Rudolf Hösl 1903 - 1945

Born 15.2.1903 in Wien
Died 4.3.1945 in Hinterbrühl

Biography

 

Over a quarter of all Austrians deported to Mauthausen concentration camp were so-called career criminals. During the harsh early period of the camp they were its only group of prisoners, and the history of the founding of the Mauthausen concentration camp, remembered as a time of particular deprivation, is shaped by them. Berufsverbrecher – ‘career criminals’ – were considered by many survivors in their own words to be ‘degenerate criminals’ and ‘predators’, as ‘the worst elements’ and as the literal ‘long arm of the SS’. They were identified with prisoner functionaries who gave beatings and murderous kapos and blamed for crimes in the concentration camps – due to their presence in the daily life of the camp often to a greater degree than members of the SS. In fact, those labelled as ‘career criminals’ had not committed a criminal offence at the time of their arrest and were not sentenced by an ordinary court. Many of them, like the members of all the other victims groups, died shortly after their arrival. In the postwar period many former political prisoners attested to their comradely behaviour in the concentration camp. And yet nothing and no one remembers them. And yet their stories have faded into oblivion. Today a lack of relevant sources makes it extremely difficult to reconstruct individual lives. But in many cases court files do exist which, while not making it possible to write a definitive biography, do allow a life to be glimpsed. This will be attempted in the following.

A burglary at the apartment of the bookkeeper Hans B. in Vienna on 8 March 1942 results in valuables worth over 1,000 Reichsmarks being taken. B. quickly throws suspicion onto the ‘ill reputed’ worker Rudolf Hösl, who was employed as a petrol pump attendant in the garage in the building. Furthermore, Hösl is friends with B.’s neighbour, Gertrude Novak. Novak is Jewish. The case files of the Criminal Police soon contain nothing but ‘Hösl and the Jewess’. Hösl and Novak are accused not only of the crime but also – although both vehemently deny any intimate relationship – of ‘race defilement’. Hösl states on record: ‘My relations to Novak are purely of a platonic nature[,] and I have never had sex with her. When I learned that Novak was a Jew, I never gave up my relationship with her because she didn’t wear a yellow star. I thought[,] after all there won’t be any consequences for me because she’s also married to an Aryan.’ Should she be divorced, continued Hösl in a less glorious vein, and so lose the legal protection that marriage to an ‘Aryan’ brings with it, she should, as a divorced ‘Jewess’, have to wear the yellow star, and he would immediately break off relations. Further investigations confirm the initial suspicions of the Criminal Police regarding the theft; finally charges are brought. However, the indictment of May 1942 concedes that no proof of an intimate relationship could be found. In addition, while there are references to previous convictions, (for whatever reason) terms such as ‘career criminal’ or ‘habitual criminal’ are not used. Hösl is simply described ‘as a canny burglar’.

The court files tell us nothing of the fate of Gertrude Novak. Gertrude Novak, born on 16 April 1913 in Vienna, died on 1 January 1943 in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

On 29 May 1942, Rudolf Hösl was sentenced by Vienna’s regional court to two and a half years’ imprisonment under harsh conditions for theft and the offence of unauthorised possession of weapons. There were ‘no extenuating circumstances’, found the judge. On 26 June 1942 Hösl was sent to Bernau jail, from where he was transferred to Garsten prison on 15 August 1942 and, finally, to the Suben workhouse. On 7 October 1944 he was transferred on ‘expiration of sentence’ to the police prison in Vienna, which, given its address at that time on the ‘Elisabthpromenade’, was known in common parlance rather quaintly as ‘Liesl’. The confirmation of the return transfer to Vienna is the final document contained in the case file. Hösl’s conviction was the third to be punished by a sentence of six months or longer. For Vienna’s Criminal Police this fulfilled the conditions necessary under the ‘primary decree for preventative crime prevention’. Hösl was deported to Mauthausen concentration camp on 3 November 1944, in whose Hinterbrühl subcamp he died on 4 March 1945.

Andreas Kranebitter

 

 

Translation into English: Joanna White

 

Sources:

Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv, Landesgericht für Strafsachen Wien, A11 – Vr. 488/42

Archive of the Mauthausen Memorial (AMM), Totenbuch des SS-Standortarztes Mauthausen [Death Register of the Mauthausen SS chief camp physician], AMM Y/46.

 

http://www.doew.at/ (entry on Gertrude Nowak, accessed on 1.12.2015) 

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