Officials closed Jewish community offices and sent the board members to the Dachau concentration camp. The intent of this legislation was to exclude Jews from the economic, cultural, and social life of the former Austria.
Once in power, the Nazis quickly applied German anti-Jewish legislation to Vienna and the Austrian hinterland. In March 1938, Nazi Germany incorporated the Austrian Republic in what became known as the Anschluss. Jews made up significant percentages of the city's doctors and lawyers, businessmen and bankers, artists and journalists. Many Viennese Jews were well-integrated into urban society and culture. The city was also a center of Zionist thought and Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, had studied at the University of Vienna. Vienna was an important center of Jewish culture and education. Including converts from Judaism, the Viennese Jewish population may have been as high as 200,000, more than 10 percent of the city's inhabitants. In 1938, some 170,000 Jews lived in the city, as well as approximately 80,000 persons of mixed Jewish-Christian background. Vienna's population of 1.9 million was 28 percent of the country's entire population in 1934. After 1918, following World War I, Vienna became the capital of the small Republic of Austria. Vienna was the capital of a large multi-national empire under the German-speaking Habsburg dynasty for five centuries.
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