--
Thomas Anders
S. Dartmouth Massachusetts

Perhaps, I just don't know where to look for the documents. Any help or direction would be gratefully appreciated
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Thomas Anders
S. Dartmouth Massachusetts

MyHeritage released Vienna exit forms last year. I found four for the members of the Dukes Family who lived in my house between 1946 to 1993, after coming to Britain in 1939.  These are just forms of a few pages, and nothing detailed. They give the education and professions of the family members, languages they spoke and other basic data.  

Air routes from Brussels continued onto Croydon in South London in UK. Relations of the Dukes family called Herzog flew from Vienna to Croydon and then onto Canada. 

Jill Whitehead

Viennese Jews were required to register their assets over 5000RM.  Those documents are still at the Vienna State Archives.  They have been indexed- see this post by Jan Meisels Allen- https://groups.jewishgen.org/g/main/topic/74443552 

Jill is referring to the Vienna Jewish Community Emigration Office questionnaires.  Thousands of Viennese Jews need help with visas, paperwork, funds, etc. in order to leave Austria so the IKG set up an emigration office to help them.  Filling out the questionnaire was the first step, and there is often additional documentation.  One questionnaire would cover an entire family.  Occasionally a person appears on more than one questionnaire. The originals are at the Central Archives of the History of the Jewish People, and MyHeritage digitized them.  There was a post on this discussion list about them.  One caveat- the last time I checked MyHeritage's search function of this collection only found the first name listed in the questionnaire. Usually it's the husband/head of household but I have seen examples where the son/daughter is the first person, or a widow living on her own is listed on the questionnaire of a child.  USHMM also has copies of the questionnaires, but our copies are scans from microfilm.

Completing the property declaration may have been one of the many paperwork steps needed to leave Austria, but I cannot remember of the top of my head.  

Findbuch.at is a database of property declarations, aryanizations, restitution claims and related records from multiple Austrian archives and other sources.  The database includes the property declarations that I think Tom is referring, Property Notices from Austrian State Archives. Follow the link to the full description of these records.  The database is only an index- researchers need to contact the proper archives to get copies of the actual records. Findbuch.at requires researchers to register with them, including submitting a photo of their drivers' license or government id, before searching the actual database.

GenTeam.eu is an excellent source for people researching Austria and other areas that were once part of the Austro-Hungarian empire.  For example they have BMD records for some Jewish communities in what is now the Czech Republic. They also have Jewish records from Nuremberg. 

USHMM has records relating Vienna/Austria from the Nazi era in multiple archival collections listed in our Collections Search catalog. Collections Search also contains personal papers collections, photographs, oral histories and some publications that are digitized and available from home.

Megan Lewis, reference librarian
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

--
Peter Heilbrunn
Amersham, England

On Sat, Mar 4, 2023 at 01:55 PM, Jill Whitehead wrote:

MyHeritage released Vienna exit forms last year. I found four for the members of the Dukes Family who lived in my house between 1946 to 1993, after coming to Britain in 1939.  These are just forms of a few pages, and nothing detailed. They give the education and professions of the family members, languages they spoke and other basic data.  

What you find depends very much on the person you're searching.
Some dossiers have letters to the authorities in them - heartbreaking and informative. For example, one letter taught me that a woman's first husband died in WWI before their daughter was born. It also helped solve the riddle of why her adolescent son travelled to an unknown lawyer in the US and lived with him as his "ward" (according to the 1940 census).
Some questionnaires have the names of people giving recommendations.
There's information about relatives in countries people wished to emigrate to that can open fascinating vistas about things you never knew about the family or about family members. And, the relatives' names are indexed.  I found a known family member mentioned as "wife's nephew" by a total stranger which led me to discover that the said wife had born a daughter out of wedlock in 1904 in a Viennese maternity home to the maternal uncle of my family member. Her husband, born in 1907 (no mistake) later adopted the daughter.  The document was from 1938 (!) 34 years after that birth. And eventually, that daughter, by now married, joined her mother and adoptive father - now escaped - in the US. I used Genteam.], Viennese birth records, ships' manifests, US census records and even Viennese divorce records to reconstruct this history.  But it all started with a known cousin of my GM's being described by a total stranger as "wife's nephew" on the IKG questionnaire.

In my family, there were some dossiers with many pages, not just 2, the names of the people abroad were indexed as well as all the names of those wishing to emigrate.
And, in one case, each adult family member filled their own request, adding all the others on page 2.
Also -- the same person may have filed a request more than once.

For those who only searched the questionnaires when they were first uploaded - I can warmly suggest doing it again.

--
Odeda Zlotnick
Jerusalem, Israel.

On Fri, Mar 3, 2023 at 04:40 PM, <tfanders@...> wrote:

My mother was never registered in the Jewish community and my Father austritted IKG in 1937. Could this explain why exit documents were not required?

 

"Austritt" means to exit.
By 1937, both your parents were not members of the IKG in Vienna. IKG stands for Israelitische Kultus Gemeinde = Jewis Religious Community. 
 
--
Odeda Zlotnick
Jerusalem, Israel.