E van B urr B ukey . Juvenile Crime and Dissent in Nazi Vienna, 1938–1945

In 1999, the Viennese Municipal and Provincial archives inadvertently shredded many of the court records from the Nazi era. In his new book, Evan Burr Bukey uses what remains of these records, supplemented with those from the Documentation Archives of the Austrian Resistance, to recreate the judicial landscape of juvenile crime between 1938 and 1945. The result is a fascinating entry point into a period most Austrians would rather forget. Studying the Juvenile Court, the Special Courts (which oversaw acts of subversion), and the dreaded People’s Court (which was more of a revolutionary tribunal), Bukey makes three key points about the specificity of juvenile offences in Vienna. First, a high number of teenagers were prosecuted for “acts of political defiance,” which may have stemmed from a sense of foreign occupation (162). Second, unlike the bombed-out, big cities of Cologne, Hannover, or Leipzig, roving gangs of violent youth did not trouble...

Dissent · Nazism · Political science · Politics · Subversion · Tribunal · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · European history and politics · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law