In Europe

sister standing rather awkwardly beside him. Jägerstätter was a simple farmer, and at the same time a nonconformist: he read and studied, he was the first person in the village to own a motorbike, he was also the first man in Sankt Radegund to push his child's baby carriage. With his clear, sober view of the world, Jägerstätter realised right away that Nazi doctrine was incompatible with his Catholic faith. He tried to summon support from the church, but on 27 March, 1938 – to quote the pastoral letter read all around the country – that same church recognised ‘with joy what the National Socialist movement has achieved.’
    In 1940 he finally entered military service anyway. After six months he was sent home on special leave. He told everyone who would listen that he was not going back. He considered fighting in Hitler's army to be a personal disgrace and a grave sin. ‘What Catholic could dare speakof this foray, on which Germany has already embarked and which it continues today in a number of countries, as a just and holy war?’ His headstrong stance led to serious quarrels with his own family.
    In early 1943, Jägerstätter, the father of three little children, was summoned to report back for duty. The local church authorities exerted pressure on him as well, but he refused, knowing full well that this meant his death. His letters from prison bear witness to a great serenity. On 9 August, 1943, Jägerstätter was beheaded in Brandenburg.
    His widow went on running the farm alone with her three daughters. After the war she received no pension at first, because Jägerstätter had ‘abandoned his country’. In the portal of the little white church in Sankt Radegund I saw the announcement of a reading by Martin Bormann Jr, the eldest son: ‘Life in the Face of the Shadow’. In the churchyard the violets were blooming, and Franz Jägerstätter's grave was covered in them.
    It behoves me here to make an aside. Jägerstätter was a Catholic, and his lonely opposition was primarily aimed against Hitler's war of aggression. The fate of the Jews, as far as I can ascertain, did not play much of a role in his stance.
    In Vienna three months earlier, I had seen another monument, a commemorative monument to the Holocaust. It depicted a Jew scrubbing the street with a toothbrush. The monument's designers undoubtedly had the best of intentions, but they erred grossly. This seemed more like a monument to the people of Vienna, rather than to the Jews. It was a monument to all those who had been forced to look the other way, who were deeply ashamed, who still have nightmares about this. But what about the rest? Were there not also countless older citizens of Vienna for whom this image summoned up only cheerful memories? Viennese who loved it, those days when the Jews scrubbed the streets, who stood watching and roaring with laughter?
    Unlike most German cities, in Vienna it was not merely a small group who committed violence and cheered it on. According to most eyewitnesses, the pogroms in the Austrian capital were carried out by tens of thousands of people, some estimates say even as many as 100,000. It continued night after night in the weeks that followed. It was as thoughall the pressure Schönerer and Lüger had built up was finally coming to a head. Department stores, shops and synagogues were plundered, apartments looted, furniture shattered, homes pillaged. Crowds cheered loudly as the beards of rabbis were shorn. After a few weeks, most Jewish firms had been ‘Aryanised’. Of the city's sixty-eight Jewish banks, only eight were left. By late 1938, 34,000 of the original 70,000 homes occupied by Jews in Vienna had been appropriated by Austrians.
    Scrubbing the streets with toothbrushes was one of those things people could not get enough of: women and children were dragged out onto the street and on a few occasions even doused with acid. Brownshirts herded hundreds of Jews to the Prater, where they were beaten and chased around the big carousel, some of them were even forced to eat grass. The crowd stood and watched.
    The Kristallnacht held later in Germany was merely an imitation of the pogrom organised by the Austrians in Vienna nine months before. The Kristallnacht had to be carefully orchestrated, while the Viennese pogroms had largely flared up of their own accord. In
Das Schwarze Korps
, the SS correspondent in Vienna wrote admiringly: ‘The Viennese have managed to do overnight what we have failed to