Dr. Dkfm. Leopold Weiß

• Born on: 21.7.1893
• Birthplace: Vienna (Wien),
• Category: Revokation of academic degree
• Right of domicile: Linz (Linz),

The English version is based on a translation by Artificial Intelligence. The authentic version is the German version.

Until the First World War

Leopold Weiß was one of three sons of Leo Weiß (also Weihs) and Karoline (née Hufnagel). His brothers were - besides the early deceased Karl - Josef and Dr. Richard Erich (1901 to 1985) Weiß. The three children were baptized Catholic in accordance with their mother's faith. The father, however, born in 1867 in the Silesian Bielitz/Bielsko-Biała as one of twelve children in a Jewish family, remained formally Jewish, even though he was not active in the Israelite Community.

Leopold enrolled at the then k.k. Export Academy after attending the Gymnasium Spittelwiese Linz (high school diploma 1911) and a commercial academy in 1913/14. Due to the First World War, he interrupted his studies. In any case, he served in the Austro-Hungarian Army during the First World War and achieved the rank of reserve first lieutenant in the Infantry Regiment 14 in 1918. On February 16, 1918, he married Dr. Maria Anna Katharina Zeiss (born June 16, 1894 in Linz) in Linz. She passed away at the age of 24 just five months after the wedding, namely on July 26, 1918.

Studies and Professional Activity

After the First World War, Leopold Weiß resumed his business studies in 1919. At the University for World Trade, as the Export Academy was now called, he passed the last of the three diploma examinations on July 13, 1920. While still during the war, he completed his studies in law at the University of Vienna. There, he obtained a doctorate in jurisprudence on July 19, 1917.

Subsequently, Leopold Weiß worked as a lawyer and industrialist. He served as director of the United Fat Products Industry Josef Estermann AG in Linz, whose president was his father. Like his brother Richard, who was also trained as a certified merchant at the University for World Trade (1920-1922), Leopold was also a member of the supervisory board of this company.

The 'Annexation' of Austria and its Consequences. 
Gestapo Detention - Robbery - Emigration - Internment as a "Hostile Foreigner"

The 'Annexation' of Austria meant a deep rupture for the entire Weiß family. That the father was considered a 'full Jew' under the Nuremberg Race Laws and the sons as 'half-Jews' exposed them from the very beginning to persecution.

Already one day after the invasion of the German Wehrmacht in Austria, they were pressured to leave Estermann AG. Additionally, the father – until then a respected commercial councilor and chamber of commerce advisor – was dismissed from his functions as president of the stock exchange, president of the Linz fruit exchange, member of the chamber of commerce for Upper Austria and of the board of the postal savings bank in Vienna, as well as deputy head of the association of the oil and fat industry. The new regime may have also reproached him for having supported the Fatherland Front, the one-party system of the previous Austrofascist regime. Ultimately, it fit into the highly constructed enemy image that the National Socialists had of 'Eastern Jews' that Leo Weiß had been active in prominent positions during the First World War as director of the Upper Austrian branch of the War Grain Traffic Office, as commercial director of the regional feed office there, and as head of food importation, to the detriment of the starving population (Weihs 2024, p. 140 with 145 f.). Leopold's brother Richard had to close his company, Richard Weiß and Co. KG, which operated gas stations in Linz and Gmunden, and lost the lucrative drilling rights he had acquired over the oil and gas company Petrolea in Burgenland, Lower and Upper Austria, and Salzburg. The National Socialist press accompanied these anti-Jewish 'cleansings' with scathing, venomous propaganda. For example, it was stated in the Arbeitersturm on March 20, 1938: “Finally, the time has come to settle accounts with this Galician Jewish family.” (cited in John 2004, p. 175) On the same April 26, on which General Field Marshal Hermann Göring, Hitler's representative for the Four Year Plan, mandated in a famous decree that all Jewish women and men were required to declare their assets to the state in preparation for the systematic robbery of the Jewish population, the entire wealth of the family was confiscated by the State Police Headquarters in Linz in favor of the state of Austria or Upper Austria, which was soon to be transformed into the Gau Upper Danube, retroactively to that March 20, on which the Arbeitersturm had unleashed itself against the Weiß family. In the Weiß family home on Linz Starhembergstraße 19, the SA standard 14 settled in after its members had looted furniture, jewelry, fur, and weapons. In April 1940, the Gaumberg brick factory, where Leopold's other brother Josef had worked as a director until the 'Annexation', was sold to the Reichswerke Steine und Erden, a subsidiary of the Hermann Göring Works. As Michael John, the Linz economic historian, emphasizes, this occurred “without cover under Nazi laws” (John 2004, p. 177).

Also, the Breitenstein Sanatorium, which a sister of Leo Weiß, Henriette Weiß (1863–1931) had founded at the beginning of the 20th century in the Semmering area and in which her siblings, including Leo, had shares until the 'Annexation', was forcibly taken over by the new rulers. Thus, the villa was confiscated immediately after the German Wehrmacht's invasion of Austria by the local Nazi command. A member of the antisemitically motivated robbery was certified merchant Wilhelm Wehlend, who had completed his studies at the University for World Trade in 1927. He stated early on in flawed grammar that he intended to “cleanse the sanatorium for the future of Jews and therefore it must be Aryanized” (cited in Weihs 2024, p. 238). He acted accordingly as the provisional administrator. Initially, the sanatorium was leased to the National Socialist Rosa Schmid from Stuttgart, who rented rooms to private individuals. However, when guests did not arrive, Schmid made the sanatorium available to National Socialist large organizations like the Wehrmacht or the German Labor Front. Since she, despite the profits she made, neither paid the agreed rent nor invested in maintaining the facilities, the sanatorium was placed at the disposal of the National Socialist War Victims Assistance by a decree of Adolf Hitler on December 20, 1942. In September 1944, the German War Blind Foundation was registered as the owner in the land register, which two months later also purchased the adjacent property “for a fraction of its true value” (Weihs 2024, p. 249).

Yet it was not only the family's property and assets that were threatened from March 1938 onwards: They also had to worry about their lives. Shortly after the Wehrmacht's invasion, Leopold was arrested by the Gestapo and was held in prison for almost nine months. Meanwhile, his parents and siblings had fled to Paris via Italy; from there they reached Great Britain through the Netherlands. After Leopold was released from prison in November 1938, he also fled to London. Eventually, his parents crossed over to New York, where the father died in 1942.

Leopold and Richard, on the other hand, were interned as 'hostile foreigners' under British law after the start of the Second World War, specifically on July 1, 1940 – although they were being persecuted by the Nazi regime. Worse still: In the summer of 1940, they were shipped to Australia on the troop transport ship Dunera with over 2,500 others who were regarded as “enemy aliens” by the British government. As had been the case in the British internment camp, they were packed in with German and Italian prisoners of war. Not only did the Jews have to endure the forced coexistence with fascists and National Socialists, but also the treatment by the accompanying personnel and the war situation made the crossing an unpleasant experience. There is an illustrative report from Kurt Flussmann, who also came from Vienna and was shipped on the Dunera from Liverpool to Australia like the Weiß brothers: „We were crammed below deck and were not allowed to go above for two months, the English guarded us with fixed bayonets. We had to relieve ourselves on the floor. I slept the entire crossing on a table. The food was brought by sailors. We were so terrified that we had no self-esteem left at all. It was desolate. Not only were we in constant fear of being torpedoed and sinking, we had no idea how long the voyage would take and where it was going. Occasionally we were allowed on deck, that was all. We were treated like prisoners. We were completely at the mercy of the situation. As it got warmer on the ship, we finally discovered after eight days that the voyage was not to Canada, but that we were to be taken to Australia. The crossing to Canada had become too dangerous. Another ship that left a week before ours had sunk after a torpedo hit with 1,200 people on board. That was a shock. The mood among the fellow passengers was depressing. We were exclusively men between 16 and 60 years old. Some fell seriously ill and were isolated from us. Our first stopover was in Sierra Leone, on the west coast of Africa. Of course, we were not allowed outside (...). (cited in Meissner 2010, pp. 141 f.)

However, even after landing in Australia, the Weiß brothers could not move freely: Until the end of the war, Leopold and Richard were interned on the fifth continent (see photo; left: Leopold, right: Richard). According to Dr. Elisabeth Lebensaft, the two brothers were forcibly held in Hay (New South Wales) since September 1940. On January 19, 1942, they were transferred to the labor camp Tatura (Victoria), which had been established shortly before under Major Julian David Layton - like many of the internees of Jewish descent and faith. According to Richard Weihs, son of Richard Weiß, the climatic conditions here were more favorable than in Hay; moreover, the inmates of Tatura could grow their own vegetables for self-sufficiency. The academics, artists, and members of other productive professions interned here tried to maintain part of their pre-war lives by establishing camp schools and clubs or through artistic works. “Yet despite their efforts for normality, they were constantly reminded by the isolation in rural Australia that they were imprisoned.” (Victorian Collections: Prisoner of War & Internment Camps: Tatura and Rushworth)

Until June 30, 1945 - thus beyond the end of hostilities in Europe (May 8, 1945) - the Weiß brothers remained interned in Tatura but could return to Great Britain on the Dominion March in July 1945, that is, before the capitulation of the Japanese army and the end of the Second World War (August 15, 1945). In January 1947, Leopold Weiß followed his mother Karoline on the ship MS John Ericsson, which the American army had requisitioned from the Kingdom of Sweden in 1941 as a troop transport ship, to the USA. On June 9, 1952, he acquired American citizenship.

Revocation of Academic Degrees

Due to his aforementioned flight, Leopold Weiß was expatriated from the German Reich in the winter of 1940; the corresponding notification was published in the Deutschen Reichsanzeiger on November 28. With this, the legal basis was given to revoke his academic degrees. Thus, on December 30, 1940, Leopold was stripped of the title of certified merchant by the University for World Trade, effective immediately. The University of Vienna followed on May 8 of the following year with the revocation of the doctoral degree. After the war, the University for World Trade refused to rectify the injustice of its own accord. Instead of automatically restoring the title as in the case of Felix Glattauer and Franz Krusche, the faculty council decided on March 9, 1946, that in his case the title should be “awarded only upon the student's report.” Similarly, the University of Vienna acted in a vexatious manner: It took until April 10, 2003, for the revocation of the doctoral title to be declared null and void. As the successor to the 'University for World Trade', the Vienna University of Economics and Business, on November 28, 2018, symbolically reinstated the title of certified merchant at a memorial concert for Leopold Weiß symbolically returning the title of certified merchant. Whether Leopold Weiß ever learned of the revocation of his academic degrees by the two Viennese institutions is uncertain.

Inadequate Restitution After 1945

Equally unaccommodating were the Austrian authorities and courts regarding restitution as with the handling of the stolen academic titles. The house on Starhembergstraße could be taken back by the Weiß family after the end of the Second World War, apparently without any significant legal problems. However, other properties taken from their relatives during the Nazi era remained either withheld from them or could only be reclaimed after lengthy, laborious, and costly procedures. Thus, the sanatorium at Semmering and the Weiß villa, which had deteriorated significantly in the meantime, were only returned to the Weiß family in 1960. Leopold's nephew Richard Weihs was able to renovate and revitalize the villa in the 2000s despite bureaucratic harassment by the authorities, but had to have the sanatorium demolished at his own expense due to pressure from the municipality of Breitenstein.

Especially well-researched is the fate of Leopold's younger brother Richard. After the war, he traveled to New York and returned from there with his mother to Linz. Even from the USA, he immediately sought restitution of the stolen assets. In fact, he was able to prove entitlement to approximately 3,000 oil drilling rights. According to Michael John, Richard Weiß was “the largest private domestic owner of drilling rights in Austria.” However, the drilling rights and oil extraction were the subject of difficult and lengthy negotiations between the Soviet Union and the Austrian Federal Government in the immediate post-war period. Ultimately, Richard Weiß also fell victim to the nationalization of the oil industry in the Soviet-occupied part of Austria, as Michael John has detailed: “In a conversation with the then Federal Chancellor Julius Raab, he urged him to continue paying the quite considerable drilling fees so as not to lose his claims. This turned out to be pointless when, after the conclusion of the State Treaty, the drilling rights remained with the Austrian state. The Republic of Austria referred Weiß [sen.] to the Federal Republic of Germany. In Berlin, a court ruling was issued in 1963 that no compensation was possible, as: ‘The deprivation occurred in Austria! There can be no transfer of rights to Germany.’ An intervention by Simon Wiesenthal was unsuccessful. Richard Weihs also fared little better in the case of the movable assets; the vast majority of the claimed valuables from the Starhemberg street house remained missing, the proof of the existence of the jewelry confiscated by the SA was not further pursued, and compensation was denied by the courts. One day, the Richard Weihs, who was affiliated with the [Austrian] People's Party, visited the then Governor Heinrich Gleissner in his official rooms. He was asked to wait in the secretary's waiting room, where Mr. Weihs discovered the painting by Joseph Floch, Snow Shoveler at Work, which had belonged to his father. A disposal act of the District Court of Linz gave reason to suspect that Floch's oil painting Mährischer Dorfmarkt from the Weihs family could also be found; the Snow Shoveler was immediately returned, but the Mährischer Dorfmarkt remained unfound. Finally, another Floch was in the family’s possession, Mrs. Weiß and her Daughters Liese and Lene. This included an aunt and two cousins of Richard Weihs. Anna and Helene Weiß fell victim to the Holocaust.” Three years after Floch's death (1977), his widow Hermine donated the oil painting created around 1923 Mrs. Weiß and her Daughters Liese and Lene to the Belvedere in Vienna, where it remains to this day. Finally, a Buddha head from Richard's Asian art collection was discovered and returned at the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna, while the extensive collection remains missing.

Richard Weiß also had an extremely disappointing experience regarding re-entry into Estermann AG post-war. Although the family regained majority control of the shares, and Richard became the general director, the brown ties within the company remained active: In the course of a trial where Richard was accused of alleged illegal currency transactions and tax evasion, the once-persecuted by the National Socialism was sentenced to five years in prison. This was significantly due to the testimonies of the three National Socialists who had taken over the Weiß family's positions in Estermann AG immediately after the 'Annexation'. These included Friedrich Thanner and the commercial councilors Alfred Schausberger and Hans Fehrer. Michael John concludes that “a number of inconsistencies occurred during the course of the trial,” raising doubts about the lawful quality of the sentence. This is further reinforced by the “anti-Semitic facets” with which the press accompanied the trial at that time (John 2004, p. 182). Additionally, Richard lost the majority of shares – and thus a significant part of his fortune – because Estermann AG carried out a capital increase during his imprisonment. As a result of the Christmas amnesty issued by Federal President Adolf Schärf in 1959, he was released early – under conditions – from prison but was left to deal with the immense costs caused by the trial, which financially ruined him. The subsequent disputes between Josef Weiß on one side and Richard and Leopold Weiß on the other led to revelations among the brothers, indicating that the attempt to rectify the consequences of the Nazi regime's persecution measures was fraught with high human costs long after the end of the war.

***

As mentioned in the obituary, Leopold Weiß passed away on January 16, 1953, in New York after “a long and serious suffering.”

Author: Johannes Koll

Source material

Weihs, Richard: Zertrümmerte Erinnerung am Semmering, Bd. 1: Eine österreichisch-jüdische Geschichte, Wien 2024.
Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien, Universitätsarchiv, Studierendenkarteikarten Leopold Weiß und Richard Weiß; Studierendenkarteikarte Wilhelm Wehlend.
Meldeauskünfte des Archivs der Stadt Linz, GZ 105/Mit/1239 und /1319.
Meldeauskunft des Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchivs, GZ MA 8 – B-MEW-1465763/2014.
Mitteilung von Dr. Elisabeth Lebensaft (Wien) an PD Dr. Johannes Koll (WU Wien) vom 9. Oktober 2018.
Mitteilung von Richard Weihs (Wien) an PD Dr. Johannes Koll (WU Wien) vom 15. April 2021.
Compass. Finanzielles Jahrbuch 1938. Personenverzeichnis (Verwaltungsräte und Direktoren), 71. Jg., Wien 1938, S. 1415 f.
Compass. Finanzielles Jahrbuch 1939. Personenverzeichnis (Verwaltungsräte und Direktoren), 72. Jg., Wien 1939, S. 303.
Michael Hepp (Hrsg.): Die Ausbürgerung deutscher Staatsangehöriger 1933-45 nach den im Reichsanzeiger veröffentlichten Listen, Bd. 1: Listen in chronologischer Reihenfolge, München u.a. 1985, Liste 211, Nr. 156, S. 441.
Bundesarchiv Berlin, R 4901/25828, Bl. 60.
Michael John: Ein Vergleich – „Arisierung“ und Rückstellung in Oberösterreich, Salzburg und Burgenland, in: Ders./Daniela Ellmauer/Regina Thumser: „Arisierungen“, beschlagnahmte Vermögen, Rückstellungen und Entschädigungen in Oberösterreich, München 2004, S. 174-184.
Michael John: Arisierung und Restitution im Fall Richard Weihs, http://www.richardweihs.com/post/der-fall-richard-weihs [12. April 2021].
Meissner, Renate S. (Hrsg.): Erinnerungen. Lebensgeschichten von Opfern des Nationalsozialismus, Wien 2010.
Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien, Rektoratsakten 1946, Zl. 390/46.
Gedenkbuch für die Opfer des Nationalsozialismus an der Universität Wien 1938, http://gedenkbuch.univie.ac.at/ [8. November 2018].
Herbert Posch/Friedrich Stadler (Hrsg.): „… eines akademischen Grades unwürdig“. Nichtigkeitserklärung von Aberkennungen akademischer Grade zur Zeit des Nationalsozialismus an der Universität Wien, Wien 2005.