Italy’s influence on Austrian policymakers is demonstrated by the legislation for a population index drafted between 1935 and 1938 by Austria’s Federal Council of Culture (Bundeskulturrat). This legislation was modelled directly on the 1929 laws enacted in Italy. As in the case of Gini’s proposal to the Interior Ministry in 1931, the legislation in Austria was eventually rejected because of a lack of finances, but it illustrated, nonetheless, the State’s plan to achieve greater control over the population. The Austrian case also highlights the regime’s intent to curb ‘undesirable’ immigration and residency in Austria, specifically of Jews. In the legislative and public discourses about the proposed legislation, therefore, we can trace Austria’s ‘demographic battle’ on several fronts: citizenship, immigration and anti-Semitism.

The first ministerial discussions about the proposal for a population index in Austria took place in June 1935. In its earliest form, the scheme consisted of a system of compulsory registration for every adult resident in Austria whether citizen, foreigner or stateless. The registration of the entire population was intended to lay the groundwork for further administrative reforms and also for a new military service law. ^[25] The Federal Council for Culture, one of four government legislative councils created under the May 1934 constitution that formally marked the end of parliamentary democracy in Austria and the period of Austro-fascist rule, ^[26] then met to discuss the proposal in September 1935. The Speaker, Dr Lenz, stated at the outset of his address to council that the population index was to be the first of several measures aimed at reforming Austria’s entire legal and administrative system of residency, immigration and welfare. He also placed the proposal for a population index in the broader European context by claiming that industrial change and the economic crisis had transformed Europe from a ‘culture of settling’ to a ‘culture of migrating’. Austria was ‘perhaps the state of least resistance against socially undesirable elements’ and for this reason it had been necessary to include foreigners as well as Austrian citizens in the population index. Just who these ‘socially undesirable elements’ were was plain from his claim that the increased numbers of stateless people had become an ‘international affliction’ on the Austrian state due to the reluctance or unwillingness of Austria’s neighbours to take in former Austrian citizens who were now stateless. ^[27]

The reference to stateless people in Austria was a reference to those former citizens of the Austro-Hungarian Empire who had been ineligible for citizenship in the new Austrian state under laws designed to exclude those who had resided in territories outside the borders of the new state before 1914. The new legislation on citizenship was promulgated on 5 December 1918, less than a month after the declaration of the Republic of ‘German-Austria’ on 12 November 1918. ^[28] The law restricted citizenship to those whose legal residence (Heimatrecht) had been in the territory of the republic before August 1914. This meant that refugees from the empire’s borderlands who after 1918 found themselves on the territory of German-Austria were excluded from citizenship in Austria. The 1918 law directly affected the 70 000 Jewish refugees from Galicia who had remained in Vienna after the war but could not claim their place of domicile in the new Austrian state. A legal loophole for these refugees was introduced a year later under Article 80 of the Treaty of Saint-Germain at the end of 1919. Under the terms of Article 80, citizens of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire could opt for citizenship in any successor state in which they identified ‘according to race and language’ with the majority of the state’s population. Article 80 was adopted into Austrian legal practice in August 1920 with the proviso that proof of one’s identification with the German language by way of graduation certificates from German primary, secondary or tertiary schools had to be shown in citizenship claims. This was an exercise in vain for many Jewish refugees who had no such proof available and for whom retrieval of the necessary documents was next to impossible and, even if they had been able to prove their German language credentials, anti-Semitic bureaucrats in the interior ministry and federal administrative court could still reject applications for citizenship on the grounds of race instead of language, given the ambiguity of the wording of Article 80. ^[29] Nonetheless, despite the legal obstacles to acquiring citizenship, the number of naturalisations including those of Jews did not decline significantly until after 1933 when a moratorium was placed on all naturalisations in Austria. Approximately 120 000 individuals were naturalised between 1919 and 1936, and a further 20 000 were naturalised under the terms of Article 80. ^[30] Thus, the move to freeze citizenship claims in 1933 came after a series of measures that defined citizenship in Austria according to language and ethnicity as well as territory. After 1933, citizenship was defined not only in ethnic and territorial terms, but in civic terms of ideological loyalty to the State. Loyalty to the State could be demonstrated through continuous residency and work in one place, which excluded foreign workers and refugees from becoming Austrian citizens.

In his comments on the draft legislation, Lenz referred directly to Italy’s 1929 law, on which the Austrian population index was modelled, and he recommended in line with the 1929 law that state inspectors be appointed to oversee the registration process and the various registry offices. And, like the Italian Interior Ministry, the Austrian legislators stopped short of Gini’s recommendation that the State itself appoint professionals to carry out the registrations at the municipal level. The parallels with Italy can also be seen from the Austrian proposal to include in addition to the population index a compulsory identification card (Erkennungskarte) to be issued to every person over the age of eighteen, modelled on the Italian Carta d’identità. The Austrian card was to function as a domestic passport and would include the person’s photograph, address, date of birth, nationality, occupation and any changes of occupation. As in Italy, the purpose of the identity cards was to help individuals better identify with the State by reminding them of their social obligations to the State: work and loyalty to one’s country of birth. ^[31]

However, there is one important difference between the Italian and the Austrian models that highlights the racial ‘front’ in Austria’s demographic battle, one not witnessed in Italy until after the Axis pact between Mussolini and Hitler in 1935 and Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1936. Unlike in Italy, where individuals and families were registered separately, the Austrian population index was to include details about an individual’s family on the same index sheet. As Lenz pointed out in the legislative discussions in the Federal Council for Culture, the inclusion of an individual’s family details was deliberately designed to require Austrian citizens to declare any business and family links outside of Austria. ^[32] As we will see below in the press discussions of the proposed law, the concern that some Austrians were supporting family members who were not Austrian citizens was directed primarily at Jews who had arrived in Vienna as wartime refugees and had been unable to prove their German linguistic and cultural credentials in the new Austrian state after the war. Even if the government did not articulate this concern directly, the implication in official statements was that certain foreigners in Austria were ‘undesirable’. For example, the Interior Minister, Emil Fey, said in an address to the Federal Council of Ministers, which appeared in the press the next day, that the longstanding practice in Austria, as in Italy, that individuals had to register in the municipality where they had their legal residence, had led to many discrepancies between municipal records and also had allowed the ‘non-Austrians’ to stay out of the authorities’ clutches. ^[33] In 1932, the Interior Ministry had deemed Nazis and communists ‘undesirable’: the Czechoslovakian-born German communist Egon Erwin Kisch had been denied entry to Austria on the grounds that his proposed lecture on Russia and China contained ‘communist propaganda’ that would undermine public order. ^[34] And in 1933, after the ban on the Nazi Party stripped Austrian Nazis who had left the country of their citizenship, statements about unwanted foreigners may have been taken to mean Nazi terrorists on Austrian soil. But by 1935, with the new Chancellor Schuschnigg broaching a more conciliatory position towards Hitler and the underground Austrian Nazis, the proposed requirement that individuals declare their non-Austrian relatives to the authorities seemed to target a different group of foreigners: Jews fleeing persecution in Germany.

Moreover, the category included not only ‘tramps’, one council member observed, but also performers and artists who stayed in a particular place for only two months, a comment that drew the mirth of other council members. Apparently what struck the council as funny were the many prominent Jewish theatre directors, actors and other performers who had come to Austria from Germany since 1933, often staying only for the annual summer season of the Salzburg Festival before emigrating to America, and who were the butt of many anti-Semitic jibes during the festival. The festival season had just finished, but now a more sinister joke was to be played on them as the council moved to stamp ‘ST’—abbreviated from ‘stichtag’ or expiration date—on their identification cards. ^[35]

One week after the Federal Council for Culture passed the proposed legislation for a population index and identification cards, the Minister of the Interior, Emil Fey, addressed the State Council on the proposed bill. His address was reprinted the next day in the Neue Freie Presse. Fey echoed the earlier claims by Lenz that the population index was to be the first of many new measures intended to overhaul the administration of the interior ministry, which Fey claimed had allowed ‘undesired foreigners’ and stateless individuals to enter and reside in Austria. The necessity of clamping down on unwanted immigration was also the reason why every resident of Austria—citizen and non-citizen—was to be included in the proposed index system. He singled out the police registration system as an immediate area in need of reform: the longstanding practice in Austria, as in Italy, was that individuals had to register in the municipality where they had their legal residence. But, according to Fey, that system had led to many discrepancies between municipal records and also had allowed the ‘non-Austrians’ to stay out of the authorities’ clutches. Minister Fey endorsed the identification cards as a way to simplify the current system, although he acknowledged the new system would be a burden in the short term for the population who would be required to register for the new cards, and for the authorities who had to implement the new system. But in the long run, the benefit of the system would be seen in the permanent contact between the individuals and the authorities, which would cultivate a ‘vibrant sense of belonging to the state’ and thereby serve the larger purpose of building a new state from the bottom up. ^[36]

The next year, true to Fey’s word, the Austrian Migration Office produced the first draft of a new Alien Act to regulate the status of foreigners in Austria through a foreigner index system. The scheme built on the earlier proposal for a population index and was based on similar laws already in place in neighbouring countries, including Czechoslovakia, which had passed an Alien Act in March 1935. The legislation underwent three revisions over an 18-month period but, like the legislation for a population index, it was not implemented before Austria’s annexation to Germany in March 1938. In the final stages of negotiation, in January 1938, the government administration conceded that a system of indexing all 290 000 foreigners in Austria was too costly an exercise and settled instead on a register for all those who had arrived in Austria since 1 January 1933. ^[37] The Alien Act was significant, nonetheless, because it revealed the full extent to which Austria’s politicians were ready to mobilise the State’s powers to curb what they perceived was a wave of uncontrolled immigration that, if left unchecked, could potentially open the floodgates to more desperate and destitute refugees, genuine or otherwise.