Kurt Welser

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Kurt Welser (* 1929 ; † August 15, 1965 in Switzerland ) was an Austrian member of the South Tyrol Liberation Committee . According to his followers, he was considered "the most active and outstanding figure" of the Austrian BAS wing.

Life

The Innsbruck merchant Kurt Welser was the head of the preparations for the night of fire in North Tyrol, like Heinrich Klier and other young activists. The passionate mountaineer carried out the explosives and weapons transports to South Tyrol. On January 30, 1961, Welser and Heinrich Klier blew up the equestrian statue of Benito Mussolini in front of the power station near Waidbruck .

Kurt Welser, together with Herlinde Molling, organized the explosives for the attacks on the night of fire from June 11th to June 12th, 1961, in which forty high-voltage pylons in South Tyrol were blown up in order to cut off the power supply to the northern Italian industry. On the instructions of the Austrian Minister of Justice, the first jury trial against Kurt Welser took place in December 1961, which led to his conviction.

In 1963 he was arrested again for blowing up the lion monument on the Traunsee-Uferstrasse in Ebensee (Salzkammergut); but he could prove his innocence.

Kurt Welser had a fatal accident on a mountain tour on the Zinalrothorn in Switzerland in autumn 1965 , while the jury trial in Graz was reopened.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Sepp Mitterhofer: Why we couldn't watch. In: Sepp Mitterhofer, Günther Obwegs (Ed.): ... There was no other way. Contemporary witness reports from the South Tyrolean struggle for freedom 2000, pp. 39–57
  2. ↑ Astrid Kofler : Zersprengtes Leben: Women in the South Tyrolean bomb years , p. 482
  3. ↑ Robert Kriechbaumer (Ed.): Die Ära Josef Klaus , Volume 2: From the point of view of contemporaries and in caricatures by Ironimus , p. 210 (Böhlau Verlag). ISBN 978-3-205-99146-5 Online at Google Books
  4. ↑ Rolf Steininger : The Fire Night and what then? South Tyrol and the bombs 1959–1969 . In: Dolomites (special print) . No. 132 , June 10, 2011, p. 34 ff .
  5. ↑ More than a few masts in: Die Presse from May 20, 2011
  6. ↑ Franz Watschinger: bombs and Justice: The first Grazer South Tyrol process in 1961 , 2003
  7. ↑ Rudolf Augstein : The many columns of the judge Seibert , in: Der Spiegel 1970
personal data
SURNAME Welser, Kurt
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian businessman, member of the South Tyrol Liberation Committee
DATE OF BIRTH 1929
DATE OF DEATH August 15, 1965
Place of death Switzerland