The Free Austria Movement in Shanghai

I’m afraid I know very little about this, so anyone who knows anything more, or can correct anything here is welcome to get in touch…

The Free Austria Movement, or the Freie Österreichische Bewegung (FAM), was a largely UK based organisation of Austrian exiles during World War Two that included a broad range of anti-Nazi Austrians, including communists. Their activities ranged from fund raising to broadcasting back into Austria via the BBC. They also established various sections outside the UK, certainly one existed in Australia and also, it seems, in Shanghai. The Shanghai FAM seems to have been partly run by two men – Felix Gruenberger and Arthur Zanker. Zanker was a Jewish specialist in children’s diseases, born in Silesia, who worked in Vienna before the war. He eventually emigrated to England (where he died in 1957) but came via Shanghai where he seems to have been briefly, but importantly, involved in the FAM organisation there. Afraid I don’t know much else about him. Neither do I know much about Gruenberger, although I believe he was also a doctor, had studied medicine in Vienna and arrived in Shanghai in 1939. I know a little more about Gruenberger as he wrote a paper in 1948, published in 1950 in the journal Jewish Social Studies, entitled The Jewish Refugees in Shanghai (you can track it down on JSTOR).

Anyway, my introduction to FAM in Shanghai was very different and much nastier. Looking at documents relating to the Nazis in Shanghai during the war I noticed the name of one SS-Gestapo agent in the city called “Bettleheim” who was himself an Austrian Jew, and a doctor (and so presumably a colleague/competitor of Zanker and Gruenberger’s in Shanghai) who worked within the Free Austrian Movement but was informing on their membership and activities to the Shanghai Gestapo throughout. What became of him I do not know.

A FAM newspaper in Switzerland