Juvenile Crime and Dissent in Nazi Vienna, 1938–1945 by Evan Burr Bukey (review)

Second World War resistance continues to have an important relevance to Austrian national identity. The main points raised by the research in Evan Burr Bukey's Juvenile Crime and Dissent in Nazi Vienna, 1938–1945 relate to two questions. Youth resistance movements in occupied countries like France and Denmark, and in cities like Hamburg and Munich, are well documented—but what of youth resistance in the "Ostmark"? And what do we mean, as Karl Stadler once asked, by "resistance," by "dissent," and by criminalized acts prosecuted by a government that is itself criminal?

Bukey's research is based on records from the Viennese Municipal and Provincial Archives and the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance. Only partial records exist—many were accidentally discarded in 1999. Bukey surveys the remaining 437 judicial records, the largest group of which are from 1945. Individual cases offer glimpses of the family backgrounds of those charged. After 1938, treason cases were tried by laws based on Prussian jurisprudence in People's Courts, whose judges often abused and humiliated those found guilty. Aside from treason, Austrian criminal code largely preserved continuity before and after 1938, though now interpreted through "völkisch norms" (11). Bukey suggests that Hitler's regime controlled youth crime more effectively in Vienna than in other large cities of the Reich (162).

During the first few months after the Anschluss, youths convicted of break-ins and petty theft were often sent to youth detention centers for several months. More serious theft was punished with hard labor. Moral offenses, particularly homosexuality for those over sixteen years of age, were punished more harshly. But the most severe punishments were reserved for political acts of defiance. A turning point came with the introduction of the Reich Juvenile Court Act in 1944, which sought to pass judgments based on character. Children diagnosed as "precocious juvenile criminals" were sent to the psychiatric division of a correctional facility; youth deemed capable of reform were treated more lightly (122). Homosexuality, with arrests rising sharply from 1938 to 1945, was punished under the Austrian penal code, while illicit intercourse with foreigners was punished under Nazi racial ordinances. In Vienna, 75 percent of juvenile convictions involved property crimes, and absent fathers were seen as a major cause of youth delinquency.

Much of the volume's interest lies in its vignettes of everything from angry public verbal outbursts to sabotage, including a sixteen-year-old arrested for stealing switches from Viennese streetcars in 1945 (152). An eleven-year-old was discovered scribbling "Hail Moscow" on scraps of paper in a toy store, which led to the arrest of twenty children involved in a resistance ring (35). A seventeen-year-old mechanic was sentenced to three months of confinement for questioning the war effort, refusing to listen to Hitler's speeches, and proclaiming that Hitler could "kiss his ass" (88). Five youths were arrested by the Gestapo for loudly applauding at a choir performance by Russian émigrés. Several teenagers were imprisoned for joining the Austrian Freedom Movement. Others typed and distributed flysheets based on British news reports and were beaten and sent to Berlin to stand trial for high treason, sentenced either to death or to half a dozen years of prison. Former staunch Social Democrats had often become radicalized Communists under Schuschnigg's regime, a transition that increased following the invasion of the Soviet Union. Of some two thousand Communists arrested by the Vienna Gestapo, at least thirty were minors (107), who were more severely punished than other resistors. After 1943, crackdowns were made on partial Jews, often for absenteeism, labor indiscipline, attempting to flee abroad or escape deportation, or spreading "false rumors" (109). Offenses committed by Viennese adolescents "mutated as the war drew to its conclusion" (126), with the increasing theft of goods that could be sold on the black market or food and increasing refusals to work or instances of tardiness. During the war, juveniles convicted of subversive activities (whether listening to foreign...