Dr. Josef Paul

After completing his law degree and a doctorate in law and 17 months of court practice, Josef Paul takes up a post as a police lawyer at the Ottakring district police station in Hubergasse.

At the time of the Anschluss, he is working as a police commissioner in Vienna-Währing, where he is particularly involved with illegal National Socialists. He was arrested at eight o'clock in the morning on 12 March 1938 by four armed SA men on the basis of an already prepared list and initially taken to the Ottakring district police station, his place of work, where his colleague Dr. Josef Auinger (1897-1961) signed the arrest warrant. Auinger had been a member of the then illegal NSDAP since 1934 and had investigated and reported Josef Paul. He was transferred from Ottakring to the Rossauer Lände police detention center. Shortly afterwards, Leopold Figl is also placed in this single cell, where 4 other prisoners are also held. Until the end of March, he was held in the prison in Sennhofgasse [today Hahngasse]. On April 1, 1938, he arrives at the concentration camp in Dachau on the first transport, the so-called Prominent Transport, as number 53 on the Gestapo list, from where he is transferred to Mauthausen on September 27, 1939.

He is released on February 10, 1940 after 23 months in a concentration camp without being interrogated beforehand and without any hearing on the reasons for his imprisonment. Weighing 37 kg, Josef Paul returned home and was drafted into the air force just a few months later, on December 1, 1940. At the end of the war, he was taken prisoner of war by the Americans on February 25, 1945 and was able to return home on September 10, 1945.