Sepp Plieseis

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Sepp Plieseis (born December 20, 1913 in Bad Ischl , Lauffen district; † October 21, 1966 there , officially Josef Plieseis, pronounced " Bliasais " in the dialect ) was an Austrian resistance fighter against National Socialism and organizer of the partisan group Willy-Fred in the upper part Salzkammergut . In contrast to bourgeois and left-wing urban resistance groups, Plieseis was a nature boy, mountaineer and poacher and was thus able to successfully escape persecution by the police and the SS in the mountains until the end of the war.

childhood

Sepp Plieseis grew up as the child of a poor working class family in Bad Ischl. He took part in the activities of the Kinderfreunde and later the Socialist Worker Youth . After the February fights in 1934 , in which Plieseis took part on the side of the Republican Protection Association in Ebensee , he was disappointed by the Austrian Social Democrats and joined the communists .

Spain fighters

However, because the KPÖ had also been banned and active resistance against Austrofascism was becoming increasingly difficult, Plieseis went to Spain in 1937 and fought on the side of the republic in the Spanish Civil War . He got to Spain via an adventurous route from Austria over the Swiss mountains and finally joined the international brigades in France .

After the end of the civil war in Spain and the victory of Franquism , he fled to France again, but was arrested there and interned in various detention camps such as Gurs , St. Cyprienne and Argiles. Due to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact , however, in 1940 there was a brief detente between the National Socialists and the Communists, and so Plieseis tried to return to the Salzkammergut in 1941 after a successful escape attempt. When crossing the French demarcation line, however, he was arrested by the German authorities as a "Red Spaniard" and transferred to the police prison in Linz , in the now also German Gau Oberdonau , where he was initially imprisoned on the basis of an open conviction for poaching. After he refused to be drafted into the German armed forces, he was sent from there to the Dachau concentration camp .

Resistance in the Salzkammergut

From Dachau he was later transferred to the subcamp in Vigaun near Hallein for forced labor . There he managed to escape from the concentration camp on October 23, 1943 with the help of local workers, including Agnes Primocic , and although there was an SS training camp with over 1,500 men at the same location, he was able to successfully travel from Hallein to Lake Attersee and flee further into the upper Salzkammergut and submerge in the Dead Mountains . There he began to build a resistance group against National Socialism, whose primary goal was initially to hide local deserters from the Wehrmacht in the mountains. By the end of 1943, loyalty to National Socialism had already fallen sharply: some soldiers did not return to the Wehrmacht from leave and preferred to go to the mountains than to be sent back to the Eastern Front. However, this also meant a great danger for their relatives, and so these partisans had to provide themselves with food in order to avoid any contact with family and friends. The knowledge of nature from Plieseis Sepp and his experiences as a poacher were more than helpful.

The group grew in the following months to around 30 people and gave themselves the code name "Willy". The partisans could not and did not want to carry out any military disruptive actions, for example on railroad tracks or police posts. However, the very existence of a resistance group in the mountains of the Salzkammergut put the National Socialist authorities on high alert, as some of the military-important armaments factories of the planned Alpine fortress were located in the Salzkammergut , the Ebensee concentration camp was very close and the greats of the party spent their summer holidays in Aussee . Nevertheless, the hiding place of the group, the mountain shelter "Igel", only a few kilometers as the crow flies from Aussee, could never be found. In order to conceal their activities and their identity, the partisans used aliases when they encountered hikers in the mountains or when they went into the valley to organize food and medicines. The group later changed its identifier to "Fred", which is why it is known today in historical research under the combined name "Willy-Fred".

The group around Plieseis also had contacts with Albrecht Gaiswinkler , who had founded a resistance group in Ausseerland as early as 1940. Gaiswinkler had contacts with the British secret service and even planned an assassination attempt or kidnapping of Joseph Goebbels during his last vacation stay in Aussee at the beginning of 1945 . However, he left for Berlin two days before the scheduled date. However, there were no joint actions between Gaiswinkler and Plieseis. Instead, together with the other members of the Willy-Fred group, including Karl Gitzoller and Alois Straubinger, Sepp Plieseis tried to survive the remaining time until the foreseeable end of the Nazi regime intact and unscathed. They were supported by resistance fighters such as Resi Pesendorfer , Marianne Feldhammer , Leni Egger and Maria Plieseis .

After 1945

After the US armed forces, coming from Salzburg, occupied Bad Ischl and Aussee in May 1945, the group finally left their hiding place and Sepp Plieseis then became a security advisor to the Americans, and later an official at the Bad Ischl town hall. Due to the political mistrust that soon arose towards the members of this communist resistance group, Sepp Plieseis and his colleagues were soon kept away from political power. He then continued to get involved with the now legal KPÖ and the Federal Association of Austrian Resistance Fighters (KZ-Verband). After the war, Sepp Plieseis married Maria Plieseis , née Wagner, who was also involved in the resistance , widowed Ganhör, and lived in Bad Ischl until his death in 1966.

Reception in Austria and the GDR

Immediately after the war, Sepp Plieseis wrote down his memories with the help of Rudolf Daumann as a ghostwriter from the time in Spain and the "Igel" in a book published in 1946 under the title Vom Ebro zum Dachstein, life struggle of an Austrian worker in Linz at the Neue Zeit publishing house has been published. In the years that followed, the events surrounding the resistance in the Salzkammergut in Austria disappeared from public discussion and, in particular, the merits of the resistance fighters who were close to the communists were given little recognition. The main reason for this was the deteriorating relations between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union, which from 1947 onwards increasingly developed into the Cold War . Since the Salzkammergut was in the American zone of occupation , these former resistance fighters, who were close to the KPÖ, were increasingly pushed out of local politics.

A direct regional reason may have been the historically still not fully elucidated Bad Ischler milk trial , in which his wife Maria Plieseis was accused by the Americans as one of the suspects and only escaped persecution by the US by fleeing to the Soviet occupation zone of Austria. Could evade military justice; only after the State Treaty of 1955 did she return to the Salzkammergut.

In contrast, people in the GDR began to be interested in the story of Sepp Plieseis from the 1970s . His autobiographical book was re-edited in 1971 under the title Partisan der Berge - Lebenskampf an Austrian worker by Julius Mader in the German military publishing house in East Berlin . A few years later, GDR television even produced a television series about the partisan struggle in the Salzkammergut, in which Plieseis was presented as an upright fighter against fascism . It is entitled Dangerous Manhunt and was released on DVD in 2010.

In 1977, the version of the book by Plieseis published in the GDR was reprinted as a licensed edition in Vienna by Globusverlag, which subsequently appeared in several editions. This can be seen as a new beginning to work with Sepp Plieseis in Austria. The regional historian Peter Kammerstätter , whose collection of materials was published in 1978, also makes an important contribution to historical research into the resistance against National Socialism in the Salzkammergut . The book by Christoph Topf, In the footsteps of the partisans, has also contributed to the awareness of history in the region in and around the Salzkammergut itself , in which he presents the historical events scientifically based on a hiking guide to the original locations. This book was first published in 1996.

In 2006, the Austrian writer Franzobel , who also comes from the region, edited the life story of Sepp Plieseis in literary terms and incorporated it into his play "Hirschen", which addresses the resistance in Ausseerland.

literature

  • 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 .
  • Hermann Langbein: "... not like sheep to the slaughter". Resistance in the National Socialist concentration camps. Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main 1980, ISBN 3-596-23486-7 .
  • Sepp Plieseis: From the Ebro to the Dachstein. Life struggle of an Austrian worker. Verlag Neue Zeit, Linz 1946. New editions under the title “Partisan der Berge”, Globus-Verlag, Vienna 1987, ISBN 3-85364-186-5 .
  • Peter Kammerstätter: Material collection on the resistance and partisan movement Willy-Fred in the upper Salzkammergut - Ausseerland 1943–1945. Self-published, Linz 1978.
  • Klaus Kienesberger: The Austria Discourse in the GDR from 1970 to 1980 - a communication-historical approach based on the discourse contribution by Sepp Plieseis. Diploma thesis in journalism, 2007.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The exported hero. In: kpoe.at . December 20, 2020, accessed August 8, 2020.
  2. ↑ KPÖ Upper Austria: Obituary for Maria Plieseis (1920–2003)  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.kpoenet.at
  3. ↑ Zeitgeschichtemuseum Ebensee: Zeitschrift Betrifft Vorteil - 2006, NR. 79, letters to the editor p. 36–37 ( Memento from February 22, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 1.3 MB), with a statement by Klaus Kienesberger
  4. ↑ Margarete Affenzeller: Operation Gämsenhirn: World premiere of Franzobel's “Hirschen”. In: derstandard.at . December 4, 2006, accessed August 8, 2020.
personal data
SURNAME Plieseis, Sepp
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Plieseis, Josef
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian resistance fighter in the Salzkammergut
DATE OF BIRTH December 20, 1913
PLACE OF BIRTH Bad Ischl
DATE OF DEATH October 21, 1966
Place of death Bad Ischl