‘WHITE SLAVE’ TRAFFICKING IN TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY BUKOVINA AND GALICIA: THE EXPERIENCE OF IMPERIAL AUSTRIA’S EASTERN PROVINCES

Ключові слова: «біле рабство», Буковина, Галичина, Австрійська імперія, проституція. Вінгфілд Н. М. “Біле рабство” або торгівля жінками в кінці ХІХ – на початку ХХ ст. на Буковині та в Галичині: досвід східних провінцій Австрійської імперії В статті розглянуто проблему торгівлі жінками або «Білого рабства», яке існувало у Цислейтанії в кінці ХІХ – на початку ХХ ст. На Буковині та в Галичині це явище традиційно пов’язували з євреями. Уважніше вивчення питання показує погані умови проживання молодих жінок та їх сімей, що штовхало їх на участь в таких злочинах. Значна увага зосереджена на спробах уряду подолати проблему «білого рабства», а також на створенні асоціацій, що боролись проти проституції. Загалом у дослідженні порушено питання добровільності та примусу щодо процесу торгівлі жінками з Буковини і Галичини. Відзначено, що перша світова війна спричинила значне зменшення масштабів «білого рабства». Підкреслено значення Міжнародної конвенції про боротьбу з торгівлею жінками та дітьми (1921 р.), що була підписана 28 країнами за сприяння Ліги Націй.

Few forms of socially deviant behavior received so much attention in the sexually saturated Austrian fin de siècle as Mädchenhandel or trafficking in girls. Trafficking in women and girls, also known as "white-slave trafficking," had also existed in preindustrial Cisleithania, but the discourse from the turn of the century focused above all on Bukovina and Galicia, two impoverished provinces in the eastern reaches of the Monarchy with large Jewish populations. 1 This discussion reflected concerns about the need for social control in an increasingly anonymous, modernizing, urbanizing, and capitalist society. 2 Certainly, Mädchenhandel was in many ways a modern crime, a crime associated particularly with Jews, who were popularly believed to supply white, unwilling girls to serve as prostitutes in brothels worldwide. Modernizing communication and transportation networks, together with the anonymity of the growing metropolises in Habsburg Central Europe not only permitted largescale immigration and women to travel alone as never before, but also facilitated trafficking in women. Indeed, commercial sex was a flourishing enterprise in the expanding urban centers of the nineteenth-century Habsburg Monarchy where prostitution was tolerated and regulated by the police rather than the courts. Bukovinian and Galician newspapers regularly advertised the Austro-Americana, Cunard, and Hamburg-Amerika lines' "newest, most comfortable, fastest, and least expensive" steamers from the port cities of Central Europe to New York, and elsewhere in North America, as well as to Buenos Aires, Africa, and East Asia. 3 After the passage of 1 January 1900 law eliminating the periodical-press stamp allowed for the proliferation of inexpensive and often illustrated newspapers among an increasingly literate audience, popular discussion of "white slavery" in late imperial Cisleithania expanded. Muckraking sensationalist newspapers of the imperial and provincial capitals addressed the topic, together with salacious details on a variety of other moral crimes, including bigamy, homosexuality, Lustmord (sexual murder), prostitution, and suicide. Journals intended for women also focused on trafficking. These articles both served a didactic function (warning them of possible danger), and permitted women who were not involved in trafficking to follow with prurient interest, feigned or real horror, the fates of their unfortunate sisters. 4 These articles often discussed Bukovina and Galicia, which were a regular source of supply for stories about women and young girls who had fallen victim to traffickers. Reflecting a variety of European-wide developments, among them eugenics, criminology, and racial nationnalism, the rhetoric facilitated the language of difference. This debate included tropes such as the corruption of "innocent girls," especially by Eastern European Jewish "Others." These menand women-were alleged to have kidnapped and even "enslaved" girls and taken them to racially different faraway places to ply the sex trade. A closer examination of the issue, however, reveals a more complicated picture that involved young women, some illiterate, attracted by the anticipated wealth of foreign liberators, hastily marrying these men and going abroad with them in the hope of a better life, often with the full support of their often poverty-stricken families. 5 Their hopes were perhaps encouraged by the occasional glowing letter to the newspaper from emigrants or newspaper articles, such as the one in 1905 about Rosa Pastor, a young Russian-Jewish emigrant who had worked in a cigarette factory for a decade in Cleveland, Ohio before her successful marriage to an American multi-millionaire. 6 In order to supply the Monarchy's tolerated bordellos with fresh supplies of sexual talent, pimps and other panderers, many of them Christian according to police records, regularly arranged for the transport of prostitutes to bordellos throughout Austria-Hungary and neighboring Germany. There was sometimes slippage between accusations of Mädchenhändel and Kuppelei (pandering). Criminal authorities regularly designated the activities of those accused-often not Jewish-of moving women within the Monarchy and to nearby Germany, even Italy, as "pandering," rather than trafficking. It was, however, the "white slavers -both male and female, and popularly identified as Jewish -and those girls and women they trafficked abroad, often, but not always, poor Jews from Bukovina and Galicia, who aroused the greatest public indignation.

The European Response to Trafficking at the Fin de Siècle
Although the worldwide traffic in women had become a concern among European reformers in the second half of the nineteenth century, the international trade in European women and girls had a long history. In his 1904 exposé, Der Mädchenhandel und seine Bekämpfung, the police physician Joseph Schrank, who became the president of the Austrian League to Combat Traffic in Women (Österreichischen Liga zur Bekämpfung des Mädchenhandels, founded 1902), described a lively trade in women and girls in the Kingdom of Hungary while under Ottoman Turkish domination that dated back several centuries. Even after the Habsburg conquest of Hungary, the Turks still had agents buy "pretty Christian girls" to send to their sultan and other important figures. It was only "later," according to Schrank, that Armenian and Jewish agents became involved in this trade. 7 By the late nineteenth century Hungarian Jews were participating in the transportation of women, who had been lured by promises of marriage to Argentina, where there was a shortage of women because female migration there had lagged behind that of males. These women were then sold as prostitutes in Buenos Aires. 8 Following the legalization of prostitution in Buenos Aires in 1875, Hungarians, later joined by Frenchmen and Polish Jews, were the most active "white slavers" in that city. 9 By the mid-1880s, English feminist and social reformer Josephine Butler, whose International Abolitionist Association had branches throughout Great Britain and Europe dedicated to the elimination of prostitution, had been made aware of the trade in women and girls connected with prostitution. Association member William A. Coote soon formed national committees for the suppression of white slave traffic in various European capitals, Egypt, South America, South Africa, and the United States.
Western European Jewish reformers had noticed a conspicuous involvement among Eastern European Jews in "white slaving." 10 Thus, in 1885, the Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls, Women, and Children was established in London and in 1897 the Hamburg branch of B'nai B'rith formed a Jewish Committee to Combat White Slavery. The increased interest in trade in women and girls clearly corresponded to a time of great economic and social upheaval among the Jews of Eastern Europe. Pogroms in imperial Russia in 1881 and1882 together with Russian anti-Jewish legislation known as the May Laws following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II drove Jews from various professions as well as from villages and small towns throughout what was called the Pale of Settlement, the western parts of Russia where Jews were allowed to live. Galicia and Bukovina were among the major destinations of hundreds of thousands of these poverty-stricken Jews fleeing violence. 11 These destitute Jewish immigrants helped supply a steady stream of young women to be trafficked abroad.
The legal status of Jewish women, who could be married without civil sanction but whose marriages were thus not legally binding, was a causal factor in the Jewish white slave problem. Some four million Jewish women in Eastern Europe and the lands of the Ottoman Empire lived under rabbinical law, where rabbis could perform marriages. Such marriages required only two witnesses. Thus, young, sometimes illiterate, women from the poor and uneducated circles of the hinterlands, whose futures portended only the grinding rural poverty of the shtetl or the miserably paid work in dangerous, rundown factories, could be tricked into marrying a man-a procurer, a bordello keeper or a bordello employee-whose intentions were criminal. These brides followed their husbands abroad only to learn that their marriages were not legally binding. Moreover, no abandoned Jewish woman could remarry an observant Jew unless she had been granted a ritual divorce from her husband or his death had been established by a Jewish witness. Some women ended up working as prostitutes for the men who had taken them abroad in the first place. Alone, destitute, and unfamiliar with the foreign lands in which they found themselves, others also ended up in bordellos. 12 The Fin-de-Siècle Austrian Response to Trafficking A defining moment in the Austrian public's perception of "white slaving" as a predominantly Jewish trade was the trial in autumn 1892 in the Galician provincial capital, Lemberg (Lwów/ Lviv), 13 a city of mixed German, Jewish, Polish, and Ruthenian 14 population. It involved twentyseven people, seventeen men and ten women, all of them Jews, who were charged with transporting women abroad against their will. Widely publicized in Galicia's and Bukovina's diverse Polish-language press, it was also covered in Vienna's explicitly anti-Semitic Deutsches Volksblatt, which consistently linked Jews to corrupttion, perversion, and scandal. 15 The accused had allegedly searched Galicia for decades, seeking "Christian" girls whom they transported in the hundreds to brothels and harems in the Middle East, Africa, and the Americas. (Jewish brothel owners abroad were rumored to demand from their representatives in Lemberg, Cracow, Warsaw, and Budapest that "the ware not be kosher.") 16 Although found guilty, none of the defendants was sentenced to more than one year in prison, which reflected the slight penalties in the Austrian penal code for procuring and trafficking in minors. There were long echoes of the case in the anti-Semitic press, and it had lasting implications for the way trafficking was understood in Habsburg Central Europe. Indeed, the case helped define the public's perception of how sex trafficking there functioned. 17 Anti-Semitic diatribes such as Alexander Berg's 1892 book, Juden-Bordelle: Enthüllungen aus dunkeln Häusern, 18 which closely tied international trade in girls with international Jewry, furthered the notion that there was a close connection between Eastern European Jews and the trafficking in Eastern European women.
The specter of women and girls from the Monarchy being delivered to exotic, "less civilized," non-European points abroad seems to have excited the Austrian public's imagination. Viennese bordello keeper Regine Riehl, the baptized-Christian daughter of Jewish parents, was portrayed at her November 1906 trial, for example, as having abused the prostitutes she employed using the kind of "violence against girls that one heard about in the bordellos in South America or God only knows where." One article on the Riehl case claimed that "the bestiality against lost women that had been dismissed as unverifiable was a daily occurrence in one of the public houses on a busy Viennese street." 19 In fact, Emil Bader, the muckraking journalist who first broke the Riehl story, compared the defendant's bordello to the brothels of Rio de Janeiro, which with other non-European cities took pride of place in contemporary literature on white slaving as "epitomes of depravity and veritable prisons of abducted European girls." 20 Contemporary reports from the fin de siècle reveal that bordello keepers throughout Austria-Hungary frequently changed the prostitutes in their employ. Some bordello managers regularly traveled in search of new girls for their establishments, while others took on girls whom the socalled panderers offered them. Local police records also show that regulated prostitutes traveled throughout the Habsburg Monarchy and Germany to find work. 21 Clandestine or unregulated prostitutes traveled, too, but they came to the attention of authorities-and thus into the historic record-primarily when they were arrested. To be sure, there was widespread trafficking within Austria, 22 between Austria and Hungary, as well as with nearby Germany, as is evident, for example, in bordello keeper Riehl's testimony at her 1906 trial. Charged with embezzlement, fraud, pandering, and other crimes associated with the operation of her tolerated bordello, she asserted that she had actually helped the prostitutes she was accused of enslaving rather than harming them. In one case, she claimed to have taken a girl off the hands of a trafficker when the bordello in Prague for which that girl had been intended rejected her. 23 Although Jewish organizations focused on the apparent preponderance of eastern European Jews in "white slaving," both as traffickers and trafficked, non-Jewish men were also involved in trafficking, and non-Jewish women were lured into prostitution or voluntarily turned to it. Some Christian men, allegedly working together with Jewish traffickers, become engaged to household servants in Galicia. After earning these women's trust by false promises of marriage, the men first looted their savings, then often persuaded them to travel under the pretence of a wedding in their home region, but in reality took them to an unfamiliar area and handed them over to a Jewish trafficker and thus to "eternal ruin." 24 Trade in women may have been quite public in Czernowitz (Chernivtsi/Cernăuţi/Czerniowce), Bukovina's provincial capital, as Schrank claimed (he also alleged that ninety percent of the girls transported from Czernowitz were Jews), but some Czernowitz city fathers-as well as their wives and daughters -supported the local branch of the Austrian League to Combat Traffic in Women, and were thus presumably aware of trafficking in Bukovina. These men and women did not appreciate the unwanted attention accusations of "white slaving" brought their city and province. 25 Certainly some residents took offense at one alleged case of trafficking in 1905 that they believed labeled their province as "uncultured," somehow beyond the European pale, and themselves as "true 'Asiatics.'" Local newspapers reported the comments of a Czernowitz city council member at a meeting on 28 March 1905. On his most recent trip to Vienna, the council man reported that the newspapers in the imperial capital had been filled with the tale of two Viennese girls who had been saved from a horrible fate at the hands of a Czernowitz trafficker: ending up in a bordello. The affair had even been the subject of discussion in parliament. The city council representative wanted to know what had actually happened and what role the local police had played in the events. 26 The situation was, however, more complicated than it appeared at first glance. The unnamed Czernowitz cafe owner who was accused of the attempted trafficking-and the middle man who helped him-rejected the accusation, asserting that the advertisement he had had placed in Viennese newspapers was "genuine." He really was looking for two female cashiers, "like those found in all cafes." When the two girls he hired did not like the work, they left. The city council member called for an explanation from the mayor; indeed, he demanded that city hall fight the attack on the city's reputation if the allegation of trafficking proved to be incorrect. At the same time, the café owner sought to save his reputation. 27 This incident, like many others that involved accusations of trafficking, disappeared from the pages of the newspaper. In this case, perhaps the resignation of the long-time mayor Anton Kochanowski on 5 April overshadowed city hall concerns about the alleged incident. 28 Accounts about Alexandria shed some light on how trafficking functioned. As a result of pressure from foreign consulates in Alexandria concerned that European women might have been brought there against their will, again according to Schrank, in April 1903 officials in that city undertook searches of houses of people thought to be involved in the international trade in women. Some twenty girls aged twelve to fifteen from Central and Eastern Europe, including Austria, Germany, and Russia, were found. 29 A March 1904 report on white slavers and their victims in Alexandria noted that the local police who worked with morals issues in that city claimed that some seventy to eighty percent of prostitutes in the local bordellos were Jews from Galicia, Bukovina, and Romania. The author of that report spoke to twenty Austrian prostitutes, six of whom said they came directly from their home regions with their alleged husbands or lovers, thus confirming that at least some Jewish women were taken abroad by unscrupulous Jewish men only to end up in bordellos. Although some of these women had sailed from the Austrian port of Trieste, they more typically came through Constantinople, which was less-well policed. 30 The traffickers were an international group who sometimes attracted the unwelcome attention of local officials, resulting in their expulsion and repatriation to the Monarchy. Indeed, shortly after the turn of the century, Egyptian officials expelled a number of European white slavers, including eight Austrian citizens, virtually all Galician Jews, mainly from Lemberg and Przemyśl. Numerous Romanians, as well as a Prussian and an English man were also expelled. 31 Traffickers abroad included "a certain Elie Kupferschmiedt from Cairo," who Czernowitz officials claimed transported young local Jewish girls to foreign bordellos. 32 Sometimes Habsburg officials also noted traffickers who were expelled from other countries and repatriated to the Monarchy. In late 1907, for example, two "dangerous traffickers," a woman from Bukovina and a man from Galicia, together with a group of eleven Austrian prostitutes were returned to Austria from Ottoman Salonica, where they simply disappeared from the historical record. 33 Like traffickers, female prostitutes hailed from all parts of the Habsburg Monarchy. Viennese medical inspection records reveal that prostitutes in the imperial capital came from Galicia, Hungary, Lower Austria, and Austrian Silesia. 34 Some traveled much farther afield. Girls from the Germanspeaking border regions of Bohemia, from Vienna, and from Hungary were taken north to Bavaria or Saxony. They were then moved from one bordello to another or transported to Hamburg, Bremen, and other harbor cities in northern Germany. 35 It seems that European-born womenmany of them Jews from Russia as well as Bukovina and Galicia-filled bordellos in Buenos Aires during the peak years of European emigration between 1870 and 1914. 36 In addition, there were the women found in Alexandria who had traveled through Constantinople. The movement of women, both voluntary and forced, for purposes of prostitution was clearly widespread and international.
Increasingly organized opposition to prostitution, including regulated prostitution, and concern over the international dimensions of white slaving found reflection in the various international conventions dedicated to the problem of white slaving that took place at the fin de siècle. Together with Brazil and eleven other European states, Austria and Hungary were signatories in Paris on 4 March 1910 to the International Convention for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic. The treaty went into effect in the Habsburg Monarchy on 8 February 1913. Article 4 of the treaty obliged signatories to bring all of their relevant legislative measures into agreement with the treaty. As required by the treaty, for example, Austrian authorities sought to explain how requests from the courts of signatory countries would be brought to the attention of the relevant officials in other signatory countries. 37 Other directives concerned arranging employment abroad, including the engagement of female performers, measures for monitoring the railroads, and suggestions to women traveling alone to help protect their safety. 38 The various religious and women's organizations that vehemently opposed tolerated prostitution sometimes helped the morals police to track the activities of alleged traffickers when they visited the Austrian lands-in order to prevent them from finding new girls for their bordellos abroad-and to trace the routes of "white slavers" and their victims. Although Jewish committees had formed early in response to the trade of Jewish girls in Galicia, the organizations battling white slaving were subsumed in 1902 under the interdenominational Austrian League to Combat Traffic in Women, which took an active role in attempting to stop the trade in women and girls. The organization, which founded branches throughout Cisleithanian Austria, including Czernowitz and Lemberg, helped police track down known traffickers in Berlin, Budapest, and elsewhere. 39 Moreover, its members participated in the international conferences that dealt with suppressing this activity.
The Trafficked from Bukowina and Galicia: Victims, Willing Participants or Both?
The more sensationalist newspapers, not only in Vienna, but also in the provinces, among them the Czernowtizer Tagblatt and Lemberg's Wiek Nowy, helped encourage the popular perception of young, innocent-often poor-girls falling into the hands of Seelenräuber (those who steal souls) and disappearing into bordellos within the empire or abroad, never to be seen again. Articles in these newspapers sometimes claimed, often without evidence that girls who had disappeared and were presumed dead owing to accident or suicide, were in fact, being held in "prisons of shame," that is, bordellos. 40 While the rumors about "lost girls" that appeared in these press reports were largely absent from regional and imperial police and political records, these accounts do contain letters from parents desperately searching for their missing daughters, some of whom entered bordellos of their own accord and others who were lured there. There were certainly cautionary tales in both the official records and the press of young girls from Bukovina and Galicia eluding white slavers, and thus escaping an uncertain fate abroad. In one turn-of-the-century case, a man named Markus Lichtental found two "pretty" Galician girls to work in Czernowitz. While traveling by rail with him toward that city, one of the girls had second thoughts and left the train at Kolomea (Kolomyia/Kołomyja/Colomeea), in southeastern Galicia. The second girl spoke with the train's conductor who called a policeman at the nearby Delatyn (Delatin/Deliatin/Delyatin) station, about 100 kilometers west of Czernowitz. The policeman recognized Lichtental, and "knew" he was taking the girl not to the Bukovinian capital but rather to a "coffee house" in Constantinople, where the girls "had to be pretty." 41 Those traffickers living in foreign countries who returned to Bukovina in an attempt to engage girls and young women for bands playing abroad were among the prospective employers of poor women who became the targets of police scrutiny. 42 Indeed, a 1906 report from Czernowitz to the Ministry of the Interior asserts that some women who went to the Ottoman Empire performed in women's bands or worked at coffee houses before and during their participation in prostitution. An article about the Czernowitz branch of the Austrian League to Combat Traffic in Women two years later mentions the return of a Bukovinian-Romanian girl from Constanza in Romania where she had gone with a women's band, but had been forced to work as an Animiermädchen (a bar hostess meant to encourage male patrons to drink; they sometimes also worked as prostitutes). The organization also reported that the head of Bukovina's provincial court had agreed to stop the issuance of passports to underage girls whose poverty-stricken parents, either owing to "naiveté" or "stupidity," were permitting them to go abroad with women's bands. 43 In some cases, intended victims escaped their captors. For example, twenty-year-old "Amiela G" from Stanislau (Stanisławów/Stanyslaviv) complained to the police in 1906 that a certain Kalman offered her a post as a cook in the house of a Countess, but took her to a bordello instead. As soon as she had realized the deceit, she escaped her kidnapper, fleeing to the police. That same year, several Viennese girls accused Salomon Borger, a Galician-born Jewish resident of that city, of attempting to lure them into practicing prostitution. He offered them positions as hairdressers in Bielitz (Bielsko/Bílsko) in Silesia. Upon arrival there, these girls found that the positions they sought had been filled, but they were encouraged to go to a small town nearby to work for Borger's father. Having been told that the father ran a bordello to which Salomon Borger sent girls from Vienna, they did not go. In their anonymous complaint to the police, the girls requested that police have Borger explain his behavior-they wanted to know why he sent them to his father's "notorious house" to have them "abandoned there to their shame." 44 Most reformers considered these women to be victims of white slavers, as "women and girls who were lured, tricked or forced to go abroad by traffickers who sold them into prostitution." 45 The situation seems to have been more complicated, however. What are we to make, for example, of the many girls from Bukovina whose parents had themselves led their daughters to prostitution and encouraged their migration to the Ottoman Empire so that they could benefit from their daughters' earnings, as one provincial official alleged? As one official reported, such people were encouraged by the return of bordello keepers and prostitutes who lived in luxury during their visits. 46 Other officials noted that women charged with prostitution sometimes lied in order to protect the men responsible for trafficking them.
This provincial official reported that as a rule these women who went to the "Orient" to work as prostitutes had usually already been involved in prostitution. The remarks of Golda Praeger, a registered prostitute who hailed from Zborow (Zborov/Zboriv/Zborów) in Galicia, appear to confirm this official's assertion. According to her 1906 testimony at the Austro-Hungarian Consulate in Constantinople, she had been registered as a prostitute in Lemberg. She left that city in October 1905, and traveled to Constantinople of her own volition, where she registered in a bordello under the name "Maria." 47 In a statement made the following February at the Austrian Consulate in the same city, another Galician-born prostitute, Peppi Beiner, claimed to have been a prostitute in Budapest for six years, before she "borrowed" one Karoline Merczel's passport. She then went to Constantinople at the instigation of an unnamed friend who allegedly worked in a bordello there, to earn more money. 48 The testimonies of "Maria" and Peppi Beiner depicting women who made their own choices, if accurate, contradicted the popular perception of traffickers corrupting innocent girls and called into question the government's need to intervene.

The Austrian Government's Efforts to Combat Trafficking
How seriously did imperial, provincial, and local authorities take the rhetoric of Mädchenhandel and what actions did they actually undertake? Archival records indicate that the Habsburg authorities did take trafficking in women and girls seriously and demonstrate some of the efforts that local, provincial, and imperial officials made to combat the problem. European consular and diplomatic officials in destination cities worldwide-Alexandria, Buenos Aires, Cairo, Constantinople, and Rio de Janeiro-sought to identify the routes taken and the people responsible for the trafficking in European women and girls. Their diplomatic reports described the plight of European women in foreign bordellos. Responding to popular domestic and international concerns about prostitution and white slaving, imperial authorities applied a number of measures in their attempts to combat it. Records from the Ministry of the Interior reflect the attention officials paid to trafficking in women at all levels. They also show the relative lack of public outcry over the movement of women within Cisleithanian Austria itself.
Certainly those Austrian officials and others concerned with preventing trafficking in women encouraged publicity to inform members of the public-especially women and girls-about the dangers that traffickers posed. They attempted to involve more people in this effort, because they believed that the police and customs officials could prevent only a few cases of trafficking. Sometimes citizens provided information on possible traffickers. 49 The police posted warnings in railroad stations-even in the railroad cars-to alert girls and women traveling alone about the dangers strange men posed. Some concerned officials also called for close scrutiny of the newspaper inserts that made such glowing promises to new arrivals in the cities of the empire and advocated using flyers, even assemblies, to inform these innocents of the possible dangers they faced once they left Austria. Moreover, officials encouraged Austrian consulates abroad to create information centers where officials and others could find out the nature of the "business" that seemed to be appealing for workers, that is, whether the establishment actually existed or if was nothing more than a "human warehouse." 50 Government directives not to issue passports to known procurers seem to have been ineffective, because traffickers used foreign passports for their travels. Nonetheless, some hindrances to travel happened. Administrative and police officials in Czernowitz, for example, watched closely for suspected panderers, and if the suspects acted the least bit questionably, their passports were seized. Border authorities there were also instructed that in cases where they harbored any doubts whatsoever about travelers who might be involved in white slaving, they were to delay their travel while they gathered evidence. 51 Concern over the issue of Mädchenhandel, heightened by on-going international congresses intent on suppressing the white slave traffic (the first of which was held in London in 1899) resulted in a second decree of the Austrian Ministry of the Interior on 26 June 1905. It called for the centralization of police activities regarding Mädchenhandel in the Viennese police directorate as the Central Office for the Control of the White Slave Trade. Thus, in August of that year the Viennese police directorate issued its own decree that delineated the sphere of activity of this central office. In addition to coordinating with local and provincial police authorities, officials in the central office would serve as mediators with foreign officials. The centralization of activities reflected a recognition that trade in women was an "international evil" and thus could only be dealt with through international agreements. This stance was in sharp contrast to thinking of prostitution as a "necessary evil," which was the defense that proponents of regulated prostitution regularly made in their contests with the abolitionists who opposed all prostitution. 52 The police directorate in Vienna was expected to coordinate and support local officials in the battle against trafficking in women, including identifying white slavers and their accomplices, as well as any trafficked women who were to be returned to their homes. With this mission in mind, the police directorate planned to establish a register of procurers and their accomplices and to print pamphlets along the lines of already existing criminal albums that would contain personal data, their criminal records, and, if possible pictures of the individuals in question. As part of the stricter, more intensive regime of surveilling those suspected of trading in women, the police directorate envisioned the regular exchange of information between local officials throughout Cisleithania and the Vienna headquarters. Police officials were expected to pay particular attention to railroad stations and quays, especially those along the borders of the Habsburg Monarchy. These were all places where young women were considered to be in the gravest danger of being accosted by panderers. The Vienna headquarters instructed local organs of public safety to pay close attention to descriptions of suspects provided to them in order to combat the trade in women. Local officials were also expected to provide Vienna with information on suspected procurers who came from their region or were resident there. Finally, police officials from the central office planned to maintain relations with the concerned officials in other countries as well as work with Austro-Hungarian diplomats and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 53

Rumors of 'Eastern European' Traffickers in Western Bohemia
Special attributes of some cities that made them attractive to the general population also made them attractive to traffickers. Karlsbad (Karlovy Vary) at the other end of Austria-Hungary from Bukovina and Galicia, in western Bohemia, was one of the most popular spa destinations in the Habsburg Monarchy. During the "season," its population expanded greatly, and among the many visitors it attracted from abroad were men and women who were allegedly involved in the international traffic in women. These individuals included panderers and bordello owners and former residents of Austria-Hungary, especially from South America, who sometimes toured the Monarchy and were thought to be searching for "new talent" to fill their bordellos. Since these questionable characters sometimes visited Karlsbad, local officials paid close attention.
Between 1908 and 1914 several groups of bordello keepers, traffickers, and pimps from Buenos Aires came to Karlsbad, not only to take the "cure" in the spa's waters-and some of them apparently really did-but also allegedly "to find" girls to take back to Argentina. Each time, the appearance or rumored appearance of people suspected of involvement in Mädchenhandel, most of them Jews, many of them born in Russia or Russian-Poland, although some of them also hailed from Germany and the Habsburg Monarchy, occasioned a flurry of correspondence among local officials and those in Buenos Aires, Berlin, and Vienna. Those who aroused suspicion included the "notorious" Russian-Polish born, Buenos Aires-based procurer Salomon Goldstein, who had allegedly been commissioned by a consortium of white slavers to come to Europe on the lookout for girls. There is, however, no evidence that any of these people, whom officials watched so closely, recruited prostitutes in Karlsbad. In one case, local authorities reported that the suspects "talked only among themselves" during their stay. In another case, officials from Czernowitz warned the Karlsbad police to be on the lookout for one Rosa Hirsch, a suspected white slaver. She and her husband, who ran a bordello in Buenos Aires, had arrived in Bukovina on 3 May 1912. They apparently left there for western Bohemia on 23 May. The Czernowitz authorities requested that the Karlsbad police supply them with any information on her activities that might involve prostitution and white slaving. According to Karlsbad authorities, however, Madam Hirsch never arrived in their city. 54 Indeed, the majority of alleged traffickers who appeared in Karlsbad, like many of the city's other visitors, seem to have come there for their health.

Wolf Goldenberg and Vasile Grigoreanu, "Eastern European" Traffickers
While the Austrian police investigated more alleged traffickers than they prosecuted, there were some successful convictions for "white slaving." Wolf Goldenberg and Herman Brusli were charged in Vienna with the attempted kidnapping in late July 1907 of seventeen-yearold Taube Schiwek, a native of Russian Poland, and with providing false information to police. The case of the thirty-year-old Warsaw-born Goldenberg, whose last known residence was Buenos Aires, reflects police efforts to apprehend and convict traffickers. They amassed a wealth of information on Goldenberg, who had allegedly come to Austria for his health. Police in London, where he was reputed to make his living from procuring and trafficking women, knew Goldenberg as "Wolf Tonner," while Buenos Aires police labeled him a Jewish white slaver. In addition to identifying Goldenberg and Bruski as traffickers, Buenos Aires police also informed consular officials that Brusli was in fact married to "Madam Helene Gesundheit" to whom he rented his house. They also noted that Dora Greenbalgh, who called herself Goldenberg's "wife," worked at a bordello in Rio de Janeiro. (Greenbalgh, a twenty-four-year-old Russian-Polish born prostitute, told Brazilian officials she had lost her virginity to Goldenberg in Warsaw, then followed him to London and later Buenos Aires, where, she claimed, he lived on her earnings.) 55 Austrian police also learned that Schiwek, while clearly naïve, was perhaps not the "shy" victim she was depicted as in newspaper coverage. 56 Representatives of the Austrian League to Combat Traffic in Women interviewed Schiwek in Vienna soon after the events, and her testimony reflects some of the ambiguities in prosecuting white slaving. It reveals a teenager, unhappy with her boss and her salary, willing to accompany a stranger to a foreign country, leaving her position without notice, without informing her father, and without taking her belongings. 57 Schiwek claimed to have first seen Israel Londner about a year earlier, while still living at home. She had been curious about him because people said he had been to America. She thought he might also have noticed her. About six months later, with her father's permission, she had moved to Jaworzna, Galicia to work. Sometime after that, the same man who had been in America appeared, staying at the very inn where she was employed. He recognized her and because she was dissatisfied with her position, he asked if she wanted to go to America. Schiwek replied that she had no money, but wanted to go to Paris where her brother and sister lived. Londner allegedly said that he would take her to Paris and she could repay him when she got a position. She opted go with him, because she thought she could get good employment. According to Schiwek, "Thinking about seeing my sister, I left without notice. Of course, my employer had fired me several times, however, without letting me go. As I said, I did not have it good there." Her departure had not been difficult: she was owed no wages and Londner had earlier told her not to bring any clothing "because styles were different where she was going." 58 The pair left Jaworzna by rail-third-class carriage -on the morning of 22 July, arriving in Vienna that evening. They went straight to the Hotel Romania, where Londner booked a room. After Schiwek had gone to sleep, Londner knocked at the door, wanting to be let in. While she claimed to have no memory of what happened that night, other than to say that she had been "very dumb," Schiwek's testimony seems to indicate that she had sexual relations with Londner. The next morning, Goldenberg appeared at the door. The men left together, but only Goldenberg returned. He told Schiwek that Londner had had to leave, but that he-Goldenbergwould take her to Paris, and if she did not like it, to America. (At this point, Londner also disappears from the story despite subsequent police efforts to locate him.) When the police arrived, apparently tipped off by the hotel staff, Goldenberg claimed not to know Schiwek, and to have no idea why she had packed her belongings with his. Schiwek concluded that if Londner or Goldenberg had told her that they had wanted to take her to a bordello, she would not have gone with them at any price. They only told her that things would go well for her and she would see her sister. 59 At their trial in Vienna the following November Goldenberg and Brusli were alleged to have met Londner soon after he took the hotel room. According to newspaper reports, the hotel staff noticed that Bruli, Goldenberg, or Londner was always with the girl, who stayed in her room. A hotel employee secretly warned Schiwek that the men might be traffickers. Schiwek allegedly responded that she did not know what they wanted, but thought they were taking her first to Paris and then to America. That evening when Goldenberg attempted to leave the hotel with Schiwek, the hotel employee produced a complaint, and Goldenberg and Brusli were arrested. 60 Both of the accused contested charges of kidnapping and providing false information. Goldenberg asserted that he suffered from foot pain and had come to Vienna to consult a specialist, which was true, according to police records. He insisted that he met Londner only in the hotel, and when asked, declared himself ready to take Schiwek to Paris. Brusli, who also claimed to have had health problems, asserted that he had not discussed Schiwek with Goldenberg or Londner, and only looked at the girl "out of curiosity." Furthermore, he did not own a bordello in Buenos Aires, but rather rented property to Helene Gesundheit (his wife, according to Buenos Aires police), and it was not his business what she did with it. Convicted of abduction and providing false information, Goldenberg was sentenced to two months' hard time with two-days monthly fasting and expulsion from Austria. Brusli, found guilty only of providing false information, was sentenced to three days' strict detention and expulsion.
Goldenberg was in many ways a stereotypical trafficker: a relatively successful Eastern European Jew who spent time outside of Europe, whose source of income was unclear, if not illicit, who kept company with other men of questionable reputation, and who had relations with women of questionable reputation. 61 Schiwek, however, complicates the image of innocent young girls tricked into leaving their homes and going abroad with men to whom they believed they were married. With her father's permission, Schiwek had already left home to work in Galicia. She seems to have had some sense of adventure, leaving her position without informing her father and on the spur of the moment in the hope of meeting up with family members, who were not expecting her, in another country.
In May 1912, Austrian authorities arrested Vasile Grigoreanu, described in newspaper reports as "a simple farmer" rather than "a career trafficker," on the Bukovinian-Romanian border. (Grigoreanu, who really was a farmer, apparently did not fit the standard stereotype of a "white slaver" in this part of the world: he was neither urban nor Jewish.) He was accused of having long made a lucrative business out of selling underage Romanian children-a total of eleven cases had been verified-from the Bukovinian village of Theodorestie to panderers in Romania. With these poor girls' fathers having long since gone abroad as agricultural workers, Grigoreanu gained the trust of their mothers by giving them a few crowns and offering to get their young daughters excellent positions in Romania. Grigoreanu then transported these girls over the border to work in bordellos. He had already left four girls-two fifteen and two sixteen years of age-in a Romanian bordello. The village teacher realized what Grigoreanu was doing and reported him, so when Grigoreanu attempted to move another five girls to Romania using false passports, the Austrian border authorities apprehended him. When asked where they were going, the five girls allegedly said they did not know where this man they trusted was taking them. 62 The conclusion to this case, like many others, did not appear in the newspaper.
Concerns about trafficking women and girls from Bukovina and Galicia continued up to the First World War. Members of the Austrian League to Combat Traffic in Women were active in both provinces. They sought to rescue "lost" girls and women and return them to their homes. Police continued to break up alleged trafficking rings, arresting numerous suspected traffickers, men and women alike.

Conclusion
Despite the popular fin-de-siècle representtation of "innocent" girls taken abroad against their will by unscrupulous Jewish traffickers to toil in foreign brothels, the reality in the Habsburg lands was far more complicated. Concern that young women from the Monarchy were being forced into prostitution in exotic locations certainly helped fuel governmental and voluntary efforts to "rescue" these women. Yet according to their own testimonies, some of them neither wanted nor needed rescuing. Some young single women, reflecting their increased mobility at the turn of the century, had gone abroad of their own volition. Moreover, the evidence demonstrates that at least some families encouraged poor girls, often rural, many Jewish, to accept questionable offers of marriage in the hope of their own economic gain. Many of the alleged traffickers reported to the Viennese-based police directorate or identified by sources abroad were indeed Jews from Bukovina and Galicia. The apparent prevalence of Jews among "white slavers" attracted the attention both of anti-Semites, who condemned their participation in the trade as another indication of flawed Jewish character, and of Jewish reform groups, whose campaigns against Mädchenhandel were in part a response to this Jewish participation. Neither all of those women and girls taken abroad nor all of those who moved them there were Jewish, however. As police records and newspaper reports demonstrate, the religion or ethnicity of the trafficker often corresponded to the location from which the women were trafficked. Examination of "white slaving" in fin-de-siècle Bukovina and Galicia also reveals that women were involved in exploiting other women. In other words, not all women by virtue of being women participated in feminist, philanthropic, and abolitionist organizations. Some traded in and sold women, including their own daughters. Women from all categories were consumers of news about trafficking, The movement of primarily poor, often illeducated-even illiterate-women especially from rural Bukovina and Galicia to the burgeoning metropolises of the Habsburg Monarchy and/or abroad, some coerced and some voluntarily, some in response to marriage proposals and some in search of employment, was an element of growing industrialization, modernization, and urbanization, as some contemporaries recognized. Greater mobility, including large-scale emigration from the two provinces resulting from an expanding rail system and better roads, and greater anonymity owing to the increased movement within the growing cities, also enabled the increased movement of women with or without their consent. Concerns about trafficking in women also reflected numerous, sometimes conflicting popular concerns. The expanding public sphere, including greater literacy, the proliferation of inexpensive newspapers, the spread of secular activist orga-nizations, and the increasingly vocal presence of women all provided greater possibilities for addressing this social issue. At the same time, intellectual and especially scientific developments and changing political conventions offered commentators a new vocabulary with which to articulate their varied concerns about the problem that Mädchenhandel constituted.
The First World War caused a brief lull in the international traffic in women. 63 The issue in any case took the backseat to military concerns about prostitution during wartime, especially its implications for the spread of venereal disease among soldiers. One of the numerous continuities between the Habsburg Monarchy and its successor states, however, was the ongoing concern about the disappearance of children, girls, and women, some of whom were thought to have been trafficked. Austria, Hungary, newly independent Czechoslovakia, reunified Poland, and the enlarged Kingdom of Romania were among the twenty-eight states worldwide that signed the International Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women and Children under the auspices of the League of Nations on 30 October 1921. When these successor states assessed their varied responses to prostitution and other issues associated with women, concerns about trafficking in girls and women were repeated, and many of the tropes associated with white slavinginnocent girls lured abroad; their lives ruinedremained the same because the stereotypes were so firmly rooted in the popular imagination. Similarly, concerns over the continued victimmization of poor, uneducated Jewish girls during the interwar period led English and German Jewish feminists to demand-unsuccessfully-a general rabbinical convocation to modernize marriage, divorce, and inheritance laws to the benefit of women. 64 Still the debate continued to reflect the same fears that European women and girls, especially those traveling alone, would fall into the wrong company, and be taken to bordellos in the non-European world.
Portions of this article were previously published in "Destination: Alexandria, Buenos Aires, Constantinople: 'White-Slavers' in Late Imperial Austria," Journal of the History of Sexuality (May 2011). I would like to thank Cathleen M. Giustino, Lisa Kirschenbaum, and Christine Worobec for commenting on earlier versions of this article and Ivanna Liakhovych for translating material in Bukovyna from the Ukrainian. collapsed in towns and refugees camps following outbreaks of religious persecution in Germany, Austria, Russia, and Poland," simplifying the differing and complicated socio-political and national situation in the region. At the turn of the century there were occasional accusations of Jewish ritual murder, but little systematic persecution of Jews on religious grounds except in Russia, where ongoing persecution of Jews created difficulties that spilled into neighboring areas of partitioned Poland and elsewhere. On Russian attitudes toward the Jews during this period, which formed also the beginning of modern Jewish politics, see, for example, Hans Rogger, Jewish Policies and Right-Wing Politics in Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); and Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 12 Kaplan, "Prostitution, Morality Crusades and Feminism," p. 619, 623. 13 I thank Jeremy King for reminding me that despite a plethora of laws and imperial ordinances beginning in the eighteenth century, there was no uniform policy concerning language use for place names until the end of the Habsburg Monarchy. The regulation of names developed piecemeal through court rulings, imperial and crownland ordinances, municipal ordinances, and some new legislation. Thus place names were by and large regulated differently in Galicia, which privileged the Polish language, than in Bukovina. For the sake of consistency, on first appearance, I list each place name with all the variations in standard usage, subsequently, employ German, which was most often used in imperial documents.