Friedrich Eitelberg

Personalia

Born:

November 23, 1924, Vienna

Died:

November 29, 1941, KZ Kauen

Profession:

Pupils

Persecution:

Kauen concentration camp 11/23/1941 - 11/29/1941,
Murdered on 29.11.1941

Curriculum Vitae

Friedrich Eitelberg was born in Vienna as the legitimate son of the Jewish lawyer Maximilian Eitelberg and the Jewish Else, née Billitz. It cannot be determined from the records whether Else Eitelberg died or the marriage was later divorced, but Maximilian Eitelberg later married Helene Eitelberg from Neutra [today: Nitra in Slovakia].

Nothing has been preserved about Friedrich Eitelberg's school career. At the age of 14, he witnessed the demise of free and independent Austria with the invasion of the German Wehrmacht. With the occupation of Austria, German legislation was adopted and with it the 'Nuremberg Race Laws', according to which Friedrich Eitelberg was considered a 'full Jew'. As such, he is forbidden from attending a grammar school.

Friedrich Eitelberg is raised together with his father Maximilian, Helene Eitelberg, and his aunts Melanie and Gertrude Eitelberg were deported to the KZ Kauen on November 23, 1941, his 17th birthday, where they were all murdered on November 19, 1941. Only his uncle Cornelius Eitelberg survived, as he was married to a Catholic 'Aryan woman' and was not deported due to his 'mixed marriage'. Friedrich Eitelberg survives his 17th birthday by six days.

On November 23, 1941, a deportation transport with 1,000 Jewish men, women and children left Vienna's Aspang train station. However, this transport never arrived at its originally planned destination of Riga.
The transport from Vienna, like several deportation transports from the "Altreich" planned for Riga, was diverted to Kaunas in Lithuania for reasons that have not yet been clarified and handed over to Einsatzkommando (EK) 3. This unit of Einsatzgruppe A had been working since June 1941 with the massive participation of local forces to "make Lithuania free of Jews" and had murdered more than 130,000 people in total. Immediately after their arrival, the deported Viennese Jews were shot in Fort IX, part of the old Tsarist fortifications in Kaunas, which had become the site of regular massacres, by Lithuanian "helpers" under the command of members of EK 3.

Documentation Archive of Austrian Resistance (DÖW)

Skip map