Austrian Chancellor Celebrates Anti-Nazi Resistance By Railway Firm

(JTA) — Austria’s chancellor praised workers of his country’s railway company for what he called their outsize resistance to Nazism during the Holocaust.
Christian Kern’s praise for the partisans of the Austrian federal railways, or BBO, appeared in a statement he penned for an exhibition about the firm’s role during the Holocaust that opened last month at the University of Tel Aviv. He wrote the text while serving as the chairman of the railway board for two years until 2016.
BBO employees “were directly involved” in deportations “and thus contributed to the Holocaust,” he wrote, but “substantial numbers of railway men” were “involved in resistance against National Socialism” despite “overwhelming political investigation and surveillance.”
The exhibition, which was sponsored by the OBB, successor to the BBO, opened in Israel for the first time last month, featuring original Nazi documents attesting to the relative prevalence of resistance among Austrian railway workers in comparison with their German ones.
One report from 1941 by the Reich Security Headquarters stated that the Austrian railway company, which in 1938 was integrated into the German one, “played a relatively major role with respect to acts of criminal sabotage since 1939, since it was here that foreign intelligence services and Austrian resistance groups had been able to set up sabotage organizations.”
These little-known documents are significant to some Austrians because they seem to contradict a widely held perception in Austria and beyond that Austrian authorities eagerly integrated into Germany after the country’s annexation in 1938.
In a statement about the exhibition, which is titled “The Suppressed Years — Railway and National Socialism in Austria 1938-1945,” Oskar Deutsch, president of the Jewish Community in Vienna, stressed that the BBO had a “central role” in “the tragedy of the Shoah,” Hebrew for Holocaust, including “the deportations to the ghettoes and death camps.”
But, he added, “there was also continuous and organized resistance, consisting of different groupings of railway servants against the Nazi dictatorship.”
By 1948, more than 29,300 BBO railway employees were found not guilty of any crime and 6,590 were found guilty of carrying out illegal orders.
The Nazis convicted 154 railway workers for their resistance, and 135 of them died in concentration camps or in prisons. Another 1,438 were sentenced to concentration camps or prisons.
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
2X match on all Passover gifts!
Most Popular
- 1
News A Jewish Republican and Muslim Democrat are suddenly in a tight race for a special seat in Congress
- 2
Fast Forward The NCAA men’s Final Four has 3 Jewish coaches
- 3
Film & TV What Gal Gadot has said about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
- 4
Fast Forward Cory Booker proclaims, ‘Hineni’ — I am here — 19 hours into anti-Trump Senate speech
In Case You Missed It
-
Fast Forward Jerusalem Post editor Zvika Klein, arrested in ‘Qatar-gate,’ says he’s being unfairly prosecuted for his reporting
-
Fast Forward Trump fires national security officials, reportedly at urging of Laura Loomer, far-right Jewish ‘Islamophobe’
-
Fast Forward Display honoring Jewish women graduates of naval academy removed ahead of Hegseth visit
-
Yiddish טשיקאַוועסן: מיידעלע געפֿינט 3,800־יאָריקע קמיע לעבן בית־שמש, ישׂראלTIDBITS: Little girl finds 3,800-year old amulet near Beit Shemesh, Israel
אַן עקספּערט פֿון פֿאַרצײַטיקע קמיעות האָט באַשטעטיקט אַז די קמיע איז געלעגן אויפֿן אָרט פֿונעם אַמאָליקן לאַנד כּנען.
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
Republish This Story
Please read before republishing
We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:
- Credit the Forward
- Retain our pixel
- Preserve our canonical link in Google search
- Add a noindex tag in Google search
See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.
To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.