Rudolf BEER, born on October 2, 1901 in Itzling near Salzburg, Catholic and single, shoemaker by profession, lived with his parents, a railroad family, in the Salzburg district of Itzling, Erzherzog Eugenstraße 61 (today Salzburg Schützenstraße 17)1.

Nothing is known so far about Rudolf BEER’s political activities, except that he was involved as an auxiliary gendarme in the imprisonment of National Socialist putschists from Lamprechtshausen in July 1934.

He was therefore arrested by the Gestapo at the instigation of the NSDAP local group leader of Itzling Johann Hofer2 on July 26, 1938, deported from the police prison in Salzburg to Dachau on August 31, 1938 and registered there as »protective custody prisoner no. 18516«.

The security guard Karl Haider, who was deported to Dachau with him, was already released in Dachau on March 13, 1939 – he survived.
Rudolf BEER, on the other hand, was transferred from Dachau to the Mauthausen concentration camp on September 27, 1939, after interventions by the local group leader Hofer , and was murdered there at the age of 38 on April 17, 1940 – a victim of political revenge.

His death in the Mauthausen concentration camp is recorded in the police registration file of the city of Salzburg, but his name does not appear in the documentation Resistance and Persecution in Salzburg, as neither a judicial file nor a victim welfare file exists.

The same applies to about 50 victims of National Socialist terror in Salzburg: loud little people who disappeared silently.

1 In the same house lived Theresia SCHAMBERGER, wife of a shoemaker, who was murdered in Hartheim in 1941. In the same house also lived a young Jewish woman who converted to the Catholic faith under the Nazi regime, survived the terror years thanks to the protection of her friends, emigrated to the USA after the liberation and died in Los Angeles in 2009.

2 Johann Hofer, who as NSDAP local group leader of Itzling took part in the People’s Court trial of four resisters from Itzling on March 3, 1943, took the view there that the defendants were incorrigible communists and therefore deserved no other punishment than the death penalty. Rudolf HARTL, Leopold HOCK, Josef THALHAMMER and Josef WARTINGER were executed in Munich-Stadelheim.
In December 1948, Johann Hofer was sentenced to ten years of hard labor under the Austrian War Crimes Act, but was pardoned in the early 1950s, released and employed by SAFE (Salzburger AG für Elektrizitätswirtschaft).
He died in Salzburg in 1979.

Author: Gert Kerschbaumer
Translation: DeepL

Stumbling Stone
Laid 22.03.2012 at Salzburg, Salzburger Schützenstraße 17

All stumbling stones at Salzburger Schützenstraße 17