Anna Hanika

Anna Hanika ( June 27, 1903 in Vienna - March 14, 1988 there ) was an Austrian clerk and resistance fighter .

life and work

Hanika was born as the youngest child of Therese and Karl Hanika. Her brother's name was Anton. Her sister Johanna later entered the Carmelite Order . The father died when she was six years old. After compulsory school, she was solely responsible for her mother's care. From 1923 until the dissolution of the Christian-Social Union of Community Employees, she was their clerk, after which she worked for a German ball bearing company. The staunch Catholic was won over by her fiancé Rudolf Wallner , Vice Inspector of the Wiener Elektrizitätswerke , to resist the Nazi regime at the end of 1939 and joined the Austrian freedom movement around Karl Lederer . Her tasks included recruiting new comrades and collecting membership fees. She convinced women from her circle of friends to cooperate, such as Margarete Skroch and Stefanie Wotraubek , who sang with her in the church choir. With the help of the informer Otto Hartmann , the Gestapo managed to roll up the group. Hanika was arrested in August 1940 and, along with other members of the Lederer group, charged with preparing for high treason . All attempts by her family to obtain release from custody failed. She was not released from custody until March 10, 1943 for health reasons. She then took Norbert Kastelic , the younger son of the imprisoned resistance fighter Jacob Kastelic , to live with her. He had become a half-orphan due to the early death of his mother. On March 3, 1944, Hanika was sentenced to two years in prison by the People's Court for aiding and abetting in preparation for high treason; the sentence was deemed to have been served by pre-trial detention.

The death penalty was pronounced against her co-defendants Karl Lederer, Alfred Miegl and her fiancé Rudolf Wallner . She was in contact with Wallner and Kastelic until their execution. She also made it possible for Kastelic to see his younger son when visiting prison. In 1945 she got involved in the identification and burial of her executed combatants, and in 1947 she appeared as a witness in the trial of the traitor Otto Hartmann. As a member of the ÖVP comradeship of the politically persecuted, Hanika dedicated herself to the documentation of the “Greater Austrian Freedom Movement” and its members. She summarized her memories of the death of Jakob Kastelic in a written report. In 1954 she took over the guardianship of Kastelic's older son. She also did charitable work and supported the missionary work in Africa by collecting medicine. When her decade-long heart condition worsened, she moved to the nursing home of the Sisters of Mercy in Gumpendorf in 1987 , where she died in March 1988.

literature

• Memories ... As a visitor to the house of death. In: The freedom fighter . Organ of the Fighters for Austria's Freedom, No. 3, September 1994
• Anna Hanika - a woman's life in the shadow of the guillotine. In: The freedom fighter. Organ of the Fighters for Austria's Freedom, No. 4, December 1994, p. 6f.
• Josef Windisch : Austrian freedom movement Kastelic - Lederer - Scholz. In: The freedom fighter. Organ of the Fighters for Austria's Freedom, No. 2, June 1984, p. 7

Web links

• University of Vienna: Hanika, Anna: clerk and resistance fighter , accessed on July 25, 2015