Ludwig Wittels

Ludwig Theodor Wittels was a first violinist with the Vienna Philharmonic and the Vienna State Opera Orchestra for nineteen years. He was recognised in his youth as an outstanding talent — a child prodigy who studied under the celebrated Czech virtuoso Otakar Ševčík and who once delighted Richard Strauss with repeated performances of the composer's violin concerto. In March 1938, within days of the Nazi annexation of Austria, Wittels was dismissed from the orchestra on racial grounds. He escaped to the United States in February 1940, but the years that followed were marked by precarious employment, declining health, and a psychological damage from which he never recovered. His mother, Charlotte Wittels, whom he was forced to leave behind in Vienna, was deported to Riga in December 1941 and murdered there at the age of seventy-one. Wittels died in New York in 1956, at sixty, of lung cancer, largely impoverished and still consumed by what had been done to him eighteen years earlier.

What we know of Wittels' life comes principally from the work of the historian Bernadette Mayrhofer, who compiled a detailed biographical essay from archival sources as part of the Vienna Philharmonic's belated reckoning with its Nazi past. Much of what follows draws on her research, supplemented by the orchestra's institutional history, the study Orchestrated Expulsion by Fritz Trümpi and Mayrhofer, and the memoirs of former Philharmonic chairmen Otto Strasser and Hugo Burghauser.

A Prodigy in Vienna

Wittels was born in Vienna on 21 March 1896. His violin training began early and advanced quickly. After preparatory studies with Alfred Rosé at the Music Academy, he entered the Meisterschule for Violin in 1912. This school, founded in 1909 under the directorship of Ševčík, was exclusive: its entrance examination was particularly difficult, and according to its statutes it was designed to take the best graduates of the music classes and bring them to the highest standard of artistic capability. Wittels completed his studies and received a State Diploma in June 1914, at the age of eighteen. He then played with the Vienna Volksoper and the Vienna Symphony before serving, during 1917–18, in the military band of the Royal and Imperial Infantry Regiment No. 4, the "Hoch- und Deutschmeister." On 1 March 1919, at twenty-two, he joined the Vienna State Opera Orchestra and the Vienna Philharmonic.

Two former chairmen of the Philharmonic later wrote about him. Otto Strasser described Wittels' outstanding musicality and noted that he was among a group of very promising young virtuosos. Hugo Burghauser recalled an occasion on which Richard Strauss spontaneously chose the youngest violinist, sitting in the last chair, to perform a solo. The audience, Burghauser wrote, saw a tiny figure whose feet did not reach the floor and swung to and fro, and assumed they were being introduced to a newly discovered child prodigy. Wittels, in fact, had merely remained child-like in stature.

Little is known of Wittels' private life before 1938. On 17 May 1930 he married Margarethe Edl, who was Catholic. Shortly before the wedding he resigned from the Jewish Community (Israelitische Kultusgemeinde). The marriage appears to have been childless.

The Purge

On 23 March 1938, eleven days after the Anschluss, the administration of the Vienna State Opera sent formal dismissal letters to its Jewish musicians. Wittels was informed in writing that he was suspended with immediate effect. The notification ended with the formula "With German Greetings. The Administration of the State Opera." Under Nazi racial categories, he was classified as "fully Jewish."

Wittels was one of thirteen Jewish members expelled from the Vienna Philharmonic. The purge was swift and thorough: the Philharmonic's own historical account records that all Jewish artists were removed and its association briefly disbanded. Of the thirteen who were expelled, seven failed to escape Austria. Five — Moriz Glattauer, Viktor Robitsek, Max Starkmann, Julius Stwertka, and Armin Tyroler — were deported to concentration camps and murdered. Two others died in Vienna as a direct consequence of persecution. The non-Jewish colleagues who stayed behind, by contrast, continued to perform. By the war's end, roughly half the orchestra's remaining players held Nazi Party membership. Some thrived. The Philharmonic gave its first New Year's Day concert on 31 December 1939, an event conceived as a propaganda tool for the Nazi regime, with proceeds donated to a Nazi charity initiated by Hitler.

What followed Wittels' dismissal was nearly two years of fear and bureaucratic humiliation. By the end of the war some 250 anti-Jewish laws had been enacted in former Austrian territory. In December 1938, Wittels was forced to choose between a lump-sum severance of three months' salary and a reduced pension beginning at age sixty. He took the lump sum and requested that it be paid in advance, because he was considering an engagement in Shanghai — one of the few places in the world that would still accept Jewish refugees without a visa. That plan was later abandoned. The Philharmonic paid him an additional 198 Reichsmarks in October 1939. His wife Margarethe, classified as "Aryan" under Nazi ideology, did not accompany him when he fled. She later remarried twice.

Escape and Exile

Wittels' escape was made possible by Gerald Felix Warburg, a cellist from the prominent German-American banking family, who provided the affidavit of sponsorship required for entry to the United States. Warburg's father, Felix M. Warburg, had been a leading figure in the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which had been providing assistance to Jews in need across Europe since the end of the First World War. Gerald Warburg was himself a musician — he had debuted as a cellist with the New York Philharmonic and was an active patron of European musicians in difficulty. Wittels paid for his own passage.

On 6 February 1940, Wittels boarded the steamship Rex at Genoa. On the passenger list, Warburg was recorded as his "friend" in New York. As his nearest relative remaining in Europe, Wittels listed his mother, Charlotte, at the Bürgerspitalgasse address in Vienna. He arrived in New York on 15 February 1940, aged almost forty-four.

His mother, Charlotte Wittels, born on 4 April 1870, was deported to Riga on 3 December 1941 and murdered there. She was seventy-one. His father, Sieghard, had died in November 1941, weeks before Charlotte was forced from their apartment.

The obstacles Wittels faced in the United States were not unique to him, but they were compounded by his circumstances. Refugee musicians arriving in America in this period encountered a range of structural barriers. In the United States, newly arrived immigrants were barred from working for their first six months. In Britain, where several Austrian musicians had fled, the Musicians' Union maintained a general work ban on immigrating musicians and actively campaigned to deny employment even to individual refugee players. Switzerland regarded itself as a transit country only, and at its instigation the notorious "J-Stamp" had been introduced to mark the passports of German Jews. Even those refugees who found haven in the United States entered a competitive market in which, as Arnold Schoenberg wrote from Los Angeles to a fellow exile in 1940, "it has become rather difficult to procure positions. There are so many gifted people here."

For orchestral players — as opposed to the great-name conductors and composers who feature more prominently in accounts of musical exile — the situation was particularly hard. Conductors such as Bruno Walter and Fritz Reiner could take guest engagements. Composers like Erich Wolfgang Korngold could adapt to Hollywood film scoring. But a rank-and-file violinist arriving in middle age, without the contacts that a celebrated soloist might command, had very few options. Wittels' case was made worse by a condition he directly attributed to his persecution. In a statement to an Austrian aid agency, he described the damage done to him: "My forced dismissal from the State Opera and the Philharmonic caused me severe mental anguish. I developed claustrophobia and an extreme nervous condition, neither of which are good for a musician. Therefore, it was not possible for me to perform as a soloist, as I had done previously."

Claustrophobia and panic attacks — the psychological aftermath of persecution and flight — had closed off his solo career entirely. He was left competing for whatever ensemble work he could find.

His first three years in America were accordingly unstable. His second wife, Katia Doubek (whom he married in exile; the date is not recorded), later wrote that after emigrating "he had a hard time, being forced to play in inferior orchestras." The surviving record shows only scattered engagements: an appearance with the Warburg Orchestra on radio station WQXR in May 1940; a performance at the "Austrian Freedom Day in New York" on 31 July 1941, alongside Hugo Burghauser, before more than two thousand people, under the slogan "Hitler's First Victim Fights for Freedom"; and work with the Salzburg Players — an ensemble of around twenty-eight musicians, mostly former Vienna Philharmonic members, assembled by Burghauser — in Bernardsville, New Jersey, in 1942. He also took various short-term jobs alongside former Philharmonic colleagues Berthold Salander and Josef Geringer. Of these three, Salander, who had arrived in New York on one of the last refugee transports in May 1941, never managed to establish himself and was chronically ill until his death in 1959. Geringer had survived a more harrowing path: he had been interned in Dachau concentration camp before being released in 1939 through the intervention of Wilhelm Jerger — the very man who had been installed as the Philharmonic's Nazi-era chairman.

In 1943, Wittels obtained a position in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra in New York, and his employment finally stabilised. But the Met season during the war years was short — just sixteen weeks of performances, with a few weeks of touring afterwards. Musicians were left to find other work for the rest of the year, a task made more difficult by a structural catch-22: other employers were reluctant to hire Met players who would leave when the opera season resumed. In a letter to his former Philharmonic colleague Leopold Föderl in August 1947, Wittels laid out the problem: "When our last trip was over, we had recordings and then a few opera performances in Carnegie Hall. Thus I was busy until July... Endless job hunting! Many other jobs are denied us because of their not wanting to hire Metropolitan players who will depart when the Met's next opera season begins." Only in 1966 — a decade after Wittels' death — was the Met season extended to cover most of the year.

Despite this insecurity, Wittels appears to have been a valued player. A notice in The Musical Leader in 1946 recorded him as concertmaster for a third consecutive season. Opera News in 1949 noted that he had studied with Ševčík and had been playing with the Metropolitan for five seasons.

A Medal for a Starving Man

In December 1952, Wittels was awarded the Nicolai Medal by the Vienna Philharmonic, along with six other former members who had been forced out at the time of the Anschluss: Hugo Burghauser, Riccardo Odnoposoff, Daniel Falk, Leopold Föderl, Josef Geringer, and Berthold Salander. The ceremony took place at the Austrian Consulate General in New York in January 1954, during the Philharmonic's tour. It had originally been planned for 1948. The New York Times reported the event under the headline "Overdue."

The timing of this modest gesture is worth noting. The Philharmonic's first US tour took place in 1956 — a lavishly funded undertaking that brought the orchestra to American audiences for the first time. In that same year, Ludwig Wittels was dying in a New York hospital, essentially destitute, and his requests for financial support from his former orchestra had led, according to the study Orchestrated Expulsion, to an exchange in which the Philharmonic's chairman and executive director accused him and his wife of "blackmail." The orchestra ultimately granted a sum that was a small fraction of the funds it had allocated for the American tour.

For decades after the war, the Philharmonic had concealed or minimised its Nazi-era history. Only in the 2000s and 2010s, following critical reporting and political pressure, did it commission independent historians — including Trümpi, Mayrhofer, and Oliver Rathkolb — and begin to publish fuller documentation of the expulsions and their victims. The violinist Daniel Falk, invited to rejoin the Philharmonic in 1946, declined, replying that a return would "raise questions" that neither he nor his colleagues were in a position to solve.

The Final Months

In June 1956, at the age of sixty, Wittels was forced to leave the Met orchestra. He had lung cancer, complicated by pleurisy, pneumonia, and diabetes — the last of which his wife attributed to the accumulated stress of persecution and exile. He did not know the full nature of his diagnosis; his wife and doctors agreed he should not be told.

Katia Wittels wrote repeatedly to the Austrian Hilfsfonds (literally "Aid Fund"), a relief fund established by the Austrian parliament in January 1956 after long negotiations and under pressure from the United States. The fund's name was deliberately euphemistic: Austria did not wish to create the impression that it accepted any responsibility for Nazi crimes, and payments were officially classified as assistance rather than compensation. The amounts paid ranged between 10,000 and 30,000 Austrian Schillings depending on age and degree of incapacity. At the exchange rate of the 1950s — 26 Schillings to the dollar — the maximum payment of 30,000 Schillings came to roughly $1,150. Even by 1950s standards, this was a derisory sum for a man who had lost his career, his country, and his mother to state-sponsored persecution.

The Hilfsfonds responded to Wittels' application with bureaucratic slowness. A certified medical statement from Dr Kurt Jellinek confirmed that Wittels was completely incapable of work and that he should not be informed of his own condition. Katia Wittels wrote letter after letter, eventually enlisting a friend in Vienna to intervene. She described the American medical system to the Viennese bureaucracy with despairing precision: "Here in this country one is allotted less time for sick leave than in Europe. What it costs! The medications alone can empty one's pockets."

By early December 1956, Wittels weighed approximately seventy-seven American pounds — roughly thirty-five kilograms — and was in and out of Lenox Hill Hospital. The couple had no income beyond a small State Opera pension of about ninety dollars a month, and no assets.

Ludwig Wittels died on 13 December 1956 in Lenox Hill Hospital. His wife was at his side. She and the medical staff had kept the nature of his illness from him until the end.

Katia Wittels was eventually awarded compensation of 30,000 Austrian Schillings, paid in two instalments in April 1957 and November 1958. She also received a widow's pension from the State Opera of forty-five dollars a month. Whether she herself had been a victim of Nazi persecution has not been established.

The public record of Ludwig Wittels after 1945 is thin — a handful of concert notices, a few mentions in exile newspapers, some compensation files. There is no evidence of a significant solo career or of any return to the public prominence he had enjoyed in Vienna. Whether he continued to play at a local or private level in his final years is not recorded. The silence itself is a kind of evidence: an artistic identity built over nineteen years in one of the world's most celebrated orchestras, dismantled and never rebuilt.

Bernadette Mayrhofer, whose archival research is the principal source for Wittels' biography, concluded that the traumatic expulsion from the Philharmonic had destroyed his world. He survived physically, but was permanently consumed by persecution and by the murder of his mother. His wife Katia, writing to the Hilfsfonds in February 1957, described it plainly: "He spoke of it constantly. It ate him up inside throughout all these years. He went to bed with it at night and he got up with it in the morning."

Music and the Holocaust, 2026

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