Resi Pesendorfer

Resi Pesendorfer (born June 21, 1902 in Bad Ischl ; † October 31, 1989 ) was an Austrian resistance fighter , first against Austrofascism and after the Anschluss against National Socialism , and the organizer of an illegal women's network in the Salzkammergut .

youth

She was born into a poor working-class family in Ischl. Her father was a salt worker in the salt pans and her mother died young when Resi was only ten years old. As a result, she had to work for various farmers as a teenager in order to contribute to the tight household budget. A few years after the mother's death, the father remarried, although Pesendorfer had a distant relationship with this second woman throughout his life.

She was already politically active in the 1920s and was close to the Social Democrats. In 1926 she married Ferdinand Pesendorfer, with whom she had a son a short time later. After the events of February 1934 , which also saw strikes and armed fighting between the Republican Schutzbund and the Armed Forces in the Salzkammergut , she joined the Communists with her husband and became a member of the banned KPÖ in 1935 .

Resistance organizer

In 1937 she founded an illegal women's group in Bad Ischl and the surrounding area and organized the resistance against Austrofascism. Among other things, the women took on courier services between Goisern, Lauffen , Ischl and Ebensee, which enabled the various illegal local groups in the Salzkammergut to stay in contact. This network remained active even after the annexation of Austria to the German Reich in March 1938, although the National Socialists pursued such communist cells even more vigorously than the corporate state before .

In 1941 there was a large wave of arrests in the Salzkammergut. First, the Gestapo attacked the OKA workers in the Gmunden district , including Goiserer Martin Langeder. Afterwards, numerous men from the resistance movement in Bad Ischl were arrested and taken to the prisons in Wels and Linz, including Alois Straubinger, Josef Filla, Raimund Zimpernik and her husband Ferdinand Pesendorfer. Many of the undiscovered activists were subsequently called up for military service and had to join the German armed forces . As a result, women increasingly became the pillars of the resistance movement.

In 1942, Alois Straubinger and Karl Gitzoller managed to escape from prison and go into hiding in the Salzkammergut. This marked the beginning of a new phase of the resistance movement, whose main task from now on was to hide the men wanted by the Gestapo and to provide them with food and weapons. In autumn 1942 she organized a hiding place for Karl Gitzoller in the vacant "Villa Waldhütte" where she was currently employed as a cleaning lady. Resi Pesendorfer himself was briefly arrested by the Gestapo in 1942. However, since she consistently denied all allegations during interrogation and no further evidence was available, she was released a short time later. But she was not intimidated by this and in the following time even made contact with resistance groups in Salzburg. Together with Agnes Primocic and other women from Hallein , she succeeded on October 23, 1943 in helping Sepp Plieseis, who was imprisoned in the local concentration camp , to escape.

Support of the Willy-Fred group

Sepp Plieseis then became the most important organizer of the resistance in the Bad Ischl region, and his code name "Willy" quickly became synonymous with the entire group. This code name was later changed to "Fred", which is why the name "Willy-Fred" has become common in historical research. The number of men in hiding rose sharply as a result, as many of them no longer wanted to go back to the war after leaving the front and preferred to take the risk of persecution. As a result, however, it became more and more difficult to find safe quarters for the people in hiding, and so Sepp Plieseis built a secret hideaway in the mountains, known as the "hedgehog". The women's network in the valley, including Resi Pesendorfer, Marianne Feldhammer and Leni Egger, then took care of supplying the men with food, but also with weapons and ammunition. However, this was also associated with a high risk, as the storage of illegally slaughtered meat was severely punished. However, the women managed to provide the group, which had already grown to 500 people by the end of 1944, with the bare essentials while remaining undetected.

Contemporary witness

The role of women in the resistance against National Socialism has long been ignored by both politics and historical research. In contrast to some male colleagues from this time, Resi Pesendorfer did not write an autobiography and after the war lived a rather inconspicuous life in Bad Ischl and later in Ebensee. However, she was actively involved in the concentration camp association and in the Federation of Democratic Women and took over functions for the local branch of the KPÖ. It was not until 1985 that the filmmaker Ruth Beckermann made a short documentary about the resistance in the Salzkammergut, in which she also interviewed Resi Pesendorfer, who was then 83, as well as Maria Plieseis - Sepp Plieseis's wife - and Leni Egger. This film with the title "The Hedgehog" is the only surviving source in which Resi Pesendorfer speaks about her work in the resistance in the Salzkammergut at that time, in which she played one of the key roles. Speaking in the Salzkammergütler dialect, she explained her own motivation for doing this as follows:

“The output is schã fu da Boatai, åwa it is on õa Måi neamt mea då gwén and I hã mi håid ãgnuma drum. I hã mi ãgnuma drum and hã ma thinks, dés muast dõa, dés muast dõa! Néd? Wia da Gitzoller ãglaufn is bai mia - Jå I mua'n ghåidn. Ea håd's gwist, I am a ãndre wia dé ãndan, néd. That's a kema, néd? "

- Resi Pesendorfer : "The Hedgehog" by Ruth Beckermann

Resi Pesendorfer died on October 31, 1989 at the age of 87.

The writer Franzobel incorporated parts of her biography into his play "Hirschen", which is about the resistance group "Willy-Fred". With the figure of Resi Pesendorfer in particular, however, the author has exhausted his artistic freedom to the full and invented a romance for which there is no evidence from historical sources and contemporary witness interviews.

literature

• Peter Kammerstätter: Material collection on the resistance and partisan movement Willy-Fred in the upper Salzkammergut - Ausseerland 1943–1945. Self-published, Linz 1978.
• Karin Berger (Ed.): The sky is blue. Can be - Women in the Resistance, Austria 1938–1945. Promedia, Vienna 1985, 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, ISBN 3-900943-32-X .

Web links

• KPÖ Upper Austria: Theresia Pesendorfer (1902–1989)
• KPÖ Upper Austria: Appreciate the female resistance
• Free Radio Salzkammergut: Like a moth, the hidden resistance of women - Part 3 of the radio documentary series Fragments of Resistance by David Guttner and Jörg Stöger (downloadable as MP3)