From Prejudice to Persecution : A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism

Annotation According to Simon Wiesenthal, nearly half of the crimes associated with the Holocaust were committed by Austrians, who comprised just 8.5 percent of the population of Hitler's Greater German Reich. Bruce Pauley's book explains this phenomenon by providing a history of Austrian anti-Semitism and Jewish responses to it from the Middle Ages to the present, with a particular focus on the period from 1914 to 1938. In contrast to works that view anti-Semitism as an inherent national characteristic, his account identifies many sources and varieties of the anti-Semitic sentiment that pervaded Austrian society on the eve of the Holocaust Anti-Semitism in Austria, as in other European countries prior to the end of the Second World War, took so many different forms that, like the term fascism, it almost defies definition. From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism