Dr. Rudolf Ruthensteiner

Rudolf Ruthensteiner from Linz studied medicine in Graz and became a member of the Carolina Graz student fraternity in 1932. In 1938, he graduated as Dr. med. univ. A few days later, he started work as a secondary doctor at the "Sisters of Mercy" hospital in Linz.

After a short time, the CVer had to make way for Nazi doctors. He went to Vienna and was given a place as an unpaid visiting doctor at the Third Medical Department. However, as he could not afford an unpaid position in the long term, he enlisted in the Wehrmacht as a military doctor and was called up in Nov. 1938.

On 28.12.1943, the active staff doctor Rudolf Ruthensteiner, a member of the 138th Mountain Infantry Regiment, was called up. Mountain Infantry Regiment, last military rank Captain, was sentenced to death, ineligibility for military service and loss of civil rights by the court martial of the 97th Infantry Division on the Kerch/Crimean peninsula for "subverting the military strength of the German people ...". His various comments about the conduct of the war and the "greatest commander of all time" (GröFaZ) were deemed to be "subversive of military power". Until the beginning of April 1944, he waited in a solitary cell in "Movable Army Prison II" in Simferopol for the execution or revision of his sentence. The advance of the Russians in the Crimea led to his transfer by ship to Romania. On the evening of his arrival in Constanza [Constanta] (Romania), Rudolf Ruthensteiner is flown back to Sevastopol by plane (Ju 52) as the last member of the contingent, because doctors are needed here. He was assigned to an infantry unit that became a Russian prisoner of war on May 7, 1944, from which he was only released back home on October 12, 1948 after more than 4 years. In the evaluation by Lieutenant Nikolaev, head of camp section no. 52 in Sevastopol, it says, among other things:

"A good and conscientious doctor. Hard working. Opposed to Hitler. He was even sentenced to death by Gestapo members of the former German Wehrmacht for agitation directed against Hitler. ... Longs for his family and his homeland. ... Because of his (almost) three years of imprisonment, he does not speak well of the Soviet Union. Believes that, as a victim of the National Socialists, he has the right to return to Austria. A devout Catholic. Believes that there can be no prosperity in the Soviet Union due to the very small number of believers. ... Considers the USSR to be an uncultivated, wild and amoral country ...."