Peter Waller

Peter Waller (born October 21, 1891 in Budapest , † September 8, 1971 in Vienna ) was a political adventurer and self-proclaimed messiah.

Life

Peter Waller was an Austrian captain until 1918. At the end of 1926 he founded a Vardanieri company with the aim of searching for the "Reich Mora" in the Orient. The "Project Ethiopia" was born with the aim of founding his home .

Waller wanted to build his empire with Austrian unemployed and unemployed from the former crown lands and also invent a new language. He described himself as the Warden Wodosch and proclaimed his doctrine of salvation in the Lobau to future emigrants.

He must have been a thoroughly charismatic, if psychologically not entirely stable personality. The newspapers referred to him as the "Messiah von der Lobau" and his following numbered tens of thousands at times. Luxembourgers were also there and there was also a Munich section. In the weekly magazine for colonization, foreign economy and traffic "Übersee" appeared the permanent column "The Wardanieri movement" between 1918 and 1935.

On May 3, 1928, a group of 140 adventurously uniformed Wardanieri with women and children set out on foot over the Semmering towards Tarvisio with their destination Abyssinia after a supplication service in the church of Mauer near Vienna . After weeks of marching, the exhausted group was refused entry to Italy by the Italians. There was a riot and everyone had to go back to Vienna, Munich and Luxembourg.

In 1934 he went to Ecuador as "Colonel of the Colonizing Medical Service in the Ecuadorian Red Cross", as he himself described, in order to find another suitable place for his Wardanieri.

After the dissolution of his movement in 1935, Waller retired as a "grand prince in retirement" to retire in 1938 for the last time. In a letter to the Reich Chancellery, he tried to persuade Hitler to have a bodyguard made up of Manabi Indians, the indigenous people of Ecuador . It is not known whether Hitler ever replied.

Waller then worked as an estate manager and later until the mid-1950s as an office assistant for a German publishing house in Vienna.

literature

• Peter Waller: With the Vienna Red Guard , Vienna 1923
• Viktor Immanuel (Graf) Falkenstein (pseud.): The Book of the Wardanieri , Vienna 1929
• Wolfgang Kudrnofsky: The Messiah von der Lobau, Peter Waller and the unemployed in the interwar period , Österreichischer Bundesverlag Vienna 1983

Web links

• Literature by and about Peter Waller in the catalog of the German National Library