Hubert Mayr

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Hubert Mayr alias Jean Georgeau alias Sepp Innerkofler ( November 28, 1913 in Innsbruck - 1945 ) was an Austrian socialist and resistance fighter against fascism and National Socialism. He was honored posthumously in February 2011 for his services to the liberation of Austria from the National Socialist tyranny .

Life

Youth and education

Hubert Mayr was born as the son of the regional forest warden Karl Mayr and the housewife Maria Mayr, born Rantner, born. His young mother died in childbed just 14 months after the birth. He then grew up with different sisters of his mother and father. Hubert Mayr graduated from elementary school in Baumkirchen and then switched to the Josefinum in Volders , where his academic performance was rather poor. His strict and deeply religious father therefore decided to send him to a clergy-run boarding school at the Paulinum Episcopal Gymnasium in Schwaz . Since the teachers accused the student of a lack of discipline, Karl Mayr took the boy back from school at the age of 13 and enrolled him in a nursery school attached to the Benedictine monastery in Zirl . One of the trainers there was able to convince Karl Mayr that it would be advantageous for his son to continue the training he had started in Germany. Together with this man named Bernthaler, Hubert Mayr traveled to Andernach in the Rhineland in 1928 , where he found an apprenticeship in a horticultural company. Bernthaler tried to get closer to the boy sexually, which he did not allow. The later biographer Hubert Mayrs emphasized that the young person “defended himself against the attacks of his guardian” and “did not allow himself to be made a victim”, thus exhibiting a behavior that would later characterize him.

In Andernach, after a short time, Hubert Mayr was in contact with the local section of the socialist children's friends and with representatives of the union. He also announced his departure from the Catholic Church in the police station. He then came into conflict with the management of the Catholic home school in which he lived and spent the night in a social democratic printing plant in Koblenz . At the instigation of his indignant father, Hubert Mayr returned to Tyrol at the beginning of 1931 .

In the underground

Due to these incidents, Hubert Mayr's relationship with his father deteriorated noticeably. The now almost 18-year-old preferred to live with relatives again and not with his father and stepmother. He reduced contacts to the bare minimum and sometimes refused visits from his father. These divergences were reinforced by the fact that Hubert Mayr joined the Social Democratic Workers' Party (SDAP) in accordance with his new political convictions and also became active in its paramilitary department, the Republican Protection Association founded in 1923/24 . After the Social Democrats were banned in 1934, Mayr went underground and was briefly imprisoned in May 1936. Released from prison, he could not find work despite having completed his training as a forest ranger.

Spain, North Africa, Italy

Mayr left Austria and went to Spain, where, as a staunch opponent of fascism , he joined the International Brigades in 1937 and fought against the putschists under General Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Mayr was wounded and contracted tuberculosis . Before the victory of Franco's troops in April 1939, he was able to withdraw to the south of France with an Austro-German contingent, where he was temporarily interned. Freed again, he supported France's defense efforts after the attack by the German Wehrmacht by working in a work company.

After the French army surrendered, Mayr fled to Algeria , where he worked as a gardener in a plantation. Under pressure from the Germans, the Vichy regime searched for him without getting hold of him. After the Allies landed in North Africa in 1942, Mayr made himself available to the British in the fight against the Axis powers and was assigned to the Special Operations Executive (SOE) there. His group was discovered during an act of sabotage against the Wehrmacht in Hammamet , Tunisia , and he was taken prisoner again.

Mayr was transferred to a camp in southern Italy , where he managed to escape after the landing of American and British troops in September 1943. He managed to get through to the Allies and henceforth became involved in the Austrian Section of the SOE. From bases in northern Italy, where partisans had brought larger areas under their control, he was supposed to advance into his home Tyrol under the code names Jean Georgeau and Sepp Innerkofler with his own command and organize the resistance there. In Auservillgraten in East Tyrol he built up a resistance group, which, however, was overthrown by treason, so that Mayr had to hide in the mountains. Several members of his commando were arrested or shot. All traces of Mayr were lost; since the turn of the year 1944/45 it has been considered lost . In 1945 the SOE declared him dead.

According to recent research by the historian Peter Pirker and the journalist Ivo Jevnikar, Hubert Mayer managed to escape from the Gestapo in Carinthia to join the Slovenian partisans in October 1944. At the beginning of November 1944, however, he was not handed over to the British liaison officers in Slovenia as requested, but instead arrested by the OZNA secret police and interrogated in Gorenja Trebuša. This emerges from an interrogation protocol of the OZNA. Then his tracks are lost. Although there is no reliable evidence for this, it is likely that Hubert Mayr was executed as a "British spy" by the OZNA. The same is likely to have happened to Hubert Mayr's companion, Rudolf Moser, a refugee from the Wehrmacht, from Dellach in the Gail Valley.

Hubert Mayr's father was abducted to Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1940 and murdered there. For religious reasons, he had publicly refused to send his children to the Hitler Youth .

Hubert Mayr was married to Lola Sánchez from Spain, whom he had met as a Spanish fighter.

Processing and awarding

In 1988, a memorial for the Austrian fighters in Spain was erected in Vienna's central cemetery . Leopold Grausam, jun. was designed. In 1995, the memorial was supplemented by two additional panels, also by Grausam jun. were created. The two additional panels, which are headed "For Spain and Austria's freedom 1936–1939", contain the names of 264 Austrian fighters in Spain; Hubert Mayr is also mentioned by name.

Mayr's life and fate remained hidden from a wider public for decades. In 2004, based on British and private sources, the journalist and political scientist Peter Pirker first published Hubert Mayr's resistance activities as part of the British war intelligence service SOE in the magazine zeitgeschichte and in the daily newspaper Die Presse . In 2005, the young historian Peter Wallgram published a biography of Mayr, which he had compiled as part of his diploma thesis on contemporary history at the University of Innsbruck , for which he visited Hans Landauer's archive of Austrian fighters in Spain in the documentation archive of the Austrian resistance and other collections, as well as evaluating documents from family property. Wallgram completed his diploma thesis supervised by Professor Klaus Eisterer in 2004 and published it in 2005 in Innsbrucker StudienVerlag .

On February 11, 2011, Hubert Mayr was posthumously awarded the Decoration of Honor for Services to the Liberation of Austria . A younger stepbrother of Mayr, Hans Mayr (born 1926), accepted the award. The laudator was Peter Wallgram. In 2012, the aegide association erected a memorial in Greifenburg (Carinthia) for the resistance fighters and persecuted in the Upper Drautal, which also commemorates Hubert Mayr. At the opening of the memorial, the writer Lydia Mischkulnig carried her text “Esperanza, Ship of the Alps. A song for Hubert Mayr as a prelude to the memorial ”. According to British sources, Hubert Mayr was last seen in Dellach im Drautal in early January 1945. Hubert Mayr is also remembered by name on the Liberation Monument in Innsbruck.

literature

  • Peter Pirker : Subversion of German rule. The British War Intelligence Service SOE and Austria. Vienna University Press, Göttingen 2012, ISBN 978-3-89971-990-1 , pp. 491–494.
  • Lydia Mischkulnig: Esperanza, ship of the Alps. A song for Hubert Mayr as a prelude to the memorial. In: Peter Pirker, Anita Profunser (ed.): From memory to memory. The victims of National Socialism in the Upper Drautal, Klagenfurt / Celovec 2012, pp. 162–163.
  • Horst Schreiber , Gerald Steinacher , Philipp Trafojer: National Socialism and Fascism in Tyrol and South Tyrol. Victims, perpetrators, opponents. StudienVerlag, Innsbruck 2008, ISBN 978-3-7065-4423-8 , p. 319 ff.
  • Peter Wallgram: Hubert Mayr 1913–1945. A life fighting for freedom. StudienVerlag, Innsbruck 2005, ISBN 978-3-7065-4116-9 .
  • Peter Pirker: Scheinwelt Ostmark, ideal Austria. The resistance of the Tyrolean socialist and SOE agent Hubert Mayr. In: Patrick Martin-Smith (author), Peter Pirker (ed.): Resistance from heaven. Operations in Austria by the British secret service SOE in 1944. Czernin, Vienna 2004, ISBN 3-7076-0182-X , pp. 250–286.
  • Peter Pirker: Agents in Field. For the recruitment of employees of the "Austrian Section" in the British secret service "Special Operations Executive" 1942-1944. In: Zeitgeschichte, 2/2004, pp. 88–120.
  • Peter Pirker: In the end there is missing. In: Die Presse / Spectrum . October 16, 2004, p. IV.
  • Peter Pirker, Ivo Jevnikar: As secret as possible. In: Die Presse / Spectrum . April 14, 2018, p. III, online at aegide.at (PDF; 2.36 MB).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Peter Wallgram, Hubert Mayr 1913–1945, p. 15.
  2. ↑ Peter Wallgram, Hubert Mayr 1913–1945, p. 17.
  3. ↑ Peter Wallgram, Hubert Mayr 1913–1945, p. 18.
  4. ↑ Peter Wallgram, Hubert Mayr 1913–1945, p. 19.
  5. ↑ Peter Wallgram, Hubert Mayr 1913–1945, p. 21.
  6. ↑ Peter Wallgram, Hubert Mayr 1913–1945, p. 33 f.
  7. ↑ Peter Pirker, Scheinwelt Ostmark, ideal image Austria, p. 266.
  8. ↑ Matthias Christler: Last honor for a forgotten hero . In: tt.com . February 13, 2011, accessed February 13, 2011.
  9. ↑ Peter Pirker, Ivo Jevnikar: As secret as possible . In: Die Presse / Spectrum . April 14, 2018, p. III .
  10. ^ Memorial to the Austrian fighters in Spain . In: nachkriegsjustiz.at . Retrieved February 12, 2011.
  11. ^ Peter Pirker: Agents in Field. P. 102.
  12. ↑ Peter Pirker: In the end there is missing. IV.
  13. ↑ Supervision: Ao. Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr. Klaus Eisterer → Wallgram Peter […]. In: Theses supervised by members of the Institute for Contemporary History. University of Innsbruck , Institute for Contemporary History ( online ; accessed February 11, 2011).
  14. ^ Lydia Mischkulnig: Esperanza, Ship of the Alps. A song for Hubert Mayr .
personal data
SURNAME Mayr, Hubert
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Georgeau, Jean; Innerkofler, Sepp (alias)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian socialist and resistance fighter against fascism and National Socialism
DATE OF BIRTH November 28, 1913
PLACE OF BIRTH innsbruck
DATE OF DEATH 1945