Egon Berliner

Egon Friedrich Berliner (born May 9, 1923 in Vienna , † April 4, 1945 in Graz ) was an Austro- British officer in the British secret service and resistance fighter in the German Reich . From 1943 Berliner was called Michael O'Hara and had the code names Friedrich Knoll , FM Chirgwin and Frederico Hofer .

Egon Berliner was the son of the Jewish bank manager Egon Berliner and Maria Humer, who came from Warsaw and who later converted to the Roman Catholic faith, who owned a fashion salon. Berliner attended secondary school in Vienna and was excluded from school after joining . In 1939 he fled to Great Britain for political and “racial” reasons. He worked as a mechanic in Cornwall but was interned as an enemy alien in 1940 and then shipped to Canada.

In 1941 he enlisted in the Pioneer Corps and was able to return to England. Initially a driver with the Royal Engineers, he was then a mechanic with the Royal Army Service Corps and the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers.

In the spring of 1943 he was recruited by the Special Operations Executive (SOE). At the beginning of June 1944 he was waiting in southern Italy to be deployed behind the German lines. As part of Operation Icecream , he parachuted with two Italians near Mantua at the end of July. This operation meant his promotion to lieutenant. He was supposed to advance from Mantua via Bolzano to Innsbruck to support communist resistance fighters.

After the jump, however, he lost contact with his comrades and was considered missing for a long time. It was not until October that he reappeared at the base in Bari . In February 1945 he was to establish contact with the social democratic resistance fighters as part of Operation Evansville . For this purpose he jumped off near Graz. But that failed and he tried to get through to the Slovenian partisans. In this attempt, however, he was captured by the Germans and severely abused by the Gestapo .

He was liquidated in the SS barracks in Wetzelsdorf just before the end of the war on April 4, 1945.

literature

• E. Lebensaft:  Berliner, Egon . In: Austrian Biographical Lexicon 1815–1950 . 2nd revised edition (online only).