Vienna in the rain | Music | 00:00 |
| CORCORAN: Vienna is a city that celebrates its past. It's a splendid heritage largely created during the 18th and 19th centuries. | 00:11 |
| Music | 00:21 |
Tina walks to cemetery | CORCORAN: But there's a sense of collective amnesia over one era. A legacy that historian Tina Walzer is determined to reveal. | 00:28 |
Tina inside walled cemetery | TINA: We have about 30,000 people buried here - but what you can see actually is about 8,000 tombstones. | 00:48 |
| CORCORAN: This is Wahring Jewish cemetery - a 20,0000 square metre wilderness in the heart of an obsessively tidy metropolis. | 00:57 |
| TINA: It's the most important Jewish cemetery in Vienna for the 19th century and | 01:12 |
Tina. Super: Tina Walzer Historian | it's the place where all the important people - the key figures of the Industrial Revolution in Austria are buried. | 01:18 |
Wall of cemetery | CORCORAN: Wahring closed in the 1880's. Within a lifetime there would be no one left to mourn the dead. | 01:29 |
Archival stills of Viennese Jews/Nazis | Music | 01:36 |
| CORCORAN: 200,000 Jews lived in Vienna when the Nazis came to power in the 1930's. Those who didn't flee were sent off to the death camps. | 01:50 |
Stills. Nazis rounding up Jews | Only 700 survived in the city at the end of the war. TINA: That's part of the reason why the | 02:05 |
Tombstones | cemetery is looking like this today, because you have to keep in mind that most of the families whose ancestors are buried here have been killed during the holocaust - so they don't live any more. | 02:13 |
| Music | 02:27 |
Tina clearing graves/Leading tour | CORCORAN: Ten years ago Tina Walzer arrived - a Jewish historian on a field trip. She's never left - and now guides tour groups through her domain. | 02:35 |
| Her lobbying has finally paid off. After years of bureaucratic buck passing, city and federal authorities have just agreed to fund a clean up. But the damage may already be done. | 02:55 |
Tina picking up part of rib bone | TINA: I'm not a doctor, but I'd say that's part of a rib. | 03:09 |
| CORCORAN: Tina routinely finds human bones, dug up by foxes that scavenge through the broken tombs. | 03:14 |
| TINA: I put it aside so that nobody would step on it. | 03:20 |
Cemetery wall | Music | 03:24 |
| CORCORAN: Constant vandalism prompted the construction of a wall topped with wire and broken glass. | 03:29 |
| TINA: If there are visitors for the guided tours at the cemetery they say ‘Well, why does the Jewish community want the place to look like a concentration camp?' So this is what they associate with the barbed wire. Well I would turn the question around and say why is it necessary to fortify a Jewish cemetery in Vienna this way. | 03:38 |
Judenplatz sign | Music | 04:04 |
| CORCORAN: Wahring may be forgotten, but in Vienna's Judenplatz the memory of the Holocaust is very much alive. | 04:08 |
Memorial | On this memorial only the death camps are listed - the dead remain anonymous. | 04:17 |
Students at memorial | Austrian authorities claim that they've done much in recent years to help atone for the past. In addition to this memorial there are now two Jewish museums in the city. The Austrian Government has established a fund to provide at least token compensation to the survivors and next of kin of Jewish families whose homes were seized in the war and never returned. | 04:30 |
Building exteriors | But there are those who claim this is all too little, too late, that the legacy of Vienna's Nazi past still lingers in these streets. | 04:53 |
Cemetery | Music | 05:03 |
| CORCORAN: Not only did the Nazis persecute the living - they pursued the dead. | 05:10 |
| To prove their master race theories, Nazi anthropologists from the Vienna Museum of Natural History exhumed between two and three hundred Jewish graves from Wahring. | 05:17 |
Portrait. Fanny von Arnstein | Music | 05:30 |
| CORCORAN: Among the remains taken away for study were those of Fanny von Arnstein. Credited as Vienna's first feminist -Fanny von Arnstein is best remembered as the hostess of backroom deals - when Europe's leaders gathered here in 1815 to redraw the continent's borders. | 05:40 |
| TINA: Think about Fanny Von Arnstein, the woman who had the first bourgeois salon | 06:02 |
Tina in cemetery. Super: | in Austria, who invited diplomats, politicians, artists, writers, journalists | 06:07 |
Portrait. Von Arnstein | to her house to form what later became political parties. Music | 06:14 |
Reporter and Baron in lounge room examining the family tree | BARON JORDIS: So, Fanny is here, Fanny von Arnstein is here... | 06:26 |
| CORCORAN: Baron Ulrich Jordis is a member of the old Austrian aristocracy. He's also a direct descendent of Fanny von Arnstein, something he's never discussed publicly -- until now. | 06:31 |
Baron Jordis. Super: Baron Ulrich Jordis | BARON JORDIS: My mother would not think of the fact that we have a Jewish ancestor - yes? She - it was this generation who had a complete unreflected anti-Semitism. | 06:47 |
Vienna streets. Night | Music | 07:03 |
| CORCORAN: It's taken a younger generation of Austrians to confront what's called the "burden of the past". | 07:13 |
| For decades, Austria's wartime generation portrayed themselves as victims of Nazism. Unlike Germany - there was no thorough de-Nazification program here after the War. When the Third Reich collapsed, anti-Jewish sentiment lived on. | 07:22 |
| BARON JORDIS: It took more than one full generation to even understand what was going on. | 07:45 |
Baron Jordis | I think the first generation that was involved -they simply didn't want to hear any more - on both sides - yes - on victims' side and on the Nazi side. | 07:51 |
Ext. Natural History Museum | Music | 08:02 |
| CORCORAN: Tina Walzer believes the Vienna Museum of Natural History may still hold Fanny von Arnstein's remains. TINA: I think it's simply because the museum | 08:08 |
Tina in cemetery | forgot about its bones and its skull collection and that parts of it are originating from the Wahring Jewish cemetery. | 08:18 |
Inside museum | Music | 08:25 |
| CORCORAN: Our search for Fanny takes us to the Museum -- imposing both in reputation and presence. | 08:31 |
Human remains in museum | The Natural History Museum now faces a complex dilemma confronting leading institutions across the world. What to do with collections gathered in the distant past - often under dubious circumstances? Do human remains belong to science or to the indigenous communities from which they came? PROFESSOR TESCHLER: This collection | 08:40 |
Prof. Teschler. Super: | holds about 40,000 individuals from different time periods. | 09:07 |
Prof Teschler with remains | CORCORAN: High above the public galleries Professor Maria Teschler, head of Anthropology, is grappling with the ethical problems posed by her collection. This means confronting the legacy of the Nazi era - when museum scientists enthusiastically endorsed master race theories. | 09:13 |
| PROFESSOR TESCHLER: During the Nazi period the scientific interests changed. | 09:37 |
Prof. Teschler | From 1938, there was more interest in what is a Jewish. How looks a Jewish person. | 09:44 |
Skulls in cases | CORCORAN: Professor Teschler says she's just completed a lengthy investigation of human remains collected during the Nazi period. | 09:57 |
Prof. Teschler | CORCORAN: Where is Fanny Von Arnstein's remains, today? | 10:07 |
| PROFESSOR TESCHLER: I think she has been reburied in 1947 - during this action after the Second World War. | 10:09 |
Labelled skulls in cases | Music | 10:19 |
| CORCORAN: But there've also been some embarrassing political skeletons that still tarnish the museum's credibility. In the 1990's, a newspaper investigation revealed that the museum still held the remains of Jewish concentration camp inmates and Polish resistance fighters. | 10:28 |
Prof. Teschler | CORCORAN: Why did it take until 1999? PROFESSOR TESCHLER: Yes, this is... CORCORAN: 54 years after the end of the Second World War - for those remains to be handed back? You must have known they were here before? PROFESSOR TESCHLER: This is very hard to explain, because I mean no one before was really, I would say really deeply interested in the history of the discipline. | 10:51 |
Skulls | It's a burden, but we have to live with it. I think what we can do is to open our archives - we have it here - we found it. For us it was not easy to realise what happened here during this time period. | 11:20 |
| CORCORAN: Nazi era exhibits are still held in storage. The science may be discredited but the museum intends keeping the labelled samples for historical reasons. | 11:38 |
Portrait. Fanny von Arnstein | Music | 11:54 |
| CORCORAN: As for Fanny von Arnstein, there were no further leads confirming her fate. | 12:00 |
Wahring Cemetery | Music | 12:09 |
Tina in cemetery | CORCORAN: Tina Walzer's search continues - and as we wander around Wahring Cemetery it becomes apparent it's a very personal quest. TINA: In the end it's very simple -- | 12:24 |
Tina | members of my family are buried here. | 12:37 |
Tina clearing graves | CORCORAN: Some of her family survived the war. And after a decade here, Tina still hasn't found the graves of her ancestors. | 12:42 |
| TINA: I always wanted to find out about what was my family like before the Nazi time, | 12:55 |
| because of course it was a vivid family. I have very few photos of them and I wanted to get a clear picture of what this was like - what was destroyed. | 13:00 |
Tina | CORCORAN: Are you sad though - at the end of the day - when you see this? TINA: No. No, I'm happy that I can do this work, and that I can help maintain the memory of these people. | 13:13 |
Tina walks through avenue of trees | Music | 13:28 |
| TINA: Because that's keeping me alive too - we are nothing without remembering our ancestors. | 13:33 |
| Music | 13:39 |
Credits: | Reporter : Mark Corcoran Camera: David Martin Editor: Simon Brynjolffssen Research : Bronwen Reed |
13:48 |