Quoting Julie Thorpe’s Pan-Germanism and the Austrofascist state, 1933–38, pages 163–165:

The debate over women’s work at the 1933 Catholic Congress also provides a context in which to examine the Austrofascist state’s coordination of Zionist groups, including women’s associations, within the Fatherland Front. Zionist groups were the most prominent Jewish organizations in the Austrofascist state following the ban on the Social Democratic and Communist parties. Even Zionist workers’ groups, like Poale-Zion, remained legal while all other Jewish workers’ organizations were banned.

Zionist women activists were engaged in a number of state-sponsored charitable initiatives alongside Catholic, liberal and nationalist women’s groups. Although Jewish women also belonged to the inter-confessional League of Austrian Women’s Associations (BÖFV), many withdrew from its activities due to the anti-Semitic views of some of its members.

Sofie Löwenherz, whose husband was the director of Vienna’s Jewish religious and political organization, the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde (IKG), led the largest Zionist women’s association, the World Organization of Zionist Women (WIZO). WIZO played a leading rôle in the formation of the Women’s Emergency Service, a national welfare organization founded in 1934 by Leopoldine Miklas — wife of the Austrian federal president, Wilhelm Miklas — to replace the former socialist welfare groups.

Löwenherz was on the organizing committee of the Women’s Emergency Service along with Motzko and other representatives of Austrian women’s associations. Löwenherz again took a prominent rôle in organizing the Fatherland Front’s Mother’s Day celebrations and exhibition in Vienna’s Natural History Museum in 1936. Her organization published a commemorative booklet honouring the memory of Jeanette Herzl (1836–1911), mother of the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, whose 100th birthday coincided with the 1936 Mother’s Day celebrations.³⁸

Official tolerance of Zionist groups and coordination of their activities within the Fatherland Front allowed the [bourgeois] state to delineate clear boundaries between ‘German Christian’ Austrians and the Jewish minority living alongside them. Zionist Jews were neither Christian nor German, and even if they spoke German their national loyalties lay elsewhere. Thus the [bourgeois] state could be absolved of its responsibilities towards all Jews by ensuring their needs were met by the Jewish community. By creating these social, political and eventually legal boundaries between Austrian citizens, the [bourgeois] state could expedite the process of Jewish emigration from Austria.³⁹

The Austrofascist state’s support for Zionism was the inverse of its own policies of Germanization: Austrofascists promoted the dissimilation of German-speaking Jews from an Austrian German identity while encouraging Slovene, Czech and Croatian minorities to dissimilate from their non-German identities to become Germanized Austrians.

One of the most prominent supporters of Zionism within the Austrofascist state was Emmerich Czermak, who[m] we have already seen was instrumental in the founding of the Fatherland Front’s ‘Germandom Work’ organization. In 1933 Czermak co-authored a book with a well-known Zionist, Oskar Karbach, entitled Ordnung in der Judenfrage (Order in the Jewish Question), in which he argued for a reversal of Jewish assimilation in the Austrian state and a religious awakening among the Jewish people.

The Jews themselves, Czermak claimed, recognized that assimilation had failed. In keeping with the earlier Christian Social proposals for a numerus clausus, Czermak outlined his proposal for the segregation of Jews as a minority group to regulate their participation in the ‘host’ nation. This was necessary, he believed, because Palestine would not be able to accommodate all the Jews in Germany let alone in Europe.

(The implication here is that millions of European Jews settling in Palestine would be fine if only it were practical, not that establishing an ethnostate there would be immoral or unnecessary.)

Karbach’s shorter contribution to the book welcomed the authoritarian measures of states that could enforce dissimilation as a state policy and thereby convince Jews that in the long term such a reform would lead to their becoming active and valuable citizens in the state.

Moderate Zionists, although they also sought minority representation and greater control over Jewish affairs in the [bourgeois] state, opposed Czermak’s proposal because it did not address the under-representation of Jews in the civil service, among other areas of public life.⁴⁰

Thus although the 1934 constitution guaranteed the equality of all citizens and the freedom of all religions, and in spite of both Dollfuss’s and Schuschnigg’s assurances to Austrian Jews that they were not second-class citizens, from the outset Austrofascist functionaries were drawing up plans to count and regulate the numbers of Jews in the state. Even before the new constitution was promulgated, the government used the ban on the Social Democratic Party as a pretext for firing Jewish doctors from public hospitals.

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Austrofascists sought to exclude all Jews, not just unassimilated Jews, and they supported Zionist groups because they believed this would aid the segregation of Jews and their eventual emigration from Austria.

(Emphasis added in all cases.)