in an effort to force him into confessing guilt for incriminating others in identical offences, though he stood his ground and did not comply. Experiencing solitary confinement and undergoing further torment at the hands of the SS, he tellingly recounted this in his memoir. After a year, one of those charged alongside him received a death sentence and a prison term was handed down to two others. Yet, he astonishingly experienced freedom due to insufficiency of evidence. Come March 1942, he discovered that his case was being revisited by the Gestapo. He took careful steps to slip out of the hospital, going into hiding until the liberation of 1945 took place.
His fortune did not extend to others who made applications under the New Industries Act in 1938. Alfred Bermann (64) pursued an entry permit for his son Otto (29), who had been detained for half a year in a concentration camp.
In his plea, Alfred wrote, “We would be extremely grateful if you could find him a position anywhere as well as facilitate his obtaining of permission. This would offer the only chance of his release.” His desperate parents made an appeal for assistance and patiently awaited a favourable response that never came.
In their fate, Alfred and his wife Mathilde were transported to Theresienstadt in July 1942. Alfred died there in September of that year, while Mathilde faced expulsion to Treblinka within the same month and met her end there. Otto, their son, managed to survive through the war and lived until his peaceful death in Canada in July 1964.
Otto Kisch (49) made an application for visas for his spouse Hertha (42) and their daughter Vera (8). He detailed his 30-year career in the shoe and slipper industry, believing he could establish or work at a slipper factory. ““No doubt the renowned Viennese fashion and style would also find respect in your country, providing a fresh spark to your markets,” he penned. Regarding his wife he wrote, “possessing the expertise of an excellent home maker and a culinary expert, she is fully capable and prepared to set up a cooking school, a bakery or similar”. The family had hoped to create a home in Belfast. However, their request was rejected.
In a rare event, Hertha and her daughter Vera were the survivors in their family after being deported to Riga, Latvia on the first day of 1942. The family was relocated to Jungfernhof, a concentration camp in the vicinity of Riga, where Otto, Hertha’s husband, was killed two months later. Post war, Hertha sought reparations from the Austrian government while residing in New York.
The Jungfernhof camp was the grim destination for almost 4,000 Jews from Vienna, Nuremberg, Stuttgart, and Hamburg, who were transported there from the end of November 1941 on. Out of those delivered to the camp, a meagre 148 remained alive when the war concluded.
For additional details on the Holocaust along with the narratives of North Ireland and Vienna, refer to ‘The Saved and the Spurned’ written by Noel Russell, available from New Island Books.