Maria Plieseis

Maria Plieseis (born August 15, 1920 in Wolfsegg am Hausruck as Maria Wagner ; † January 9, 2003 in Sankt Florian near Linz ) was an Austrian resistance fighter against National Socialism in the Salzkammergut and a member of the KPÖ . After the Second World War she was married to Sepp Plieseis and in 1947 was one of the suspects in the Bad Ischl milk trial .

youth

She was born in 1920 as Maria Wagner in Wolfsegg am Hausruck. The small farming and mining community, in which lignite was mined, was one of the scenes of the Austrian Civil War in February 1934 . After attending secondary school, she completed a two-year training course as a seamstress and, in 1938, when Austria joined Austria , she was a student nurse in Linz .

Then she worked as a sister for the Catholic "Liebeswerk" in Linz and Steyr and later in a home for difficult-to-educate children in Gleink, now a district of Steyr. She then moved to Bad Ischl , where she married the teacher Walter Ganhör in 1941. On August 3, 1941, she gave birth to their son Peter Ganhör. But a short time later, on October 21, 1941, her husband fell as a Wehrmacht soldier at the front and Maria became a widow at the age of 21.

Resistance in the Salzkammergut

In Bad Ischl she came into contact with anti-fascist resistance groups, which began to build up an illegal network in the upper Salzkammergut. In 1942 she also joined the KPÖ, which was severely persecuted under National Socialism. In autumn 1943 she was involved in the liberation of Sepp Plieseis from the Vigaun satellite camp near Hallein. After he had fled over the mountains to Ischl, he went into hiding for a short time in the apartment of Maria's mother, Maria Huemer. As a result, she was involved in the Willy-Fred resistance group that came into being at the end of 1943 . She herself took on courier services to exchange messages between those who went into hiding in various places in the Salzkammergut, and she participated in the illegal procurement of food to supply the partisans.

After the war

After the end of the Second World War she married Sepp Plieseis and lived with him in Bad Ischl. In 1947 there was a hunger demonstration against the reduction in milk rations for small children, which escalated and also led to anti-Semitic riots. The US administration in the American zone of occupation was looking for those responsible. It came to the Bad Ischler milk trial . Above all, members of the Ischl communists were named as guilty, among them Maria Plieseis. In contrast to the others, Maria Plieseis escaped persecution by the US military jurisdiction by fling to the Soviet-occupied part of Austria.

Only after the conclusion of the Austrian State Treaty did she return to the Salzkammergut and from 1961 to 1970 worked as a tailor for the traditional costume manufacturer Lodenfrey in Bad Ischl, where she was also the works council chairwoman until 1969. From 1970 until her retirement, she worked in the KPÖ district secretariat in Gmunden.

In 1985 the filmmaker Ruth Beckermann made a short documentary about the resistance in the Salzkammergut, in which she also interviewed the female resistance fighters who were still living at the time, including Resi Pesendorfer , Leni Egger and Maria Plieseis. This 37-minute film with the title The Hedgehog is an important contemporary witness document today.

Maria Plieseis died at the age of 82 on January 9, 2003 in Sankt Florian near Linz.

swell

• Peter Kammerstätter: Material collection on the resistance and partisan movement Willy-Fred in the upper Salzkammergut - Ausseerland 1943–1945 , self-published, Linz 1978
• Berger, Karin (ed.): The sky is blue. Can be - Women in the Resistance, Austria 1938–1945 . Vienna: Promedia-Verlag (Edition traces), 1985, 272 pages, ISBN 3-900478-05-8
• Christian Topf: On the trail of the partisans. Historical hikes in the Salzkammergut . Edition Geschichte der Heimat, Grünbach bei Freistadt 1996, new edition 2006, ISBN 3-900943-32-X

Web links

• KPÖ Upper Austria: Obituary for Maria Plieseis (1920-2003)