Marie Schönfeld

Marie Karoline Schönfeld (born July 13, 1898 in Vienna ; † September 19, 1944 there ) was an Austrian government assistant and resistance fighter against the Nazi regime . She was sentenced to death by the Nazi judiciary and beheaded in the Vienna Regional Court .

Life

Marie Schönfeld and her brother Franz Schönfeld (* 1890) came from a family of civil servants in Währingen and were raised in a strict Catholic sense. They were among the legitimists and advocated the restoration of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. After completing compulsory school, Marie Schönfeld attended a two-year business school and then worked for the City of Vienna. In 1917 she became a civil servant in the Ministry of Public Works. From 1919 to 1934 she was a member of the Christian civil servants' union and the Fatherland Front . Privately, she was a member of the Marian Congregation for the Virgin . From 1938 she worked as a shorthand typist in the clearing office of the property traffic office. Together, the siblings produced “highly treasonable inflammatory and diatribes” and distributed them on the streets and in post boxes from May 1942 until the arrest on May 20, 1943, or sent them by post to various NSDAP and police stations. A leaflet contained a parody of the Deutschlandlied :

"Germany, Germany must disappear from the world,
let's hope that it will soon fall miserably into ruins. [...]
German terror, German cheek, German pressure and German coercion, they
should never torment us, our whole life long. "

- Schönfeld siblings : Anti-National Socialist pamphlet from 1942

Another leaflet sent to the NSDAP Gauleitung Vienna threatened that “we in our stolen Austrian country will slit open your bellies that you have eaten at our expense, tear out your intestines and thus wreath the images of Hitler.” The pamphlets were Written by Franz, Marie helped with the reproduction. The Gestapo recorded a total of around 65 different texts.

Death sentence and execution

Marie and Franz Schönfeld were sentenced to death on July 15, 1944 by the People's Court for “preparing for high treason and favoring the enemy ”.

“In 1942/43, the siblings Franz and Marie Schönfeld jointly produced and distributed numerous anti-subversive pamphlets of the worst content in Vienna and are therefore sentenced to death and loss of honor for life for preparing for the Habsburg separatist high treason and favoring the enemy. [...] There is no place for such people in the German national community. You have made yourself forever dishonorable [...] and must be stamped out of it. "

- People's Court : Justification of the death sentence against Franz and Marie Schönfeld, July 15, 1944

The execution of the Schönfeld siblings by guillotine took place on September 19, 1944 in the Vienna Regional Court .

Commemoration

The names of the siblings can be found on the plaque in the former execution room of the Vienna Regional Court .

swell

• Bailer , Maderthaner , Scholz (ed.): "The enforcement went without any special features". Executions in Vienna, 1938-1945. Vienna, undated, pages 90f. Online version (with three photographs of each sibling): p. 91
• Documentation archive of the Austrian resistance : No longer anonymous , with photos from the identification file of the Gestapo Vienna, accessed on April 10, 2015
• Fine, Erich: The stones speak. Memorials of the Austrian struggle for freedom. Memorials for the victims of fascism. A documentation. Vienna 1975
• Austrian women in resistance : Short biography Marie Karoline Schönfeld , written by Karin Nusko, accessed on April 12, 2015
• Willi Weinert: “You can put me out, but not the fire”: a guide through the grove of honor of Group 40 at the Vienna Central Cemetery for the executed resistance fighters . Wiener Stern-Verlag, 3rd edition 2011 [1]

proof

1. ^ Postwar Justice , accessed April 10, 2015