Franz Bernthaler
Personalia
Born:
Died:
Profession:
Persecution:
Imprisonment 1938 (2 months),
Imprisonment summer 1943 - 15.04.1945,
Murdered on 15.04.1945
Memberships
Curriculum Vitae
Franz Bernthaler was born the illegitimate son of a carpenter in Zwain, Carinthia. After school, he becomes a primary school teacher and takes part in the First World War. Between 1919 and 1920, he was a member of the Social Democratic Party. He then became a member and official of the Heimatschutz and the Vaterländische Front. He is married and has 5 children.
After the occupation of Austria by Hitler's Germany, Franz Bernthaler, a staunch opponent of National Socialism, is first taken into protective custody for two months and then released as a primary school teacher. He found a job as an auditor of the finance chamber of the diocese of Gurk.
In March 1943, he asked another accused sympathizer of the AFÖ, priest Ferdinand Frodl, who has to go on a business trip to the nunciature in Berlin, to take a flyer with him so that it can be smuggled abroad and broadcast on the radio. Although Ferdinand Frodl agrees, he destroys the leaflet.
When the AFÖ is dismantled by the Gestapo in the summer of 1943, Franz Bernthaler is also arrested. He spent over a year in pre-trial detention in the Rossau prison in Vienna. The trial against him and twelve other members of the AFÖ should have taken place on July 20, 1944, but the assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler on the same day was the decisive factor in the trial being postponed until August 11, 1944. He was charged with "aiding the enemy" and sentenced to death.
From the indictment:
"The defendant Frodl stated that, as the then head of the seminary, he had planned a business trip to Berlin to see the nuncio in the spring of 1943. This had become known in the episcopal finance chamber in Klagenfurt, where the accused [Franz] Bernthaler was employed, and Bernthaler had now approached him with the request to take political appeals to Berlin with him, which were to be brought abroad via the nunciature and distributed from there by radio. However, he had refused to carry the letters with the appeals because he knew that the nuncio only sent letters abroad that concerned ecclesiastical matters. At Bernthaler's insistence, he then suggested that the leaflets be sent abroad via a consul of a foreign power in Vienna. He was thinking of a consul whom he did not know personally, but of whom he had heard that he had campaigned for Austrian Jews of Catholic denomination [...]. Shortly afterwards, Bernthaler had brought him an open envelope containing two anti-government pamphlets. As the pamphlets were full of stylistic and spelling mistakes, he considered them unsuitable for distribution and burned them."
Until April 1945, Franz Bernthaler sat on death row in the Vienna courthouse. When the Red Army was only a few kilometers from Vienna, he and 45 other prisoners sentenced to death were sent on a death march via Stockerau and Maissau to Krems on the night of April 4-5, 1945, where the group arrived at Stein an der Donau prison on April 9, 1945. Six days later, on April 15, 1945, the SS ordered all prisoners to be executed, including Franz Bernthaler.
Places
Residence:
Citations
Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstands (DÖW); Photo: DÖW
