Vienna, March 15, 1938. Hundreds of thousands of people lined the streets to watch Austrian and German armed forces parade together.

The same day, in the same city, several dozen Jewish men and women knelt on the sidewalks with brushes in their hands. Storm troopers ordered them to scour off slogans painted in red on the pavement. One of them was "Heil Austria."

The Associated Press gave it a few lines in its dispatch from Vienna that day. A small Texas paper printed it on its front page, just after two short items on crude oil output and Social Security registrations.

The word being scrubbed away was "Austria."

I. Who wrote the words

The words had been painted only days before.

The Austrian chancellor, Kurt Schuschnigg, had called a plebiscite on the country's independence. The British correspondent G. E. R. Gedye later wrote that as soon as it was announced, members of Schuschnigg's youth organization, on the chancellor's instructions, painted the "Dollfuss Cross" on the pavements and stencilled his portrait on walls. Gedye says he saw it himself.

The plebiscite never took place.

On the morning of March 13, the American chargé d'affaires in Vienna, John C. Wiley, cabled the Secretary of State: the situation was "completely liquidated." Austria was under German military occupation in the guise of a "friendly visit." The new government had not yet presented itself to the diplomatic corps. He added one line: the consensus was that political opponents and Jews would be dealt with in the German Nazi manner rather than in the milder Austrian fashion. Many had already been arrested.

At eleven that night Wiley cabled again. At 7:30 the new press chief had told foreign correspondents that President Miklas had resigned, "presumably forced." A quarter of an hour later came the "constitutional law for the reunion of Austria with the German Reich." Article 1: Austria is a province of the German Reich. A referendum would be held on April 10, open to "German" men and women.

Wiley added his own reading: the restriction presumably excluded Jews.

The slogans painted for the independence vote now belonged to no one. By March 15, the people the storm troopers brought to scrub them off were the very people just shut out of the vote.

II. The window over the Graben

Gedye's office window looked down on the Graben, in the heart of Vienna.

For many weeks, he wrote, he watched the same scene from that window. Storm troopers dragged Jewish men and women out of shops, offices and homes, pushed brushes into their hands, splashed them with acid, and made them kneel and scrub for hours at Schuschnigg's leftover propaganda, while crowds jostled, jeered and laughed. Where there was none to scrub, he said, he had seen Nazis paint it on first for the Jews to remove.

The first "cleaning squad" he saw was at the Praterstern, in the Jewish quarter. They were made to wash a stencilled Schuschnigg portrait off the pediment of a statue. Storm troopers dragged in an elderly Jewish working man and his wife. Tears ran silently down her cheeks; she looked straight ahead, through her tormentors. She held her husband's arm. Gedye could see her trying to pat his hand.

The mob howled: "Work for the Jews at last!"

In his preface he recorded another man: an ashen-faced Jewish surgeon on hands and knees before half a dozen young men with swastika armbands and dog whips. The fingers that had saved many Viennese lives held a scrubbing brush. One storm trooper poured an acid solution over the brush and the fingers; another sluiced the pavement from a bucket, taking care to drench the surgeon's striped trousers.

What Gedye found hardest to reconcile was not the uniformed Nazis. It was the onlookers: the soberly dressed Viennese "Little Man" and his wife, pushing to get closer, grinning.

III. A "precedent"

Later, apologists for the Nazis said this was only tit for tat.

Gedye granted the fact behind it. Under Dollfuss and Schuschnigg, Nazis caught painting swastikas were sometimes made by the police to paint them over in black, or to sweep up the paper swastikas they had scattered.

Then he set the two side by side. The Nazis had been taken out in the early morning, with few people about, to remove illegal propaganda they themselves had put up the night before. The Jews were now taken to the busiest streets at the hour of greatest humiliation, to remove the entirely legal campaign material of the previous government, which they had had nothing to do with.

One made people clear up what they had done. The other picked someone at random and made him kneel for the whole city.

IV. "Fifty Jews today, any Jews"

On the street it looked like a carnival. What Gedye saw was a routine that started every morning.

He lived in the Habsburgergasse, with S.S. guards in the basement of his building. Every morning, he wrote, the S.S. squads were told how many Jews to round up that day for menial work. Once a regular police detective came to his office while he was out, to pour out his disgust at orders to arrest fifty Jews that day: "any Jews."

They preferred doctors, lawyers and merchants. The favourite task was cleaning the toilet bowls in the S.S. barracks with bare hands.

Gedye also saw a piece of paper. A highly skilled Jewish surgeon, whose services an influential Nazi needed, had been given a document stating that he was "exempted" from scrubbing pavements and lavatories.

Humiliation now had rosters, quotas and exemption slips.

V. Reports from the legation

What happened on the street went into the diplomatic cables.

On March 16 Wiley reported that Hitler had left for Germany the night before, and that the reports of arrests and of the Nazi "clean up" reaching the legation matched those in the American press. This, he wrote, was a period of "efficient terrorism"; a list of "enemies" had been carefully prepared. Money and private property were being seized wholesale, Jewish department stores plundered, and suicides continued.

Austrian Jews, he went on, were unable to leave. Many with American connections were calling at the legation.

His last line: the situation here was worse than it had ever been in Berlin.

On March 25 Wiley sent a formal despatch with a memorandum compiled by the commercial attaché, Mr. Richardson. The premises of the main Jewish associations had been closed. The Jewish hospital, the old people's home, several schools and three soup kitchens were still open, but every Jewish welfare fund in Vienna had been blocked, and real distress had begun.

He wrote of the streets: a campaign of indignity. An eminent rabbi had had his beard cut off. "Hundreds, if not thousands" had been made to do degrading and menial work. Nearly all the Jewish population lived in acute anxiety and depression, feeling they were in a state of "legalized lawlessness," without rights and with no higher authority to appeal to. Suicides had been numerous. He added a careful qualification: so far as he knew, there had been no Jewish deaths by violence.

There was also something about American firms. Companies such as the Vacuum Oil Company had been "advised" to dismiss their "non-Aryan" employees. Vacuum Oil was told to do it gradually and to keep some of the more important Jewish staff for six or eight months so they could break in their successors.

The economic pogrom, the despatch said, seemed to be easing somewhat. The S.A. was beginning to take down the boycott signs on Jewish shops, and exit visas might become easier to obtain.

But the last paragraph read: for many hundreds of thousands of "non-Aryans" it was economically very hard to stay in Austria, and for the vast majority it seemed equally hard to find a refuge abroad.

VI. Folkestone

On March 15, the day of the brushes in Vienna, there was a door on the English side of the Channel too.

That day six people holding Austrian passports arrived at Folkestone. Three were admitted at once, and a fourth after inquiries. Two were refused: one man had been refused permission the previous November to settle in Britain; the other did not claim to be a refugee and could not show he could support himself even for a short stay.

Those were the figures the Home Secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare, gave the House of Commons on March 22. The week before, the Labour MP Arthur Henderson had asked for an assurance that what had happened "yesterday," when Austrian refugees were prevented from entering, would not be repeated. R. A. Butler of the Foreign Office replied that it was a matter for the Home Office.

On March 22, at the end of Questions, Hoare made a statement. The government wished to keep Britain's tradition of asylum for people who had to leave their own country for political, racial or religious reasons. But indiscriminate admission would create police difficulties and aggravate unemployment, housing and other social problems. So while offering asylum as far as practicable, it was essential to avoid creating an impression that the door was open to immigrants of all kinds. Otherwise people would arrive at the ports in numbers too large to admit.

Members pressed him. Aneurin Bevan asked about poor people who had left because of their opinions, loss of liberty or persecution: would they be allowed to land? Mr. Paling asked whether money played a large part in deciding who got in. Miss Wilkinson pointed out that many people's bank accounts had been sequestrated; would the government accept guarantees from British people willing to give them a home?

Hoare's answer came back in the same form each time: every individual case would get the most sympathetic consideration possible.

One member finally asked whether the Home Secretary had asked the Dominions if they would take some of the refugees fleeing from "wholesale murder in Vienna."

In the record, that question has no answer.

On April 26 Hoare gave the House a number: from March 13 to April 24, 1,671 people holding Austrian passports had been given leave to land, for varying periods, and some of them had since left.

VII. A car in the rain

The brushes did not stop.

On April 26 a Washington paper carried a report from London: cable dispatches from Vienna told of a wave of anti-Semitism of unprecedented severity across Austria. In a downpour, Jews had been made to wash a storm trooper's car, parked right in front of the British consulate, at least fifty times, until police intervened at the consular officials' request. Elsewhere Jewish guests were made to scrub floors, wash windows and do deep knee bends for twenty minutes; one old man fainted after ten.

On April 29 Josef Bürckel, the Reich commissioner sent to Austria, issued a decree. Wiley reported it that day: Bürckel stressed that Vienna must be "Aryanized," while denouncing those who were speculating and using sharp practices at the Jews' expense. He would run Aryanization himself, on an "absolutely legal but therefore all the more thorough basis."

Wiley also noted the reaction in Jewish circles. They said, ironically, that they must now regard Bürckel as their guardian angel, but they hoped for energetic measures against the physical violence and terror of the Austrian S.S., the S.A. and other lawless elements.

The next day the American ambassador in Berlin, Hugh Wilson, cabled an explanation of why Austria was worse than Germany. Hitler wanted Austrian National Socialism to be "Austrian," with most posts in Austrian hands, which left Berlin with less control than usual. Austrian Nazis were working off old hatreds, taking revenge on political enemies and on Jews, and seeking personal gain through forced liquidations and outright plunder. The British consul general in Vienna thought the Austrian Nazis more violent and unscrupulous than the party in Germany.

The street brush was being taken over by a "legal" decree.

VIII. After the brush

On May 31 Wiley sent a cable of a few lines: since the morning of the 27th, wholesale arrests of Jews; many reported sent to Dachau. The action was reliably attributed to Himmler's direct orders, and presumably meant to demoralize the Jews further, make spoliation easier, and "expedite exodus."

In March the brush made people kneel in the street for the whole city to see. The purpose of the May arrests was written in a diplomatic cable: make them go.

And the last paragraph of Wiley's March despatch still stood: impossible to stay, and nowhere to go.

Gedye himself could not stay. He wrote that he was expelled from Vienna by the German secret police. According to a press cutting reproduced in his book, Butler told Parliament that the German authorities had expelled him over an article whose figures for the number of people imprisoned in Austria they regarded as untrue.

What he left in his book is still the pavement seen from that window on the Graben. "Austria" had once been painted there. The people later made to kneel and scrub it off no longer even had the right to cast a vote for Austria.

Sources and editorial boundaries

1. Wire report: Associated Press, Vienna, March 15, 1938, "Jews Made To Scrub Vienna Sidewalks," in The Laredo Times (Laredo, Tex.), March 15, 1938, p. 1, read from the Library of Congress Chronicling America OCR text: while hundreds of thousands watched the parade, several dozen Jewish men and women scrubbed sidewalks under storm troopers' orders, scouring off "heil Austria" and other slogans painted in red in the last days of the Schuschnigg regime; others cleaned Schuschnigg posters from lamp posts. The dispatch says "in the Ghetto"; the story does not use this to name a specific district. Also The Washington Times (Washington, D.C.), April 26, 1938, p. 4, "Jews Are Tortured In Vienna, Report" (datelined London, April 26, relaying Vienna dispatches): the car washed at least fifty times in front of the British consulate, floor scrubbing, window washing and knee bends, the old man who fainted. Both are contemporary relayed reports and have not been independently verified. 2. Eyewitness memoir: G. E. R. Gedye, Fallen Bastions: The Central European Tragedy (London: Victor Gollancz, 1939), read in the archive.org OCR text (Digital Library of India copy in.ernet.dli.2015.174613): the preface (the surgeon) and the chapter "Terror Unchained," about pp. 307–311 and 322–324 (office over the Graben, flat in the Habsburgergasse, the first cleaning squad at the Praterstern, the earlier police practice with Nazi swastikas and his rebuttal of the parallel, the daily round-up numbers and the police detective, toilets cleaned by hand, the "exemption" document). Gedye was a strongly anti-Nazi British correspondent writing after his expulsion; these scenes are his own observations and what he was told, and the text marks them as his. Other episodes in the book are not used. Butler's statement on the expulsion is taken from the press cutting Gedye reproduces; Hansard was not checked for it. The book is in copyright; it is paraphrased with only very brief quotation. 3. U.S. diplomatic records: FRUS 1938, vol. I, docs. 450 (Wiley, Vienna, March 13, 11 a.m.), 454 (same day, 11 p.m.), 466 (March 16); FRUS 1938, vol. II, docs. 281 (Wiley, despatch No. 166, March 25), 284 (Wiley, April 29, Bürckel decree), 286 (Wilson, Berlin, April 30), 294 (Wiley, May 31). https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1938v01 and https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1938v02. Richardson's memorandum and its exhibits were not printed and were not read. 4. British parliamentary record: HC Deb 16 March 1938 vol 333 cc382-4 (Henderson on refugees refused "yesterday," Butler's reply); HC Deb 22 March 1938 vol 333 cc990-6 (Hoare on the six Austrian passport holders at Folkestone on March 15 and his statement on asylum; questions from Bevan, Paling, Wilkinson, Cocks and others); HC Deb 24 March 1938 vol 333 cc1363-4; HC Deb 26 April 1938 vol 335 c16 (1,671). Read on api.parliament.uk Historic Hansard. Mr. Cocks's question has no recorded answer. 5. Boundaries: no Vienna police files, Nazi Party or S.S. internal orders, or original photographs were examined; the daily "quotas" rest only on Gedye's account and are not presented as a documented system. Wiley's "so far as I know there have been no Jewish deaths by violence" is his own qualified statement of March 25. "Wholesale murder in Vienna" is Mr. Cocks's wording, not this story's judgment. No invented dialogue, inner thoughts or atmospheric detail; the crowd's shout, the surgeon and the elderly couple all come from Gedye. 6. Rights: U.S. diplomatic papers and British parliamentary records are public documents; the 1938 newspaper reports and Gedye's book are paraphrased with very brief quotation. The narrative is original and reproduces no protected modern account.