The robbery of Freud

From Harry Freud's album: Sigmund and Alexander Freud taking a walk in the Grinzing district of Vienna, 1937

Sigmund Freud embodied everything that the Nazis' ethnic ideology fought against. From their point of view, as a Jew and the founder of psychoanalysis, he was considered “foreign” and “corrosive”. His books were burned in May 1933 with those of other intellectuals and writers, and psychoanalysis was brought into line in the same year and converted into a positivist natural science loyal to the regime. After all, Freud was able to practice in Vienna for another five years before his fate, as well as that of 70,000 Austrian Jews, was sealed with the "annexation" of Austria to Nazi Germany on March 13, 1938.

With the exhibition “The Freud Case. "Documents of Injustice", Vienna's Sigmund Freud Museum remembers the weeks, months and years after the invasion of Austria by German troops on March 12, 1938 and the resulting disenfranchisement, persecution, expulsion and extermination of Viennese Jews using the example of the Freud family, including the younger brother Alexander and the four sisters Rosa Graf, Maria Freud, Adolfine Freud and Pauline Winternitz. The exhibition draws on thousands of pages of family letters held at the Library of Congress (LoC) in Washington, D.C.

The Freud Museum is located at Berggasse 19 in the Freud family's former home in the ninth district, where Freud's practice was also located. The listings shown there include furnishings, jewelry, securities, books and deportation lists. The Freud family's assets are documented in detail. Contrary to what the Nazis later claimed, Freud was allowed to keep almost nothing of it. The interior of his practice, including his collection of antiques, was shipped to London, but Freud was robbed “behind the scenes,” writes Daniela Finzi in the catalog accompanying the exhibition.

Another aspect is the documentation of the "disenfranchisement of Freud" that was created by the perpetrators, by the SS Obersturmbannführer Erich Führer and the representative for the "Aryanization" of Freud's practice and the International Psychoanalytic Publishing House, Anton Sauerwald. “German thoroughness” also ensured that the Nazi terror was recorded for posterity. Führer and Sauerwald were employed in various capacities to manage the Freud family's assets in order to expropriate them. The lawyer Erich Führer was a member of the "illegal" National Socialists even before the "Anschluss"; he also managed the assets of Freud's brother Alexander. In 1938 he and his wife Sophie fled penniless via Zurich to London and then on to Canada, where he died in 1943 after a heart attack.

Anton Sauerwald's role is much more complex than that of the Führer. On March 15, 1938, he was appointed trustee for the Freud family by the National Socialists. At that time, the National Socialists appointed a person loyal to them for every Jewish business who was supposed to ensure that the allegedly illegally acquired Jewish assets were “Aryanized.” According to Freud biographer Ernest Jones, Sauerwald was considered a "rabid anti-Semite and Nazi," and in his file with the NSDAP district leadership he was classified as "morally impeccable."

In October 1945, Sauerwald was arrested at the instigation of Freud's nephew Harry, then an officer in the U.S. Army, arrested and charged with “unjust enrichment,” but later acquitted. A letter from Anna Freud to the Vienna regional court also helped, in which she exonerated Sauerwald and pointed out that the families of Sigmund and Alexander Freud would not have been able to escape and survive without his help.

»The persecution in Austria and especially in Vienna went beyond the Reich. The public humiliation was more blatant and sadistic, the expropriation was better organized, and the forced emigration was quicker.« Saul Friedländer

Two years ago, the Jewish Museum Vienna documented the systematic disenfranchisement of Viennese Jews with the exhibition “Raub”. One of the largest state raids in history began with the “Anschluss”. »The persecution in Austria and especially in Vienna went beyond the Reich. The public humiliation was more blatant and sadistic, the expropriation was better organized, the forced emigration quicker," writes historian Saul Friedländer in his study "The Third Reich and the Jews."

Accordingly, today's Freud House served as a National Socialist collective accommodation from 1939 to 1942. During this time, at least 79 Jewish people were forcibly accommodated there on the way to deportation. The chapter "Housing policy after the 'Anschluss'" vividly traces the fate of the Viennese Jews using the example of Freud's sisters. “Anti-Jewish regulations” meant that many had to move into “collective apartments” or Jewish retirement homes. Ultimately, the new accommodations were nothing more than collection points for the later deportations. So-called “house lists” document that sometimes several dozen people were crammed into one apartment. Freud's four elderly sisters lived at Biberstrasse 14, door number 7. At least 15 other names are recorded for this address. Other names have already been crossed out, meaning they were deported or died.

Last but not least, the exhibition dispels the myth that Freud simply left his sisters behind in Vienna. Numerous letters and documents show that Freud and his brother Alexander did everything they could to make their departure possible. But the documents also show how desperation and hopelessness grew after the numerous applications were rejected. In 1941, financial support from the family finally stopped, also because there were no longer any options to transfer the money. A little later the women were deported to Theresienstadt, where Adolfine, who was already seriously ill, died. The three other sisters came to Treblinka and were murdered there shortly after their arrival.

Those who survived the Shoah generally did not return to their old homeland, not only because they could not bear the memories of the atrocities and crimes, but also because the evil spirit had by no means disappeared with the end of Nazi rule. And not only among the perpetrators and followers, but also among those who, although politically persecuted and imprisoned themselves, could not and did not want to hide their own anti-Semitism.

It is therefore important that the exhibition addresses this chapter, also because the Austrian population saw itself as the first “victim of National Socialism,” as shown, among other things, in the “Preamble to the Declaration of Independence” of April 27, 1945. The three parties involved in the founding of the state, SPÖ, ÖVP and KPÖ, founded the victim myth of the post-war period. Chancellor Karl Renner (SPÖ) even declared that the "return of the stolen Jewish property" should not be made to the "individual victims, but to a common restitution fund" "in order to prevent a mass, sudden flood of expelled people back."

At this point, Sigmund Freud, his brother Alexander and their four sisters were no longer alive. Only Freud's daughter Anna and nephew Harry experienced the end of the Nazi regime. The exhibition in the Freud Museum shows the entire picture of the persecution, disenfranchisement, expulsion and killing of Viennese Jews after the "Anschluss" in 1938, which continues to have an impact to the present day. A present in which anti-Semitism has long since become acceptable again because it never went away - and not just among convinced Nazis and supporters of the FPÖ.

The special exhibition “The Freud Case. Documents of Injustice” can be seen in the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna until November 9, 2026.