Hans Maršálek

Hans Maršálek at the liberation ceremony in Mauthausen 2001

Hans Maršálek , actually Johann Karl Maršálek (born July 19, 1914 in Vienna ; † December 9, 2011 ibid) was an Austrian typesetter , political activist and criminal investigator. After the Second World War he worked as a chronicler of the Mauthausen concentration camp .

Life

Maršálek was born in Vienna as the son of a Czech working-class couple and learned the profession of typesetter.

Enthusiastic about the ideals of socialism at an early age and a member of the Socialist Workers' Youth , Maršálek joined the Red Aid in 1936 and fought underground against the fascist Catholic corporate state .

After being drafted into the Wehrmacht , he fled to Prague and worked there in the social democratic emigrant organization. After switching to the KPÖ , in 1940 he was persuaded to cross the border at breakneck speed from Prague to Vienna; there he was supposed to recruit people for acts of sabotage. His camouflage - he attended the commercial academy under his real name and worked in a printing company - was exposed, and so he was arrested by the Gestapo in Prague in the spring of 1941 .

After Maršálek had survived the torture of the police and the proceedings brought against him, he was taken to Mauthausen concentration camp in September 1942; Due to his previous professional knowledge, he managed to find accommodation in the camp's office after just a few weeks. From May 1944 he became a camp clerk.

Maršálek played a leading role in the political resistance of the prisoners of the Mauthausen concentration camp and organized acts of sabotage relevant to armaments and the relocation of prisoners. As far as possible, he and his organization also succeeded in providing practical help to the prisoners and in regulating health and nutrition issues better than before. Shortly before the camp was liberated, largely chaotic conditions, at least within the camp, were avoided.

After the liberation in May 1945, Maršálek worked from the end of May 1945 to 1963 as a criminal investigator with a special assignment for the Austrian Ministry of the Interior and, among other things, helped to research war criminals and Nazi officials and bring them to an orderly process. In 1946 he married Anna Vavak , who was imprisoned in the Ravensbrück concentration camp and at times did forced labor in the Siemens camp in Ravensbrück .

From 1964 until his retirement in 1976 he was director of the Mauthausen Memorial and Museum. Everything that happens in the concentration camp memorial today is based on his work. Most recently he was senior police officer and councilor .

Maršálek was instrumental in founding the Austrian camp community Mauthausen and the Comité International de Mauthausen and held leading positions until his death.

Maršálek died on December 9, 2011 at the age of 97 in Vienna. The burial took place on December 30, 2011 in the fire hall Simmering . His urn was buried in the local urn grove in the family grave (Section 5, Group 9, No. 323).

Acting as chronicler of the Mauthausen concentration camp

Hans Maršálek at the award of the honorary doctorate in 2009

Maršálek emerged in the course of his life with numerous anti-fascist and camp chronistic publications; But he became famous for his book The History of the Mauthausen Concentration Camp , the first edition of which appeared in 1980 and reveals both the history of the camp and astonishing details of camp life with terrifying clarity and factual lack of illusion.

Controversy

Maršálek has been awarded numerous prizes for his descriptions, which manage without hatred and yet do not leave out any horror of the existence of the camp. However, he was also violently attacked and accused of one-sided preferential treatment of political prisoners during his time as a camp clerk. Maršálek always reacted to these allegations with great serenity.

Awards

1977: Decoration of honor for services to the liberation of Austria

2009: Honorary doctorate from the Johannes Kepler University Linz “in recognition of his outstanding services to the construction of the Mauthausen Memorial, to the security and development of the camp archive and to the scientific and journalistic processing of the history of the Mauthausen and Gusen concentration camps and the resistance against NS -Regime".

In 2015, the Mauthausen Committee Austria donated the Hans Maršálek Prize in memory of Maršálek for outstanding achievements in the field of commemoration, remembrance and awareness work.

Publications

Hans Maršálek's grave

• The history of the Mauthausen concentration camp. Documentation. 4th edition 2006, ISBN 3-7035-1235-0
• Mauthausen warns! Fight behind barbed wire. Facts, documents and reports about the largest Hitler extermination camp in Austria. Edited by the Mauthausen Committee of the Federal Association of Austrian Concentration Camps and Those Politically Persecuted . Vienna 1950
• The way of a Viennese Czech to a concentration camp , in: Zeitgeschichte 16 (1989).
• Editor with Kurt Hacker for the Austrian camp community Mauthausen: Short story of the Mauthausen concentration camp and its three largest subcamps Gusen, Ebensee, Melk . Vienna 1995

Web links

• Literature by and about Hans Maršálek in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Mauthausen Memorial: Brief curriculum vitae and video interview with Hans Maršálek
2. ^ Newsletter Mauthausen Memorial obituary for Hans Marsalek from December 13, 2011
3. ^ Johann Karl Marsalek in the search for the deceased at friedhoefewien.at
4. ↑ Honoring Austrian freedom fighters. In:  The new reminder call. Journal for Freedom, Law and Democracy , issue 11/1977, p. 2 (online at ANNO ). .
5. ↑ Laudation honorary doctorate ( Memento from December 9, 2014 in the Internet Archive ).
6. ↑ First award of the Hans Maršálek Prize. In: mkoe.at . June 16, 2015, accessed September 19, 2019.