Viktor Robitsek
Viktor Robitsek was a second violinist with the Vienna Philharmonic who, after thirty-five years of service with one of the world's most celebrated orchestras, was dismissed without warning in March 1938 for being Jewish. He and his wife Elsa were subsequently stripped of their pension rights, forced from their home, moved between temporary lodgings four times, and finally deported to the Łódź ghetto — known under German occupation as Litzmannstadt — where both were killed in the spring and early summer of 1942. His story is one of several that emerged only in the twenty-first century, after the Vienna Philharmonic granted historians access to its long-restricted archives. It reveals how the machinery of persecution ground down even those who had devoted their professional lives to an institution that, for decades afterwards, chose not to speak about what had happened to them.
Robitsek was born in Vienna on 19 May 1877. Between 1887 and 1897, with some interruptions, he studied at the Conservatory of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde — today the University of Music and Performing Arts — under Joseph Hellmesberger Jr., who was solo violinist, concertmaster and conductor at the Court Opera. On 1 November 1902, Robitsek joined both the Court Opera Orchestra and the Vienna Philharmonic. He married Elsa Robitsek, born on 10 June 1880. In 1914 he left the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde, the official Jewish community of Vienna, and thereafter had no religious affiliation. He considered himself non-confessional, a fact that made no difference at all to what followed.
On 12 March 1938, German troops crossed into Austria. The Anschluss was greeted warmly by much of the population, and within the Vienna Philharmonic itself the rate of Nazi party membership was strikingly high. Historian Oliver Rathkolb, who led a panel of researchers granted access to the orchestra's archives from 2013, described his surprise at what he called the "high rate of Nazification" within the ensemble. Out of 123 members of the Philharmonic association, sixty were either NSDAP members or candidates for membership, and two belonged to the SS. Many had joined the party before 1938, when membership was still illegal in Austria, meaning they did so out of conviction rather than professional necessity.
Eleven days after the Anschluss, on 23 March 1938, Robitsek received a brief written notice from the State Opera management. The text was blunt: "The Management of the State Opera informs you herewith that effective immediately you are released from employment until further notice. With German Greeting, Management of the State Opera." After more than three decades of service, he was out. He was formally forced into retirement on 1 July 1938 and then, in a further bureaucratic cruelty, retroactively dismissed in December of that year. He was presented with a choice: accept a severance payment of twelve months' salary, or forfeit the severance in exchange for a pension reduced by one quarter. What he decided is not recorded. From the Vienna Philharmonic separately he received a severance of 240 Reichsmarks.
Robitsek was not the only one affected. In total, thirteen Jewish musicians were expelled from the orchestra. The conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, who had regularly performed with the Philharmonic since the end of his formal engagement in 1930, intervened with Goebbels on behalf of nine so-called "Versippte" — musicians who had some Jewish ancestry or were married to Jewish spouses — and succeeded in obtaining special permission for them to continue working, as he had done for similarly affected players in the Berlin Philharmonic. It is, as Sebastian Huebel has observed, a historical irony that a single conductor twice managed to preserve the positions of musicians in two of the world's foremost orchestras. But Furtwängler's reach had limits. He could not protect those classified as fully Jewish, and Robitsek and his colleague Max Starkmann, both released from their positions on 1 September 1938, did not leave the country in time.
The daily reality for Viktor and Elsa Robitsek after his dismissal was oppressive and worsening. Anti-Semitic legislation tightened sharply. Once the war began, Jews in Vienna were forbidden to appear on the streets after 8 PM, barred from public places, and prohibited from listening to the radio. In September 1940, the legal protection against eviction for Jewish residents was officially revoked, and between 1940 and 1942 many Jewish families were forced to relocate repeatedly, often ending up in cramped, shared accommodation without adequate washing or cooking facilities. The Robitseks were moved four times: from their apartment at Königsklostergasse 7 in the sixth district to the Wipplingerstraße 32 in December 1940, then to Peter-Jordan-Straße on 1 October 1941, and finally to Alserstraße 21 from 22 October 1941. Each move took them further from anything resembling a home.
On 27 October 1941 — the day before the couple's scheduled deportation — Wilhelm Jerger, the chairman of the Vienna Philharmonic during the Nazi years, wrote a letter to Walter Thomas, chief advisor to the regional governor Baldur von Schirach, attempting to stop the transport. Jerger pointed out the poor health and age of both Viktor and Elsa, noting that Robitsek suffered from digestive and heart problems and that his wife had difficulty walking due to spinal trouble. The letter closed with "Heil Hitler!" — the obligatory salutation of the period. It was not Jerger's first such effort: he had already intervened on behalf of Robitsek and several other Jewish colleagues and orchestra members with Jewish wives on 23 October 1941, and had earlier succeeded in securing the release of another musician, Geringer, from Dachau. But in the case of the Robitseks, Schirach would not budge. Rathkolb noted that Jerger "described the cultural history of his former colleagues like you would today in an encyclopedia," calling this surprising for the Nazi period. Surprising or not, it changed nothing.
On 28 October 1941, Viktor and Elsa Robitsek were deported from Vienna to the ghetto at Łódź. They were among approximately 5,000 Viennese Jews transported there between mid-October and early November of that year. The demographics of this group were telling: more than 78 percent were over 45, more than 41 percent were over 60, and nearly 9 percent were over 70, with a high proportion of women. They were, in other words, predominantly elderly and vulnerable, which was the point.
The Łódź ghetto had been sealed since the summer of 1940 and held, at various points, between 200,000 and 250,000 people. Conditions were defined by hunger, overcrowding and epidemic disease, chiefly typhus. The ghetto was administered as a vast forced-labour operation under the ultimate control of the German municipal authorities, with the internal Jewish administration dominated by Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, the self-styled "Eldest of the Jews." Contact with the outside world was forbidden; telephones had been removed from private homes and radios confiscated.
Despite all of this, a musical life of sorts existed in Łódź during the early 1940s. A symphony orchestra performed at the House of Culture on Krawiecka Street, a converted 400-seat cinema that also hosted a revue theatre and the Hazamir choral society. The conductor Teodor Ryder, who had been deported to the ghetto in 1940, led concerts featuring works by Beethoven, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Puccini and Schubert. There were, according to research by Carla Shapreau, many high-level musicians interned in the ghetto, and evidence suggests that musicians who could do so brought their instruments with them. Whether Robitsek had his violin with him in Łódź is not known, but it is probable: Shapreau's research into the Vienna archives indicates that many musicians took their moveable instruments when possible, and this was likely the case for expelled Philharmonic members.
Whatever fragile musical culture existed in the ghetto did not last. In April 1942, the Nazi authorities banned the performance of works by German composers. The House of Culture was closed in the summer of 1942 and converted into a factory for blankets and pillows. Then, on 17 January 1944, an order was issued requiring all ghetto inhabitants to surrender their musical instruments. A contemporaneous chronicle entry written by an internee records the moment with painful clarity: "One can readily imagine what it means for a professional musician, a virtuoso, even a dilettante, to be forced to give up his beloved violin." The chronicler noted that the ghetto held a number of accomplished violinists, and concluded that "Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, Schumann, will fall silent in the ghetto forever."
By that point, Viktor and Elsa Robitsek had been dead for nearly two years. Elsa died on 20 May 1942. Viktor followed on 10 June 1942. Both deaths were a consequence of the conditions in the ghetto — hunger, illness and exhaustion. By May 1942, 771 Viennese Jews in Łódź had died from these causes. From May 1942 onwards, many more were transported to the killing centre at Chełmno and murdered in gas vans. Approximately half of all those deported from Vienna to Łódź in October and November 1941 had been killed by the SS before the beginning of summer 1942.
Robitsek was one of seven Vienna Philharmonic musicians who died as a result of Nazi persecution. Five — Robitsek, Moriz Glattauer, Max Starkmann, Julius Stwertka and Armin Tyroler — perished in camps or ghettos. Two more died in Vienna as a direct result of persecution. On the other side of the ledger, eleven members who had been able to escape found refuge abroad: the renowned concertmaster Arnold Rosé, who had served in the orchestra since 1881, emigrated to England in 1938; the solo cellist Friedrich Buxbaum followed him; five others — Daniel Falk, Leopold Föderl, Josef Geringer, Berthold Salander and Ludwig Wittels — found positions at the New York Metropolitan Opera; and concertmaster Riccardo Odnoposoff left for South America.
The Vienna Philharmonic was slow to confront this history. Postwar Austria did not officially express regret for its role in the Third Reich until 1991. When the historian Fritz Trümpi began researching the orchestra's Nazi-era past in 2003, the management refused him access to the archives. The idea of external researchers examining the records was, he said, considered taboo. Trümpi gained partial access in 2007, but it was not until 2013, under public pressure and following critical reporting in the Austrian press, that the orchestra's chairman Clemens Hellsberg commissioned the independent historical panel led by Rathkolb. Their findings confirmed what had long been suspected: that roughly half the orchestra's members had been affiliated with the Nazi party, that the orchestra had awarded honorary distinctions to senior Nazi officials including Schirach himself, and that the celebrated New Year's Day concert, now watched by millions worldwide, had originated in 1939 as a Nazi propaganda event with proceeds donated to a Hitler-initiated wartime charity.
A memorial stone — a Stein des Gedenkens — has been placed outside the building at Königsklostergasse 7, the address from which Viktor and Elsa Robitsek were first forced to move. It is a small marker on a quiet street, and it is the only physical trace in Vienna of a man who spent thirty-five years playing in one of its great institutions.
Music and the Holocaust, 2026
Sources
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Shapreau, Carla J. "The Vienna Archives: Musical Expropriations During the Nazi Era and 21st Century Ramifications." Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation Report, 2014. Available at: www.lootedart.com/web_images/pdf2014/Shapreau-014-updated-compressed%2023443.pdf
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