Anna Strasser

Anna later worked as a sales representative promoting Persil washing powder. For several decades following the war, she kept her Nazi-era activities to herself, but during the 1980s, she began to tell her story of that period. In 1999, the municipal authorities at St. Valentin made her an honorary citizen in recognition of her work.

During 1943 and most of 1944 Anna Springer continued to seek out opportunities to help victims of government persecution. During the middle part of 1944, the Strassers received a visit from two gentlemen, allegedly from a Vienna-based resistance group, who asked about the progress of their various projects. During subsequent interrogation Anna Strasser would realise that the two gentlemen were sent by the Gestapo. She was arrested at the end of the afternoon on 11 September 1944 when she arrived home to find the local policeman waiting for her in an agitated state. She knew him well: he regularly went bowling with her brother-in-law. He told her that a Gestapo man was waiting for her in the house. After she had briefly greeted her sister and some customers in the shop, she went through to the living room, where a tall man in a civilian dress was waiting for her. He presented himself and explained politely that he had to arrest her for anti-state activities. She was taken across the road to the police station, where she was left with the local policeman in a first-floor waiting room, from where she was able to make one or two short telephone calls to friends and relatives. By the time she was taken out, it was dark. She was escorted onto a bus that was normally used to take people to work at the Nibelungenwerk (tank factory). The bus was full of people, some of whom were strangers but many of whom she knew. Some were tied up, others not. She squeezed in beside a Polish doctor whom she knew because they both worked at the factory. She passed him the last of the biscuits she had with her along with some cigarettes, earning herself a shouted reprimand from a Gestapo man accompanying them: "We are not in a coffee house: what are you thinking of!".

With the pressures of war intensifying, in 1942 Anna Strasser was recruited to work in the vast new Nibelungenwerk (factory) at nearby Herzograd (administratively part of St. Valentin), where Tiger Tanks were being produced by a workforce that would eventually reach approximately 15,000. Strasser worked at the tank plant till her arrest in September 1944. She was assigned, in the first instance, to the accounts department where she found herself with "a jovial boss and lovely colleagues". During the summer months the glass-fronted offices became unbearably hot. Both for this reason and because she once again could look out of the windows and see prisoners from Mauthausen, who had been conscripted as forced labourers to work at the plant, being beaten to death. One day she suffered a nervous and physical collapsed and wept uncontrollably for a sustained period. This led to her being placed on sick leave for many weeks. When she was seen by a specialist doctor she explained her symptoms and was accordingly assigned to work half time, working mornings and then returning home while colleagues remained at work through the afternoon. This gave her much more time than hitherto to attend to the needs of government victims. One opportunity was provided by the arrival of large numbers of Jewish families from Hungary at the Windberg camp, which was approximately 15 minutes away. Each day these people were driven past the Strasser family's shop to the sports fields behind the house where they were tasked with building bunkers. They were mostly former office workers, completely unused to the heavy physical work which was now required of them, and they frequently needed help. One of their numbers was a medical doctor who repeatedly visited the shop and took the opportunity to push notes to Maria Strasser, Anna's sister, begging for certain carefully specified drugs and medications. Anna Strasser made it her business to visit Dr. Kleinsasser, the local railway doctor. Kleinsasser was a party member, but also a good man. Strasser told him why she needed the drugs and the doctor wrote out the necessary prescriptions, identifying Anna Strasser as the patient. She then took the prescriptions to one of the various pharmacies in any one of six towns in the area, in order to avoid triggering suspicion through her seemingly inordinate need for a fantastically diverse range of treatments. After dark she took the medications to the sports fields and left them in pre-agreed locations. Sometimes she set off the barking of dogs, but she was never caught. By 1944 the Jewish people had been taken away: no one knew where to. After the war, with Lower Austria under Soviet occupation, Dr. Kleinsasser was denounced to the Soviet authorities as a Nazi and taken away. Strasser, by this time at liberty, accompanied the doctor's son (another doctor) to visit the Soviet military commander for the region and told the man about the many prescriptions Dr. Kleinsasser had written out, despite knowing that they were for Jewish prisoners. After a long silence the Soviet commander stated that the doctor and Anna Strasser would not be among the many Austrians of working age (and others) sent to Soviet labour camps": "we need people like this in the world." They were free to go home. Old Doctor Kleinsasser lived on in St. Valentin for several more years.

Strasser expressed her support while insisting that if the two of them came across one another again at the station restaurant or elsewhere, it would be better that they should ignore each other. Every day, as she took her short walk after lunch beside the ramp leading from the railway to the camp, Anna Strasser took to carrying basic supplies with her, such as bread, sugar, biscuits, needles and twine with buttons. Sometimes she dropped them where inmates, who were badly underfed, might find them, and inmates soon learned to watch out for her lunchbreak walks. On one occasion she was rewarded with a letter of gratitude that the inmates had somehow managed to send using the postal service. She was not the only one who tried to find ways to get food to camp detainees. Her colleague Franz Winklehner, the store manager, got into the habit of purchasing corn, maize, turnips, cabbage and potatoes from farmers making deliveries to the depot, exchanging them for fertilizers and settling the balance. He was also sometimes seen to be throwing bread and cigarettes to newly arrived detainees being herded along the ramp from the train, past his office, to the camp. Winklehner's home was in the same building as the co-operative offices. One evening towards the end of 1940 the Winklehners received a visit at home from two Gestapo men during their evening meal. He was taken to Linz for questioning and then taken to the Dachau concentration camp. On 26 February 1941 his wife received from him a letter in which he wrote that he would probably be released a couple of months later in an amnesty to be announced in celebration of Hitler's birthday. The next news, when it came, was that he had died. Anna Strasser was able to accompany his widow to see his body. During the visit they were able to see the man in his coffin briefly but the widow was shouted at when she went to touch Winklehner's corpse. They were informed brusquely that Franz Winklehner had died of "circulatory disorders". Pausing only to utter a hurried Pater Noster, as they were hustled out Anna Strasser made herself a promise, "Even if I end up dying like Mr. Winklehner, I will help wherever I can." She did.

On her eighteenth birthday in 1939, Strasser took a job in the bookkeeping department at the warehouse depot of an agricultural co-operative in Mauthausen.

By the time of Anna's birth, five of her siblings had already died, but her family life was reportedly happy. Her father, Johann Strasser, worked for an insurance company and died in 1938. "At first we were very sad about his death", Strasser later wrote, "but when Hitler arrived, we knew that God had called him away at the right time". After her father died, Strasser's mother assumed her husband's job at the insurance agency while her eldest stepdaughter took charge of the family shop. At the age of seventeen, Strasser embarked on a twelve-month commercial apprenticeship in Linz in the support office of a medical doctor.

Anna Strasser (15 April 1921 – 17 May 2010) was a German resistance activist who helped forced labor and concentration camp victims until her arrest in 1944. She emerged from her internment in successive concentration camps and prisons, followed by time in a labour camp.

Some days later she was taken for interrogation. The question covered in very great detail her life to date. She was asked aggressively why she opposed the state but asserted that she had done nothing contrary to the interests of the state. The interrogations became increasingly aggressive and repetitive. Her questioners also triggered her anger by attacking her religious beliefs from various angles. On 21 September 1944 she was taken from her cell to the police prison which had by now become a Gestapo centre. Silently her escort placed her in a cell, chaining both of her hands and one of her ankles to large iron rings fastened securely into the wall. Using her fingernails, she scratched the date into the surface plaster: 21.9.1944. Tired out by standing but prevented by her chains from sitting or lying down, she managed to settle into a squat. Her overwhelming memory of that cell would be of its stench, her hunger and the "terrible screaming" from somewhere close by in the building. The next day, early, she was unchained by a policeman and escorted over to the bathroom. On returning to her cell, she was chained up again, but less tightly than before. There was still no food. During the day three Gestapo men turned up and embarked on a sustained angry shouting session at her, threatening to cut off her hair and confiscating hairpins, shoe laces, suspenders and bra. The next day she heard a jangling of a key in the corridor and yelled out the one word, "bread". Shortly afterwards the door opened and a policeman pushed in a hunk of bread with his toe while indicating with his hand and face that she should tell no one about what he was doing. A pattern of hunger combined with lengthy abusive shouting sessions during which her Gestapo questioners pressed her to confess to ... something began to emerge. When she was not being interrogated she interacted a lot with God. She was forced to listen as one of her interrogators dictated a telegramme to the authorities in St. Valentin mandating the arrest of four of her friends. After about a week of this there was an abrupt change. Her angry interrogator became uncannily smooth and polite. The day came when she was sat on a large sofa surrounded by several ample leather arms chairs, in an elegant office with Persian carpets on the floor and portraits of Hitler and Himmler on the wall. She was politely informed by an exceptionally handsome Gestapo man that the authorities were not really interested in the little people, such as herself but in the "big fish" of the resistance movement. She was to be returned to society. But, of course, if she did not speak out at her interrogation scheduled for the next day, then she should not expect to come out alive. She was returned to her cell, where she was provided not just with bread but with a large serving of poor-quality meat stew. She was no longer chained in her cell and was permitted to eat normally as she sat on the straw mattress. The next day her interrogation session comprised a long eerily well-mannered session during which Anna Strasser dictated her life story, which was converted carefully into a detailed 13-page document that included her factual recollection of her treatment by the Gestapo and concluded with an assurance that if ever she got out she would resume her support for needy people because it was in her nature, where someone needs help, to provide it. The contents were largely or wholly already known to her interrogator and she was able to dictate without interruption. On 30 September 1944 she was returned to the St. Pölten district courthouse, where she rejoined her co-workers, mending laundry in the "sewing room" cell.