Commemorating the victims of National Socialism who lived at Neutorgasse 15

On 4 May 2016 a commemoration ceremony was held at Neutorgasse 15 in the 1st District of Vienna during which a memorial plaque remembering the victims of National Socialism was unveiled in the presence of the Israeli Ambassador, representatives of the Jewish Community Vienna, the National Fund of the Republic of Austria for Victims of National Socialism and the City of Vienna. At the request of Christine Spiess, the City of Vienna’s project director for “Aspern + Vienna’s Urban Lakeside”, the National Fund had compiled a dossier on the fates of the residents of Neutorgasse between 1938 and 1945. Sadly, the research confirmed that many of these residents had indeed been deported to concentration camps and murdered.

The building at Neutorgasse 15 in the 1st District of Vienna is inextricably linked to the fates of many victims – it was their penultimate or final place of abode before being carried off to their deaths in the Nazi camps. The building’s history in the years 1938 to 1945 plainly illustrates the expulsion, disenfranchisement and genocide of Austria’s Jewish population.

The residents of the apartments at doors no. 3/4, 5 and 6 – Margit and Dr. Fritz Tintner, Ignatz and Margarethe Popper, and Dr. Samuel Popper – had already been living in the building prior to the Nazi assumption of power in March 1938. Margit Tintner, the building’s owner, was driven out of the property. Although the property was not seized and no change of ownership was ever recorded in the land register, she – like many other Jewish owners – was not able to dispose of her property freely. After 1945, Margit Tintner’s heirs sold off the property, piece by piece.

Between 1939 – following the introduction of so-called collective apartments – and 1943, a total of 39 individuals were registered at the address Neutorgasse 15, all of whom were deemed Jewish in accordance with the Nuremburg Race Laws. Six people died there, a further 27 were deported from there to ghettos or concentration camps (Łódź or Terezín) or extermination camps (Maly Trostinec near Minsk or Auschwitz-Birkenau), only one of whom survived, and the remaining five were transferred to other collective apartments or the Jewish retirement home, from where they were later deported and murdered.

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