Building on a considerable and growing scholarly corpus that explores the experience of youth in the Third Reich, from the Hitler Youth and Napolas to adolescent disenchantment, Evan Burr Bukey addresses a notable lacuna by examining juvenile crime and the legislation surrounding it in Nazi Vienna from the Anschluss to the end of World War II. The monograph under review here comprises the latest of Bukey's long-distinguished career researching Austria—and Vienna in particular—under Nazi rule, and makes an important, if incomplete, contribution to our understanding of how Nazi and Austrian legal codes interacted and affected the experiences of youth “lawbreakers.” Ultimately, Bukey argues that, despite the permeation of Nazi institutions into Austria, the survival of some Austrian institutions, such as the penal code, preserved “a sense of regional identity and judicial continuity” with the authoritarian Dollfuß-Schuschnigg regime (and, in some cases, the Habsburg monarchy), which helps explain the transition to and success of the Second Republic after the collapse of the Third Reich (2). This continuity of legal precepts and traditions, Bukey asserts, when combined with the knowledge that Vienna—the Reich's second-largest city—did not witness the rise of delinquent gangs of youth (unlike cities such as Cologne, Essen, and in the industrial Ruhr because it stood beyond the range of Allied bombers) justifies his study of Vienna's peculiarity within the Reich.
The book is divided into six chapters and proceeds topically and broadly chronologically. In the first chapter, Bukey argues that the Anschluss represented much less of a Gleichschaltung for the Austrian legal system because Austrian laws were already largely aligned with Nazi Germany, although this also prevented legal uniformity despite a heavy flow of German laws, ordinances, and regulations into the Ostmark. This, he contends, was due to the rigidity of the Austrian system, shaped by Catholic morality, which appeared so robust to Nazi jurists that they felt it would only enhance German common law, and the challenges faced by Austrian legal experts in having to learn the intricacies of German law seemingly overnight, which was deemed impractical and unreasonable. The second chapter draws attention to the inconsistencies that emerged over sentences meted out by regional and newly established higher courts but shows that the overall number of juvenile convictions remained constant throughout the war and did not differ significantly from the pre-Anschluss years. In the third chapter, Bukey notes how the Special Courts imposed far more severe penalties than those sentenced by the Juvenile Division of the Higher Regional Court and booked offenders of a more diverse social profile than the latter. Bukey attempts to distinguish between juvenile delinquents and youth opposition to the Nazi regime in the fourth chapter, and he shows that while archival evidence clearly identifies that half those sentenced acted in opposition to the Anschluss and National Socialism, motives for the other half remain less certain. In chapter 5, Bukey demonstrates how the new law seemingly curtailed juvenile delinquency in the final fifteen months of the war. Moreover, although sentences were initially severe, they were more moderate than earlier in the war, which was mainly a pragmatic response to mobilize youth for the waning German war effort. “Postwar and Beyond,” as well as a brief afterword, wrap up Bukey's analysis and show how work stoppages and absenteeism skyrocketed in the final months of the war. Although property crimes remained high throughout the Nazi period in Austria, stolen goods such as bicycles, radios, and phonograph records at the beginning of the war were replaced by cigarettes, cigars, and ration cards, which were highly valued on the black market, at the collapse of the regime and the arrival of the Red Army.
Bukey is most convincing on the endurance of the Austrian penal code in the face of Nazi “coordination” after the Anschluss, showing how the authoritarian precepts of the Austrian legal tradition only became more relevant and constitutive under the Nazi regime. Bukey also makes novel claims about how, in this, the impact of the Anschluss and Nazification was not as one-sided as previously suggested, but that indigenous institutions maintained an unexpected judicial continuity with Austrian regimes of the past and were reflected back on Nazi judicial thinking. Moreover, the selection of Vienna as a case study that offers unique insights to the experience of war as a large city that did not face the conditions that gave rise to teenage gangs and widespread criminality until the very end of the war is appropriately defended. Its merits notwithstanding, the book suffers several shortcomings. As Bukey makes clear, his archival source base is largely fragmentary, and he uses these snippets to postulate wider claims or trends. Although he is aware of the limits of his evidence, this does give the overall impression that the work could be rounded out by more rigorous archival exploration, which Bukey admits (162), and which might explain the rather thin conclusions of this work. Perhaps an unfinished work in total, Bukey's book lays out the key paths in taking this important research forward and, as he suggests, fills an important gap from which others may examine the connection between Austrian legal continuity during the Nazi era and the success of the Second Republic.
