The Fall of the Dynasties: The Collapse of the Old Order: 1905-1922

by Edmond Taylor

Some 45 per cent of the Viennese population in 1900 lived in fiats of one or two small rooms; one Viennese in twenty had no room of his own at all, but lived as a bettgeher, sleeping, for a few pennies, in someone else’s bed while its regular occupant was at work, or spending the nights in one of the ghastly “warming rooms” (flophouses) maintained by private charity. The most miserable slept on the grass of the Prater in summer and lived all winter, as Hitler was able to observe, in the damp tepid stench of the sewage canals. Hitler himself was doubtless a bettgeher for a time, and Jenks believes that he probably slept on occasion in the Prater or in a “warming room.” In later life, the Nazi Fuehrer still shuddered to recall those “pitiful dens” and those “sinister pictures of dirt and repugnant filth, and worse still.”