The annexation of Austria was accompanied by the rapid “coordination” [Gleichschaltung] of the government, economy, and society along National Socialist lines. For political and racial “enemies of the people,” this meant subjection to brutal violence and a wave of discriminatory and repressive legislation. The cruelest repression was experienced by Austria’s approximately 200,000 Jews, 170,000 of whom lived in Vienna and were now exposed to the Nazis’ unlimited hatred. Street violence and arbitrary humiliations assumed proportions never before seen in the German Reich. Tens of thousands of Jews fled abroad. Others were deported to the borders and abandoned there. The Jews who remained in the new Eastern March [Ostmark] quickly fell victim to the antisemitic laws that had been in effect in the German Reich since 1933. They were deprived of their political and civil rights, forced out of their professions, and lost their firms and shops in the process of “Aryanization.”