http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2018/11/in-1938-tory-mps-account-of-post.html
(Sir) Beverley Baxter (1891-1964) was a Canadian-born journalist who spent most of his career in Britain, where he became a Conservative MP. His account of the persecution of Jews in post-Anschluss Vienna appeared shortly after the Kristallnacht pogrom, the 80th anniversary of which is being marked now.
Appearing in an Australian newspaper (Shepparton Advertiser, 25 November 1938), Baxter’s article was entitled “Jew-Baiting In Vienna: How the pogroms are organised”. Here is what he wrote (I’ve changed his original spelling of Brownshirts as two words):
What is the truth about the persecution of Jews in Germany and Austria? How far are tales of
atrocities figments of the imagination or inventions of propagandists? It was partly to answer these questions that I went recently to Vienna, where the Nazis are now in supreme control, and where purification of the Germanic race is proceeding according to plan.
It is difficult to describe the Nazi movement one way or another. To condemn it out of hand would be foolish and would show a lack of understanding. We who extol democracy must be willing to learn where this political and economic creed has succeeded against difficulties that would discourage the methods of democracy.
There is a tremendous and genuine idealism in the movement. It is written in the faces of the young men who have donned the uniform of the cause. One cannot look upon the clear eyes and fine physique of these boys without admitting that Hitler has accomplished miracles. Out of a defeated and disillusioned nation he has created a magnificent new generation — if we are to judge humanity by the welfare of the body and the purposefulness of the spirit.
Unfortunately, in the launching of this movement of “national regeneration,” and I do not mock the phrase — there were also let loose forces of national degradation which are now out of control. And the most vile of these is the persecution of the Jews.
In what I write here I have purposely refused to credit the stories of atrocities which cannot be proved. They may be in time. I only mention, however, those which I know to be true.
Herr Rudolf Bear was a director of the Vienna Opera. He was sitting in his box one night when three Austrian Brownshirts entered and drove him in a car to the outskirts of Vienna, where they beat him with truncheons.
When the director reached home, a bleeding pulp of a human being, he took poison. His servants discovered it in time, however, and he was rush ed to the hospital, where the best doctors in Vienna fought for his life — and won.
At last he was discharged, a cured man, and warned about his future conduct By the authorities.
That night he shot himself. [Emphasis added here and below.] Search the literature of tragedy if you like and tell me where fiction can outdistance that story of established fact.
One of the pranks of the Austrian Brownshirts that followed the invasion of the German army, was to make Jews scrub the pavements; and the favorite victims of this sadistic exploitation were young Jewesses.
But not always. A Jewish violinist was given a pail of water and told to scrub the pavement outside a Christian shop. To add point to the jest, acid was poured into the water. The violinist performed his task, to find that the acid had burned the skin from his fingers and that he could never again — or so he thought — play his violin. He went home and took poison.
