Kriminaloberinspektor Robert Gerstberger

Robert Gerstberger was born in Markersdorf in Upper Silesia [today: Markvartovice in the Czech Republic] as the illegitimate son of Wilhelmine Gerstberger. His mother later married and took the surname Vogl.

Nothing has survived about Robert Gerstberger's childhood and youth. Between 1908 and 1913, he served in the k.u.k. Army. In the same year that he disarmed from the army, he joined the Vienna Security Guard in the first district of Vienna. As a Viennese policeman, he was not drafted into the I. World War I. In 1917, he married Leopoldine Maria Fiala and subsequently became the father of a son and a daughter.

After the defeat of Austria-Hungary, the break-up of the dual monarchy and the expulsion of the Habsburgs, he was transferred to the Mariahilf police station as a detective in 1919.

No records of his work there have survived. In any case, Robert Gerstberger must have been committed to opposing National Socialism.

Robert Gerstberger witnessed the demise of a free and independent Austria with the invasion of the German Wehrmacht on March 12, 1938. In November 1938, he was dismissed as 'politically unreliable' and forced to retire. His son, who was a medical student in the meantime, was drafted into the Wehrmacht. Robert Gerstberger survives the Second World War on a pension.

In April and May 1945, Robert Gerstberger witnesses the liberation of Austria and the re-establishment of the Republic. He is immediately reinstated in the police service, at his old station in Mariahilf, and joins the newly founded Austrian People's Party (ÖVP) and the ÖVP-Kameradschaft der politisch Verfolgten und Bekenner für Österreich.