Helene Legradi

Helene Legradi , also known by her first married name, Helene Sokal , (born March 26, 1903 in Znaim ; † 1990 ) was an Austrian lawyer and communist resistance fighter against National Socialism .

Early years

As the daughter of the women's rights activist, teacher and school director Franziska Urschler and the teacher Rudolf Mirna, she grew up in Znojmo and attended the girls' college there . She then studied political science and economics , received his doctorate in 1926 for Dr. sc. pol. and in 1936 to Dr. iur . She married the lawyer Sokal, with whom she had three children. She found a job as a trainee lawyer in a law firm in Vienna .

resistance

In 1936 she joined the Communist Party of Austria (KPÖ), which was banned under Austrofascism . She worked with Theodor Pawlin. He was arrested by the Gestapo in February 1941 as head of the Provincial Commission of the KPÖ . When she was sure that she would no longer be caught in the ensuing wave of arrests, she joined the Maier-Messner resistance group . Her future husband, the chemist and director of the Wiener Wander-Gesellschaft , Theodor Legradi established contact with Heinrich Maier .

Sokal and Legradi took over the accommodation of the persecuted in the group (so -called submarines ), the smuggling of such persons abroad and their support with funds raised in the closest circle.

In 1942 it was recognized as the most important task that a connection with the Allies should be established and maintained, and that one would get an assurance from them in the sense of the later Moscow Declaration . The aim was to make provision for the time of the invasion in agreement with the victorious powers in order to avoid final fighting and destruction. Maier, Sokal and Legradi drew up a corresponding memorandum, which also gave an overview of the economic and mood conditions in the country. Helene Sokal learned this eleven-page document by heart. With a forged letter of invitation allegedly about an inheritance in Swiss francs , she received permission to travel to Switzerland via the Vienna foreign exchange office . In the summer of 1942 she was able to write down the memorandum in Switzerland and hand the paper over to an acquaintance of Maier, the theology professor Otto Karrer, in Lucerne . He promised to forward it to the English politician Cripps and the Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov via the English consul he knew. As confirmation of receipt of the memorandum, a request was made to mention the password on May 1, 1942 on the radio. This password was actually sent by the BBC a few weeks later , with no response from Moscow.

After it became known that Theodor Pawlin had been sentenced to death in September 1942, Helene Sokal drove to Berlin with Theodor Pawlin's wife Eva, who had also worked as an assistant in the law firm for a number of years, to seek mitigation in person from the attorney at law, Ernst Lautz of judgment to ask. He denied with the words: “There is no mercy for functionaries!” Theodor Pawlin was executed in January 1943.

When the Maier-Messner group was broken up, Helene Sokal was arrested by the Gestapo on April 4, 1944. In July 1944, she successfully faked appendicitis and was taken to the General Hospital . There she managed to escape a few days after the operation. Until the liberation of Vienna, she lived as a “submarine” in the city.

On April 5, 1945, Sokal asked Cardinal Theodor Innitzer and Prelate Jakob Fried, at the beginning of the struggle for Vienna, to ring the Pummerin as a signal for the capture of the city in order to save unnecessary fighting, but this was refused by Innitzer.

In the Second Republic

In April 1945, Helene Sokal, as a representative of the KPÖ, was involved in talks with the Red Army in Palais Auersperg about the appointment of a Vienna mayor. Until Johann Koplenig's return from Moscow, she also represented the KPÖ in the Vienna City Hall , where she held initial talks with the SPÖ together with three-day mayor Rudolf Prikryl and Klotilda Hrdlicka .

After the war, she married Theodor Legradi in 1945.

Helene Legradi was active in the Federation of Democratic Women in Austria and in the peace movement. Politically she tried to advance the legal reform for equality of women and wrote numerous papers on it.

Josef Dobretsberger brought her to his newly established office for East-West Trade in 1952 because of her knowledge of economics , where she became the managing director and where she was active until the end of the office in 1989. Numerous contacts were made to China, where Helene Legradi also traveled several times.

"Business relationships help peace, because those who trade with one another do not shoot themselves."

- Helene Legradi

Since 1980 she is said to have been - without her knowledge - a source of information for the Enlightenment Headquarters (HVA), the GDR foreign intelligence service of the Stasi . In addition, information that she received from East Berlin and that she distributed in the quarterly circular messages for East-West trade should have contained propaganda produced by the HVA.

Helene Legradi remained a member of the KPÖ until the end of her life. She died in 1990 and was buried on February 9, 1990 at the Inzersdorfer Friedhof .

Works

• Helene Legradi: ... and tomorrow I'll be a lay judge . What the people's judge should know about his office . Globus-Verlag, Vienna 1948.
• Helene Legradi, Edmund Rudolf Fiala: Handbook of Austrian Eastern Trade . Austrian Office for East-West Trade, Vienna 1967.
• Helene Legradi: And in Marco Polo's footsteps. A short history of Austrian trade with the east. Löcker, Vienna 1986, ISBN 978-3-85409-097-7 .
• Helene Legradi: The other Vienna. Experiences from the years 1944/45 . In: Materials on Contemporary History . No. 5 . Geyer Edition, Vienna / Salzburg 1989, ISBN 978-3-85090-132-1 .

supporting documents

1. ↑ Legradi, Helene. In: Ilse Korotin (ed.): BiografıA. Lexicon of Austrian Women. Volume 2: I-O. Böhlau, Vienna / Cologne / Weimar 2016, ISBN 978-3-205-79590-2 , p. 1941 f.
2. ^ ^{A b c} Manfred Mugrauer: A "gang of crooks, swindlers and naive people" . In: DÖW (Ed.): Yearbook 2016: Fanatiker, Duty Fulfiller, Resistant . Vienna 2016, ISBN 978-3-901142-66-6 , pp. 121–122, 137–138 ( online on the DÖW website (PDF; 542 kB)).
3. ↑ ^{a b c d} Helene Legradi: The other Vienna. Experiences from the years 1944/54 . In: Erika Weinzierl , Rudolf G. Ardelt , Karl Stuhlpfarrer (eds.): Materials on contemporary history . tape 5 . Geyer Edition, Vienna / Salzburg, ISBN 3-85090-132-7 , foreword by Gerhard Schäffer , p. 7-13 (n.d.).
4. ^ Siegfried Beer : "Arcel / Cassia / Redbird": The Maier-Messner resistance group and the American war secret service OSS in Bern, Istanbul and Algiers 1943/44 . In: DÖW (Hrsg.): Yearbook 1993: Focus on resistance . 1993, p. 77 f .
5. ↑ Helene Legradi: The other Vienna. Experiences from the years 1944/54 . In: Erika Weinzierl, Rudolf G. Ardelt, Karl Stuhlpfarrer (eds.): Materials on contemporary history . tape 5 . Geyer Edition, Vienna / Salzburg, ISBN 3-85090-132-7 , p. 21 (no year).
6. ↑ Helene Legradi: The other Vienna. Experiences from the years 1944/54 . In: Erika Weinzierl, Rudolf G. Ardelt, Karl Stuhlpfarrer (eds.): Materials on contemporary history . tape 5 . Geyer Edition, Vienna / Salzburg, ISBN 3-85090-132-7 , p. 41 (no year).
7. ^ Gertrude Enderle-Burcel : Josef Dobretsberger - a political cross-border commuter in east-west trade . In: Gertrude Enderle-Burcel, Dieter Stiefel , Alice Teichova (eds.): “Zarte Gang” - Austria and the European planned economy countries. Communications from the Austrian State Archives . Special volume 9th Studienverlag, Innsbruck 2006, ISBN 978-3-7065-4336-1 , p. 147-149 .
8. ↑ Jan von Flocken , Eberhard Vogt: Stasi: Wolfs Princess in Vienna . In: Focus . No. March 10 , 1999 ( online on Focus website).