The Jewish Trail of Tears The Evian Conference of ... - Haruth.com

into the economic, cultural and political spheres of Austrian life, especially in the capital
of Vienna, in which the majority of Jews in 1938 resided. Whereas the Socialists and
Communists were the first victims of Hitler’s accession to power, in Vienna it was the
Jews who bore the “brunt of the Nazis revolutionary fire,” facing mass arrest, plunder,
impoverishment and the fury of the mob.
The Central Office for Jewish Emigration (Zentralamt jüdischer Auswanderung
or ZjA) was established in March 1938 in Vienna by Adolf Eichmann of the
Sicherheitsdienst or S.D. (in the former Rothschild palace at 20-22 Prinz-Eugen-Strasse)
to systematize and expedite the emigration process and the transfer of Jewish capital. He
compared the process to that of a factory conveyor belt: “The initial application and all
the rest of the required papers are put in at one end, and the passport falls off at the other
end.” 25 Eichmann informed his superior in the Gestapo Department of Jewish Affairs,
Herbert Hagen, on May 8, 1938 that he had “demanded” that twenty thousand Jews
“without means” emigrate from Austria during the period April 1, 1938-May 1, 1939 and
received assurances from the Jewish community and Zionist groups “that they would
keep to this.” 26
Eichmann and many other Nazi ideologues viewed the Jews as the “eternal” and
“most dangerous enemy” of National Socialism. Germany had to become Jüdenrein or
25 Statement given by Eichmann during his trial in Jerusalem in 1962cited in Debórah Dwork and Robert
Jan van Pelt, Holocaust: A History (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002), 121.
26 Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939, vol. 1 (New
York: Harper Collins, 1999), 244. For a fuller account of Eichmann’s recollection of this period in time see
“The Trial of Adolf Eichmann Session 18 (Part 5 of 6)” available from
http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/e/eichmann-adolf/transcripts/Sessions/Session-018-05.html ; Internet;
accessed March 12, 2010. Eichmann and Hagen had travelled to Palestine in 1937 to assess the
possibilities of mass German Jewish emigration.
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