I have just been reading ‘The Order of the Day’ by Éric Vuillard, in which he claims that the Austrian press reported 1,700 suicides in the week before the Nazi takeover - and discusses restrictions on reporting suicides in the aftermath. Is this true?
Edit: he goes on to write that gas companies cut off service to Austrian Jews because their consumption was costing companies too much money, he postulates that this is linked to suicides - is there any evidence to support this?
I was intrigued by those massive numbers so I just did a comparative search of several of the most popular Austrian newspapers of the period between the 1st and 12th of March 1938 (Neues Wiener Tagblatt, Kronenzeitung, Das Kleine Tagblatt) in the ANNO digital archive for Austrian newspapers.Of these the "Neues Wiener Tagblatt" reported on the most cases of suicide in that period: 9 suicides, none of the victims was mentioned to be Jewish. So the part of the massive increase of suicides before the Anschluss is not supported by the reporting. However, in general cases of suicide were very high in interwar Austria due to rising economic despair after the dissolution of the old Habsburg trading hubs, the Phoenix Affair crash and the Great Depression. The result of this was that the rate of suicides was between 30 and 40 people per 100 000 inhabitants during the First Republic and the Austrofascist dictatorship.
It is also worthy of mention that even before the post WW1 period Austria was known as a nation sporting a lot of suicides. For example when the famous Mayerling suicides of the son of Franz Joseph and his lover occured in 1889, they are only 2 out of 3800 suicides that year which was a massive amount compared to the population of the crownlands that would later make up Austria.
This changes after the Anschluss. If one looks at the numbers of suicides afterwards we have 213 suicides in March, 138 suicides in April and another 143 in Mai and so on. Out of these 43 procent were Jews. The now Nazi led administration suppressed the publication of this wave in suicides however to generate a better image of their takeover abroad. In 1939 this spike in suicides disappeared only to reappear in 1945 with close to 4700 suicides - this time not Jews and regime critics but rather ideological Nazis and/or people fearful of their fate under Soviet military rule. These suicides occurred mostly during late April and early May 1945. This would be the only occurrence of such a massive amount of suicides happening in one month that I could find.
So the claim that this wave of suicides occured the week before the Anschluss is false, rather it was a continuous series of suicides by Jews, regime critics and of course the regular non-political suicides which accumulated come close to the number of 1700 suicides during the whole 9 months left in 1938.
Sadly I could find nothing supporting the claim that cut off gas service contributed to this increase in suicides.
Sources
Botz, B. Vom Anschluss zum Krieg, Wien 1978, 98ff.
Ortmayr, N. Selbstmord in Österreich 1819-1988 in: Zeitgeschichte 17, Wien 1990, 209-225.