Egon Schönhof

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Egon Oskar Schönhof (born April 9, 1880 in Vienna ; † October 19, 1942 in Auschwitz concentration camp ) was an Austrian lawyer and politician .

Life

Egon Schönhof was born in Vienna as the son of the Jewish lawyer Friedrich Schönhof and converted from Judaism to Roman Catholicism with his father in 1900, at the age of 20 .

Schönhof was a student at the Academic Gymnasium in Vienna before studying law at the University of Vienna from 1898 to 1903 . In 1904 he received his doctorate . After almost six years in which Schönhof had worked as a trainee for other lawyers and in this way acquired practice, he opened his own law firm in Vienna's third district, Landstrasse .

After his military service as a one-year volunteer from 1901 to 1903, he was promoted to lieutenant in the reserve in 1904 . Shortly after the outbreak of the First World War , he joined the Joint Army of Austria-Hungary as a soldier , in which he was promoted to lieutenant colonel in 1914 with signum laudis . Schönhof was taken prisoner by Russia in May 1915 and was interned in numerous forced labor camps over the next five years, most recently in the camp near Kansk in Siberia . When he returned to Austria in 1920, he was not only a free man, but had also changed from a liberal intellectual to a staunch communist , influenced by the October Revolution that he had witnessed .

Soon after, Schönhof joined the Communist Party of Austria (KPÖ) and began to defend comrades in the courts in the 1920s. He was also a lawyer for the KPÖ federal party chairman Johann Koplenig , when he was accused of high treason in 1927 after the Vienna Palace of Justice fire . When he was supposed to defend communists in Romania in 1925, the state forbade him to do so and he was expelled from Romania.

In 1930 he published the guidebook How does a proletarian behave in court? . In the 1928 Red Book against Schober's White Book , on which Schönhof worked, the Vienna Justice Palace fire was described from the perspective of the KPÖ. Schönhof was a candidate for the KPÖ both in the 1927 National Council election and in the subsequent parliamentary election in 1930 . Both times, however, the KPÖ failed to make it into the National Council. In 1932 Schönhof was elected to the board of the Marxist Workers' School (MASCH) of the historian Arnold Reisberg . The school met in a pub in the inner city first district . Here in January 1933 he gave a first lecture against fascism and national socialism . When the KPÖ was banned in autumn 1933, Schönhof lodged a protest with the Constitutional Court , but failed.

During the Austrian Civil War in February 1934, Schönhof did not take on any relevant role, but he nevertheless spent around two years in police custody in the Wöllersdorf detention center. When he was released in 1936, he was placed under police supervision.

On the day Austria was " annexed " to Germany, on March 12, 1938, Schönhof was arrested by the Secret State Police (Gestapo) and taken to the Rossauer Lände police station. On June 17, 1938, he was deported to Dachau concentration camp and on September 22, 1938 to Buchenwald . Although attempts were made to get Schönhof free with a foreign visa, this did not succeed. At the beginning of October 1942, after four years in Buchenwald, Schönhof was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland . The camp records indicate that Schönhof's transport reached the camp on October 17th. Two days after his arrival, on October 19, 1942, Egon Schönhof, who is said to have been physically weakened by the privations, was murdered by the Schutzstaffel (SS) in the sick barracks by injecting gasoline. Other sources deviate from this and state that Schönhof had been in Auschwitz for at least two weeks before his death.

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personal data
SURNAME Schönhof, Egon
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schönhof, Egon Oskar (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian lawyer and politician (KPÖ)
DATE OF BIRTH April 9, 1880
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH October 19, 1942
Place of death Auschwitz concentration camp