Peter Rindl

Peter Rindl (born 1915 in Vienna ; † July 3, 1982 in New Delhi ) was an Austrian journalist . Rindl fought with the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War in 1937 and was arrested after the Wehrmacht invaded Austria and taken to the Dachau concentration camp .

Life

Rindl's father was a well-known criminal defense attorney who was believed to have been murdered in Auschwitz. His stepfather, who as an arms dealer had good relations with the National Socialists and consistently covered Peter Rindl's Jewish mother throughout the Nazi period, was able to obtain an “erroneous discharge” from Dachau. Rindl was ordered to go to his parents' apartment after his arrival in Vienna and report to the police. However, he drove directly to what was then Vienna-Aspern Airport and, in agony, was able to convince a KLM pilot to “put a pilot's cap on me and smuggle me out in the cockpit”. He only found out after the war that the police had been waiting for him in his parents' apartment, as he suspected. It seems certain that those who were determined to actively fight against the National Socialists succeeded in joining the French army after emigrating to England on paths that seem adventurous from today's point of view, but exemplary at the time.

He returned to England after the war and was sent to Vienna by the Communist Party to join the newly founded communist evening newspaper Der Abend as chief reporter . He gradually moved away from the KPÖ and became editor-in-chief of the New Forward . After he had observed from his office window - and this was his own account - how Russians were dragging a civilian into a car and had written an editorial entitled “This is not how it works, comrades!”, He broke with the communist party. He worked for the newspapers Freiheit and Die Furche and lived in Vienna, went on extensive trips and worked as a newspaper correspondent in India.

From 1964 to 1967, Rindl was a press attaché in Tokyo . Since he was not granted parental leave, he quit in order to write a large book on all facets of the subject of "Death in India". Among other things, he lived for some time in a flat-sharing community with Indian beggars, sharing their food consisting of beggars and waste. On July 3, 1982, he died of a stroke while riding in New Delhi, but the first death reports from the Austrian Foreign Ministry incorrectly mentioned a motorcycle accident.

Rindl's half-sister Trude Ackermann , with whom he had a very good relationship, was a long-time castle actress and acting teacher and was involved in the film about the Comedian Harmonists . His adopted daughter Rosy, whom he "picked up on the street" after several childless marriages in India, lives in Vienna.

Publications

• The obedient rebels. Workers in Japan. Europa Verlag, Vienna 1968.
• Make of the muzzle of the rifle. Nationalism and Communism in Southeast Asia. Wollzeilen Verlag, Vienna 1969.