Karl Reindl 1913 - 1945

Born 20.2.1913 in Linz
Died 28.4.1945 in Mauthausen

Biography

Karl Reindl was my uncle. His wife Theresia was my father’s sister. He was one of the 42 antifascists who were gassed as late as 28/29 April on the orders of the Gauleiter of Oberdonau, August Eiguber. There were to be no forces available capable of rebuilding the country after the war.

Personally I only have a blurred memory of him: a well-built man with dark eyebrows, who had showed me rabbits in a garden. At the end of the war I was nearly eight years old and at that age I could already pick up the conversations and stories at the Sunday family gatherings. I remember that Uncle Karl had already attracted attention earlier because, as a railway worker, he had secretly smuggled water to people in cattle trucks at a station.

Much later I gathered the facts: His confirmation of imprisonment from Linz reveals that he was arrested twice immediately after the ‘Anschluss’ as a protective custody prisoner and that ‘from 11.11.1944 to 13.11.1944 [he] was imprisoned in the local jail on behalf of the Gestapo for KP [Communist Party] activities and transferred from here to Mauthausen concentration camp on 13.11.1944.’

A ‘declaration under oath’ from the postwar period states: ‘The former political prisoner, Herr Josef Binder, born 31.12.1894, residing […], states under oath that Herr Karl Reindl, born 20.2.1913, in Linz, was gassed on 29.4.1945 on Eigruber’s order, at around 4pm, in Mauthausen concentration camp.’

Uncle Karl was a patissier by profession. From his copy of the Wanderbuch für die oberösterreichischen Herbergen für reisende Arbeitssuchende (Travel guide to Upper Austrian boarding houses for travelling job seekers) we learn that he was unemployed from April 1933 to the end of April 1944. During that time he ‘travelled’ through most of Upper Austria, Lower Austria, Salzburg and into Tyrol. There was a break from August 1933 to March 1934. This could indicate that he participated in the fighting in Linz in February 1934. Some postcards sent by comrades who fled to the Soviet Union also points to this. He was then employed on the railways and assigned to routes in Poland.

Since most men during the war were at the front, workers who were essential to their employers, the tobacco factory, the dockyard, the railway and especially women undertook important illegal work.

Betrayal led to a large-scale wave of arrests in September 1944, which ravaged the illegal Upper Austrian Communist Party, in Linz, Wels, Steyr through to the Salzkammergut region and Lake Aussee. When in September the Gestapo came to see my Aunt Resi, an air raid alarm had just sounded and the three Gestapo men immediately took to their heels. She was sure that they had nothing on her because she knew that Max Grüll, the comrade with whom she had worked, had already been beaten to death in Mauthausen and had obviously not given her away. To her horror Karl Reindl came home for three days in October 1944. Officially in order to pick up winter underwear. The Blockwart[1] saw him during this time. Since reaching resistance fighters in the Salzkammergut turned out to be too difficult, he decided to return to his post in order to abscond in Poland. Resi even accompanied him to the station. There the station master saw him and called out: ‘Reindl, you’ve been missing a good while!’ We never found out who had betrayed him.

Aunt Resi was arrested on 23 October 1944, was sent to the women’s prison barracks on the Hühnersteg (Kaplanhof), was taken from there to Mauthausen for interrogation, survived the terrible air raid of 31 March 1945 and was taken with the other women who had survived to the Schörgenhub work re-education camp. There she narrowly avoided falling victim to Eigruber’s order because the administration and guards had fled the approaching Americans. Her friends Gisela Tschofenig, Risa Höllermann, an unknown Jewish woman and three men were murdered as late as 27 April 1945. To this day I remember a bare patch of ground in a field that was to have been my aunt’s grave.

Margit Kain

Translation into English: Joanna White

 

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