Julius Madritsch

Julius Madritsch (born August 4, 1906 in Vienna ; † June 11, 1984 ibid.) Was an Austrian rescuer of the Jews who was named " Righteous Among the Nations " by Yad Vashem in 1964 .

Madritsch was drafted into the German armed forces in 1940 . He was a trained textile merchant and was appointed trustee of two Jewish clothing companies near the Krakow ghetto . In 1941 he was also allowed to set up another factory directly on the ghetto area, and later another branch followed at the Tarnow ghetto . In the factories he employed as many Jews as possible (including a large number of unskilled workers) who were thus safe from deportation to extermination camps. Together with his factory manager Raimund Titsch , Madritsch ensured humane working conditions and increased food rations for the Jewish forced laborers, and in some cases there was even kosher food in the factories' kitchens . Together with Oswald Bosko , who was the policeman responsible for guarding the Krakow ghetto, he repeatedly helped Jews to escape from the Warsaw ghetto and smuggled food into it.

In 1942 Julius Madritsch learned of the imminent deportation of the children from the ghetto to Auschwitz . Thereupon Madritsch and Bosko smuggled the children of the workers from the ghetto into the factories, from where they could be taken out of the country or hidden with Polish families. Hundreds of Jewish families who were hiding in cellars and bunkers on the ghetto grounds when the ghetto was "dissolved" in March 1943 were rescued in the same way.

When the ghetto was closed, the workers employed in the factories were interned in the Plaszow concentration camp , from where they could walk to the factories at Madritsch's request. When after September 1943 it was no longer allowed to leave the camp, Madritsch moved his factory to the camp site. Under the pretext of distributing additional food as a "bonus for good performance", he brought large quantities of food into the camp, which he also distributed to inmates who were not employed by him.

When the Plaszow concentration camp was dissolved in September 1944, all efforts by Madritsch and Titsch to protect their workers from deportation by classifying their factories as "war-important production facilities" failed. Only about a hundred people could be accommodated in Oskar Schindler's ammunition factory .

Madritsch died in 1984 and was buried in the Vienna Central Cemetery (group 73, row 14, number 82).

literature

• Daniel Fraenkel, Jakob Borut (ed.): Lexicon of the Righteous Among the Nations: Germans and Austrians. Wallstein Verlag , Göttingen 2005, ISBN 3-89244-900-7 ; P. 334 ff.
• Andrea Löw, Markus Roth: Jews in Krakow under German occupation 1939–1945. Wallstein, Göttingen 2011, ISBN 978-3-8353-0869-5 .
• Melanie Hembera: The Shoah in the Krakow district: Jewish life and German occupation in Tarnów 1939-1945 . Darmstadt: WBG, 2016 ISBN 978-3-534-26786-6

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Julius Madritsch on the website of Yad Vashem (English)