Alexander Wienerberger

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Alexander Wienerberger (born December 8, 1891 in Vienna ; † January 5, 1955 in Salzburg ) was an Austrian chemical engineer who worked for chemical companies in the USSR for 19 years . While working in Kharkov , he created a series of photographs of the Holodomor from 1932 to 1933 that provide photographic evidence of the mass hunger of the Ukrainian people at the time.

Life

Alexander Wienerberger was born in Vienna into a family of mixed origins. Despite the fact that his father was Jewish and his mother was Czech, according to his daughter, Alexander considered himself an Austrian and an atheist.

From 1910 to 1914 he studied at the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Vienna .

During the First World War he was mobilized into the Austro-Hungarian army , took part in battles against the Russian army and was captured in 1915.

In 1917 he was allowed to move to Moscow, where he and friends founded a chemical laboratory. In autumn 1919 he tried to escape from Soviet Russia via Estonia to Austria with forged papers , but in Pskow he was arrested by Cheka and convicted of espionage. After a few weeks, however, he managed to escape, he returned to Moscow and took over a paint factory as a tenant. He was imprisoned again from autumn 1923 to April 1924. Wienerberger was appointed an engineer for the manufacture of varnishes and paints and later worked in factories for the manufacture of explosives.

In 1927 his marriage to Josefine Rönimois failed. The ex-wife stayed in Estonia with her daughter Annemarie and son Alexander (later Annemarie moved to Austria).

In 1928 Wienerberger visited his relatives in Vienna for the first time after his imprisonment and married Lilly Zimmermann, the daughter of a manufacturer from Schwechat. On his return to Moscow, the restrictions that allowed his wife to move to the Soviet Union were lifted. In 1931 his wife was allowed to return to Vienna for a short time, where she gave birth to their daughter Margot.

In the early 1930s, the Wienerberger family lived in Moscow, where Alexander was employed at a chemical plant. In 1932 he was transferred to Lyubuchany (Moscow Oblast) as technical director of a plastics factory, and in 1933 he was transferred to the same position in Kharkov .

Photographic evidence of the 1932–1933 famine

A photo of a hungry girl from Kharkov is one of the most famous photos of the Holodomor (by Alexander Wienerberger).

When Wienerberger lived in Kharkov, the then capital of the Ukrainian SSR , he witnessed the Holodomor , a massive famine, and photographed the scenes he saw on the streets of the city, despite the threat of arrest by the NKVD .

During his stay in Kharkov, Alexander Wienerberger secretly took around 100 photographs of the city during the Holodomor. His photographs show lines of hungry people in grocery stores, starving children, corpses of people in the streets of Kharkov, and mass graves of hungry victims. The engineer took his photos with the German Leica camera, which was probably sent to him by friends from abroad.

Wienerberger left for Austria in 1934 and, with the help of the Austrian embassy, ​​sent negatives by diplomatic mail. Austrian diplomats insisted on such caution, as a possible discovery of photographs during border control could threaten his life. After his return to Vienna, Wienerberger gave the pictures to Cardinal Theodor Innitzer , who, together with the Secretary General of the International Committee of National Minorities, Ewald Ammende, presented them to the League of Nations .

In 1934 the Fatherland Front in Austria published Wienerberger's photos in a small brochure entitled “Russia as It Really Is”, but without mentioning the author.

Wienerberger's photographs were first made available to the public in 1935 thanks to their publication in the book “Muss Russland Hungern?” By Ewald Ammende . Wienerberger's authorship was not mentioned in the publication for security reasons.

In 1938 Wienerberger proudly pointed out in a series of articles in the Salzburger Volksblatt that his photos had been included in the Anti-Comintern exhibition and the “ The Eternal Jew ” exhibition .

In 1939 Alexander Wienerberger published his own book of memories of life in the Soviet Union in Austria, in which two chapters are dedicated to the Holodomor. The photos were also included in his memoir, published in 1942.

In 1944 Wienerberger served as a liaison officer for the Russian Liberation Army . After the war, he managed to avoid extradition to Soviet troops - he penetrated the American occupation zone in Salzburg, where he died in 1955.

To date, Wienerberger's photos have been republished in many other works and are exhibited in the Canadian Museum of Human Rights in Winnipeg in particular .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c "Це був геноцид": історія британської фотохудожниці, яка ширить пам'ять про Голодомор . BBC Україна. 23 листопада 2018. Retrieved November 23, 2018.
  2. ↑ Russia as it really is !, ed. v. of the Fatherland Front, responsible for the content: Dr. Ferdinand Krawiec, Vienna 1934, 16 pp.
  3. ↑ Dr. Ewald Ammende, does Russia have to go hungry? The fates of people and nations in the Soviet Union, Vienna 1935, XXIII, 355 pages. With 22 fig
  4. ↑ Alexander Wienerberger, Hard on hard. Engineer in Soviet Russia for 15 years. A factual report, Salzburg 1939
  5. ↑ Alexander Wienerberger, To a load of salt in the GPU cellar. Experiences of a German engineer in Soviet Russia, with drawings by Günther Büsemeyer, Gütersloh [1942], 32 pp.

Web links

Commons : Photographs by Alexander Wienerberger  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Wienerberger, Alexander
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian chemical engineer
DATE OF BIRTH December 8, 1891
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH 5th January 1955
Place of death Salzburg