Austria Key Dates

1918

Following the end of World War I and the death of Emperor Franz Joseph I, the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapses. Austria became a republic.

1919

Treaty of Saint-Germain deprives Austria of much of it territory.

A stab in the back theory emerges that Jews and communists have betrayed the country.

1933

30 January   

Adolf Hitler is appointed Chancellor of Germany.

May

The Austrian Nazi Party launches a violent propaganda and terror campaign inside Austria to destabilise the state.

1934

July

Austrian Nazis attempt a coup d’état, assassinating Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, but the takeover fails.

1935

September 

The Nuremberg Laws are declared in Germany.

1938

11–13 March

Germany invades and annexes Austria in an event known as the Anschluss. Local citizens and Hitler Youth aggressively humiliate and attack their Jewish neighbours.

28 March

A new law strips Jewish cultural organisations of their legal civil rights.

26 April

The regime decrees that all Jewish property valued over 5,000 Reichsmarks must be registered for eventual “Aryanisation” (confiscation).

August

Adolf Eichmann establishes the Central Agency for Jewish Emigration in Vienna, weaponizing bureaucracy to strip Jews of their assets in exchange for exit visas.

8 August

The SS opens the Mauthausen Concentration Camp, which becomes the main hub of Nazi terror on Austrian soil.

9–10 November

During Kristallnacht, state-sponsored pogroms destroy more than 40 synagogues in Vienna and result in the forced arrest of over 6,000 Jewish men, who are sent to concentration camps.

1939

30 January

Hitler says ‘if war erupts it will mean the Vernichtung (extermination) of European Jews’.

23 May 

British government severely restricts immigration to the Palestine Mandate in the 1939 White Paper.

1 September

Germany invades Poland.

October-April 1940

Systematic mass deportations begin. Eichmann orders the transport of 1,600 Viennese Jews to a detention camp in Nisko, Poland.

1941

February–March 

The SS resumes targeted mass deportations, sending roughly 4,500 Jews from Vienna to various ghettos in the Lublin district of occupied Poland to be murdered.

Autumn 

Large-scale deportations expand toward the Baltic states and the occupied Soviet Union, including Riga, Kovno, and Minsk, where victims face immediate mass shootings.

1942

20 January 

Wannsee Conference.

1 March

Auschwitz II-Birkenau begins operation.

Spring

Transports accelerate, sending remaining Austrian Jews to death camps like Auschwitz and transit ghettos like Theresienstadt.

October

The Nazi authorities declare Vienna ‘free of Jews’ (judenrein). Only about 8,000 Jews remain out of a pre-war population of 192,000—mostly individuals protected by mixed marriages.

1943

February

Germany surrenders at Stalingrad.

Autumn

Mauthausen Concentration Camp expands its network of subcamps (such as Melk and Ebensee) to exploit slave labour for underground munitions factories.

1944

19 March

Germany invades Hungary.

Summer 

The massive Soviet offensive prompts SS chief Heinrich Himmler to order prisoners in all concentration camps and sub-camps be forcibly evacuated toward the interior of the Reich.

November

As the Soviet army approaches Hungary, the Nazis force roughly 40,000 Hungarian Jews on brutal death marches through Austria to construct defensive fortifications.

Winter  

SS authorities increasingly evacuate concentration camp prisoners from both east and west on foot. Many death marches culminate at Mauthausen.

1945

January–April

As frontline concentration camps are evacuated, tens of thousands of dying prisoners are marched into Mauthausen, causing extreme overcrowding, starvation, and rampant disease.

13 April

Soviet forces capture Vienna.

5 May

The US Army reaches and liberates the Mauthausen Concentration Camp and its subcamps. Of the 190,000 total people imprisoned there over seven years, at least 90,000 died.

8 May

Nazi Germany signs an unconditional surrender, ending World War II in Europe.

September

The Seitenstettengasse City Temple—the only Viennese synagogue to survive Kristallnacht unburned—provisionally re-opens.

1945-Late 1940s

Austria serves as a major host site for Displaced Persons (DP) camps, housing Jewish survivors.