For a long time I could not discover the fate of a relative of mine (a first cousin twice removed) who was born in Vienna in 1885. His name for the first 24 years of his life was Max RIND, though in 1909 he formally left the Jewish community, converted to Christianity, and changed his surname to RIED. He and his two surviving siblings, a brother and a sister (two others had died earlier of natural causes), were living in Vienna at the time of the Anschluss. The sister escaped to the US with her husband and their daughter in 1939, while the brother, with his wife and two daughters, escaped in 1940. The arrival record of the brother in New York names Max as a relative living in his country of origin, and gives his place of residence as Perchtoldsdorf, a town on the southwestern edge of Vienna. There is also a record of a declaration by Max, and of one by his wife Hilde, made under the Nazi decree of April 1938 to facilitate the confiscation of property from Jews. I could find no record of Max or his wife as either a victim or a survivor of the Holocaust in the Yad Vashem or other Holocaust Web sites.
At last, more recently, I got a break, though it is somewhat enigmatic. I found the record of Max's birth in the Geburtsbuch of the Wiener israelitische Kultusgemeinde, and found that it contained a record of his death. I have posted an image of the record below.
Besides the information originally written at the time of Max'x birth on 11 August 1885, there are two rubber stamps with further information entered by hand. One stamp says "Annahme des Zusatznamens Israel - Sara angezeigt!" This reflects the decree of 17 August 1938 that Jews must adopt the middle name "Israel" if male and "Sara" if female. The other has the words "verst.," "St.A.," and "No.," each followed by a blank that has been filled in. "Verst." abbreviates "verstorben," so the date that is written after it, "27.VIII.1941" (27 August 1941), is Max's date of death. Written after "St.A." is "28, Währing" (though it may also be "Wahring"), and after "No.," which obviously means "number," is "1131." The second item appears to be a location, but it could refer to the neigborhood of Währing (in which case it is not clear what the "28" is the number of) or to Währinger Straße or Währinger Gürtel (though in that case one would expect to see some indication by abbreviation of which of the two is meant). I have no idea what "St.A." stands for or what the number 1131 is the number of.
So one puzzling thing about the record is what these abbreviations and numbers means. The second puzzling thing about it is how it came to be written at all. Max Rind, or rather Max Ried as he was by that time, had formally left the Jewish community in 1909. How would the news of his death have reached the israelitische Kultusgemeinde? What is more, this page (https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/timeline-of-jewish-persecution-in-the-holocaust) says that on 12 March 1938, when Germany annexed Austria, Austria was "immediately subject to all antisemitic laws in effect in Germany. Jewish organizations and congregations are subsequently forbidden." I don't know exactly what duration is meant by "subsequently" here, but I would expect that by August of 1941, the israelitische Kultusgemeinde had been shut down. On the other hand, it seems strange that Nazi officials would bother to keep records of the Jewish community up to date.
So my two questions are (1) What do the abbreviations and numbers in the death record mean? and (2) Who could have written the record of Max's death?
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Miles Rind
Cambridge, Mass.
