From Prejudice to Persecution

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. |A history of Austrian anti-Semitism--and the Jewish responses to it--since the Middle Ages, with particular focus on the 1914-1938 period. This study identifies many sources and varieties of the anti-Semitism that has pervaded Austria.