Dr. Viktor Neurath

“Medical inventory: eye, ear, and nose instruments, 1 instrument case, 2 instru­ ment tables, 1 washstand, 1 glasses case, 1 eye test case, 1 simple perimeter instrument, 1 corneal microscope, 1913 model, 1 tonometer, 1 astigmometer [...], 1 wash­hand stand, 1 small wall mirror, 2 chairs, 1 spinning stool, 2 small woo­ den tables. This inventory was acquired in 1913 and is not deliverable.” (Supple­ ment to the property register of Dr. Viktor Neurath, St. Pölten, 14. 6. 1938) Dr. Viktor (also written Victor) Neurath was born in Vienna on 29 July 1884 to Maximilian, a merchant from Kolin (Bohemia), and his Prague-born wife Louise, née Schlesinger. Both Neurath’s parents died in 1923 and in the following years he also had to mourn the loss of his three siblings Ida, Martha, and Rudolf. During his medical studies, Neurath specialized in eye, throat, nose, and ear medicine, completing his doctorate in Vienna in 1908. In 1911, as a young intern, he taught summer courses at Vienna University’s eye clinic. On 20 November 1913, just ten months before he opened his practice in St. Pölten, a Ms. Helene Lendl publicly thanked him in the St. Pöltner Zeitung “for the good and successful treatment of my child, who suffered from an acute corneal inflammation, and for curing my own long-term ear troubles.” Neurath’s expertise in this area is demonstrated in his article “On a Rare Corneal Complication in the Case of Trachoma” published in the Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrift No. 46/1925, in which he mentioned his two-and-a-half-year activity “on a trachoma ward with a constant occupancy of 1200-1300 patients.” Unfortunately, he did not mention where this had been. Like so many Jews in the monarchy, Viktor Neurath fought for his emperor and fatherland, was promoted to Senior Physician of the Landsturm, the Austrian reserve force, and after four-and-a-half-years of service received the “Golden Cross of Merit with the Crown on the Ribbon of the Medal of Bravery for his outstanding and self-sacrificing service in the face of the enemy.” On 22 July 1937, the district health fund announced in the St. Pöltner Stadtnachrichten that Neurath would be retiring “after 25 years of service” due to illness. On 8 November 1938, Viktor Neurath deregistered to Liechtensteinstraße 32–34/6 in Vienna’s ninth district, that very day also marrying Anna Streit, who was born in Raitz/Buskowitz (Moravia) in 1899. On 23 November 1941, he was placed on a transport along with 1,000 Viennese Jews heading from the Aspang train station to the Kovno Ghetto in Lithuania, arriving on 26 November. Three days later, the deportees were all shot dead at the Ninth Fort, part of the old fortifications. Altogether about 30,000 people were murdered in Kovno. We do not know how Viktor Neurath’s wife Anna was able to escape, yet on 11 June 1947 she applied to have her husband declared dead and submitted a restitution claim for his property at Nordbahnstraße 26 in Vienna’s second district. In his property register, Neurath also cited debts “with no fixed conditions” totaling 13,000 Reichsmark that he owed his nephew Otto Nordon in Brooklyn. This was the son of his sister Ida, married name Nussenblatt (later changed to Nordon). As Captain Otto Norman Nordon, he would conduct the interrogation of Martin Gottfried Weiss (1905 Weiden/Oberpfalz–1946 Landsberg am Lech) on 6 November 1945 in the course of the Nuremberg Trials. Weiss, the former camp commandant of Neuengamme, Dachau, and Lublin-Majdanek, was sentenced to death on 13 December 1945.