Josef Angermann

Josef Angermann (born October 25, 1912 in Innsbruck , † January 8, 1944 in Vienna ) was an Austrian typesetter and communist. He was a resistance fighter against National Socialism and Austrofascism .

Life

Angermann learned the typesetter's trade after completing his school career in Vienna. In the early 1930s he became a member of the KPÖ and in 1933 was imprisoned for two weeks for “illegal” activity for the party. After the armed uprising against the Austro-Fascist corporate state under Engelbert Dollfuss was put down in mid-February 1934 , Angermann was imprisoned for ten months as a member of the Republican Protection Association . Due to “illegal” activities for the KPÖ, two more weeks of imprisonment followed. At the end of 1935 he emigrated to Czechoslovakia . From 1936 he studied at the International Lenin School in Moscow and was then summoned by the party leadership of the KPÖ to Paris , where he worked as a journalist for the central organ, the Austrian Red Flag . After the " Anschluss of Austria " to the German Reich , he stayed illegally as an instructor in Vienna under the code names "Leo Holzer" and "Karl Wendl".

During the Second World War , Angermann was arrested in mid-December 1940 by members of the security police in Paris . Angermann, whose communist activities the Gestapo was aware of through the police files taken over by the Austrian authorities, was sent to the Dachau concentration camp . On June 10, 1941, Angermann was transferred from there to Vienna, where he was identified by the Gestapo and imprisoned until October 18, 1941. Then Angermann was drafted into the Wehrmacht and relocated to the Eastern Front in April 1942 . In September 1942 he was able to defend the Red Army .

The foreign leadership of the KPÖ, now in exile in Moscow, prepared Angermann for a covert deployment in Austria. Disguised as a member of the Wehrmacht , Angermann was dropped off as an agent with a radio station behind the German lines in Austria as a parachutist. Angermann came to a party comrade in Vienna. Despite conspiracy, the Gestapo became aware of the plan that enemy agents would be dropped behind the German lines, and they searched for Angermann at full speed.

“On June 11, 1943, it became known to the intelligence service that Communist partisans were looking for quarters for parachute agents who had been dropped off from Soviet aircraft in Wehrmacht uniform behind the German lines and were to be deployed in Vienna. In the course of the extensive investigation, which was carried out immediately, it was found that the parachute agent was the typesetter Josef Angermann. On the basis of systematic surveillance of Angermann's circle of relatives and friends, Angermann was arrested on June 16, 1943. He resisted his arrest as best he could and made use of his pistol, but the weapon failed, apparently as a result of a failure in the ammunition. He confesses [...] that he defected to the Russians on the Eastern Front in September 1942. "

- From the daily report of the Gestapo Vienna No. 6, 18.-21. 6. 1943

Angermann was interrogated by Johann Sanitzer , who was also in charge of the “sabotage, radio and parachute combat” department at the Vienna Gestapo. In the end, Sanitzer tried to force Angermann to play a radio game with the Moscow headquarters in order to deceive them. Probably due to the mistreatment and Angermann's refusal to cooperate, he snatched the bayonet from a security guard in the Gestapo interrogation room on Morzinplatz and inflicted severe neck injuries. He succumbed to these injuries in early 1944.

literature

• Willi Weinert: "He died for Austria's freedom" - On the 65th anniversary of the death of Josef Angermann . In: Alfred-Klahr-Gesellschaft - Mitteilungen, Issue 1 of March 2009, pp. 5–6. (pdf; 606 kB)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Quoted in: Documentation archive of the Austrian resistance: Identifying card index of the Gestapo Vienna, entry: Josef Angermann, Vienna ( Memento from December 20, 2010 in the Internet Archive )