Willibald Zelger 1907 - 1945

Born 17.11.1907 in London
Died 28.4.1945 in Mauthausen

Biography

Willibald Zelger was born on 17 November 1907 in London, the son of Lilian and Willibald Zelger. His father originally came from South Tyrol, had worked as a photographer in London around the turn of the century and returned to Austria shortly before the outbreak of the First World War to avoid internment as an Austrian citizen. During the war Zelger Sen. set up a horse butcher’s in Wels, which grew over time into the firm Fleischindustrie W. Zelger. Willibald Zelger Jun. was musically talented and did not want to take over the meat business. In the end he pursued a career as an electrician.

On 17 May 1941 Zelger was arrested for listening to foreign radio broadcasts and sentenced to 15 months’ imprisonment. He served his sentence at Linz regional court and Garsten prison. Since he was a British citizen, Zelger Jun.’s family kept pressing him to flee to Switzerland. However, he did not want to leave behind his fiancée Anna or his father.

As an ‘enemy alien’ Zelger needed an ‘Exemption from Provision of a Certificate of no Impediment to Marriage’ from the ‘Reich Chief of the SS Reich Interior Minister’ in order to marry. This was granted him on condition that he take German citizenship.

In 1944 Willibald Zelger joined the ‘Wels Group’, an illegal organisation made up mainly, but not exclusively, of Communists. The group was betrayed by a spy and around 100 people in the Linz, Wels and Gmunden area were arrested. Willibald Zelger was imprisoned on 7 September 1944, five days before his planned wedding to Anna Kalcher, and transferred to the Mauthausen concentration camp. His fiancée was already pregnant at the time of his arrest. Subsequently she tried relentlessly to make contact with Willibald Zelger but was blocked time and again by the Gestapo and the SS. As described in a report by the survivor Richard Dietl, the members of the ‘Wels Group’ who had been imprisoned were mistreated from the beginning, with some being murdered by the SS shortly after their arrival.

In January 1945 Anna Kalcher gave birth at seven months to a son who was also named Willibald. Now she had to fear for the lives of both her son and her fiancée at the same time. This terrible time and its traumatisations bore heavily on Anna Kalcher, even after liberation, and not least in terms of her health.

Since Gauleiter Eigruber’s wanted to leave the Allies no ‘forces capable of reconstruction’, he had the Upper Austrian antifascists imprisoned at Mauthausen concentration camp murdered shortly before liberation. On the night of 28 to 29 April 1945, 42 people, among them Willibald Zelger, were murdered in the gas chamber at Mauthausen.

Harald Grünn

 

KZ-Verband Oberösterreich

 

 

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