Three Months in a Gestapo Prison

Copyright © 2011 by Alfred Wallner

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ISBN: 978-1-4620-4376-7 (sc)

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iUniverse rev. date: 08/05/2011

Glossary

People

Alfred Wallner: 33 years old in early 1945, the time of his help to the Americans and his imprisonment. Studied medicine in Austria’s Innsbruck and trained at Villach hospital, where he met his wife Maria. His father, a railway inspector, moved to Villach in 1933.

Maria Wallner: 24 years old, born in Villach, where her father managed a movie theater. Mother of young Alfred, who was two and a half years old at the time, and four months pregnant with Alfred’s sister Inge.

Herbert Emberger: Brother-in-law of Dr. Wallner, being the husband of Grete Wallner, the elder of his two sisters. Died near Berlin during the last days of the war.

Theo Golla: another brother-in-law, that one married to Edith Wallner, the younger of Dr. Wallner’s sisters. Lost a leg at the battle of Monte Casino in1944.

Heinrich (Heinerl) Wegscheider: architect friend of Dr. Wallner; also the son of a railway official.

Hansi Wunderer: dentist friend of Dr. Wallner, also the son of a railway official.

Places

Gmünd: a charming medieval town of some 1,500 inhabitants at the time, lying about 26 miles northwest of Villach at the confluence of the Lieser River in the north and the Malta in the northwest.

Heiligengeist: the village of Maria Wallner’s parents, which consisted of several farm houses in a mountain valley some four miles west of Villach.

Karnerau: a district in the outskirts of Gmünd to which the Porsche factory moved during the last year of the war.

Carinthia (Kärnten): one of Austria’s nine Länder, which are something like states.

Klagenfurt: the capital of Carinthia, 22 miles east of Villach.

Lavanttal: a valley formed by the river Lavant, some 37 miles east of Klagenfurt and just north of the town of Dravograd, just over the border in Slovenia

Liesertal: a valley formed by the river Lieser, which flows into Gmünd from the north.

Maltatal: a valley formed by the river Malta, which flows into Gmünd from the northwest.

Pflügelhof: a group of farm houses deep in the Malta valley, five miles west of Gmünd.

Radenthein: a village some 10 miles southeast of Gmünd and three miles east of Spittal.

Simmerlach: the village of Herbert Emberger, five miles north of Villach.

Spittal: a small medieval town three miles south of Gmünd and 21 miles northwest of Villach; seat of the regional administration.

Villach: an important rail and road center, lying close to Italy and Slovenia, of some 35,000 inhabitants at the time of the story. Its hospital served the entire region to the west, including Gmünd and Spittal.

Wörthersee: a large lake to the west of Klagenfurt, linked to it by a canal.

Contents

Glossary

FOREWORD

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

Epilogue

Postscript

Afterword

FOREWORD

This is a true story. Like many people whose parents sheltered them from knowledge of their hardships, I learned about it when I was attempting to sort out some boxes of old books and papers my father left in a storeroom when he died twelve years ago. The manuscript—its first pages missing, its typed letters blurred and faded—told of events that took place during early 1945, the final months of the Second World War. The cold winter in the south of Austria, then united with Germany and sharing the terrible fate the people had brought upon themselves, was drawing to a close.

Three years earlier, at the start of 1942, my father, a young country doctor named Alfred Wallner, had been posted to serve in Gmünd, a charming medieval town in the province of Kärnten, or Carinthia, one of Austria’s nine Länder that in some ways resemble American states. After Alfred, as I’ll call him, studied medicine in Innsbruck, fate took him to a city called Villach, an important railway hub, much larger than Gmünd, in Austria’s southeastern tip near Italy and Slovenia, which was then part of Yugoslavia. Alfred met my mother, Maria, when he treated her broken thumb at the Villach hospital where he was training to become a surgeon. They were married within a month.

The depression that followed World War I deeply affected Maria and Alfred’s generation. The massive unemployment and political instability that drove the country toward seeming ruin caused emotional as well as economic misery. While many elders, including the young couple’s parents, filled with nostalgia for the good old days of the Austrian monarchy, some of their adult children hoped communism would bring prosperity for everyone by doing away with the old ways; but communism terrified others. Growing internal strife deepened the sense of doom. When Hitler came to power in 1933, many saw him as a savior who could put Germany back on its feet, helping Austria do the same. Five years later, at the time of Austria’s Anschluss—its link-up or joining with Germany’s Third Reich—99 percent of the voting population approved.

Hitler started by enabling people who knew nothing—meaning almost everyone—about his quick, ruthless violence against real, possible and imagined enemies to take their first deep breath of hope and optimism in years. Soon the great majority were back at work. New roads were built throughout the land whose citizens were promised they would all own cars. Industry began flourishing and German technology was fast becoming the best in the world.

Those were among the reasons that Germany’s virtual annexation of Austria in 1938 prompted the overwhelming popular enthusiasm. It was easy for Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, his able assistant in demagoguery, to convince the masses that the German people had a duty to prove their greatness to the world and that the vengeful Treaty of Versailles, which Berlin had been forced to sign in 1919, following the end of World War I, was cruel and humiliating. Hadn’t the American President Woodrow Wilson opposed the treaty’s terms and pleaded for a just peace? Even Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister, had hesitated, predicting We shall have to fight another war all over again at three times the cost.

But the general euphoria and soaring expectations were brief. Hitler’s swift, brutal repression silenced his opponents. The first price paid by the general public was a gradual loss of freedom. Groups of fanatical National Socialists, Nazis, began roaming cities and towns, intimidating their inhabitants. Dressed in brown shirts with armbands displaying the swastika, an Indian religious symbol for eternity, the toughs—mostly what used to be called undesirable elements—threatened and employed beatings.

That was just a prelude conducted by amateurs. Members of the Schutzstaffel defence squadrons, the much more feared SS, were recruited from especially devoted National Socialists whose sworn duty was to protect Hitler and his entourage. Dressed their black uniforms that also displayed the swastika, they deliberately spread terror among the population. After they assassinated several close associates and possible rivals of Hitler, their ferocious organization took control of the country. Soon all freedom was snuffed out. If you didn’t support Hitler, you were an enemy of the Reich, a traitor.

The SS were efficiently assisted by the Geheime Staatspolizei, the Gestapo secret police, who administered their practically unlimited power with inhuman methods and utter brutality. Soon Austria and Germany were living under a regime of terror that delivered them to general psychosis. No one dared voice an opinion. Not even one’s children could always be trusted because they were openly encouraged to spy on their parents.

When Hitler attacked Poland in 1939, however, the great majority of Austrians as well as Germans believed the lies of their newspapers and radios, specifically that the war had been forced on the German Reich. At its start, the superiority of the German army that brilliantly executed Hitler´s strategy of blitzkrieg, lightning war, convinced almost everyone that the superior race, to which they were proud to belong, was invincible. But the war’s progression led to more and more thousands of deaths, and made it apparent that the German army was far from invincible. The crazy decision to march on Moscow in the autumn of 1941 made it increasingly clear that the country’s leader was a bloodthirsty madman.

My father’s posting to Gmünd in January 1942 made him happy not to have been sent to the front, especially the eastern front. The Battle of Moscow in the autumn and winter of 1941-1942 was followed by the even more savage Battle of Stalingrad, which changed the course of the war. But it was blessedly different in southeastern Austria of the picture postcard winters that featured beautiful little towns nestled in the snowy lower Alps. Not surprisingly, Alfred and my mother fell in love with their new surroundings in the historic little town of Gmünd. There two rivers converge: the Lieser, which flows down a picturesque valley from the north, and the Malta, which meanders from the northwest. At one place, the Malta, joined by an impressive waterfall, rushes through an even more idyllic valley flanked by high mountains. My father tended to patients in that valley as well as in Gmünd. By the time I was born, in October of the same 1942, both my parents were very happy to have left much larger Villach, whose railway installations were the target of increasingly heavy bombardment.

It’s not easy now, 66 years after the end of ghastly World War II, to imagine what Austrian youth felt as the fighting drew toward its close. They knew nothing about some of their countrymen’s enthusiastic participation in the Nazi mass murders, participation suggested by 40 percent of the personnel and most of the commandants of the death camps at Berlzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka being Austrian. But even if they had known, it’s probable that much of the population would be less than outraged or even shamed. After the war, Austrians as a whole would declare themselves the first victims of Nazism, conveniently forgetting that they had overwhelmingly supported the Anschluss. Not that the postwar record either was sterling. The first postwar president announced that the country had no room for Jewish businessmen, and a 1948 survey established that nearly a quarter of the residents of Vienna thought that the Jews had got what they deserved.

That would be later. Now, as the prospects for victory evaporated, some of the younger generations of course continued to hope their side would win, as virtually all people have done throughout history. At the same time, those who didn’t shut out all other considerations knew that hope was fantasy. For some, victory had become an unwanted as well as impossible dream because the Führer they’d seen as delivering Austria together with Germany from their great troubles that followed World War I had in fact delivered them to far worse, although few knew the extent of the regime’s torture and murder of Poles, Jews, Gypsies and dozens of other nationalities Germans considered inferior: good enough only to serve them, if they were permitted to live. But many now did know that instead of lifting Europe to a higher civilization, Hitler was plunging it toward hell. And since Austrian youth had involuntarily become part of an unspeakably cruel regime, they saw the Allied forces in a mixed light. Still the enemy on the battlefield, they were at the same time expected to liberate the country from its oppressors.

After the Allied invasion of Normandy in June, 1944, everyone knew the war would end more or less soon. Alfred in particular had every reason to hope he and his family would survive the horrors alive, in fact almost unscathed. How could he have guessed his ordeal would start only now?

After the war was at last over, American friends he’d made during the course of the activities his narrative relates helped him open a medical practice in Villach, but he abandoned it three years later. That was in answer to a call of adventure: an opportunity to live and work in Ethiopia, with which he’d fall in love. The opportunity came after my father became friends with a man named Roman Hall. A member of a displaced persons camp near Villach whose people Dr. Wallner looked after medically, Hall mentioned that an uncle of his was an advisor to Haile Selassie, and soon obtained permission for him to practice in Ethiopia.