Wolfgang Neuschmidt

Wolfgang Neuschmidt (born March 7, 1901 in Söll ; † February 9, 1977 ) was an Austrian judicial officer and a Righteous Among the Nations .

Rescuing Jewish prisoners

In 1944, five Jewish prisoners in the Innsbruck prison asked the judicial officer Neuschmidt for help. Innsbruck police inspector Karl Dickbauer and his colleague Anton Dietz had already been commissioned to prepare a transport for prisoners from Innsbruck prison to Auschwitz . Among the 88 prisoners there were five Polish Jews - Leokadia Justman-Wisńicky, Mirjam Fuchs, Paulina Janaszewicz, Regina Litmann-Rundbaker and Ruth Litman-Eisenberg. They were arrested by the Gestapo on March 13, 1944 , after posing as Christian-Polish foreign workers.

Wolfgang Neuschmidt called on his superior Karl Dickbauer for the girls on the grounds that they were needed for kitchen work in prison. Police inspector Dickbauer made the girls' papers disappear. They were not attached to the transport to Auschwitz , but remained in prison and were employed in the prison kitchen.

When the order arrived on January 18, 1945 to transport all inmates of the prison to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp , Dickbauer helped the girls to escape from prison. The criminal investigator Rudi Moser also offered his help. Leokadia Justman-Wisńicki and Mirjam Fuchs managed to escape from prison during the night with the help of police inspectors Dietz and Dickbauer.

Erwin Lutz offered them his apartment in Innsbruck as their first place of refuge. Then they hid in the apartment of Maria Stocker , a friend of Rudi Moser. Leokadia Justman-Wisńicki and Mirjam Fuchs survived the Holocaust through the efforts of the aforementioned Austrians, who thereby endangered their own lives .

Web links

• Documentation about the righteous in Austria